30/11/2020

(AU) Scott Morrison's Climate Language Has Shifted – But Actions Speak Louder Than Words

The Guardian -  |

Analysis: The PM changed tone as soon as Joe Biden was projected likely next US president. Will a policy pivot follow?

The recent shift in the prime minister’s language invites two questions: is there a pivot under way, and is the shift real?’ Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP


Scott Morrison’s language about Australia adopting an emissions reduction target of net zero by 2050, and about climate action more generally, is starting to warm up. The recent shift in the prime minister’s language invites two questions: is there a pivot under way, and is the shift real?

The story so far

We know the Coalition’s history on climate policy. The Abbott government repealed Labor’s climate price, attempted to gut the Renewable Energy Target and abolish agencies driving a transition to low emissions energy. Morrison while treasurer brandished a lump of coal in the parliament, telling his opponents not to be “scared”. For much of this year, the Coalition has ignored persistent entreaties from environmentalists and major business groups to adopt a target of net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest, and to use the economic recovery from Covid-19 to lock in the transition to low emissions. Morrison has never ruled out adopting a net zero target but has created the impression the government wasn’t interested – an impression reinforced by the government’s declaration that it would pursue a “gas-led recovery” after the pandemic.

When and why did the language change?

In the couple of weeks before the US presidential election on 3 November, Japan, China and South Korea adopted pledges taking them closer to net zero. Morrison also had a private conversation with the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, in which net zero was raised. Leaders were anticipating the likely election of Joe Biden. The Democrat had promised to end the backsliding of the Trump era and revitalise international climate negotiations, starting with bringing the US back into the Paris deal. Biden’s appointment of John Kerry as his climate envoy after winning the election is a further signal of seriousness. From the moment Biden was projected as the likely winner, Morrison’s language began to change. It became noticeably warmer. Morrison now says Australia wants to “reach net zero emissions as quickly as possible”.

What about 2030?

Before we get to 2050, Australia has an emissions reduction target for 2030, and the government will be under pressure to update that commitment with a higher level of ambition in the next round of international climate talks.

Australia’s current target is a 26%-28% cut below 2005 levels, and the government has been planning to meet that (not very ambitious) target using carryover credits from the Kyoto period. Official government emissions projections released in December last year found Australia was not on track to meet the 2030 target unless it used the credits. Australia’s use of the Kyoto-era concessions has been strongly opposed by a large number of nations in international climate discussions, and experts say there is no legal basis for their use under the Paris agreement.

After Biden’s victory, Morrison used a speech to business leaders to signal, hey presto, magic happens: Australia might not deploy the accounting trick to help meet the 2030 target after all. The prime minister said: “My ambition is that we will not need them and we are working to this as our goal, consistent with our record of over-delivering.” The hint from Morrison was that new projections, expected to be released in December, will show Australia is on track to meet the promised cut without carryovers.

How can that happen?

In part, because the Australian government has not been great at forecasting future emissions and tends to substantially change its estimates each year.

Estimating future emissions is difficult. Each year, officials make assumptions about what will happen in 50 areas of the economy and come up with projections of how much will be emitted. For more than a decade, they have significantly over-estimated how much CO2 the country will emit in the years ahead before revising down the projections, sometimes significantly.

The biggest miscalculation has been in electricity generation. Renewable energy has come into the grid much faster than the government expected – the national 2020 renewable energy target was met ahead of time, state targets in Victoria and Queensland have started to have an impact and the cost of solar and wind energy continues to drop, making investment more attractive. Officials also overestimated how much grid electricity the country would use – demand has fallen, in part due to nearly a third of homes now having solar panels.

For reasons that are not clear, the official projections have assumed there would be less renewable energy in the system than the models used by the Australian Energy Market Operator, which runs the power grid. Addressing this will bring future projections down.

There are other anomalies. The projections do not factor in drought, which in recent years has reduced emissions from agriculture as farmers have had to substantially reduce cattle and sheep numbers.

Officials last year revised down the emissions forecast for the next decade by 344m tonnes. If a similar readjustment were to happen this year, it could lead to the government saying it was now on track to meet its modest 2030 target without the carryover credits.

Has anything else changed that could affect the projections?

The only new policy of note from the Morrison government this year has been its low-emissions technology roadmap. Released in September, it claimed developing five new technologies could “avoid” 250m tonnes of emissions a year by 2040.

