21/09/2021

(NYT) United Nations Warns Of ‘Catastrophic Pathway’ With Current Climate Pledges

New York Times - Somini Sengupta

An accounting of promises made by countries in the years since the Paris accord found that they are not enough to avoid drastic impacts from climate change.

Credit...Florian Gaertner/Photothek, via Getty Images

The global average temperature will rise 2.7 degrees Celsius by century’s end even if all countries meet their promised emissions cuts, a rise that is likely to worsen extreme wildfires, droughts and floods, the United Nations said in a report on Friday.

That level of warming, measured against preindustrial levels, is likely to increase the frequency of deadly heat waves and threaten coastal cities with rising sea levels, the country-by-country analysis concluded.

The United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said it shows “the world is on a catastrophic pathway.”

Perhaps most starkly, the new report displayed the large gap between what the scientific consensus urges world leaders to do and what those leaders have been willing to do so far.

Emissions of planet-warming gases are poised to grow by 16 percent during this decade compared with 2010 levels, even as the latest scientific research indicates that they need to decrease by at least a quarter by 2030 to avert the worst impacts of global warming.

Mr. Guterres is likely to drive home the sense of urgency next week when the world’s presidents and prime ministers gather for the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

It will continue to loom over the meeting of the 20 largest economies, known as the Group of 20, at their gathering in Rome in late October, and then be the focus of the United Nations-led international climate talks in November in Scotland.

Credit...Andrew Kelly/Reuters
Talks don’t always yield results, though, as was made clear at a virtual meeting that President Biden hosted Friday, designed to nudge countries to make more ambitious pledges. Several key countries with high emissions, notably China, sent midlevel envoys.

“Now science is shouting from the rooftops that it’s time to level up actions in an order of magnitude sufficient to the challenge,” Christiana Figueres, a former head of the United Nations climate agency, said in a statement. “All other geopolitical issues will fade into irrelevance if we fail to rise to the existential challenge that climate change presents.”

Altogether, nearly 200 countries have made voluntary pledges to reduce or slow down emissions of planet warming gases under the Paris agreement, reached in 2015 with the aim of averting the worst climate impacts. Some countries have since strengthened their pledges, including some of the world’s biggest emitters, like the United States, Britain and the European Union.

But still missing are new pledges from 70 countries, including China, which currently produces the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as Saudi Arabia and India, both large economies with a significant climate footprint. Brazil, Mexico and Russia submitted new pledges that have weaker emissions targets than their previous ones.

All those pledges, taken together, are far short of what’s needed to limit global temperature rise to levels that would avert the worst impacts of warming, the report confirms.

When it was reached in 2015, the Paris Agreement set a target of limiting average temperature rise compared with preindustrial levels to well below 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century.

Since then, because of advances in research, the scientific consensus is that the rise needs to be limited to 1.5 degrees C; beyond that threshold, there is a far greater likelihood of devastating consequences, like widespread crop failures and collapse of the polar ice sheets. So far, global temperatures have risen about 1 degree C since the late 19th century.

For its part, the United States, which has produced the largest share of global emissions since the beginning of the industrial age, has pledged to cut its emissions by 50 percent to 52 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade, a target that is shy of the commitments of the European Union and Britain.

But it is already proving to be difficult, especially politically, and it remains to be seen whether Mr. Biden will be able to persuade members of Congress to support major climate legislation before he goes to the international climate talks in November.

At the White House meeting Friday, known as the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, Mr. Biden implored the leaders of nine countries and the European Commission to act faster and more aggressively to slash greenhouse gases.

He also announced that the United States and Europe have pledged to help reduce methane emissions 30 percent globally by 2030 and asked other nations to join that effort. Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide.

“I need to tell you the consequences of inaction,” Mr. Biden said.

Pointing to recent extreme weather events including hurricanes, floods and wildfires around the country, flooding across Germany and Belgium, fires raging in Australia and Russia, and a record temperature in the Arctic Circle, Mr. Biden told leaders: “We don’t have a lot of time.”

A recent analysis by Climate Action Tracker found that no major emitters have a climate pledge in keeping with the 1.5 degree target. Several countries, including Britain and the European Union, are close. The United States is not.

“Governments are letting vested interests call the climate shots, rather than serving the global community,” Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said in a statement.

The timing of the synthesis report, as it’s called, is as important as its content. The next round of international climate talks are barely six weeks away and there is still uncertainty around who can attend considering travel restrictions to limit the spread of the coronavirus. It is unclear if some of the world’s biggest economies, including China and India, will announce new climate pledges by then.

A separate analysis released this week, by the Washington-based World Resources Institute, found that actions by the world’s 20 largest economies are key to slowing down global climate change. The 20 economies contribute 75 percent of global emissions.

