04/06/2018

Investors With $26 Trillion In Assets Urge G7 Leaders To Act On Climate Change

Deutsche Welle - David Martin | Reuters

Several huge investment firms, including Germany's Allianz Global Investors, have urged G7 leaders to increase their fight against climate change. The pleas will likely fall on deaf ears in the Trump administration.

Institutional investors boasting some $26 trillion (€22.3 trillion) in assets urged leaders from the Group of Seven nations to double down on their pledge to cut down greenhouse gas emissions by phasing out coal power entirely.
"The global shift to clean energy is under way, but much more needs to be done by governments," the group of 288 investors said in a statement ahead of the upcoming G7 summit in Canada, slated for June 8-9.
Signatories included leading investment firms such as Allianz Global Investors, Aviva Investors, DWS, HSBC Global Asset Management, Nomura Asset Management, Australian Super and HESTA.


What if the earth gets two degrees warmer?

Investors warned that pledges agreed on the back of the 2015 Paris climate summit did not go far enough to limit global warming. Governments, they said, needed to phase out coal power and fossil fuel subsidies worldwide to make any tangible progress in the fight against climate change. Coal power continues to account for almost 40 percent of all generated electricity.
Leading nations also needed "put a meaningful price on carbon," investors wrote in their statement, which was delivered to each of the G7 governments and the United Nations.
Stephanie Pfeifer, CEO of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, one of the signatories, said Sunday's statement marked the first time such a broad group of leading investment firms has called for a phase-out of thermal coal used in power generation.
"There is a lot more momentum in the investor community" to put pressure on governments, she told the Reuters news agency.


What future for coal workers?

 Trump's climate policy poses obvious roadblock
However, investors' calls for stricter climate policy risk being ignored by the US.
President Donald Trump has made clear he favors bolstering the US' fossil fuel industry and has voiced his doubts over the scientific findings on climate change.
Trump also announced a year ago that the US would pull out of the Paris climate accord, citing the supposedly "draconian financial and economic burdens" the agreement imposed on American jobs and the US economy.
Investors sought to counter those claims in Sunday's letter, writing that countries and firms that implement the Paris agreement's climate goals "will see significant economic benefits and attract increased investment."
The US along with Germany and Japan, is also not a member of the "Powering Past Coal" alliance, a group of almost 30 countries founded last year seeking to halt all coal power usage by 2030. G7 nations Canada, Britain, France and Italy are among the alliance's members.

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Government's $500m Great Barrier Reef Package May Have Limited Impact Amid Climate Change

ABC Science - Joanna Khan

Coral bleaching is caused by higher than normal water temperatures. (Supplied: Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority)
At the end of April a $500 million package to help the Great Barrier Reef was announced by the Federal Government.
It didn't take long for questions to be raised about the decision to give $444 million in funding to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, a small charity with a revenue of only $8 million in 2016.
The funding will be split between improving water quality, supporting reef restoration science, increasing crown-of-thorns starfish control, community engagement and reef monitoring.
But there is no acknowledgement of what scientists argue is the biggest threat facing the reef: climate change.
Without climate action, can this package actually do anything to help the reef?
The answer is no, according to many involved in reef research, management and conservation, including University of Queensland coral biologist Sophie Dove.
"Unless we mitigate the CO2, a lot of the other solutions such as cleaning the water and removing crown of thorns are somewhat immaterial," Dr Dove said.
"All of those things can assist in helping any coral reefs that remain to survive and prosper in the future — but without climate mitigation, I think that's an issue."

Local reef actions must be met halfway
While the funding is a step forward for addressing local pressures on the reef like water quality, it must go hand in hand with national and global emissions reductions, according to Russell Reichelt from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA).
"We're very clear that it is absolutely critical to achieve action globally on climate change, but we're focused on what we can do as the Marine Park Authority in the local region," he said.
The funding was not designed to work on its own, said Dr Reichelt, who chairs the GBRMPA.
"The real solution in the long run is to address rising greenhouse gas concentrations in our atmosphere," he said.
"But we're still left with things that will happen inevitably now, because of the amount of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. So there was never a greater imperative that we look for ways to relieve local pressures."
However, some scientists have expressed concern that the funding is targeting some local measures that have not yet been proven effective.
Research fellow Jon Brodie from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies wrote in The Conversation that "one concern with the package is that it seems to give greatest weight to the strategies that are already being tried — and which have so far fallen a long way short of success".

Reef already changed by warming
If the water temperature doesn't drop after bleaching, corals starve and die, and get overgrown with algae. (Supplied: Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority)
Across the entire Great Barrier Reef 30 per cent of corals died after the 2016 bleaching event. In the northern third of the reef, where up to 50 per cent of shallow water corals were lost, some corals actually "cooked" because the underwater heatwave was so severe.

The government is avoiding dealing with the root cause of this, which is climate change, said Great Barrier Reef campaigner Imogen Zeethoven from the Australian Marine Conservation Society.
"I wake up at night thinking, what will it take for this Government to respond effectively, if losing 50 per cent of the shallow water corals on the reef isn't enough?" she said.
"They can invest $500 million over six years, but if they do nothing about climate change then it will all be wasted in the end."
Coral ecosystems have already been radically transformed by climate change.
The loss of corals due to the 2016 bleaching has forced some northern reefs to transition to new compositions of corals with less diversity — dominated by slow-growing species with more simple physical structures.
And scientists have already documented changes in reef fish diversity as a result of the coral loss.