There was been no explanation of how that number was reached, and with the arguable exception of “clean” hydrogen, the government has not yet committed significant new funding to develop the technologies. It is unclear how this policy could reasonably change the projections in a meaningful way.

More noteworthy is that, while the federal government has tried to slow the influx of solar and wind by neither continuing nor replacing the renewable energy target, the states keep stepping in to fill the gap.

The big one is the NSW plan to underwrite 12 gigawatts of new wind and solar over the next decade – a development that will be banked by Canberra as “progress” in terms of projected national emissions reductions, but also criticised by the federal energy minister, Angus Taylor, because it might bring forward the closure of coal plants, which is of course a necessary development if you are a government now wanting to trumpet a downward trend in emissions. You know it makes sense.

Would a lower emissions forecast be good news?

Lower emissions would, of course, be great. But if it happens it isn’t something we should get too excited about, for two reasons.

The first should be pretty obvious – the government will not have actually done anything yet. These are projections, not actual emissions.

Before Covid-19 hit, Australia’s national emissions remained stubbornly flat under the Coalition, having dipped only about 2% in the more than six years since it was elected. They will be lower this year due to the pandemic, but that is not something the government can claim credit for, and it may not continue.

The second reason is, as mentioned above, Australia’s target is nothing to crow about. It was a fudge from the beginning. The size of the cut – 26%-28% – was just a lift of the US commitment under the Paris agreement, with one notable difference – the Obama administration promised that target for 2025, while the Australian government pushed it back to 2030.

Getting to net zero emissions, as scientists say is necessary, isn’t just about the end goal. It’s about how much you emit as you get there. To play its fair part in meeting the goals of the Paris agreement, Australia can only emit so much over the next three decades.

Advice to the government in 2015 suggested playing its part would require a cut equivalent to between 45% and 65% by 2030. A recent analysis by analysts at the Climate Action Tracker found Australia’s fair share over that timeframe was 66%. The current target does not get the job done.

So will the government do more on climate?

It is not impossible, but it is far from guaranteed.

There will be pressure on Australia over the next year not only to set a target of net zero by 2050, but to go further by 2030 than promised. The US under Biden will be required to set a new target for that date and other major countries are expected to do the same. Dropping the plan to use carryover credits will not be enough to satisfy their expectations.

Apart from saying we can meet our (lowball) 2030 target without a Kyoto-era accounting trick (cue applause) there’s no sign at the moment the government is working up a higher 2030 target. It is working on a long-term climate strategy, which was a commitment under the Paris agreement. It was due this year, but has been pushed back to before the next major climate summit in Glasgow late next year. It is expected, but not guaranteed, to include modelling of what future action on climate will mean for Australia.

There are a couple of other policies in the works. The government has dumped a long-promised electric vehicle strategy and replaced it with the promise of a “future fuels” plan on hydrogen, electric and bio-fuelled vehicles, but it is not expected to deliver significant new commitments to accelerate an emissions cut.

Potentially more significantly, it has also said it will look at the safeguard mechanism, a Tony Abbott-era policy that was supposed to limit emissions from big industrial sites. So far, the scheme has barely justified its existence. Companies have mostly just been allowed to increase their CO2 limit, known as a baseline, and pollute more.

Presumably recognising this is not sustainable, the government earlier this year said it accepted a recommendation from a review headed by former Business Council of Australia president Grant King that the mechanism should be changed so that companies would be rewarded for cutting emissions below their baseline if they were undertaking “transformative” projects and not just producing less or shutting down. It sounds like a step back towards carbon pricing – rewarding cuts and, if the Coalition can stomach it, finally penalising increases in emissions.

Would the government go back to carbon pricing?

Morrison should use his political capital and his internal authority to drive a substantive change – but he won’t want to lose his job over it. Part of what’s going on with Morrison’s shift in language is the prime minister testing how much he can get away with: how positive can he sound about emissions reduction before the right of the Liberal party starts having a tantrum, or before the National party has a public meltdown because someone has whispered coal is not good for humanity after all? Think of Morrison as inching along a dimly lit ledge several stories above the ground.

But the rest of the world isn’t waiting for the Coalition to get its act together. Action on emissions is picking up elsewhere and at some point Australia will have to deal with rising CO2 from big industry and transport.

In the meantime, as the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO recently reported, climate change is already here and extreme weather events are getting worse.

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Climate Graphic Of The Week: The Arctic Frontline

Financial Times - Leslie Hook

LARGE IMAGE 

Arctic sea ice hit the second-lowest level ever recorded this year, reaching its summer minimum level in mid-September.

