07/05/2019

Biodiversity Crisis Is About To Put Humanity At Risk, UN Scientists To Warn

The Guardian - 

‘We are in trouble if we don’t act,’ say experts, with up to 1m species at risk of annihilation

Students protest in Adelaide. UN experts warned people alive today are at risk unless urgent action is taken. Photograph: Kelly Barnes/EPA 
The world’s leading scientists will warn the planet’s life-support systems are approaching a danger zone for humanity when they release the results of the most comprehensive study of life on Earth ever undertaken.
Up to 1m species are at risk of annihilation, many within decades, according to a leaked draft of the global assessment report, which has been compiled over three years by the UN’s leading research body on nature.
The 1,800-page study will show people living today, as well as wildlife and future generations, are at risk unless urgent action is taken to reverse the loss of plants, insects and other creatures on which humanity depends for food, pollination, clean water and a stable climate.
The final wording of the summary for policymakers is being finalised in Paris by a gathering of experts and government representatives before the launch on Monday, but the overall message is already clear, according to Robert Watson, the chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
“There is no question we are losing biodiversity at a truly unsustainable rate that will affect human wellbeing both for current and future generations,” he said. “We are in trouble if we don’t act, but there are a range of actions that can be taken to protect nature and meet human goals for health and development.”
The authors hope the first global assessment of biodiversity in almost 15 years will push the nature crisis into the global spotlight in the same way climate breakdown has surged up the political agenda since the 1.5C report last year by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Like its predecessor, the report is a compilation of reams of academic studies, in this case on subjects ranging from ocean plankton and subterranean bacteria to honey bees and Amazonian botany. Following previous findings on the decimation of wildlife, the overview of the state of the world’s nature is expected to provide evidence that the world is facing a sixth wave of extinction. Unlike the past five, this one is human-driven.
Mike Barrett, WWF’s executive director of conservation and science, said: “All of our ecosystems are in trouble. This is the most comprehensive report on the state of the environment. It irrefutably confirms that nature is in steep decline.”
Barrett said this posed an environmental emergency for humanity, which is threatened by a triple challenge of climate, nature and food production. “There is no time to despair,” he said. “We should be hopeful that we have a window of opportunity to do something about it over these two years.”
The report will sketch out possible future scenarios that will vary depending on the decisions taken by governments, businesses and individuals. The next year and a half is likely to be crucial because world leaders will agree rescue plans for nature and the climate at two big conferences at the end of 2020.
That is when China will host the UN framework convention on biodiversity gathering in Kunming, which will establish new 20-year targets to replace those agreed in Aichi, Japan, in 2010. Soon after, the UN framework convention on climate change will revise Paris agreement commitments at a meeting in either the UK, Italy, Belgium or Turkey.
Watson, a British professor who has headed both of the UN’s leading scientific panels, said the forthcoming report will delve more deeply than anything before into the causes of nature collapse, chief among which is the conversion of forests, wetlands and other wild landscapes into ploughed fields, dam reservoirs and concrete cities. Three-quarters of the world’s land surface has been severely altered, according to the leaked draft. Humanity is also decimating the living systems on which we depend by emitting carbon dioxide and spreading invasive species.
Watson said the authors have learned from attribution science, which has transformed the debate on the climate crisis by showing how much more likely hurricanes, droughts and floods have become as a result of global heating.
The goal is to persuade an audience beyond the usual green NGOs and government departments. “We need to appeal not just to environment ministers, but to those in charge of agriculture, transport and energy because they are the ones responsible for the drivers of biodiversity loss,” he said.
A focus will be to move away from protection of individual species and areas, and to look at systemic drivers of change, including consumption and trade.
The political environment is changing in some countries due to overwhelming scientific evidence and increasing public concern about the twin crises of nature and climate, which have prompted more than 1 million students to strike from school and led to street protests by Extinction Rebellion activists in more than a dozen countries.
The UK parliament declared a climate emergency this week and the government’s chief climate advisory body recommended an accelerated plan to cut carbon emissions to zero by 2050. Until now, however, the nature crisis has been treated as far less of a priority. “Where are the headlines? Where are the emergency meetings?” asked the school strike founder, Greta Thunberg, in a recent tweet on the subject.
Extinction Rebellion activists said protests that blocked several London streets last month were as much aimed at the defence of nature as stabilising the climate. “They are two sides of the same destructive coin,” said Farhana Yamin, a coordinator of the movement who is also an environmental lawyer and formerly a lead author of the IPCC report.
“The work of IPBES is as crucial as the work done by the IPCC on the 1.5-degree report. That is why Extinction Rebellion is demanding an end [to] biodiversity loss and a net-zero phaseout by 2025. We can’t save humanity by only tackling climate change or only caring about biodiversity.”

