Climate Change: World 'Faces Food Shortages And Mass Migration' Caused By Global Warming

Independent - Tom Bawden

World Meteorological Society chief warns dwindling water supplies is greatest of all dangers posed by climate change

1.6 billion people already live in areas that are classed as having “water scarcity" Getty

The world is facing a future of food shortages and mass migration as a consequence of widespread water shortages caused by global warming, the outgoing head of the World Meteorological Society has warned.
Michel Jarraud, the WMO's Secretary-General, said of all the dangers posed by climate change – from increasingly intense storms and a growth in disease to rising sea levels that may submerge cities – the greatest threat is from dwindling water supplies.
About 1.6 billion people already live in areas that are classed as having "water scarcity" and that number is forecast to reach 2.8 billion by 2025. It will go on climbing after that as the planet continues warming.
Large swathes of Africa, the Middle East and Asia will be hit hardest, although parts of Australia, the US, South America and southern Europe are also vulnerable.
Experts predict the scarcity will unleash a major refugee crisis as the lack of water for drinking, crops and manufacturing makes huge populated areas uninhabitable and hundreds of millions of people are forced to move.
"Often we think about climate change in terms of temperature but actually the most important parameter which will be affected is the water cycle," Mr Jarraud told the Carbon Brief website. "In a water-stressed area, there will be even more stress on the water resources."
The world's rising population will also exacerbate the problem as it continues to stretch increasingly meagre water supplies.

The population is due to soar from 7.3 billion people today to 11.2 billion by the end of the century – with much of the growth due to come from Africa, a continent where many areas are already hot, poor and short of water, according to UN forecasts.
There is evidence that the world's water resources are already coming under intolerable pressure. Earlier this year the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, home to 20 million people and once known as the City of Drizzle, was hit with such a bad drought that residents began drilling through basement floors and car parks to try to reach groundwater.
In California, Governor Jerry Brown introduced a drought mandate requiring cities to cut water use by as much as 36 per cent or face fines. And in Middle-Eastern countries such as Iran, swathes of countryside have been reduced to desert because too much water is being used.
Global warming will put further pressure on water supplies by upsetting established weather patterns, leading to less rainfall in some areas and drying out groundwater supplies, Mr Jarraud says.
"With climate change coming, the frequency and intensity of heatwaves will increase and the frequency and intensity of droughts in some parts of the world will increase," he said, adding that health and food shortages were among the other serious threats posed by global warming.
"Some diseases will expand in areas that they don't exist now because of climate change… A few years ago there were some major food crises. Right now, for the last few years there have been hotspots here and there. However, all the ingredients are there for a food crisis to come back on a very large scale," said Mr Jarraud, who will step down from the WMO at the end of the year after the maximum term of 12 years in the post. He will continue as an advisor.
Mr Jarraud said he welcomed the Paris Agreement this month in which world leaders agreed to limit global warming to between 1.5C and 2C – although he stressed that meeting that target would not be easy.
"It is still possible to stay under 2C but it requires bold and ambitious action," he said, adding that he was cautiously optimistic about the prospect for tackling climate change following the agreement.

Links

• COP21: Four things you need to know about the Paris climate change treaty
• Climate change: Government criticised for scrapping project intended to limit CO2 emissions

Abbot Point Coal Port Open to Challenge Over Tugboat Harbour Left Out of EIS

The Guardian - Shalailah Medhora

The federal environment minister, Greg Hunt, confirms harbour had not been considered in the environmental impact statement for the terminal expansion

The Abbot Point coal terminal expansion may face a court challenge and possible reassessment. Photograph: Alamy