Warm temperatures and an unusual summer heatwave in Siberia contributed to the ice reaching that threshold for only the second time in the 42 year records, just behind that of 2012, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Average air temperatures over the Arctic Ocean were at record highs during May, July and August.

As the planet warms, the Arctic Sea is expected to undergo its first ice-free summer before the year 2050, according to a research paper in Geophysical Research Letters.

The average rate of sea ice decline is about 13 per cent per year.

During autumn the sea ice expands, and thickens, although by the end of October the extent of the sea ice was still about one-third below normal levels, based on the 1981-200 average.

As the ice melts, through the loss of its reflective surface the ocean absorbs more solar radiation which in turn exacerbates global warming. It can also have an effect on the water circulation, with far-reaching consequences for weather patterns and ecosystems.

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(AU) Clean and green: powering through 'watershed week' for energy policy

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Two landmark energy events in the two most populous states this week sent some signals that the end of Australia's decade-long torment over climate policy is in sight.

NSW's parliament debated for 30 hours before pushing through its Electricity Infrastructure Investment Bill despite 249 amendments from One Nation MP Mark Latham. This set the state on what Energy Minister Matt Kean hopes will be the path to becoming a "clean energy superpower".

Matt Kean says a 'new brand of politics' helped win multi-party support for a plan to make NSW a 'clean energy superpower'. Credit: Janie Barrett

Kean's counterpart in the Victorian Labor government, Lily D'Ambrosio, this week secured $540 million dollars in the Victorian budget for six renewable energy zones, and nearly $800 million for energy efficiency programs that typically draw little fanfare but are often the cheapest low-carbon options.

Days earlier, D'Ambrosio dubbed the $200 million deal with the Morrison government to underwrite a major new transmission - similar to NSW's - as a "renewables superhighway".

It was the first instalment of what Victoria trusts will be a bilateral bonanza on the scale of the $3 billion deal agreed earlier this year between the Berejiklian and Morrison governments.

"It's been a real watershed week," Kane Thornton, the chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, says. "NSW has legislated an extremely progressive and aggressive agenda and there's been a big budget [for renewables'] in Victoria."

"It really sets us up for the energy transition."

Getting to these points in the two states was not an easy task.

Victorian Minister for Energy, Environment & Climate Lily D'Ambrosio has, with less fanfare than her northern counterpart Matt Kean, has also been steering her state down a low-carbon economic path. Credit: Joe Armao


Of the two, Kean's journey is indicative of the many obstacles to pushing the energy bill through.

He had to contend with opponents from within his own party and even pushback from his federal Coalition counterpart Angus Taylor. Then there was the big energy corporations.

"Those powerful vested interests – the big energy money, the coal barons, that have decided energy policy in this country for generations – finally, we wrested back control of the agenda from them and put it back in the hands of the community," Kean tells the Herald and The Age from his parliament office in Sydney.

Arguably Australia's most famous and notorious power station: AGL's Liddell coal-fired power plant in the NSW Hunter Valley. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

"What's different this time is we had a relentless focus on delivering cheap energy," he says. "It was all about the economics and I think that's a different approach [from what's] been taken in the past."

Kean's new energy road map takes in many policy destinations, such as auctions to bring in energy storage to support renewables, support for five renewable energy zones which he hopes will bring in $32 billion in new clean energy investments. There are also advocates to ensure consumers and local manufacturers are treated fairly.

The potential political roadblocks weren't inconsiderable either.

Matt Kean, the NSW Energy and Environment Minister (left) with NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro at the Perth COAG event in November 2019. Kean credits support from Barilaro as critical to getting his energy policy through.

Kean had to win over the Premier Gladys Berejiklian and her right-wing Treasurer Dominic Perrottet, Nationals leader John Barilaro, and lately Labor and the Greens to ensure that even a change of government would likely leave the policy framework intact.

"This is durable and lasting reform," Kean says. "This means energy policy in NSW is settled – this is so important for the private sector."

Such multi-party support has largely eluded policymakers at a state and federal level. Kean himself describes taking on the energy and environment portfolios in March 2019 not long before Malcolm Turnbull became the third prime minister to be rolled, in part, because of climate policy. He says he then found a "smouldering wreck" of an energy policy after Scott Morrison abandoned the National Energy Guarantee.

