The Best Way To Protect Us From Climate Change? Save Our Ecosystems

The Conversation - Tara Martin & James Watson

Clearing mulga woodland in Queensland to open up land for cattle during drought. M. Venterriven 

When we think about adapting humanity to the challenges of climate change, it’s tempting to reach for technological solutions. We talk about seeding our oceans and clouds with compounds designed to trigger rain or increasing carbon uptake. We talk about building grand structures to protect our coastlines from rising sea levels and storm surges.
However, as we discuss in Nature Climate Change, our focus on these high-tech, heavily engineered solutions is blinding us to a much easier, cheaper, simpler and better solution to adaptation: look after our planet’s ecosystems, and they will look after us.

Biting the hand that feeds us
People are currently engaged in wholesale destruction of the systems that shelter us, clean our water, clean our air, feed us and protect us from extreme weather. Sometimes this destruction is carried out for the purpose of protecting us from the threats posed by climate change.
For example, in Melanesia’s low-lying islands, coral reefs are dynamited to provide the raw building materials for seawalls in an attempt to slow the impact of sea-level rise.

A seawall built using coral in Papua New Guinea J.E.M Watson

In many parts of the world, including Africa, Canada and Australia, drought has led to the opening up of intact forest systems, protected grasslands and prairies for grazing and agriculture.
Similarly, the threat of climate change has driven the development of more drought-tolerant crops that can survive climate variability, but these survival abilities also make those plant species more likely to become invasive.
On the surface, these might seem like sensible ways to reduce the impacts of climate change. But they are actually likely to contribute to climate change and increase its impact on people.
Sea walls and drought-tolerant crops do have a place in adapting to climate change: if they’re sensitive to ecosystems. For example, if storm protection is required on low-lying islands, don’t build a seawall from the coral reef that offers the island its only current protection. Bring in the concrete and steel needed to build it.

How ecosystems protect us
Intact coral reefs act as barriers against storm surges, reducing wave energy by an average of 97%. They are also a valuable source of protein that support local livelihoods.
Similarly, mangroves and seagrass beds provide a buffer zone against storms and reduce wave energy, as well as being a nursery for many of the fish and other marine creatures that our fishing industries are built on.
Intact forests supply a host of valuable ecosystem services that are not only taken for granted, but actively squandered when those forests are decimated by land clearing.
There is now clear evidence that intact forests have a positive influence on both planetary climate and local weather regimes. Forests also provide shelter from extreme weather events, and are home to a host of other valuable ecosystems that are important to human populations as sources of food, medicine and timber.
Forests play a key role in capturing, storing and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, a role that will likely become increasingly important in avoiding the worst of climate change. Yet we continue to decimate forests, woodlands and grasslands.
Northern Australia is home to the largest savannah on earth, containing enormous carbon stores and influencing both local and global climate. Despite its inherent value as a carbon store, there has been discussion around whether these northern regions might be opened up to become Australia’s new food bowl, putting those extensive carbon stories in jeopardy.

Cheaper than techno-solutions
In Vietnam, 12,000 hectares of mangroves have been planted at a cost of US$1.1 million, but saving the US$7.3 million per year that would have been spent on maintaining dykes.

Planting mangroves in the Philippines to restore forests. Trees ForTheFuture/Flickr, CC BY

