Lethal Heating: 11/28/20

28/11/2020

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

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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(Commentary) Without Planting More Trees In The Tropics, We Can’t Fix The Climate

Mongabay - Edward Mitchard

Native tree saplings are prepared for planting in the Mantiqueria range of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. Image via The Nature Conservancy’s Tackle Climate Change Program.

Author Edward Mitchard is Professor of Global Change Mapping at the University of Edinburgh, and Chief Technical Officer of ecosystem mapping company Space Intelligence.

I don’t know whether it’s all thanks Greta Thunberg, or due to unusually strong fire seasons in Australia, North and South America, and Siberia in the past 12 months, but there appears to be an increasing realization among the world’s politicians that action on climate change is urgently needed.

We know what needs to be done.

We must cut emissions from across our power, transport and industry sectors drastically and fast. And we must stop tropical deforestation.

Key Points

Planting ‘the right tree in the right place’ is key to restoring forests and halting climate change.
To be effective though, planting should largely be done in the tropics, where they can grow with maximum rapidity vs northern regions (where tree planting can also add to the albedo effect, canceling out some carbon sequestration benefit).
Other benefits of focusing on the tropics are those that accrue to developing nations, where tree planting can improve both local environments and economies, through projects like agroforestry.

But the basic physics and complex economics of climate change are clear that cutting emissions drastically and stopping deforestation, while necessary, are not by themselves sufficient. We need to also suck out massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, partly because emissions reductions cannot run fast enough, and partly because we’ve already emitted far too much carbon.

The only technology we have currently that can suck carbon out of the atmosphere at any kind of scale is growing trees. So tree planting and forest restoration are essential, and we need to scale up our current paltry efforts urgently.

Funding is available for this: governments are increasingly investing in ecosystem restoration both within their countries and abroad (e.g. the Bonn Challenge commitments), but we will not get near to what is needed without the financial firepower of companies. I believe companies should be encouraged to purchase carbon offsets to assist with forest protection and restoration, so called ‘Nature Based Solutions,’ but this is controversial (e.g. this recent article from Greenpeace).

Like miniature versions of national economies, corporations must aim to reduce their emissions to as near zero as they can, as soon as possible. This is often the source of the controversy: offsetting should not replace emission reductions. But then companies should pay to offset the residual remaining emissions.

MAX Burgers, a large Scandinavian fast food chain, was ahead of the curve in the mid-2000s when it started working to reduce emissions from its supply chain and operations as much as possible. But it still had residual emissions, which it offset through purchasing carbon credits that funded tree planting products in the developing world through the Plan Vivo carbon standard. It continues to offset its residual emissions now, in fact making its food ‘climate positive,’ offsetting more emissions through tree planting for every meal sold, than is released through their entire chain. Large Scottish brewery Brewdog recently made a similar pledge, that its beer will be ‘carbon negative’ due to reductions in supply chain and production emissions, and tree planting to more than compensate for the residual emissions.

In both cases this seems like a good thing, and if consumers think so, too, the brands will benefit along with the climate.

But there are choices about where to plant trees. I imagine MAX chose to invest in tropical tree planting projects for its offsets because they were attracted by the co-benefits such planting offers. By funding farmers to grow trees on their land, they add an additional revenue stream to some of the world’s poorest families, improve the biodiversity of these landscapes, and potentially increase the resilience of these farmers to extreme events such as storms and floods.

But Brewdog, like many others, have chosen to plant their trees closer to home (in their case in the Highlands of Scotland). There are clear reasons to want to plant trees locally – companies wish to invest in their local environment and communities. They want themselves and their customers to see their new forest, and be able to explore and enjoy it rather than just trust the company about their intangible, faraway carbon credits. And some people in public life and the media are critical of planting trees in faraway places, seeing it as ‘greenwashing’ or in other ways not the same as local carbon offsets.

Fire on the border of Kaxarari Indigenous lands in Lábrea, Amazonas state, Brazil, 17 Aug, 2020. Photo © Christian Braga/Greenpeace.

Focus on the tropics makes the most sense

However, tree planting in different locations is not created equal. Fundamentally, trees grow much faster in the tropics, and land and labor are much cheaper there.

Therefore, for a given financial investment, more trees can be planted in the tropics over a larger area, and these trees will capture carbon faster than an equivalent number outside the tropics – and far faster than in northern latitudes such as Scotland or Sweden.

These differences are not trivial: I have seen newly restored forests in tropical Peru reach 15 m height in about 6 years, whereas a Scots Pine planted in the Scottish Highlands might take 60 years to achieve that height. This will translate directly into carbon storage, suggesting per hectare carbon sequestration rates in Scotland might be just a tenth of that in the tropics.