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'Very Close': Cost Of Some Electric Cars To Match Petrol Ones By 2020

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

The total cost of owning an electric vehicle will match some equivalent petrol or diesel-powered cars as soon as next year, according to analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The analysis, released on Tuesday, found electric cars "should start to achieve total cost of ownership parity with equivalent internal-combustion [cars] as early as 2020 in Australia for some segments of the market".
The cost of owning an electric car will match some petrol and diesel models by next year. Credit: Bloomberg
Ali Asghar, a Bloomberg NEF analyst, said average mid-sized battery electric ones would match the cost of a higher-end BMW-3 series vehicle by next year. For models such as Toyota's Camry or the Honda Accord, the parity point in ownership costs including purchase price was three to five years off.
"The crossover point is coming very close," Mr Asghar said, as tumbling battery costs allow manufacturers to drive prices lower.
The ownership costs were based on assumptions such as fuel costs of $1.30 per litre, rising 0.8 per cent annually after inflation, and an electricity price of 25 cents per kilowatt-hour. "If people generate electricity from their own solar panels, they can essentially cap the charging cost," he said.
EVs have been a point of difference between the Coalition and Labor during the election campaign after Opposition Leader Bill Shorten set a goal of half of new cars sales being electric by 2030 and proposing tougher average emissions standards for petrol and diesel models.
The Coalition labelled the plans a "carbon tax" for cars and Mr Morrison stated during Monday's debate in Perth that a new EV would cost $28,000 more "than a standard car".
Just 2176 plug-in electric cars were sold in Australia in 2018 - or about one in 500 new sales - in part because of the higher upfront costs and lack of models.
Bloomberg NEF, though, predicts 53 EV models will enter the Australian market by 2023 when sales will have climbed to 40,000, or about 3 per cent without any government policy to propel a take-up.
While politicians have focused on consumers, the spur for EV purchases may well come from the business sector, with fleet purchases accounting for about a fifth of all vehicle sales.
AGL Energy and Eclipx have set electric vehicle targets, and with a fleet cycle of two to four years, such purchases can increase demand, Mr Asghar said.
Hurdles for EVs, though, include the lack of recharging points, particularly in remote regions.
Home-based charging could also be challenging for the one in six households living in flats or semi-detached units that do not have access to dedicated charging points, Bloomberg NEF said.
The country's poor emissions standards are another barrier, with average carbon-dioxide emissions for passenger cars at 171.5 grams per kilometre in 2017, or 13 per cent higher than the 2016 average in the US.
"While emissions intensity of new Australian cars fell over the last decade, it is still higher than countries such as Saudi Arabia where historically low petrol prices provided little incentive to improve vehicle efficiencies," Bloomberg said.

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Our Carbon Budget Is All But Spent, But Who In Canberra Is Counting?

Fairfax - Penny Sackett* | Will Steffen*

According to the ABC’s Vote Compass, a majority of voters has put the environment ahead of the economy as the top election issue. Yet the budget we haven’t heard about in this so-called "climate election" is the carbon budget. That’s the budget set by the laws of physics and chemistry to hold global warming to the safer side of 2 degrees.
A polar bear climbs out of the water in the Franklin Strait in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The Arctic is suffering dramatic loss of sea ice. Credit: AP
Barring some speculative technology deployed in the next decade on massive, unprecedented scales that pulls down more carbon from the atmosphere than we are putting up, the emissions budget that humans must not exceed is 1000 billion tonnes of carbon – give or take. That’s the total carbon budget – from the beginning of the industrial revolution – to keep global warming strictly below 2 degrees with at least a 2/3 chance.
But the amount we have left to “spend” is much less, for three reasons. First, humans have already emitted 585 billion tonnes of carbon over the course of history until the end of last year. That must be subtracted to see what’s left.
Second, other greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, also cause warming, so we need to account for their effects. That’s another 210 billion tonnes of carbon we can’t spend.
Finally, the budget must be reduced by 110 billion tonnes more, because warming increases the release of land carbon to the atmosphere, specifically through wildfires and the melting of permafrost, effects that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have not taken into account.
fter doing the sums, only 95 billion of the original 1000 billion tonnes is left to spend on carbon dioxide emissions. With 10 billion tonnes of carbon emitted every year, without immediate action, humanity will burn through the remaining budget in just 10 years. At that point, the chances of holding warming to 2 degrees will drop below 2/3, and we might as well flip a coin to know whether the climate will exceed boundaries maintained for more than a million years.
To put that in an Australian context, we can divide that remaining 95 billion-tonne budget evenly across the world’s population. With 0.33% of the world’s population, Australia’s “fair share” of the remaining budget is 310 million (million, not billion) tonnes of carbon to “spend” on carbon dioxide emissions, which come primarily from burning fossil fuels.
Sound like a goodly amount? Well, using recent numbers from the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, Australia would use up that “fair share” in just three years.
Three years. Now there’s something that fits into an electoral cycle. And that’s not even counting the carbon dioxide that results from exported Australian coal burnt overseas.
We are accelerating toward disaster. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues to increase year after year. In fact, the rate at which it is increasing is itself increasing.
Renewable energy technologies, electric cars, improved land use, and managing waste are all important pieces of a transition to a healthy, prosperous Australia living within a carbon budget. But from a scientific point of view, the single most critical climate issue in this election is the elephant in the room.
You know the one, that rogue elephant that is trying desperately to remain invisible and not leave footprints on policy papers: the continued expansion of fossil fuel extraction in Australia.
Fossil fuel reserves already being exploited contain more than enough carbon to consume the remaining carbon budget for the 2 degrees Paris target. Simply put, it is senseless, dangerous and irresponsible to expand fossil fuel facilities in Australia (or anywhere else).
We are in the midst of a climate emergency that is disproportionately affecting the young, the poor, and the vulnerable. In emergencies, good leaders take considered, immediate and extraordinary action to combat the biggest source of threat. Australia needs leaders who acknowledge and commit to combating this climate elephant in the party room. Will they step forward before May 18?

*Penny Sackett, former Chief Scientist for Australia, is a physicist and honorary professor at the Climate Change Institute, Australian National University.
*Will Steffen is an emeritus professor at ANU and a councillor at the Climate Council. 

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