The Abbot Point coal terminal may face a court challenge and a possible reassessment by the commonwealth after Greg Hunt admitted that the future development of a tugboat harbour at the site had not been considered in its environmental impact statement.
Earlier this month, the North Queensland Conservation Council said it discovered plans by the mining company Adani, which leases the terminal, to build a tugboat harbour at Abbot Point near Bowen in north Queensland.
The Abbot Point expansion cleared a major hurdle by gaining commonwealth approval on Tuesday, on the condition that it complies with strict provisions relating to how and where dredge spoil can be dumped.
The plans to build a tugboat harbour were not part of the environmental impact statement (EIS) undertaken by the federal government and could mean that the entire project needs to be referred back to the commonwealth for reassessment.
"This question of the tugboat harbour was put forward by one of the environment groups. It was asserted as if it were a fact and that it could be slipped through without approval. That's false," the federal environment minister told ABC Radio on Tuesday.
"If such a proposal were put forward then it would have to be in accordance with state and federal law. And not to do so would in fact be an action that would be punishable under the federal law."
A spokeswoman for Hunt confirmed to Guardian Australia that the tugboat harbour had not been included in the EIS.
"What was put in front of us, we assessed on the basis of law," the spokeswoman said. "There is no such proposal from the Queensland government at this stage."
Excluding the tugboat harbour could open the entire EIS up to a legal challenge, the Environmental Defenders Office in Queensland has warned.
"We will be looking very carefully at the lawfulness of the approval [granted by Hunt]," its chief executive officer and solicitor, Jo Braggs, told Guardian Australia.
Braggs said the tugboat harbour was consequential to the Abbot Point project and must be assessed alongside the expansion of the terminal, even though the harbour was not expected to be needed in the short term.
The possible legal challenge is not the only hurdle facing the expansion of the terminal, with Hunt confirming that the company would need to complete a dredge management plan before the project could proceed.
The expansion could yet hit financial snags too; the Queensland government has insisted Adani pay its own way.
"This is a private company, and the private company Adani must get the finance independently if it is to go ahead," the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said. "There will be no taxpayers' money going towards this project."
The international credit agency Moody's has threatened to downgrade the debit accrued by the Abbot Point coal terminal to junk status.
Moody's analyst, Mary Anne Low, said "severe pressure" on the coal industry meant there was a higher probability that contracts would not be renewed or would end early.
Conservationists have criticised the expansion of the port, saying it would adversely affect the neighbouring Great Barrier Reef. Laws to stop dredge spoil from being dumped in the reef were recently enacted.
But the mining industry in Queensland said that the project, which would export coal extracted from the $16bn Carmichael coalmine if it goes ahead, would create much needed jobs in the state.
Queensland's resources minister, Anthony Lynham, said fossil fuels still have a role to play.
"Coal is good, even as we move towards renewable energy," he told Sky News on Tuesday. "We've struck the right balance between economic development and the environment."

Links

• Abbot Point coal port expansion faces hurdle over 'secret' tugboat harbour Abbot Point coal terminal expansion given approval by Greg Hunt
• Abbot Point coal port expansion faces hurdle over 'secret' tugboat harbour
• Coal from Carmichael mine 'will create more annual emissions than New York'
• Conservation group challenges approval of Carmichael coalmine as 'illegal'

Could The Paris Agreement Mean That Half Of All Coal Will Go Unmined?

Grist - Clayton Aldern

Shutterstock

A new Bank of America report notes that up to 50 percent of the world's coal reserves could remain unburned if countries intend on meeting the goals laid out earlier this month at the Paris Climate Conference.
The analysts estimate there are 890 billion tons of coal reserves out there — which is a lot of money to say no to — but they are confident that looming regulatory pressure coupled with efforts like the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign will continue to push the needle in the right direction.
Coal remains the biggest horse in the race to destroy the planet, and knocking its knees out is one of most obvious ways to give Earth a little more time.
Even 50 percent might not be enough to prevent catastrophic warming, though. Previous estimates have placed the "unburnable" figure at an even more aggressive 80 percent (or more). Whatever the number, there's mounting consensus that if the world is actually interested in a habitable future — and given the outcome in Paris, ostensibly it is — it'll have to keep most of that coal in the ground. "The latest carbon initiatives are the nail in the coffin for global coal," wrote the bank.
Not that the Paris Agreement actually says any of that.
In 32 pages of bureaucratese devoted to halting climate change, the word "coal" appears exactly zero times. "Fossil" is similarly absent. It's the diplomatic analogue of writing in the passive voice: By sidestepping the fossil industry, negotiators can play the hero without actually managing to assign any real, politically unpalatable responsibility for the problem. Instead, the agreement's long-term goal is framed in terms of limiting temperature increases to a maximum of 2C, while pursuing all efforts to limit the increase to 1.5. In order to achieve the goal, countries have agreed to "achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases" — in other words, zero-net emissions by the end of the century.
Over at Vox, David Roberts argues that the zero-net emissions goal is a good one. It's easy to rally around zero, and there's a clarity here that isn't captured by a ceiling on temperature increases. "It settles the question of what will happen to the fossil fuel industry and investments that rely on fossil fuels," he writes. "They will go away. It might be soon, it might be later, but the end state is determined. They are slated for extinction." That's the same logic that Bank of America applies when it argues that the Paris Agreement will help cripple the coal industry.
But that's not what zero-net means. It's what environmentalists wantit to mean.
Zero-net is the land of offsets and moonshots. Roberts acknowledges as much: "It leaves open the possibility, badly needed for any hope of hitting, er, avoiding 2 degrees, of substantial 'negative emissions' technologies (like carbon sequestration) later in the century, enough to balance out some remaining emission sources." If zero-net is a rallying cry — a signaling mechanism — the signal it's sending is one of market solutions: of cap-and-trade and carbon capture and REDD+ and Carly Fiorina's favorite word (innovation).
Of course, there's no doubt that the private sector needs to be on board if the world is to stop a changing climate, and the agreement is chock-full of nods in its direction. But if negative-emissions innovation comes sooner than later, that's all the more reason for coal miners to keep digging and coal-fired power plants to keep burning. And as long as they continue to do so, the world will continue to see emissions offloading, inequitable air pollution, and insecurity of indigenous land tenure.
The end-of-century emissions goal "sends a clear signal to investors that each new long-term fossil fuel investment, each new mine, well, pipeline, coal plant, or export terminal, is riskier than the last," writes Roberts. Maybe. (Certainly, Bank of America knows a thing or two about investors.) But a clearer signal would have been to indict the fossil fuel industry outright. Fossil fuel lobbies, petrostates, and countries interested in cheap development made sure in Paris that wasn't the case.