D'Ambrosio has been a long-serving energy minister in Victoria and has watched the prospects of a coherent national climate and energy policy wax and wane.

While overseeing a more pro-renewables policy mix than NSW, D'Ambrosio knows securing the same bipartisan support is getting harder as Victorian Liberals drift further right.

Likewise in Queensland, the policy divide between Labor and the opposition remains wide. Had Annastacia Palaszczuk's Labor Party lost last month's election, an incoming Liberal National government would have likely dismembered most of Labor's plans for renewable energy and hydrogen hubs.

All smiles: Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor (left) with NSW Energy and Environment Minister Matt Kean, at the Perth COAG energy ministers meeting in 2019.

The final passage of the NSW energy bill on Friday closed a chapter, but the victory was still "touch and go", with final turbulence coming from federal minister Taylor.

The Australian Financial Review reported on Monday that Taylor was demanding NSW hand over its energy modelling, warning that the policy could have "unintended consequences" of closing coal-fired power stations faster than scheduled. This was just as Latham was gearing up to ''stall'' the bill's passage with the hope of killing it.

A big summer blackout would be all that was needed to stoke fears about the grid's stability even though Kean's policy won't begin to make full traction until later this decade.

Behind the scenes, though, Kean had already telephoned Taylor after learning of the ''backgrounding'' his staff were doing on the NSW policy to journalists.

Taylor is understood to have told Kean he wouldn't go any further than the comments he had given to the AFR and that he would make these public at the AFR's energy summit on Monday.

"I've got a constructive relationship with Angus," Kean says. "When he gives me his word, I trust him ... I agreed to allow my officials to brief him [on the modelling] and we left it at that.''

The Morrison government is still concerned about early closures of coal-fired power plants triggering price spikes for consumers, as was the case when Victoria's Hazelwood plant shut in 2017 after barely six months' notice.

NSW and Victoria's policies have the effect of reducing the "national" and "market" functions of the National Electricity Market (NEM) as they expedite planning for their special renewable energy zones. In the process, they are also reducing the federal role in the power sector.

Taylor says his government would "continue to develop and implement policy that protects consumers, maintains downward pressure on electricity prices and develops the backbone of a reliable, lower emissions NEM for the next decade and beyond".

"The NEM will always have a future, it is a physically connected grid to efficiently deliver electricity to consumers across NSW, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT," he says, adding the federal government "will always have a role in the shaping [its] direction".

For their part, the big generators and retailers, such as AGL and EnergyAustralia, have concerns too. AGL, the largest generator and carbon emitter in the country, has said its 250 megawatt gas plant planned for Newcastle has been delayed because of the NSW bill.

"We only got the broad strokes a couple of weeks ago so we are rushing to do some modelling to put in place what we think it might mean," Brett Redman, chief executive of AGL, says. "[The details] could make an enormous impact on what it is that you will invest, when you will invest and how you will invest".

Similarly Liz Westcott, head of energy at EnergyAustralia, says there was some alignment.

"Industry, market bodies and governments actually all have a common goal: a common goal to get to an energy system that's going to be reliable, affordable and carbon-neutral," she says.

"But we are not fully aligned on the pace and maybe the sequence of things, and in particular now the role we each play – what's the role of the private sector ... of government and market bodies?"

For Tennant Reed, Ai Group's principal national advisor, the state road maps and ''superhighways'' may be under construction but the final destination is a long way off.

He says some studies indicate global electricity generation demand may need to more than double to decarbonise the economy. Reeds says the growth in Australian generation could be larger still if we are competitive in hydrogen exports.

Modernising the electricity sector "is the easy bit, actually," Reed says.

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29/11/2020

The End Of The Internal Combustion Engine?

Al Jazeera - Nick Clark

It revolutionised the world, from transport to means of production, but after 160 years, a new electrical future awaits.

Muaz Kory/Al Jazeera
The internal combustion engine revolutionised human life.

It made the commonplace possible: the car, the Uber, the bus, the motorbike. We took to the skies in aircraft and spread our wings across the world. It even mobilised war with tanks, ships and submarines. Agricultural productivity soared with the development of the tractor and other farm machinery. It gave oil-producing countries unimaginable wealth.

But after 160 years of shaping the world we live in, the demise of this extraordinary force-for-change is in plain sight.

The growing push for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 means that a new revolution is upon us, one that will change the way we power our lives, in the home, in our farmers’ fields, and on the road.

