16/06/2018

How Can Climate Policy Stay On Top Of A Growing Mountain Of Data?

The Guardian - Jan Minx*

Tracking all the relevant publications on climate change has become impossible. Climate science and policy need a new approach for an age of big literature
Oxfam activists portrayed the G7 leaders, including US President Donald Trump, standing next to a burning Earth during the G7 Summit in Quebec City, Canada in June 2018. Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA 
When the lines between scientific facts, legitimate disagreements and uncertainties about climate change are being deliberately blurred – not least by world leaders like Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has never been more important.
It is the IPCC’s task to make sense of the landscape of scientific findings, where they agree, and why they may differ.
The authors of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report – hundreds of scientists across many disciplines – have a massive task on their hands, ahead of its publication in 2021.
When the volume of scientific information continues to grow exponentially, so does the difficulty of maintaining a clear overview. Tracking and reading all of the relevant publications on climate change has become impossible, as more emerge in a single year than was previously the case over an entire, or multiple, assessment periods.
Even if there was no further growth over the next three years, the relevant literature to be reviewed for the IPCC’s sixth assessment will be somewhere between 270,000 and 330,000 publications. This is larger than the entire climate change literature before 2014. So conducting a scientific assessment is increasingly a “big literature” challenge.
Exponential growth in scientific publications on the topic of climate change. The numbers shown refer to the Web of Science database for scholarly literature. The overall climate change literature relevant for assessment will be much larger. Figure by Max Callaghan, updated from Minx et al. (2017). Photograph: Max Callaghan 
Managing the literature is vital if we are to ensure the credibility of the IPCC in future. We need to let computers help us to read and digest information we can no longer comprehend on our own.
The IPCC needs to lead the way towards a new era of computer-assisted assessments. Machine learning and natural language processing must be used to understand and synthesise a huge volume of relevant material. New categories of experts – from scientometrics, computational linguistics and data analytics – will need to be involved.
Decision-makers also want knowledge from the research community that can contribute to meaningful solutions. But systematic progress in learning about climate solutions has been limited within the IPCC to date. The quest to understand what policies work well – and under what conditions – remains in its infancy.
This problem is particularly acute in the social sciences. Some argue that social science evidence doesn’t lend itself to generalization. But a bigger challenge is the lack of appreciation for research synthesis as a scientific endeavor in its own right.
The dearth of synthetic evidence in policy and social science literatures makes it impossible for the IPCC to aggregate the knowledge that is diffused across thousands of individual studies.
Changing the culture of the social sciences to better support scientific assessment and accumulated learning about climate change solutions won’t be easy.
While the IPCC can act as a catalyst, any shift will also require more capacity in synthesis methods, and support for collaborative networks. Research funders and governments also need to direct more funding towards research synthesis.
The good news is that there are models for such a transformation. Researchers in medicine, education and psychology have been forced to grapple with similar challenges over recent decades –and systematic research synthesis is now well established within these fields as a basis for policy advice.
The misleading impression that any single scientific study has the same standing as all others is toxic for a culture of evidence-informed policymaking.
By elevating research synthesis to the gold standard of scientific policy advice – and using big data and machine learning techniques to deliver it – we can strengthen the IPCC and provide a stronger response to the Trumps and Erdogans of this world, who want to cherry-pick evidence to suit their own agendas.

*Jan Minx is head of the working group on applied sustainability science at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) in Berlin, and professor of climate change and public policy at the Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds.

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Interview: Climate Change And The Disappearing Islands Of Kiribati

Human Rights Watch - Amy Braunschweiger

The Republic of Kiribati, a group of 33 Pacific Islands home to 100,000 people, sits on average  six feet above sea level. Scientists believe that at some point this century, these islands may become uninhabitable as ocean levels rise due to climate change. The film Anote’s Ark, showing at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York, tells Kiribati’s story through the eyes of now-former president Anote Tong, as he advocates with world leaders for help for his people, and a Kiribati woman named Sermary, who emigrates with her family to New Zealand after her home floods. Amy Braunschweiger talked with the filmmaker, Matthieu Rytz, about his film and his attachment to a country that may soon no longer exist.
Anote Tong, then president of Kiribati, swims in the lagoon near his home.
The whole thing started on Panama’s San Blas islands, which are expected to be covered by rising sea water due to climate change. I went there on assignment from the New York Times to cover the issue, and I was so upset by it. And I thought, where else on the planet are people experiencing this? So I looked at a world map, and I heard about Kiribati. I wasn’t even aware of its existence. Here was a country whose ocean territory was as wide as the United States, in the middle of the Pacific, and I never heard of it. I was just amazed. I went there for two weeks to work as a photographer. I didn’t plan to make a movie.
How did you meet President Tong?
I had chartered a plane to take aerial photographs, and the pilot was a close friend of his, and he introduced us. I was quite shy. He was a head of state that knew that within a century, he won’t have a state anymore. What’s a bigger challenge than that? I just spontaneously asked him about making this movie. And he said yes. I had never made a movie before, never even done a short film. So I figured, “OK let’s do this, let’s figure out how to make a film.” It was the start of a four-year journey.