In Louisiana, the destruction of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 led to an examination of how coastal salt marshes might have reduced some of the wave energy in the hurricane-associated storm surges.
Data have now confirmed that salt marshes would have significantly reduced the impact of those surges, and stabilised the shoreline against further insult, at far less cost than engineered coastal defences. With this data in hand, discussions are now beginning around how to restore the Louisiana salt marshes to insulate against future extreme weather events.
US foreign aid in Papua New Guinea has also encouraged the restoration and protection of mangroves for the same reason.
Instead of turning cattle to graze on native grasslands and savannah during times of drought, farmers struggling to sustain livestock in marginal areas could instead be funded to farm carbon and biodiversity by restoring or preserving these ecosystems. This might involve reducing the number of cattle, or in some cases even removing cattle entirely. Australia is very well-informed about the carbon value of its many and varied ecosystems, but is yet to fully put that knowledge into practice.
The cost of adapting to climate change using largely technological solutions has been put at a staggering US$70-100 billion per year. This is small change compared to current global energy subsidies estimated by the International Monetary Fund for 2015 at US$5.3 trillion per year.
Protecting ecosystems reduces the risk to people and infrastructure, as well as the degree of climate change: a win-win.
There is no doubt that technological solutions have a role to play in climate adaptation but not at the expense of intact functioning ecosystems. It is time to set a policy agenda that actively rewards those countries, industries and entrepreneurs who develop ecosystem-sensitive adaptation strategies.

Links

• Manage the land to protect the reefs
• Research good news for coralline algae, but not necessarily for reefs
• Marine reserves saved coral reefs from Queensland floods
• Climate change guardrail too hot for coral reefs?

Scientists Are Floored By What’s Happening In The Arctic Right Now

Washington Post - Chris Mooney

Temperature anomalies for January, 2016. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

New data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggest that January of 2016 was, for the globe, a truly extraordinary month. Coming off the hottest year ever recorded (2015), January saw the greatest departure from average of any month on record, according to data provided by NASA.
But as you can see in the NASA figure above, the record breaking heat wasn’t uniformly distributed — it was particularly pronounced at the top of the world, showing temperature anomalies above 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the 1951 to 1980 average in this region.
Indeed, NASA provides a “zonal mean” version of the temperature map above, which shows how the temperature departures from average change based on one’s latitude location on the Earth. As you can see, things get especially warm, relative to what the Earth is used to, as you enter the very high latitudes:

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Global warming has long been known to be particularly intense in the Arctic — a phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification” — but even so, lately the phenomenon has been extremely pronounced.
This unusual Arctic heat has been accompanied by a new record low level for Arctic sea ice extent during the normally ice-packed month of January, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center — over 400,000 square miles below average for the month. And of course, that is closely tied to warm Arctic air temperatures.
“We’ve looked at the average January temperatures, and we look at what we call the 925 millibar level, about 3,000 feet up in the atmosphere,” says Mark Serreze, the center’s director. “And it was, I would say, absurdly warm across the entire Arctic Ocean.” The center reports temperature anomalies at this altitude of “more than 6 degrees Celsius (13 degrees Fahrenheit) above average” for the month.
The low sea ice situation has now continued into February. Current ice extent is well below levels at the same point in 2012, which went on to set the current record for the lowest sea ice minimum extent:

National Snow and Ice Data Center

“We’re way down, we’re at a record low for this time of year right now,” says Serreze. When it comes to the rest of 2016 and the coming summer and fall season when ice melts across the Arctic and reaches its lowest extent, he says, “we are starting out in a deep hole.”
So what’s causing it all? It’s a complicated picture, say scientists, but it’s likely much of it has to do with the very strong El Niño event that has carried over from 2015. But that’s not necessarily the only factor.

Researchers say 2015 was the hottest year on record, and that it "smashed" the previous record, which was 2014. The Post's Chris Mooney explains what that could mean for weather patterns, the Paris climate deal and 2016. Gillian Brockell, Chris Mooney/TWP