Electric vehicles

While some would say that being carbon neutral by 2050 is not enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change, we can say for certain the era of the electric vehicle is upon us. From the United States to the European Union and beyond, nations are pledging to phase out the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles within 15 years.

In China, car buyers bought more plug-in vehicles in 2019 than the rest of the world combined. In Norway more than 60 percent of new cars registered in September this year were electric.

Globally, battery technology is getting cheaper. According to research by BloombergNEF, the cost of a lithium-ion battery pack for an electric car fell 87 percent from 2010 to 2019.

Right now Tesla is the most valuable carmaker in the world despite making far fewer cars than its competitors like Toyota and Volkswagen.

A Tesla charging station in California. Electric cars are becoming more popular in countries around the world. [EPA]Fossil fuels


Meanwhile, fossil fuels still account for 80 percent of the world’s energy. But as energy analyst Ramez Naam pointed out in a fascinating episode of the Outrage and Optimism podcast, fronted by Former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, the balance is shifting fast.

“The cost of energy from wind power has dropped by a factor of 10. The cost of electricity from solar power has dropped by a factor of 30,” Naam said.

“None of this is happening as fast as we want. But it’s happening a lot faster than people in industry, especially in the fossil fuel industry or the automotive industry, think it’s going to happen.

“And what’s clear is the Internal Combustion Engine for ground transport is dead, dead, dead, dead.”

Challenges ahead

While car and truck tailpipe emissions slowly phase out in the coming decades, other transport sectors present an altogether more daunting challenge.

Aviation accounts for 3 percent of the world’s carbon footprint (some say more), but powering passenger planes sustainably is a tough call. Yet there is optimism that by 2050, short-haul flights at least, will be fuelled by green technology like hydrogen fuel cells.

One of the hardest areas to transition is shipping. The global merchant fleet carries 90 percent of world trade.

After moving from sail power in the mid-19th century, to coal-burning steamships, and then the modern era of heavy fuel oil, the industry now looks to natural sources of propulsion again. This is a considerable and difficult problem, especially for the colossal bulk carriers that ply our oceans.

But the transition has begun. China promises to be carbon neutral by at least 2060. US President-elect Joe Biden is proposing to make electricity production in the US carbon-free by 2035, providing millions of jobs in the process. And across the world, nations are upping their ambitions to reduce emissions.

Again, more needs to be done, but it all helps drive technological progress, in all sectors.

And in the coming years, the internal combustion engine, that extraordinary feat of scientific progress, will become a chapter of history as we quietly buzz about in our electric cars.

A portrait of Karl Benz and a copy of the patent for the world’s first car powered by a gas combustion engine, a three wheeler named “Velociped” which was issued January 29, 1886 for Benz’s invention. Internal combustion engine vehicles could soon be a thing of the past [AP]
The final word
And so you have to ask yourself ... am I the CEO of an oil and gas company or the CEO of an energy company? Because the first one is doomed. The second one, there’s massive growth, for the world’s going to use much more energy in 2050. But it’s going to be clean energy.
Ramez Naam, Energy Analyst
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Solar Panels Made From Food Waste Win Inaugural James Dyson Sustainability Award

Dezeen  - 

Engineering student Carvey Ehren Maigue has been named the James Dyson Awards first-ever global sustainability winner for his AuReus system, in which waste crops are turned into cladding that can generate clean energy from ultraviolet light.

Unlike traditional solar panels, which only work in clear conditions and must face the sun directly because they rely on visible light, the translucent AuReus material is able to harvest power from invisible UV rays that pass through clouds.

As a result, it is able to produce energy close to 50 per cent of the time according to preliminary testing, compared to 15 to 22 per cent in standard solar panels.

AuReus cladding can be applied to windows or walls

When applied as a kind of fluorescent covering to windows or facades, AuReus can capture UV rays bouncing off of pavements and the surrounding architecture, turning entire buildings into vertical solar farms.

This maximises the amount of energy that can be generated.

AuReus takes its name from the aurora borealis and is inspired by the physics that power the northern lights. Luminescent particles in the atmosphere absorb high energy particles like ultraviolet or gamma rays, before degrading and reemitting them as visible light.

The material is made using waste agricultural crops

Similarly, Maigue's system uses luminescent particles derived from waste agricultural crops. To pull out the bioluminescent particles from specific fruits and vegetables, Maigue goes through a process of crushing them and extracting their juices, which are then filtered, distilled or steeped.