Then President Anote Tong of Kiribati in Paris to advocate with world leaders around climate change. Kiribati’s islands may become uninhabitable as ocean levels rise due to climate change. © Matthieu Rytz
Throughout the movie, Tong eloquently speaks to world leaders about climate change and his country. What was it like to film this? 
When I learned he would meet with the pope, I flew to the Vatican and met him. I did that whenever he met heads of state, was at the UN Human Rights Council, or any important moment. I basically covered every important meeting he had for the whole three years. I can tell you, in this political arena, the action is really fast and extremely boring. You go there, shake hands with Obama, and that’s it. It’s waiting hours and hours for the next meeting.
What’s your relationship like with Tong?
I was a one-man show, and because I was just a regular guy with a camera, I got more and more access. It got to the point where I was sharing dinner and having wine with him. Now we have almost like a grandfather-grandson relationship.
When I look back over the past five years, I see how I tried to keep my professional distance from the story, and I wonder, what just happened? How in the world did a Swiss white guy just become so close to the president of Kiribati?
What is Tong like in person?
You go to his home, what you’ll discover is that he is a traditional fisherman, living in a simple house with his grandchildren. There is only cold water. He spends his days on the lagoon fishing, and at night he spends time with his family and tells stories. He’s an elder respected by the community, and he drinks Kava, a traditional drink, and has a very important relationship to the spiritual world. So, he’s a mix of a traditional fisherman and something like a shaman. You would never ever think of him as the same guy hanging out with the pope. It’s an incredible contrast.


Trailer for the movie Anote’s Ark, an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival 2018.

 Your story also focuses on a Kiribati woman named Tiermeri  Tiare, known as Sermary, who was able to get a visa to live in New Zealand with her family. Why did you choose her?
Through Sermary you can understand the legacy of the people in Kiribati and what they’re going through. They have this program called “Pacific access category.” Every year they pick 75 people from Kiribati, a bit like a lottery, and those people can migrate to New Zealand. I basically got in touch with one of my friends in Kiribati who had contacts with the high commissioner, and from them I got the list of people who had won. All people still living in Kiribati who in a year or two would be in New Zealand. Sermary She was the first person I called. I just knew she was perfect.

Sermary and her children in Kiribati. Sermary and her family, who move to New Zealand, are featured in the movie Anote’s Ark. © Matthieu Rytz
In the movie, you see Sermary struggling to adjust to life in New Zealand. In one scene you see how, right after she landed in Auckland, she’s completely overwhelmed by the airport’s parking lot.
There is only one road in Kiribati, and it’s 23 kilometers long. That’s the only place on Kirbati with a few cars. In another scene we cut from the movie, Sermary and her friend drive out of the airport and into an Auckland suburb. Sermary looks at the houses and asks,  “Why are there so many classrooms in this country?” In Kiribati, the only buildings with walls are classrooms, built by the church. People there don’t live in houses. And I think that’s an important perspective. All their lives they didn’t have walls. And they don’t have worry about the rent or buying food. There’s nothing to buy on the islands, although they do trade some coconuts for tea or sugar. When I was there, I wanted a cup of tea, and the vendor asked me for half a coconut. I only had an Australian dollar and offered it to him, but he had no use for the money. And I thought, ”Wow.” Leaving this culture is an incredible life change.

An aerial view of one of Kiribati’s islands. © Matthieu Rytz
Before she left for New Zealand, Sermary’s home flooded for the first time in an unusual storm. But when she talked to her friends of the rising water and the need to leave Kiribati, no one agreed. President Tong also spoke of people in Kiribati not believing climate change endangered their islands. Were you surprised to find those views there?
For me, this is the very point of the movie. Tong says again and again, “Climate change should not be a political issue.” Meanwhile, politicians play their electoral games. In Australia, in Kiribati, politicians deny the existence of climate change to win some votes, and they’re playing with the future of this planet. The story of Kiribati is a warning to the rest of humanity. It’s too late for Kiribati. It’s too late for Manhattan, too. It’s just a question of time. And a very important question is, how are you going to deal with that? For me, the main point about the movie is not “Kiribati is going under water so I should take action and buy a Tesla and it’s going to be better.” It’s way deeper than that. What we need now is a real paradigm shift. It’s a question of re-connecting to our land and the nature around us. And that’s something Tong is deeply concerned with. We are basically disconnected and the climate is in crisis.

Men construct a seawall in Kiribati, located in the Pacific Ocean. Kiribati’s islands may become uninhabitable as ocean levels rise due to climate change. © Matthieu Rytz
Anote’s Ark is a quiet film with many meditative shots of water, as opposed to the dramatic floods shown in other climate change films. Why did you choose to make the film this way?
Because I respect nature. For me, the first director of this film is nature and the island itself. It has its own voice. Climate change movies in general are dramatic and fast and show destruction. It’s easy to show these powerful images. But they don’t resonate for me. For me, climate change is much more subtle. Like erosion. It takes time, but it’s happening. Take the example of Manhattan. Every day, every single day, some rock is worn away. It’s not dramatic. And it will eventually destroy everything. It’s deep and subtle and unstoppable.
Meanwhile, though, Kiribati has a new president who has undone many of Tong’s climate-oriented policies.
This new government are basically climate deniers. I think they took the climate-denier position  to get elected. I went with my partner to Kiribati over Christmas, and I took my projector and my laptop and started showing the movie in different communities. The people loved the movie. But I was stopped by immigration and the police and they took my laptop and projector, and we were deported. I cannot go back now. But the thing is, when this happened the UN Ambassador from Kiribati in New York sent an official letter to the Sundance Film Festival, asking them to take the movie. And they did.
Sermary plays with her baby in Kiribati. Sermary and her family, who move to New Zealand, are featured in the movie Anote’s Ark. © Matthieu Rytz 
How is Sermary now?
Sermary is good. The Kiribati have such a powerful community, they just stay together and hang out together in Auckland. I was with them two weeks ago, and it was beautiful. It could be better of course, but they have a good life there. If I had scripted the movie, and said at the end, Sermary would have a baby in New Zealand, and we would film her saying to her baby,  “Are you a Kiwi?” I would say it’s too much. But that happened. I didn’t want the movie to have a positive end, but it’s just life, and it goes on.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
For me, the next question will be climate justice, and who has access to these funds and resources. Which is why this movie belongs in a human rights film festival.

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