Bank of England Governor Warns Of Risks From Climate Change

The Guardian -  Larry Elliott

Bank of England governor tells Lloyd’s insurers that ‘challenges currently posed by climate change pale in significance compared with what might come’

Mark Carney said: ‘Once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.’ He proposes that firms ‘would disclose not only what they are emitting today, but how they plan their transition to the net-zero world of the future’. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, has warned that climate change will lead to financial crises and falling living standards unless the world’s leading countries do more to ensure that their companies come clean about their current and future carbon emissions.
In a speech to the insurance market Lloyd’s of London on Tuesday, Carney said insurers were heavily exposed to climate change risks and that time was running out to deal with global warming.
The governor said that proposals would probably be put to the G20 meeting in Turkey in November urging the world’s leading developed and developing countries to bring in tougher corporate disclosure standards so that investors could better judge climate change risks.
“The challenges currently posed by climate change pale in significance compared with what might come,” Carney said. “The far-sighted amongst you are anticipating broader global impacts on property, migration and political stability, as well as food and water security. So why isn’t more being done to address it?”
Carney added that there was a growing evidence of humans’ role in climate change, noting that since the 1980s the number of registered weather-related loss events had tripled. Inflation-adjusted losses for the insurance industry had increased five fold to $50bn (£33bn) a year.
France will host the latest global attempt to combat climate change at a summit in December, and Carney added to the pressure for action by pointing to the threats to “financial resilience and longer-term prosperity. While there is still time to act, the window of opportunity is finite and shrinking”.
The governor, who is chairman of the Financial Stability Board, the international body set up by the G20 in 2009 to monitor risks to the financial system, said losses would be higher than expected if recent weather events proved to be the new normal.

A man by the Qiantang river after Typhoon
Dujuan hit China. Claims for flood damage
could affect financial stability.
Photograph: Imaginechina/Rex Shutterstock

“Climate change is the tragedy of the horizon. We don’t need an army of actuaries to tell us that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors – imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix.
“The horizon for monetary policy extends out to two to three years. For financial stability it is a bit longer, but typically only to the outer boundaries of the credit cycle – about a decade. In other words, once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.”
Carney said there were three ways in which climate change could affect financial stability: physical risks, such as claims from floods and storms; liability risks that could arise if those suffering climate change losses sought compensation from those they held responsible; and transition risks caused by the revaluation of assets caused by the adjustment to a lower-carbon economy.
The governor said that global action to tackle climate change could have a profound impact on companies if their business models were challenged by the move away from fossil fuels.
“Take, for example, the International Panel on Climate Change’s estimate of a carbon budget that would likely limit global temperature rises to 2 degrees [centigrade] above pre-industrial levels.
“That budget amounts to between a fifth and a third of the world’s proven reserves of oil, gas and coal. If that estimate is even approximately correct it would render the vast majority of reserves “stranded” – oil, gas and coal that will be literally unusable without expensive carbon-capture technology, which itself alters fossil fuel economics.
“The exposure of UK investors, including insurance companies, to these shifts is potentially huge.”
Carney said that, following a meeting in London last week, the FSB was “considering recommending to the G20 summit that more be done to develop consistent, comparable, reliable and clear disclosure around the carbon intensity of different assets”.
One proposal, he added, was the creation of an industry-led group, a climate disclosure taskforce, to design and deliver a voluntary standard for disclosure by those companies that produce or emit carbon.
“Companies would disclose not only what they are emitting today, but how they plan their transition to the net-zero world of the future. The G20 – whose member states account for around 85% of global emissions – has a unique ability to make this possible.”

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RAW VIDEO: Bank of England governor Mark Carney warns "climate change threatens financial resilience and longer term prosperity."

Shark Culling And Overfishing May Be Contributing To Climate Change

ABC - Sarah Sedghi

Research finds shark culling is contributing
to climate change (AAP: ScreenWest)

 New research has found that sharks play an important role in preventing climate change, warning that overfishing and culling sharks is resulting in more carbon being released from the seafloor.

A paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change has found that the culling and fishing of sharks and other large fish is leading to an overabundance of their prey, such as turtles, stingrays and crabs.
Larger numbers of these marine creatures means that vegetation which stores carbon is being eaten in greater quantities.
"Sharks, believe it or not, are helping to prevent climate change," said Dr Peter Macreadie, an Australian Research Council Fellow from Deakin University and one of the paper's authors.
Several years ago researchers found that carbon is stored in blue carbon ecosystems in the marine environment.
"They are the seagrasses, the salt marshes, the mangroves and they're among the most powerful carbon sinks in the world," Dr Macreadie said.
"So they will capture and store carbon at a rate 40 times faster than tropical rainforests like the Amazon and they'll store that carbon in the ground for millennial time scales."

He said as predators were culled and overfished, other marine life consumed more and more vegetation.

"Turtles, crabs, certain types of worms, stingrays — these animals that are overabundant to do with loss of predators used to keep their numbers in check," Dr Macreadie said.
The researchers used Cape Cod in Massachusetts as an example of where this process had been observed.
"There had been overfishing in the region, so a lot of the big fish had been removed and then what we saw was an increase — a remarkable increase, a huge increase — in the number of crabs that bury and borrow down in the system, in the salt marsh which sequestered all this carbon," Dr Macreadie said.
"And we'd found that in an area there, the crabs had become so abundant that they had pretty much destroyed the salt marsh, and it was a small area, it was only 1.5 square kilometres, but it liberated 250,000 tonnes of carbon that had been stored in the ground."

Release of ancient carbon would have 'catastrophic' effect
He said with the culling of huge numbers of sharks and other top ocean predators, researchers had discovered many other examples of this occurring.
"There's been some 90 per cent loss of the oceans' top predators and so we've learnt this link between sharks and other top predators and the cascading effects they will have down to other animals in those ecosystems that are eating themselves out of house and home.
"They're eating the blue carbon ecosystems that have sequestered so much carbon and this is causing release of ancient carbon as a consequence."
Dr Macreadie said it would have a catastrophic effect on the environment.
"We've only just scratched the surface here," he said.
"These blue carbon ecosystems are so critical for sequestering carbon and they support these important food webs, and when these food webs are disrupted it's a bit like playing a game of Jenga — you pull out a few pins and the whole thing falls apart.
"If we just lost 1 per cent of the oceans' blue carbon ecosystems, it would be equivalent to releasing 460 million tonnes of carbon annually, which is about the equivalent of about 97 million cars.
"It's about equivalent to Australia's annual greenhouse gas emissions.
"So I think it's time to take a good look at the way in which nature helps mitigate climate change for us and trying to do everything we can to let that natural process operate in full force, and if sharks are a part of that, if predators and a part of that we need to take that into consideration."

Australia Leads World On Household Solar … And On Coal

Renew Economy - Sophie Vorrath 

With 1.4 million households with solar PV installed, rooftop solar has been one of Australia’s renewable energy success stories – a fact that is celebrated in a new report by the Energy Supply Association of Australia.
The report, titled Renewable Energy in Australia – How do we really compare?, notes that while Australia is ranked sixth in the world for total solar per capita, it is number one when it comes to solar on rooftops.



And the ESSA fact sheet has plenty of nice graphics to illustrate this achievement.



“More than one in seven households now have solar PV systems mounted on their roofs, which is a 15 per cent penetration rate,” the report says.
And it shows that South Australia and Queensland are leading the charge, with an average of 25 per cent and 24 per cent of households with solar on their roofs, and some suburbs in Adelaide and Brisbane – like Virginia and Chandler – boasting more than 50 per cent household PV penetration.



“We have double the penetration rates of the next best country, Belgium, and more than three times the level in Germany, which is considered a leader in solar generation,” says ESAA chief Matthew Warren.
The report also shows that South Australia and Tasmania have some of the highest per capita wind generation in the world, alongside leading US states like Iowa and Texas.



The message from this analysis, argues Warren, is that Australia “has not been a laggard” on renewable generation.
“This analysis clearly (shows) that we are have made progress in terms of sourcing energy from wind and solar and this can be expected to continue,” he says.
It’s an interesting message, coming from ESAA, which has in the past lobbied to have Australia’s Renewable Energy Target reduced and, more specifically, for the removal of upfront payments under the small-scale technology component of the RET – a measure aimed squarely at slowing rooftop solar uptake.
It seems to suggest that Australia is tracking just fine in its shift to renewable energy, as it tackles the dual task of emissions reduction and the modernisation of its grid. But surely the ESAA is not arguing that Australia has done enough.
The chart below, which is included on ESAA’s fact sheet, tells another story: That Australia is also among the world’s leading consumers of coal power generation. Anyone else confused?