The particles are suspended in resin before the resulting substrate is moulded into cladding and clamped onto walls or sandwiched between the two panes of a double glazed window.

These particles convert UV light into visible light, which is reflected to the very edges of the panel.

"The light relies on internal reflectance of the material to self-correct and guide itself towards the emitting edge," said Maigue, who is a student at Mapua University in the Filipino capital of Manila. "This can be controlled by specific laser etching patterns
as well."

This visible light can then be captured and converted into electricity by a string of regular photovoltaic (PV) cells, like the ones found in regular solar panels, which fringe the outside of the cladding.

Maigue developed the system while a student at Mapua University in Manila

With the help of integrated regulating circuits, this electricity can then either be stored or used immediately.

"In that way, it can be directly used as a stand-alone or can be connected in groups to produce a higher output," he told Dezeen. "It can also be easily integrated into existing solar photovoltaic systems since its electrical output is suitable for such systems as well."

The fruits and vegetables are crushed and filtered to extract bioluminescent particles
The crops used are sourced from local farmers, who have been affected by severe, climate change-induced weather disruptions.

Around a quarter of people in the Philippines rely on the agricultural sector for their employment but due to global warming, the industry is being affected by more frequent and extreme weather events, which damaged more than six million hectares of crops between 2006 and 2013, worth an estimated $3.8 billion.

By repurposing some of the crops that were rotting on the fields, Maigue makes use of an untapped waste stream and gives farmers a way to monetise their lost yield.

"Combatting climate change is a journey that will need several generations to complete. This means great products alone would not suffice," the engineer said.

"In the conception of AuReus, I aimed to create a future-facing solution in the form of renewable energy and at the same time integrate a present-day value-creating solution for our farmers, who are being affected negatively by the present-day effects of climate change," he continued.

"In this way, we can show people that adapting sustainability to fight climate change is something that can benefit both the present and the future generation and in doing so, we can rally more people in this fight against climate change."

Moving forwards, Maigue plans to turn the AuReus substrate into threads to form fabrics and curved plates to be attached to vehicles and aircrafts.

Maigue says the system could be applied to entire buildings such as the Montreal Convention Centre

The Sustainability Award is a new addition to the annual James Dyson Awards, equal to the competition's top prize.

This year's international winner was Spanish engineer Judit Giró Benet and her at-home breast cancer testing kit. Both she and Maigue take home £30,000 to fund the further development of their projects.

Among the 2020 national winners was the UK's Tyre Collective, with a wheel-mounted device that can capture microplastic emissions from car tyres, and an artificial voice box by Japanese engineer Takeuchi Masaki that can mimic the wearer's former voice.

Note: Images and videos are courtesy of The James Dyson Foundation.

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(USA) From Wildfires To Disease, Here Are The Top 5 Ways Climate Change Is Already Hurting Your Health

 ABC America - Ramie Fathy

Some scientists say it may have contributed to the current COVID-19 pandemic.

'It’s Not Too Late' with Ginger Zee: Climate change experts demand action
ABC's Ginger Zee breaks down the science behind climate change and why experts are calling for the climate change debate to move beyond settled science and focus on action.

With the COVID-19 pandemic dominating the headlines, President-elect Joe Biden has just released his administration's plan to address another potentially catastrophic global threat: climate change.

Scientists warn that it's not just plants and animals threatened by rising temperatures -- climate change is impacting humans as well. And for medical experts, this is particularly troubling.

"We're in it now," said Dr. Paul Auerbach, an emergency medicine physician at Stanford University and author of "Enviromedics," the pioneering book on climate change and health. "It's happening, and it all boils down to health. This is a health care issue."

Though the effects of climate change on health are numerous, they remain unfamiliar to many. Climate change has now been linked to heat-related illnesses, the spread of infectious disease, physical harm from extreme weather, health complications related to poor air quality, and other individual and public health harms.

Perhaps most importantly, climate change could become one of the main drivers of future novel outbreaks, and may have contributed to the current COVID-19 pandemic.

"The next global pandemic could be, in some capacity, due to climate change," said Dr. Jesse Bell, Professor of Health and Environment at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health.

ABC News spoke with a variety of health experts to determine the top five ways climate change is affecting human health.

Heat-related illness

As the planet gets warmer, people across the globe are beginning to feel the heat.

"Right now, the clearest effects of climate change are through heat," said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, a pediatrician and Interim Director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

"More people die each year from heat -- more than from many medical problems," Bernstein said, noting that heat waves may aggravate a wide range of illnesses, from asthma to mental health disorder to diabetes and kidney disease.