Australia Is Swimming Against The Global Tide On Coal

Australian Conservation Foundation - Hannah Aulby*

Continuing down the mine shaft will leave us with a dinosaur economy.

Continuing down mine shaft will only lead to dinosaur economy, according to the Australian Conservation Foundation. Photo: Michele Mossop

The International Energy Agency's latest coal market forecast provides a startling demonstration of just how far out of synch the Australian government is with the tide of global energy trends.
The IEA's Medium Term Coal Market Report 2015 shows world coal demand has peaked and is in decline.
The agency has slashed its five-year estimate of global coal demand by more than 500 million tonnes.
Coming hot on the heels of the Paris agreement to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees, the IEA report confirms the global financial and political shift away from coal.
Other finance analysts, including Goldman Sachs and IEFFA, believe 'peak coal' is already here. The UK Government has made a commitment to close all its coal-fired power plants.
Commentators have said the Paris agreement marks the end of the fossil fuel era.
Here in Australia, the economic implications of this shift are already being felt.
Anglo American recently announced a new round of job losses as a result of the company selling its Queensland coal mines.
Other companies, such as Cockatoo Coal, have recently been forced into administration.
Yet the federal government continues to back the industry, handing out approvals for new coal mines and continuing to subsidise coal projects.
Given the Paris climate agreement and IEA's dire forecast for coal demand, you'd think a responsible government, particularly in a historically resource-driven economy such as Australia's, would be looking ahead and planning for a future beyond coal.
Such forward planning would include transition plans for community and workers, mine rehabilitation plans and diversification of the economy.
But our government's response thus far has been to bury its head in the sand and continue to prop up a dying industry.
With more than $10 billion a year in subsidies, and many fossil fuel companies avoiding tax payments, it is not only the government that's propping up the industry; every Australian taxpayer is too.
Yet according to records just released by the Australian Tax Office, coal companies such as Adani Abbot Point Holdings, Anglo American, Yancoal, EnergyAustralia, Whitehaven and Glencore all paid no tax in 2013-14.
These companies didn't pay tax, but taxpayers paid the companies. The IMF estimates each Australian pays $437 in fossil fuel subsidies each year.
Continuing down the mine shaft will only lead to stranded assets in a dinosaur economy.
The Wiggins Point coal terminal is a stark example of this.
Opened earlier this year, after a long construction phase that included major dredging on the Great Barrier Reef, the Wiggins Point coal terminal is now struggling to pay its debts.
Banks are quickly selling off their stakes and major owners Bandanna Energy and Cockatoo Coal have both gone bankrupt.
Major debtor Glencore has now had a slump in its stock price, creating yet more instability for the project.
Initially aiming to ship 27 million tonnes in its first year, working up to 60 million tonnes at its peak, the project came in at only 1.2 million tonnes leaving Wiggins Point in its first five months of operation.
Wiggins Point will mean massive taxpayer subsidies, and will likely result in environmental reef destruction and exorbitant climate pollution – and for what?  A ghost port in a dying industry.
What's next?  The government has approved the Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin – although ACF is challenging that approval in the Federal Court – and has given the green light to what would be the world's largest coal terminal at Abbot Point.
Will these turn into yet more stranded assets?
The Turnbull Government now has a choice.
It can continue down the mine shaft and keep wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money on stranded assets.
Or listen to the IEA's forecast, diversify the economy and support the future livelihoods and clean, safe future for the 99 per cent of Australians that don't work in the coal industry (and the less than one per cent that do).

*Hannah Aulby is a clean energy campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation