31/03/2018

More Than 75 Percent Of Earth’s Land Areas Are ‘Broken,’ Major Report Finds

Motherboard - Stephen Leahy

Once-productive lands have become deserts, are polluted, or deforested, putting 3.2 billion people at risk.
In Thailand, global warming and lack of rainfall causes cultivated land to dry up and crack. Image: Petr Baumann/Shutterstock
Like a broken cell phone that can only text or take pictures, but not make a single call, more than 75 percent of the Earth’s land areas have lost some or most of their functions, undermining the well-being of the 3.2 billion people that rely on them to produce food crops, provide clean water, control flooding and more.
These once-productive lands have either become deserts, are polluted, or have been deforested and converted for unsustainable agricultural production. This is a major contributor to increased conflict and mass human migration, and left unchecked, could force as many as 700 million to migrate by 2050, according to the world’s first comprehensive evidence-based assessment of land degradation, released today in Medellín, Colombia.
Deforestation in Madagascar. Image: Dudarev Mikhail/Shutterstock
Land degradation—including deforestation, soil erosion, and salinity and pollution of fresh water systems—is also driving species to extinction and aggravating the effects of climate change, the report concludes. It was written by more than 100 leading experts from 45 countries for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). IPBES is the ‘IPCC for biodiversity,’ a scientific assessment of the status of non-human life that makes up the Earth’s life support system. A major companion report was released Friday documenting the rapid and dangerous decline in biodiversity. It called for fundamental changes in how we live, run our societies, and the economy.
“This is an extremely urgent issue that we need to address yesterday,” said Robert Scholes, a South African ecologist and co-chair of the assessment. “Land degradation is having the single biggest impact on the well-being of humanity,” Scholes said in an interview in Medellín.
Human activities, mainly those involving agriculture and urbanization, have destroyed or degraded topsoil, forests, and other natural vegetation and water resources nearly everywhere, the report found. Wetlands have been hit hardest, with 87 percent lost globally in the last 300 years. Wetlands continue to be destroyed in southeast Asia and the Congo region, mainly to plant oil palm trees.
Less than 25 percent of the Earth’s land surface has escaped the substantial impacts of human activity—and by 2050, this will have fallen to less than 10 percent. Most of these future land losses will be in Central and South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The only places left relatively unaffected will be polar regions and tundra, high mountains, and deserts, the report projects.
Ending land degradation is “an urgent priority to protect the biodiversity and ecosystem services vital to all life on Earth and to ensure human well-being,” said Luca Montanarella, a soil scientist from Italy and co-chair of the assessment.
“We’ve know about this for over 20 years, but it is only getting worse,” Montanarella said in an interview in Medellín. There is little public awareness and it is not considered an urgent issue by most governments. The only way to stop the decline is at the local level, and through the choices each of us make, he said.
River bank erosion in Bangladesh. Image: Sangib Kumar Barman/Shutterstock
Those choices include choosing to eat less meat and buying food from local growers who use the most sustainable farming practices. Up to 40 percent of food is wasted globally at various points, from farms to overstuffed refrigerators, said Robert Watson, IPBES Chair. Countries also need to end their production subsidies in agriculture, fisheries, energy, and other sectors, Watson told Motherboard.
Rich countries need to take responsibility for the impacts that their consumption of imported products may have. The country landscape of the United Kingdom is a tourist attraction because the country imports 35 to 40 percent of its food from other countries, said Watson. “People don’t see the impacts of their consumption.”
Ending land degradation and restoring damaged lands would provide more than one third of the most cost-effective greenhouse gas mitigation activities required by 2030 to keep global warming to below 2°C. And doing this would cost at least three times less than doing nothing and create much better livelihoods and jobs for local people, said Watson.
“Implementing the right actions to combat land degradation can transform the lives of millions of people across the planet, but this will become more difficult and more costly the longer we take to act,” he said.

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Majority Of Australians Support Phasing Out Coal Power By 2030, Survey Finds

The Guardian - 

50% of Coalition voters and 67% of Labor voters want to phase out coal, and majority also support striving to cut greenhouse gas emissions
Anti-coal mining protesters join thousands at a march in Sydney on 24 March. Photograph: Rushton/EPA
A majority of Australians would support phasing out coal power by 2030, including half the people in a sample identifying as Coalition voters, according to a survey by a progressive thinktank.
The research funded by the Australia Institute says 60% of a sample of 1,417 Australians surveyed by online market research firm Research Now supported Australia joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance to phase out coal power by 2030.
The Powering Past Coal Alliance – spearheaded by the UK and Canada – was unveiled at the COP23 climate talks in Bonn. The agreement is not legally binding, and the membership does not include Australia or other major coal exporters and users.
The survey suggests there is a core level of support across Australia’s partisan divide for signing on, with 50% of Coalition voters supportive as well as 67% of ALP voters. The significant dissenters were One Nation voters, with only 36% supportive.
A majority of Australians also supported increasing ambition on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, with 58% support, including 47% of Coalition voters in the sample.
“The strong majority support for phasing out coal power shows how far the community is ahead of the government on climate change,” said the Australia Institute’s deputy director, Ebony Bennett.
She said the Turnbull government’s approach on climate and energy policy meant Australia was at risk of missing out on jobs and investment associated with a global boom in renewable energy, and was out of step with public sentiment.
The research follows a declaration on Wednesday at the National Press Club by the resources minister Matt Canavan that he was not interested in contemplating a discussion about a just transition for workers displaced by any phase out of coal consistent with Australia’s international climate obligations.
Canavan said workers suffered when industries shut down or were phased out so euphemisms like “just transitions” were best avoided. “I don’t like the term transition, let’s be frank, if you want to shutdown the coal industry, say it – that’s what will happen.”
The resources minister said expanding the coal industry was “not inconsistent with the obligations we’ve got to reduce carbon emissions”.
He said countries were increasing investment in high-efficiency coal plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the Paris accord. Canavan did not mention that some countries, such as Japan, are increasing investment in high-efficiency coal because of a phase-out of nuclear power.
Canavan also declared in response to a question about balancing his portfolio responsibilities to boost the resources sector with his responsibilities to the Queenslanders who elected him that he had been elected to parliament “on a platform that is unashamedly pro-coal”.
While Canavan was elected because he was given a winnable position on the LNP’s Queensland Senate ticket, the resources minister said: “I got elected on the basis I will support the resources sector.”

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The Sahara Is Growing, Thanks In Part To Climate Change

Washington Post - Darryl Fears

Camels walk on the sand during the “Gallops of Morocco” equestrian race in March in the southern Moroccan Sahara desert. (Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty Images)
Earth’s largest hot desert, the Sahara, is getting bigger, a new study finds. It is advancing south into more tropical terrain in Sudan and Chad, turning green vegetation dry and soil once used for farming into barren ground in areas that can least afford to lose it.
Yet it is not just the spread of the Sahara that is frightening, the researchers say. It’s the timing: It is happening during the African summer, when there is usually more rain. But the precipitation has dried up, allowing the boundaries of the desert to expand.
“If you have a hurricane come suddenly, it gets all the attention from the government and communities galvanize,” said Sumant Nigam, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic science at the University of Maryland and the senior author of the study. “The desert advance over a long period might capture many countries unawares. It’s not announced like a hurricane. It’s sort of creeping up on you.”
The study was published Thursday in the Journal of Climate. The authors said that although their research focused only on the Sahara, it suggests that climate changes also could be causing other hot deserts to expand — with potentially harsh economic and human consequences.
Deserts form in subtropical regions because of a global weather circulation called the Hadley cell. Warm air rises in the tropics near the equator, producing rain and thunderstorms. When the air hits the top of the atmosphere, it spreads north and south toward the poles. It does not sink back down until it is over the subtropics, but as it does, the air warms and dries out, creating deserts and other areas that are nearly devoid of rain.
“Climate change is likely to widen the Hadley circulation, causing northward advance of the subtropical deserts,” Nigam said in a statement that announced the study.
At the same time, he said, the Sahara’s southward creep suggests that additional mechanisms are at work. One is probably the natural climate cycle called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO, in which temperatures over a large swath of the northern Atlantic Ocean fluctuate between warm and cold phases for 50 years to 70 years. The warm cycles deliver precipitation to subtropical areas, and the cold cycles keep it away. Human-caused climate change can increase the intensity and length of the drier cycle.
Nigam and the study’s lead researcher, Natalie Thomas, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, used data from the Global Precipitation Climatology Center to arrive at their finding. They studied grids and patterns from 1920 to 2013, mixing in satellite data compiled “over the last three decades,” Nigam said.
They determined that the AMO was in a positive phase that delivered more rain to areas near the Sahara from the 1930s to the early 1960s. It then switched to a negative cycle that lasted 40 years. A 1980s drought — “the most intense … of the 20th century” — was attributed to the latter phase and linked to “higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
Railway tracks are covered by sand as a result of desert encroachment in 2013 at Ogrein Railway Station in Sudan. (Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters)
Over the second phase, the Sahara crawled south mostly, encroaching on a more tropical area known as the Sahel. Its effect could be seen on a water basin that drains into Lake Chad. “The water level has been falling precipitously,” Nigam said. “It’s very depleted. We can’t attribute it all to rainfall. There may be human draws from the lake. But it’s telling, a visible element, and it clearly lies in the area where the Sahara is encroaching southward.”
Africa is the continent least responsible for human-caused climate change, but it’s the most vulnerable to its effect because of unique features. It is, for example, a land mass almost evenly divided between the Southern and Northern hemispheres, creating a wide variety of climate zones.
Thomas said she started the research as a way to characterize century-long trends but focused on Africa’s Northern Hemisphere when she noticed “really strong trends over the proximity of the Sahara.”
As the researchers went about their work, downloading satellite data and information from the global climatology center, the evidence became more concerning. “The finding was impressive because it was happening in the summer season, the growing season where Africa receives most of its rainfall, a really important season for agriculture,” Nigam said.
Yet that is when the greatest southward advance of the Sahara occurred, he said. A season of rain was being replaced by the expansion of a desert, without the affected governments, Chad and Sudan mostly, noticing.
The future implications for countries already affected by lack of rain and drought could be dire, Nigam said. “Water resource planning, water use and long-term planning is important.”