New funding is still critical
Echoing these sentiments, CEO of the Australian Institute of Marine Science Paul Hardisty said the $500 million was a good start, but emissions also needed to be addressed.
Where is the urgency in Australia's climate policy?
Australia needs to stop pretending we're tackling climate change.
"On the business-as-usual trajectory … in a few decades there won't be any reefs, or at least reefs as we know them today," Dr Hardisty said.
"If you don't get greenhouse gas emissions under control then no amount of money is any use."
But Dr Hardisty said that didn't mean we should stop funding other local reef protection measures.
"We're past the point where we can say that getting emissions under control will be enough," he said.
"To have healthy reefs that provide trillions of dollars in ecosystem services to humans every year, then you've got to do both, there isn't another option."
By relieving other pressures on the reef such as poor water quality and crown-of-thorns starfish, the reefs of the future will have a better shot at surviving — no matter that form they take.

So where is the simultaneous climate action?
Spending on climate issues was cut in the 2018 budget from $3 billion to $1.6 billion in 2019, and it will be reduced further to $1.25 billion by 2022.
On top of that, the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) has an emissions reduction target of 26 to 28 per cent by 2030, which reef campaigner Imogen Zeethoven said was insufficient.
"A 26 per cent reduction, as proposed by the NEG, matched by all the countries in the world would result in all coral reefs in the world dying," Ms Zeethoven said.
"They need to dramatically upscale their emissions reduction target to match the funding investment that they're putting into the reef."
Dr Reichelt said that advocating for both global and local solutions for the reef was like walking a tightrope.
He said it was a balance between "making sure people understand the underlying cause and the need for global action, as well as not giving up on the reef locally".
"If the reef does survive until the end of the century we'll have a better, more diverse coral reef if we take all these local actions now," he said.

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Don't Turn To The Military To Solve The Climate-Change Crisis

The Guardian - *

Warning about conflicts, wars and mass migration is the wrong way to approach things
The heat waves and fires in recent years have shown that climate change will have a big impact on Australia. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP
The Australian Senate’s declaration last month that climate change is a “current and existential national security risk” was clearly intended to inject much-needed urgency into the country’s climate policy stalemate.
Bringing together the unusual bedfellows of military generals and environmentalists to warn about the dangers of climate change, it has the possibility to break though Australia’s culture wars on the issue.
 However, by framing climate change as a security matter, it also has significant consequences in shaping how we respond to a warming planet.
 As the climate crisis unfolds, is the military the institution we want to turn to for solutions?
The Australian Senate inquiry was initiated by the former Greens senator Scott Ludlam and heard from diverse actors, including humanitarian agencies and defence strategists.
 It examined the likely impacts of extreme weather on military infrastructure, the economy and the wider region. It concluded that “climate change is exacerbating threats and risks to Australia” and called for improved military preparedness, better studies of “risks” to Australia, and enhanced coordination between government agencies.
The question rarely asked is whose security are we talking about - security of what, for whom and from whom?
In this, Australia is following a well-worn path forged by the European Union and the United States. The Pentagon in 2003 was the first to talk about climate security, framing climate change as a “threat multiplier” that would exacerbate conflict, terrorism, mass migration and social instability.
In 2008, the EU concurred saying that global temperature increases of more than 2 degrees (current predictions suggest we are heading for more than 3 degrees) would “lead to unprecedented security scenarios”.
Security is a modern day weasel word – who can be against security? The question rarely asked is whose security are we talking about - security of what, for whom and from whom? The US, EU and now Australian strategies, though, clearly state they are talking about the security of their respective nations in the face of “threats” usually coming from the consequences of climate change in neighbouring countries.
The submission from Australia’s Department of Defence to the inquiry put it this way: “When climate impacts are combined with ethnic or other social grievances, they can contribute to increased migration, internal instability or intra-state insurgencies, often over greater competition for natural resources. These developments may foster terrorism or cross-border conflict.”
They argued that this “could lead to an increase in the demand for a wide spectrum of Defence responses including maintaining law and order following disasters”.
The image they paint is a dystopian one, which assumes that climate change disruptions will lead to a dog-eat-dog world, causing conflicts and wars, and prompting millions to migrate – and this will require the military to deal with the ensuing chaos.
The effect of this approach is to turn the victims of climate change into potential threats and to make a militarised response to the impact of climate change the default response.
The Australian Senate report is more nuanced than some US Pentagon reports in advocating for a range of strategies, including additional climate finance and better disaster resilience planning.
But by blurring the distinction between the military’s ideas of security and other “human security” approaches, it embraces and reinforces a military response to climate change.
This can be seen in the report’s strong appeals to the military to expand its role in disaster relief, even though this typically is the most costly form of relief and can end up militarising humanitarian disasters as the world witnessed graphically in New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina where deployed National Guards ended up shooting at flood victims.
The Senate report has less focus on the way the impacts of climate change will vary dramatically depending on the level of poverty and vulnerability of the affected community. Nor does it challenge the economic structures or laws that have led to this inequality and vulnerability, such as the role of Australia’s trade policies in undermining rural livelihoods and disrupting food systems.
This is not surprising. After all, the essence of “security” is to secure what already exists. This means securing a world order in which Australia’s per capita income is 25 times that of nearby Kiribati or Solomon Islands and where even in Australia 2.9 million people live under the poverty line.
 It is an approach that seeks to build walls to exclude the dispossessed rather than tackle the underlying causes that cause people to migrate – shown today most visibly in Australia’s inhumane treatment of refugees in Nauru.
Australia’s experience of unprecedented heat waves and fires in recent years has already shown that climate change will have a big impact on the country and the wider region. But how those impacts play out will depend to a great degree on how we choose to respond.
An approach that relies on military forces and barbed wire will worsen the crisis and create a world no one wants to live in.
Real security emerges from recognising our interdependence, tackling injustice and inequality, and working together to protect those who are most vulnerable.

*Nick Buxton works at the Transnational Institute based in the Netherlands and is co-editor of The Secure and the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations are shaping a climate-changed world (Pluto Books, 2015)

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