This not only means that costs for achieving the same carbon capture in far northern latitudes are far higher, but also that the land footprint is far greater. It does not mean we should not be restoring forests in the Scottish Highlands: that has many values too, and will capture significant quantities of carbon in the longer term. But it does not seem to me to be an efficient use of financial resources for the majority of a carbon offset portfolio of a company – tropical forest restoration or agroforestry projects are more sensible from a financial and land footprint standpoint.

Students in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, planting trees. Image courtesy of Gullele Botanical Garden.

There is another complicating factor: the albedo effect. This is how reflective the Earth’s surface is, and is one of the nasty feedback loops of climate change: as the climate warms, there is less ice cover in the oceans, and less snow cover on land, meaning less heat from the sun is reflected back into space, and the Earth warms faster. This is probably the main reason the arctic is warming so much faster than the rest of the planet.

Planting trees in the tropics has little further impact on the albedo effect – non-forest and forested surfaces in the tropics have similar albedo. But in the far northern latitudes, the impact is significant: trees are much darker than the snow that would otherwise lie on the land for much of the year. Thus planting trees in northern places, while it will still (slowly) take carbon out of the atmosphere, might nonetheless actually warm the planet more than leaving things as they are.

Finally, there are clear social and biodiversity reasons to plant trees in the tropics. The money will flow to some of the poorest people on the planet, and be directly used to increase the quality of their local environment.

Trees lower the local temperature, provide shade, stabilize the ground to protect against landslides and the damage caused by heavy rain, and potentially provide non-timber products such as fruits. Companies and the consumers of their products should be delighted to be able to invest in improving the incomes and local environment of developing countries as a side effect of capturing carbon. And further, these financial and environmental benefits provide direct resilience for these communities against some of the impacts of climate change, such as the increased incidence and severity of extreme weather events.

In Sri Lanka, diverse agroforestry plots often surround dense plantings of tea. Photo by Chandni Navalkha for Mongabay.

So I would encourage politicians, NGOs and others to encourage companies to get themselves to net zero fast. They should do this by removing emissions from their supply chain as much as possible, and all hints of new deforestation. And the residual emissions should be offset, and I believe these offsets should come mostly through a massive expansion in agroforestry and forest restoration projects across tropical regions.

Some of this can be natural regeneration of previously cleared land and some agroforestry: plantations should be expanded in the tropics too to provide timber products, but are not good at directly capturing carbon in the long term. And some offsets could happen closer to home for these companies: but tree planting outside the tropics may not actually be climate positive, and other projects such as peatland restoration may offer greater benefits.

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These Places Will Flood If Climate Change Isn’t Mitigated

Nerdist - Matthew Hart

There’s a real possibility that sea levels, rising due to climate change, will lead to coastal flooding across the globe. And, because people form settlements near coasts, that may mean hundreds of millions of people, if not more, will be displaced this century.

To understand the problem’s magnitude, YouTuber, Atlas Pro, has made a video showing just how bad the situation could become. And yes, worst-case scenario is an absolute nightmare.

Lands That Will FLOOD in Our Lifetime. Atlas Pro

Atlas Pro, a geographer and scientist who’s made numerous videos discussing the effects of climate change before, focused on flooding for this video.

And while it’s 20 minutes long, and provides predictions that are downright depressing, the video gives a good sense of how climate change may ultimately uproot a massive portion of humanity.

The main driver of the problem, as Atlas Pro notes, is that people love to settle near river deltas; that is, the mouths of rivers containing large amounts of sediment built up into land masses.

Some examples of the largest deltas include the Mekong delta, in Vietnam and Cambodia; the Ganges-Brahmaptura delta in Bangladesh and India; and the Mississippi Delta in the U.S.

Geography of the Ice Age. Atlas Pro

Around the world, hundreds of millions of people have settled around these deltas thanks to their providing ample resources (fresh water, fish, etc.) as well as their super-fertile lands. Unfortunately, however, because deltas are at—or even below—sea level, that means if ocean levels rise even slightly, they’re in trouble.

As for the specific areas most in trouble in the U.S., both coasts, west of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and east of the Appalachian Mountains respectively, are at serious risk. Flooding, for example, could wipe out Delaware, as well as parts of Maryland and Virginia, on the east coast. On the west coast, water pushing in through the San Francisco Bay could inundate California’s Central Valley.

In regards to the rest of Earth, flooding could displace hundreds of millions in India and China, and millions in Australia and South America. (Java, a small island in Indonesia at great risk of flooding, has 140 million people itself.) Africa, however, seems like it’ll fare best out of all the continents thanks to its steep coastline. Although, to be fair, people there will have to worry about plenty of heartbreaking issues this century too.

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