15/03/2020

Women Shouldering The Burden Of Climate Crisis Need Action, Not Speeches

The Guardian - 

From loss of livelihoods to domestic abuse, women bear the brunt of natural disasters. Without change, progress on gender equality will be undone
A woman wades through flood waters in the aftermath of Cyclone Aila in Harinagar, Satkhira, Bangladesh in 2009. Photograph: Abir Abdullah/EPA
Milikini Failautusi, 30, lives on the Pacific island of Tuvalu. She has become virtually a nomad in her own country after rising tides forced her to leave her ancestral atoll and move to the main island, Funafuti.

She is now a climate activist. She can no longer visit her home island, yet remains committed to her country with a burning desire to prevent her own children from inheriting an underwater ghost town. This is not just Milikini’s story.

While climate change threatens livelihoods and security around the world, it is women who are bearing the brunt. Women predominate in the workforces of many sectors that are most vulnerable to climate change such as agriculture, livestock and fishing.

To make things worse, inequalities mean women are more likely to suffer dislocation to their lives as a result of flooding and drought. According to the UN, about 80% of people displaced by climate change are women. More than 70% of those displaced by the 2010 flooding in Pakistan were women and children.

Among those who lost their lives in India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka as a result of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, three times more women died than men. But why?

Rigid gender roles in the region meant men in the region were more likely to be able to swim than women. Furthermore, women were more likely to be caring for children and family members during the critical evacuation time.

Women who do survive such disasters often end up in unclean evacuation centres where they can be exposed to gender-based violence and cannot access health services. Research by the International Union for Conservation of Nature found climate change and environmental impacts are increasing violence against women and girls including domestic abuse, child marriage and sexual assault.

In many societies, encouraging progress is being made towards gender equality, but climate change can stop or even reverse this progress.

If business-as-usual climate action continues, there are dangers that the gains of gender equality will be lost. There is a risk that as climate change accelerates, gender roles could become more entrenched.

More men may be forced to move in search of better job opportunities, while women are left behind to care for members of their extended families and bear the burden of household responsibilities. Those who have to remain in more disaster-prone or vulnerable locations as a result are then likely to experience greater poverty, have their livelihoods destroyed and suffer increasing health issues.

We know that any attempts to restore environmental degradation and lower the risks posed by global heating are likely to fail if they do not take into account gender inequality.

We know, from a report published last week by WaterAid, that climate finance is still not reaching the poorest and most vulnerable people, who are likely to be most affected by climate change. – about half of all countries receive less than $5 (£3.86) a year for each person.

In 2016, a UN report found that only 0.01% of all worldwide funding went towards projects addressing both climate change and gender, despite specific provisions in the 2015 Paris agreement for women’s empowerment.

Such statistics are sobering, but there are some encouraging signs of progress. Developed countries have pledged $100bn a year in climate finance by 2020 to help developing nations cut emissions and adapt to problems such as worsening droughts, flooding and sea-level rise. The Green Climate Fund, the main channel through which climate finance is dispersed, stipulates that all grants must treat women’s needs as a priority.

The Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub, based in Mauritius, is already making impressive progress in unlocking much-needed resources for countries and communities that would not otherwise have the capacity to lodge successful applications for funding already pledged.

At the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Rwanda in June, we can expect leaders to consider further innovative approaches to tackle environmental priorities, including the strategy proposed by women’s affairs ministers, which focuses on gender and climate change.

The strategy is designed to encourage countries to collect and analyse data disaggregated according to criteria such as sex and age in order to devise improved climate solutions and to target them more accurately.

Women like Milikini need more than speeches, however sincere. They need urgent collective action to tackle all aspects and impacts of the global climate crisis. Women on the frontline must be on an equal footing at all levels so that they, their families, their communities and the nations in which they live and work can survive and thrive. In the Commonwealth, we are working towards just that.

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While We Self-Isolate, It’s A Good Time To Reflect On The Urgency Of The Climate Crisis

RenewEconomy - 

AAP Image/Paul Braven
Sophie is editor of One Step Off The Grid and deputy editor of its sister site, RenewEconomy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.
As Australian governments scramble to formulate the appropriate response to the pandemic proportions of the Coronavirus, a new report from the Climate Council has reminded us of the burningly urgent need to address that other global crisis, climate change.
The report, titled Summer of Crisis, says – unequivocally – that Australia’s devastating and unprecedented 2019-2020 bushfire season was fuelled by the climate impacts that are, in turn, being fuelled by the burning of coal, oil and gas.
The Climate Council says the horror bushfire season, which in some parts of Australia started in winter, not only cost lives, wiped out livelihoods and decimated Australia’s native animal, bird and insect populations, but will also leave a serious dent in the economy.
The tourism sector alone, the report says, is set to lose at least $4.5 billion because of the bushfires, and is estimated to have led to a 10-20 per cent drop in international visitors booking holidays to Australia.
The smoke that blanketed Sydney, meanwhile, is estimated to have cost that city $12-50 million per day, while more than 23,000 bushfire-related insurance claims lodged nation-wide have been totted up to an estimated total value of $1.9 billion.
As for the carbon budget, that was blown out of the water with the fires estimated to have contributed between 650 million and 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere – equivalent to the annual emissions from commercial aircraft worldwide and far higher than Australia’s annual emissions of around 531 million tonnes.



