15/05/2017

Thinking Globally, Acting Transnationally

Legal Planet - 

Despite Trump, Americans are joining the international fight against climate change.
The U.S. government obviously isn’t going to be taking a global leadership role regarding climate change, not for the next four years.
 At one time, that would have been the end of the story: the only way to accomplish anything internationally was through national governments.  But we live in a different world today and there are other channels for international action against climate change.
Today, transnational networks of state and local governments, private firms, and NGOs are actively addressing climate change and other environmental problems, with or without the help of their national governments.
The Under2 MOU is a great example outside of the formal framework of international law.  Here are the key facts:
The Under2 Coalition is a diverse group of governments around the world who set ambitious targets to combat climate change. Central to the Under2 MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) is an agreement from all signatories to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions 80 to 95 percent below 1990 levels, or limit to 2 annual metric tons of CO2-equivalent per capita, by 2050. A total of 167 jurisdictions spanning 33 countries and six continents have signed or endorsed the Under2 MOU. Together, the Under2 Coalition represents 1.09 billion people and $25.9 trillion in GDP, equivalent to over a third of the global economy.
Here’s a list of the U.S. signatories: Austin, California, Connecticut, Los Angeles, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York City, New York, Oakland, Oregon, Portland,  Rhode Island, Sacramento, San Francisco, Vermont, and Washington. The other signatories span the globe. There are also a dozen U.S. cities in another transnational network, the C40 network of global cities.
There are networks in the private sector, too. For example, there’s ICNR, which is mostly but not entirely U.S.-based:
The Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR) is a network of more than 120 institutional investors representing more than $15 trillion in assets committed to addressing climate change and other key sustainability risks, while building low-carbon investment opportunities. INCR includes the largest institutional investors in North America as well as leading religious and labor funds, asset managers and socially responsible investment funds.
The membership is diverse.  In a quick look at the list, I spotted the AFL-CIO, Amherst College,BlackRock, CalPERS, Deutsche Asset Management, the Teamsters, and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank.
Another network is the Climate Group, an organization of multinational corporations who are committed to 100% renewable energy. The group include Coca-Cola, BMW, GM, Google, NestlĂ©, and Tata Motors.  As multinationals, their policies inevitably have impact across national boundaries.
Environmental groups also reach out beyond national borders.
The Sierra Club has its International Beyond Coal Project, while the NRDC does work in Canada, China, India, and Latin America. EDF is “working directly with China’s government to help the nation launch market-based solutions to trim emissions, while leveraging our business networks to lower pollution in China’s vast manufacturing sector.”
In short, the U.S. government might have withdrawn from the international climate effort, but American firms, state and local governments, universities, and others are still very much part of the effort. The absence of federal leadership is a grievous blow, but international efforts go on.

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Barack Obama Warns Climate Change Could Create Refugee Crisis ‘Unprecedented In Human History’

The Independent - Ian Johnston

'If the planet warms at the far end of the potential estimates, it would be catastrophic'
United States former President Barack Obama talks during the 'Seeds&Chips - Global Food Innovation' summit, in Milan AP
Climate change could produce a refugee crisis that is "unprecedented in human history", Barack Obama has warned as he stressed global warming was the most pressing issue of the age.
Speaking at an international food conference in Milan, the former US President said rising temperatures were already making it more difficult to grow crops and rising food prices were "leading to political instability".
He said the United States was currently experiencing "floods on sunny days", increased wildfires and, in Alaska, increased coastal erosion as the ice melts and no country was "immune" to the problem.
If world leaders put aside "parochial interests" and took action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by enough to restrict the rise to one or two degrees Celsius, then humanity would probably be able to cope.
Failing to do this, Mr Obama warned, increased the risk of "catastrophic" effects in the future, "not only real threats to food security, but also increases in conflict as a consequence of scarcity and greater refugee and migration patterns".
"If you think about monsoon patterns in the Indian subcontinent, maybe half a billion people rely on traditional rain patterns in those areas," he told the Seeds & Chips conference, in remarks previously reported by Business Insider.
"If those rain patterns change, then you could see hundreds of millions of people who suddenly find themselves unable to feed themselves, because they're already at subsistence levels.
"And the amount of migration, the number of refugees that could be resulting from something like that, would be unprecedented in human history."
He noted that some of the worst effects of climate change would be "borne by people in poor nations that are least equipped to handle it".
The current refugee crisis, which has seen hundreds of thousands of people from war-torn Syria and other places affected by conflict and poverty, travel to Europe would be "just the beginning of the kinds of problems we would see", Mr Obama said.
"Some of the refugee flows into Europe originate not only from conflict, but also from places where there are food shortages that will get far worse as climate change continues."
He dismissed sceptics' claims that climate change is still a matter for debate.
"The only real controversy is 'how much warmer will it get?' There's really no controversy that the planet is getting warmer and the human activity is contributing to the warming," he said.
"And what is also the conclusion of almost every scientist is if the planet warms at the far end of the potential estimates that it would be catastrophic and at the low end it would still be disruptive."
Current climate models produce a range of possible outcomes as a result of the doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, from about 1.5C to 5C of warming. So far CO2 has risen from about 280 parts per million – a level that had remained fairly constant from the end of the last Ice Age to the 1800s – to more than 400ppm today.
And Mr Obama stressed how important he considered the issue to be.
"During the course of my presidency, I made climate change a top priority because I believe, for all the challenges we face, this is the top one that will define the contours of this century more dramatically perhaps than any other," he said.
"No nation, whether it's large or small, rich or poor, will be immune from the impacts of climate change."
The election of the climate-science denying Donald Trump as president was simply "part of what happens in democracy", Mr Obama said.
Dinka cattle herders starting their migration in South Sudan. Lisa Murray: Gallery
Earlier, without referencing Mr Trump, he said: "You get the politicians you deserve."
But the "good news" was that the private sector had already grasped that the future would "is in clean energy".
"I do not believe that any part of the world has to be condemned to perpetual poverty and hunger. And I do not believe that this planet is condemned to ever-rising temperatures," he said.
"I believe these are problems that were caused by man and they can be solved by man.
"I'm fond of quoting the words of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who believed that there's such a thing as being too late.
"When it comes to climate change, the hour is almost upon us. If we act boldly and swiftly, if we set aside our parochial interests … we can leave behind a world that's worthy of our children … a world not marked by human suffering, but human progress."

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'Our Country Will Vanish': Pacific Islanders Bring Desperate Message To Australia

The Guardian - 

Kiribati and other low-lying countries are under threat from climate change, and while their people would rather stay behind, they may be left with no choice
The archipelago of Kiribati is the world’s lowest-lying country, with an average height above sea level of just two metres. Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images
“Like a drop of water in a bucket, on its own is small, but if there are many, many drops, soon it is overflowing.”
Erietera Aram’s water analogy is apposite. His country faces being lost under the waves of the Pacific Ocean.
Migration is the last option. We want to save our countries.
Aso Ioapo from Tuvalu
The i-Kiribati man is in Australia delivering his message about the reality of climate change in his country, and of its immediacy. Each discussion, he says, is like a drop of water, adding to the one before it, slowly building understanding of the existential threat to his people and place.
“Climate change is not something off in the future, it’s not a problem for later. We are living it now,” he says.
The archipelago of Kiribati – 33 tiny coral atolls spanning 3.5m square kilometres of ocean – is the world’s lowest-lying country, with an average height above sea level of just two metres.
From left, Erietera Aram from Tarawa, Kiribati; Mangila Kilifi from Kiribati; and Saineta Sioni from Funafuti, Tuvalu.
Most of the 113,000 i-Kiribati live crammed on to Tarawa, the administrative centre, a chain of islets that curve in a horseshoe shape around a lagoon.
“My place is very small,” Aram says. “If you stand in the middle, you can see water on both sides. We are vulnerable. One tsunami, one tsunami and our whole country will disappear.”
Already, there is less and less of Kiribati for its inhabitants. The coastline is regularly being lost to king tides and to creeping sea levels, and in a very real sense, there is nowhere to go.
The loss of land is causing conflict – Tarawa is growing ever more densely crowded, as families living on the coastline are forced inwards, infringing on another’s claim.
The next round of multinational climate talks in November – COP 23 – will be chaired by Fiji, and is expected to swing particular focus of the global climate debate to the Pacific, where comparatively minuscule amounts of carbon are produced, but the effects of climate change have been felt first, and most acutely.
Assuming the COP presidency, the Fijian prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, said he would “bring a particular perspective to these negotiations on behalf of some of those who are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change – Pacific Islanders and the residents of other small island developing states and low-lying areas of the world”.
The Betio hospital in Kiribati, which sustained damage during Cyclone Pam in 2015. Photograph: Kiribati Climate Action Network
But the islands’ fight to be saved was everybody’s, Bainimarama said.
“Our concerns are the concerns of the entire world, given the scale of this crisis.”
Aram and compatriots from Kiribati and fellow low-lying islanders from Tuvalu are travelling with the Edmund Rice Centre, a social justice group, across Australia. They have met politicians, unions, coalminers, and officials from the CSIRO and power stations “and we think they have heard our stories, they understand how serious this is”.
Recent reports from groups as disparate as the World Bank, the Menzies Research Centre and the Lowy Institute have suggested allowing open-access migration from Pacific Islands to Australia as a more effective economic stimulus than aid, and as a strategy for coping with the impacts of climate change, which are already beginning to see islands across the Pacific lost to the sea.
In April, the former US deputy undersecretary of defence Sherri Goodman visited Australia, and said the Pacific was “right in disaster alley” and the region would be “on the frontlines” of widespread forced migration caused by climate.
The issue of a mass migration is a contentious one for the Pacific Islands facing annihilation under the waves. Many islanders are resistant, but understand it may be inevitable.
“We don’t want to leave our country,” Aram says. “We love our land, and it doesn’t have the same meaning to be living somewhere else. We don’t want to be migrants of climate, but if there is no change our country will disappear into the sea.”
It feels terrible, he says, to worry about one’s country’s very existence.
“What will happen to my children’s country, that’s why I worry. What am I leaving behind? We are the voice of the children of these vulnerable countries.”
Aso Ioapo from Tuvalu says “migration is the last option of the Tuvaluan people”.
“Our history and our culture are very important to us, and we believe that this is the place we are supposed to be. We don’t want to lose that, we don’t want to lose who we are.”
Tuvalu has had an increasing number of cyclones, of greater intensity, over recent years. In 2015, Cyclone Pam sent massive waves washing over some entire islands. About 45% of the country’s 10,000 population was displaced, the government said.
“The cyclones are occurring more regularly, and they are more powerful now,” Ioapo said.
“We have to face that we might have to go to another place. That is hard. But migration is the last option. We want to save our countries.”

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