“We’ve got this huge El Niño out there, we have the warm blob in the northeast Pacific, the cool blob in the Atlantic, and this ridiculously warm Arctic,” says Jennifer Francis, a climate researcher at Rutgers University who focuses on the Arctic and has argued that Arctic changes are changing mid-latitude weather by causing wobbles in the jet stream. “All these things happening at the same time that have never happened before.”
Serreze agrees that the El Niño has something to do with what’s happening in the Arctic. “I think this is more than coincidence. That we have this very strong El Niño at the same time when we have this absurd Arctic warmth. But exactly what the details are on that, I don’t think we can say right now,” he says.
In Alaska, matters have been quite warm but not record-breaking this winter, says Rick Thoman, climate science and services manager for the National Weather Service in the state.
“It’s been another warm winter in Alaska,” Thoman says. “No other way to put it. This is the third in a row that’s been significantly warmer than normal.” Alaska’s winter so far (taking into account the months of November, December and January) has been the third warmest on record since 1925, he says.
Still, it all fits a by-now familiar picture of an Arctic warming up considerably faster than the mid-latitudes, with consequences that could extend far outside of the polar region, says Rafe Pomerance, a former deputy assistant secretary of state who sits on the National Academy of Sciences’ Polar Research Board.
Impacts of Arctic warming are usually considered in isolation, and that’s a mistake, he says. “It’s unraveling, every piece of it is unraveling, they’re all in lockstep together,” Pomerance says. “What tends to happen is, everybody nationally reports on the latest piece of news, which is about one system. You hear about the sea ice absent the temperature trend. So you really have to think of it as a whole.”
Indeed, impacts of Arctic warming include the melting of major Arctic glaciers and Greenland (containing the potential for up to 7 meters of sea level rise if it were to melt entirely), the thawing of carbon rich permafrost (which could add to the burden of atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions) and signs of worsening wildfires across the boreal forests of Alaska, to name a few.
If the Arctic is this warm in January and February, then when real warmth comes later this year, these will all be areas to watch.
“I think this winter is going to get studied like crazy, for quite a while,” says Francis. “It’s a very interesting time.”

Links

• January was the ninth straight month of record breaking global warmth
• This is where the Earth is most vulnerable to big swings in climate
• Why the U.S. is cutting carbon emissions no matter what happens with the Supreme Court 
• The solution to climate change that has nothing to do with cars or coal
• We may have just seen a truly ominous new weather record

Kiribati President: Climate-Induced Migration Is 5 Years Away

Climate Home - Alex Pashley

Low-lying atoll nation has bought land in Fiji to relocate its 100,000 population as global warming impacts accelerate

(Flickr/ OggiScienza)

Islanders will start leaving Kiribati in 2020 as rising seas make life too difficult, according to its president Anote Tong.
The government has built coastal walls and floating islands but they won't be enough to stop emigration, he told a climate change meeting in Wellington, Radio New Zealand reported on Tuesday.
"People are getting quite scared now and we need immediate solutions. This is why I want to rush the solutions so there will be a sense of comfort for our people," Tong said.
Kiribati, a string of 33 coral atolls dotted around the international dateline in the Pacific, purchased land on nearest neighbour Fiji in 2014. It's a three-hour flight away from overcrowded capital Tarawa.
The move drew international publicity, with Tong boosting his profile as a defender of countries on the front line of climate change.
Tong's twelve-year rule will come to an end this year as he steps down after a third term. He said the land purchase had met criticism, but it meant security for islanders in the long-term.
The people of Kiribati, which is largely dependent on foreign aid, had to prepare to "migrate with dignity," he told delegates in Wellington.
Aside from climbing sea levels, extreme storms and acidifying oceans threaten the reef atolls in decades to come.
Greg Stone, chief ocean scientist at NGO Conservation International and Tong's science advisor at last year's Paris climate summit, said brackish water destroying crops was another key driver.
"The freshwater table is the thing people don't think about. For every inch of sea-level rise, you lose 10 square feet of arable land. It seeps into the soil."But in the face of mass relocations, Fiji's help offered reassurance, Stone said: "The Fiji government is the first nation to say if you need a place to live, you can come and live here."

Links

• Tong calls for moratorium on coal mines 
• Sun sets on $35,000 appeal to film vanishing Pacific island 
• Kiribati president rejects climate change evacuation stories
• Kiribati president: My people are the polar bears of the Pacific
• Kiribati Cabinet approves plan to buy land in Fiji for climate refugees
• Kiribati president: It is "too late" to save my islands