So dire is the threat to human health that Bernstein helped compile guidelines for educating medical trainees about the health effects of climate change.

"Heat waves likely kill more people in the U.S. than any other climate-related disaster, because heat waves occur everywhere across the U.S., including places as different and distant as Nebraska, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle," said Bell.

Infectious disease

As anyone who has eaten leftovers that have been left out too long can attest, infectious agents -- and the bugs that carry them -- thrive in particular environments and conditions. And as climate change alters environmental conditions across the planet, so too does it affect the geographic distribution of infectious diseases.

"Some infectious diseases that were already present in North America, like Lyme disease, leishmaniasis, and various fungal infections, have already become an issue in areas that were previously unaffected by them," said Dr. Misha Rosenbach, a dermatologist and climate change activist at the University of Pennsylvania.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the number of Lyme cases in the U.S. has more than tripled since 1995, and rates continue to rise.

Meanwhile, climate change has also facilitated the spread of waterborne infectious diseases.

A man receives a COVID-19 vaccination from Yaquelin De La Cruz at the Research Centers of America (RCA) in Hollywood, Fla., Aug. 13, 2020. Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images
"Warmer temperatures around the globe cause rising sea levels, warmer seawater, and either more frequent or increasingly severe natural disasters like hurricanes and floods," said Rosenbach. "And each of these events is associated with a range of infectious diseases, including life-threatening diarrheal disease, respiratory infections, and skin infections."

Natural disasters, such as recent hurricanes Harvey and Sandy, brought diseases like cholera and bacterial infections in their wake, according to Dr. Saul Hymes, an assistant professor of clinical pediatrics and a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at Stony Brook Children's Hospital.

Climate change is also a driving force behind "spillover" events, in which viruses leap from their animal hosts into humans, Hymes said.

"Climate change causes disruption to natural animal habitats, and also movement of people into new habitats to avoid flood regions or drought-prone areas," Hymes said. "This can bring humans and animals into more contact and lead to increased likelihood of disease crossover events like those we are seeing more often, including SARS-CoV-2."

Extreme weather events

Along with the ongoing pandemic, 2020 has also witnessed a record-breaking hurricane season as well as wildfires and floods across the globe -- and climate change is thought to be contributing to the severity of all of these extreme weather events.

Experts predict that these are not outlier events but rather the start of a new normal.

"These trends will likely continue over the next century," Bell said.

Houses leveled by the Glass Fire are viewed on a street in the Skyhawk neighborhood of Santa Rosa, Calif., Sept. 28, 2020. Noah Berger/AP
And extreme weather events have indirect health impacts by creating refugee areas.

"As with the Astrodome in Houston after Katrina, these can become overcrowded and thus are hotbeds for transmission of flu and other common person-to-person viral infections," Hymes said.

Air quality

Another way climate change affects human health is through its impact on air quality. While the burning of fossil fuels directly pollutes the air, global warming that's a byproduct of fossil fuel combustion also contributes to and exacerbates worsening air quality.

"For one, climate change has led to drought and to heat waves that have caused the California wildfires, and the smoke and particulates in the air directly harms those with respiratory issues like COPD or asthma," Hymes said.

Cars drive along the Golden Gate Bridge under an orange smoke filled sky at midday in San Francisco, Sept. 9, 2020. Harold Postic/AFP via Getty Images

Even without wildfires, rapid temperature swings and ozone depletion can exacerbate respiratory illnesses like asthma, according to Hymes.

Meanwhile, climate change can influence air quality and human disease through an intermediary: plants.

"Warmer climate and longer summers have led to alterations in pollination and flowering cycles -- some plants now undergo a second flowering in a season, for example," said Hymes. "In general, there's been either a significant increase in pollen counts or a major shift in their timing, or both. And these are often significant asthma triggers as well as affecting other allergic conditions."

Mental health and trauma

According to Bell, extreme weather events can spur mental distress.

"The psychosocial impact of extreme weather events is huge," he said. "People have their possessions and homes destroyed. They must move and rebuild and often are doing so with much of their wealth obliterated. This can cause significant mental distress, rates of depression and anxiety, as well as PTSD rise in survivors of such events."

Some researchers have already begun documenting the psychological impacts of climate change, including major depression, anxiety, PTSD and adjustment disorders, as well as increases in drug and alcohol use and domestic violence. The chronic stress caused by climate disasters has also been associated with worse cardiovascular health.