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Falling Renewable Costs 'Chilling' For Fossil Fuels

Fairfax - Cole Latimer

The rapidly falling cost of renewable energy and batteries is "chilling" for the future of the fossil fuels sector, raising doubts about the viability of new coal power stations.
A Bloomberg New Energy Finance report has found the price of renewables has fallen by almost a fifth over the last year, with wind and solar generators becoming cheaper than both coal and gas-fired power stations.
Elena Giannakopoulou, head of energy economics at BNEF, said the rapidly falling cost of renewable generation and battery power is changing the game for the electricity sector.
"The conclusions are chilling for the fossil fuel sector," she said.
The combination of batteries and wind farms is providing more power flexibility. Photo: David Mariuz
The cost of electricity supplied by lithium-ion batteries, like the Tesla installation in South Australia, has fallen nearly 80 per cent, from $US1000 ($1308) a kilowatt hour in 2010 to only $US209 a kilowatt hour in 2017.
Wind and solar are proving cheaper because their cost of electricity has fallen significantly, while that for coal, gas, nuclear and large hydro projects has only slightly decreased.
"We are seeing record-low prices being set for wind and solar, and then those records being broken again and again on a regular basis. This is having a powerful effect – it is changing perceptions," BNEF head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Seb Henbest, said
BNEF said Australia had one of the world's lowest levelised cost of electricity for onshore wind and solar.
Solar power will likely be cheaper than coal by 2020.
The Australian National University forecast future prices of new renewable energy generators would fall to $50 a megawatt hour in the 2020s.
The ASX forward prices for NSW between the 2020 March quarter and 2021 December quarter run to an average of $75.73 a megawatt hour for coal-fired power.
Globally, the levelised cost of electricity for wind farms was $US55 per megawatt hour for the first half of 2018, down 18 per cent from the same time last year, while solar power has also fallen 18 per cent to $US70 per megawatt hour. Only offshore wind generation failed to fall significantly, dipping 5 per cent in costs year on year
EY believes Australian renewable energy will cost the same or be cheaper than fossil fuels as soon as 2020.
This parity is forecast to happen as the Renewable Energy Target - a government scheme designed to support building renewable generation like wind and solar - comes to an end.
However, Ms Giannakopoulou said despite the rapidly falling costs of renewables it does not spell the end for fossil fuels.
"Some existing coal and gas power stations, with sunk capital costs, will continue to have a role for many years, doing a combination of bulk generation and balancing, as wind and solar penetration increase," she said.
"But the economic case for building new coal and gas capacity is crumbling, as batteries start to encroach on the flexibility and peaking revenues enjoyed by fossil fuel plants."
Australia has been putting wind and solar through its paces to see if it can provide both more stable, instantly available energy to the grid, overcoming the issues of how to generate electricity when the wind isn't blowing and the sun doesn't shine.
The government recently announced new trials to improve the accuracy of the renewable systems’ self-forecasting ability, which allows them to predict the weather in their immediate area and know how much electricity they can provide into the grid, ensuring there is no sudden shortfall when the weather changes.
There are also trials to use wind farm-generated electricity to provide power that smooths out demand and supply to make sure it is balanced.
Neoen Australia’s South Australian Hornsdale 2 wind farm also carried out trials providing intermittent energy into electricity markets under a wide range of operating conditions, saving the market about $3.1 million due to the lower cost of energy.

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