In light of all this, the report says, Australia’s continued shirking of its international responsibility to take actual action to drive down its greenhouse gas emissions is morally and economically reprehensible – particularly as the world braces for a new hit from the novel Coronavirus.
“Australia urgently needs a plan to cut our domestic greenhouse gas emissions to net zero and to phase out fossil fuel exports, because we are one of the world’s largest polluters,” the report says.
“We are the 14th largest emitter of greenhouse gases globally and emit more per person than any other developed country.
“We are also the third largest exporter of fossil fuels … Clearly, what Australia does matters and the longer we delay, the harder the problem will be to solve.
“We cannot call on other countries to take action if we fail to do so. We simply cannot leave this mess for our children to try to fix.”
The report is particularly scathing about the federal Coalition government, which it says has ignored repeated warnings from scientists over at least a decade, and more recently from fire and emergency experts about impending bushfire disaster.
“Simplistic arguments about arson, hazard reduction and ‘green tape’ do not stand up to scrutiny, and are not responsible for what was clearly a series of weather-driven disasters,” the report says.
“Worsening extreme weather is clearly driven by a warming climate. Further denial and delay in taking action on emissions guarantees a worsening of disasters into the future.
“Taking action now will provide a chance to stabilise, then eventually reduce disaster risks for future generations.”
This week, the public and policy focus is almost entirely trained upon the spread of COVID-19, and how to keep this at bay, without bringing the economy to its knees.
As we wait for further advice from health minister Greg Hunt – who in his previous role as environment minister gave the green light to the Adani Group’s massive Carmichael coal mine in northern Queensland – we must not forget about one of the biggest threats to the health of humankind.
While we humans obsessively check our body temperatures, scientists have been checking the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere and waters for decades now, and warning that these are rising to levels that will not support life.



As the Bureau of Meteorology has told us, 2019 was the hottest year on record across Australia with mean temperature 1.52°C above average and mean maximum temperature 2.09°C above average. It was also the driest year on record, with rainfall 40 per cent below average.
Setting a clear pathway to end fossil fuel production and generation, and a more ambitious and longer-term target for emissions reduction, is the least Australia can do.

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Climate Change: The State Of Our Atmosphere

Al Jazeera News

Last seen three million years ago, the amount of the Earth's warming will get greater, even if it falls again.


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The "Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2019" has been issued by the World Meteorological Office.

It stated 2019 ended with a global average temperature of 1.1 degree Celsius above estimated pre-industrial levels, second only to the record set in 2016, a year influenced by a strong El Nino event.

In 2018, greenhouse gas ratios reached new highs with carbon dioxide (CO2) at 407 parts per million (ppm). Preliminary data indicates that greenhouse gas concentrations continued to increase in 2019.

The usefulness of greenhouse gases
This needs some context to understand. The reason we can live on this planet is because greenhouse gases keep it warmer than an atmosphere without them would provide.

 However, if the amount of the most effective heat-trapping greenhouse gases is increased too much, we will simply overheat, in an out-of-control manner.

Since the dawn of humanity, we have never seen such a high concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. At the start of the industrial revolution, it was at 275ppm. In prehistory, there have been higher levels.

Historic warming
A paper published by Yale University in 2017 lays out the following points: The last time the atmosphere contained 400ppm of CO2 was about three million years ago, the mid-Pliocene, recently enough for the planet to be not radically different than it is today.

Back then, temperatures were 2 to 3C (3.6 to 5.4F) above pre-industrial temperatures. The Arctic was more than 10C hotter, and sea levels were 15-25 metres higher.

Homo habilis (aka "handy man"), the first species in the Homo line and probably the first stone-tool users, got a taste of this climate as he arrived on the scene 2.8 million years ago (Homo sapiens didn't show up until 400,000 years ago at the earliest).

Record reliability
There's a lot of debate about both temperatures and CO2 levels from millions of years ago. But the evidence is much firmer for the last 800,000 years, when ice cores show that CO2 concentrations stayed between 180 and 290 ppm. There have been eight glacial cycles over these past 800,000 years, mostly driven by regular and understood wobbles in the Earth's orbit. This is the benchmark against which scientists usually note the unprecedented modern rise of CO2. 

Beyond just the concentration of greenhouse gases, the rate of increase in concentration appears to be unprecedented. Dana Royer, a climatologist at Wesleyan University said during the end-Triassic extinction, 200 million years ago, CO2 values jumped from about 1,300ppm to 3,500ppm. That took somewhere between 1,000 to 20,000 years and was caused by massive volcanic eruptions in what is now the central Atlantic.

Current risk
Today, we could conceivably change our atmosphere by thousands of parts per million in just 200 years. There is nothing anywhere near that in the ice core records. Though 400 seems a big number now, CO2 concentrations could easily pass 500ppm in the coming decades, and even reach 2,000 by 2250 if emissions are not brought under control.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from 2013 shows the projected outcome depending on our actions:
  • In the most pessimistic scenario, where the population booms, technology stagnates, and emissions keep rising, the atmosphere gets to a startling 2,000 ppm by about 2250. That gives us an atmosphere last seen during the Jurassic when dinosaurs roamed, and causes an apocalyptic temperature rise of perhaps 9C (16F).
  • In the most optimistic scenario, where emissions peak now (2010-2020) and start to decline, with humans actually removing carbon from the air by 2070, the atmosphere dips back down below 400ppm somewhere between 2100 and 2200.
Even assuming a scenario of zero emissions from very soon, getting back to pre-industrial levels of 280ppm is "sort of a 10,000-year proposition", said Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's CO2 programme in San Diego. It was Ralph's father who set up the Mauna Loa CO2 well-positioned measuring site in Hawaii in 1958. At that time, the concentration of CO2was 316ppm.

"If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed and to which life on Earth is adapted ... CO2 will need to be reduced ... to at most 350 ppm," Columbia University climate guru James Hansen has said.

We sailed past that target in about 1990, and it will take a gargantuan effort to turn back the clock.

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