"It is absolutely imperative that we address these psychological issues because they have impacts on everything: personally, socially, economically, politically," said Dr. Lise van Susteren, a psychiatrist and environmental activist.

But to van Susteren, climate change's effects on mental health extend far beyond the individual level.

"Injuries, deaths, houses being burned down or flood, the loss of possessions and general disruption of life -- these all have a psychological toll," van Susteren said. "In turn, all of these psychological damages have an impact on our physical health, and this has repercussions on all aspects of our lives."

Though climate change has already begun to impact our health and well-being, scientists and doctors say it's not too late to take action to combat it and to mitigate its effects -- through personal choices to reduce your carbon footprint, through community action, and through smart policy.

"Realize that everything you do is part of the collective, and realize that you're setting the social norm," said van Susteren. "It all begins at home."

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28/11/2020

More Than 3 Billion People Affected By Water Shortages, Data Shows

The Guardian - 

UN warns about consequences of not conserving water and tackling climate crisis

A waterhole in Harare, Zimbabwe. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization found 50 million people in sub-Saharan Africa live in areas where severe drought has catastrophic impacts on cropland and pastureland once every three years. Photograph: Aaron Ufumeli/EPA
Water shortages are now affecting more than 3 billion people around the world, as the amount of fresh water available for each person has plunged by a fifth over two decades, data has shown.

About 1.5 billion people are suffering severe water scarcity or even drought, as a combination of climate breakdown, rising demand and poor management has made agriculture increasingly difficult across swathes of the globe.

The UN warned on Thursday that billions of people would face hunger and widespread chronic food shortages as a result of failures to conserve water resources, and to tackle the climate crisis.

Qu Dongyu, director-general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said: “We must take very seriously both water scarcity (the imbalance between supply and demand for freshwater resources) and water shortages (reflected in inadequate rainfall patterns) for they are now the reality we all live with … Water shortages and scarcity in agriculture must be addressed immediately and boldly.”

He said that the UN’s sustainable development goals, which include wiping out hunger and improving access to clean water, were still within reach but that much more needed to be done to improve farming practices around the world and to manage resources equitably.

The organisation’s State of Food and Agriculture 2020 report found that 50 million people in sub-Saharan Africa live in areas where severe drought has catastrophic effects on cropland and pastureland once every three years. More than a 10th of the world’s rainfed cropland is subject to frequent drought, as is about 14% of the world’s pastureland.

Rainfed agriculture represents 60% of global crop production, and 80% of land under cultivation, with the rest benefiting from irrigation. However, irrigation is no panacea: more than 60% of irrigated cropland around the world is highly water stressed. 

Irrigation of the wrong type can waste water, depleting non-renewable resources such as underground aquifers, and poor management can result in some farmers losing out on water resources – for instance, in the case of downstream farms, if rivers and waterways are run dry by upstream irrigation.

Small-scale and farmer-led irrigation systems are often more efficient than large-scale projects, the report found. Large-scale state-funded schemes in Asia, for instance, have relied on tapping directly into groundwater, putting excessive pressure on that resource. But small-scale farmers around the world face extra difficulties, such as a lack of secure tenure over water rights, and little access to finance and credit.

Separate research has recently shown that the world’s farmland is increasingly being concentrated in fewer hands, with large companies and international owners taking over swathes of production, while small farmers – whose farms are often run along more environmentally sustainable lines – are increasingly being pushed out. About 1% of the world’s farms operate 70% of the worlds’ farmland.

Food production must change in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and try to stave off climate breakdown, but even this is not straightforward, the FAO warned. 

“As the world aims to shift to healthy diets – often composed of relatively water-intensive foods, such as legumes, nuts, poultry and dairy products – the sustainable use of water resources will be ever more crucial,” said Qu, former vice-minister of agriculture and rural affairs in China. 

“Rainfed agriculture provides the largest share of global food production. However, for it to continue to do so, we must improve how we manage water resources from limited rainfall.”

This year’s FAO report focused on water, but much of the organisation’s work this year has been to try to stem the potential for the coronavirus pandemic to give rise to widespread food shortages. The organisation called on governments earlier this year to keep global supply chains and food markets open, despite the travel restrictions resulting from the pandemic, and these calls seem to have largely been heeded.

The world’s harvests this year have generally been good, with some exceptions, but some areas of Africa are still under threat of severe food problems.

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