On Monday, Mr. Guterres is scheduled to host another meeting, also aimed at encouraging all countries to ratchet up their climate pledges before or at the talks in Glasgow, known as the 26th meeting of the Conference of Parties, or COP26. He will also encourage rich countries to keep their promise to help poorer countries deal with the impacts of climate change.

“There is a high risk of failure of COP26,” Mr. Guterres warned Friday. “It is clear that everyone must assume their responsibilities.”

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(Yale) Can The Economy Afford NOT To Fight Climate Change?

Yale Climate Connections - Dana Nuccitelli

Some say the economic costs of fighting climate change are too high, but a new study shows the economic cost of doing nothing could be 15 times higher than current estimates. 


Author
Dana Nuccitelli, research coordinator for the nonprofit Citizens' Climate Lobby, is an environmental scientist, writer, and author of 'Climatology versus Pseudoscience'.
Those opposing a fast transition to renewable energy and other aggressive action to fight catastrophic climate change often argue that the economic costs would be too great. 

Now, with the proliferation of extreme hurricanes, droughts, floods, wildfires, and other disasters linked to a changing climate, it has grown more apparent that the status quo also carries a cost – defined as the “social cost” of carbon. 

But recent research indicates existing economic models may have low-balled those potential social costs by trillions of dollars.

Papers accounting for the value of nature and heat-related mortality conclude that the social cost of carbon is in the hundreds of dollars per ton of carbon dioxide pollution.  A new study published in Environmental Research Letters (ERL) also finds that the cost of doing nothing could be 15 times greater yet. The trillion-dollar question for climate economists is: will climate damages have persistent effects that result in slower economic growth?

“Climate change makes detrimental events like the recent heat wave in North America and the floods in Europe much more likely,” noted the new study’s co-author Chris Brierley of the University College London.

“If we stop assuming that economies recover from such events within months, the costs of warming look much higher than usually stated. We still need a better understanding of how climate alters economic growth, but even in the presence of small long-term effects, cutting emissions becomes much more urgent.”

That insight has important repercussions for federal climate rules. In adopting new regulations, federal agencies are required to weigh the resulting costs and benefits to American taxpayers. Experts estimate how much a ton of carbon dioxide pollution costs society as a result of the climate change damages it causes. This “social cost” of carbon is notoriously difficult to pin down.

Wild cards include uncertainties about the magnitude of climate damages and about the resulting economic costs, and subjective judgments about how much governments value or discount the wellbeing of future generations.
From Obama’s $50 per ton, to Trump’s near-zero, to Biden’s TBD – to be determined
The Obama administration pegged the social cost of carbon at about $50 per ton, but the Trump administration reduced the federal social cost of carbon estimate to near zero by heavily discounting the value of future generations and entirely disregarding the wellbeing of humans beyond U.S. borders.

The Biden administration reversed those changes by restoring the Obama administration estimate and now is in the process of incorporating the latest research to further update the value.

In a separate but relevant new report, the World Meteorological Organization has found that over the past five decades, the number of extreme weather disasters has increased fivefold globally and associated costs have increased sevenfold.

More than half of those costs have been borne by the United States, largely because of damages resulting from extreme Atlantic hurricanes like Katrina in 2005, Harvey, Maria, and Irma in 2017, Sandy in 2012, and Andrew in 1992. Damages from these storms totaled almost $500 billion (nearly $1.2 trillion when adjusted for inflation).

This year’s Hurricane Ida is expected to add $95 billion to that total. And as the latest IPCC report concluded, hotter global temperatures and ocean waters will cause a greater proportion of tropical cyclones to rapidly intensify and become dangerous Category 4 and 5 hurricanes.

Slower growth means compounded costs

Many climate-economics models have assumed the global economy will keep growing at a steady rate no matter how much the climate changes. Over the past decade, more and more climate economists have questioned this assumption, noting that economies will increasingly struggle to fully recover from persistent and worsening climate damages.

UC Davis climate economist Frances Moore, who was not involved in the new ERL study, said the novel part of its approach involves figuring in the possibility of “partial persistence” of damages from climate change.  “This is probably a more realistic representation of what is really going on” as opposed to previous studies that either chalked up damages as permanent “or not persistent at all.”

The ERL study concluded that if just 10% of economic damages from climate change were to persist and reduce economic growth, the social cost of carbon would increase by a factor of 15, into the thousands of dollars per ton.

Moreover, the authors found that these adverse economic impacts would be heavily borne by countries in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America: developing countries that have contributed the least to the climate crisis, but which are the most vulnerable to its impacts as a result of  their already hot climates and lack of resources available for adaptation efforts.

The study authors also investigated the possibility that countries could reinforce their resilience to persistent climate damages through adaptation measures. They concluded that keeping the social cost of carbon below $600 per ton “would require lowering the persistence of temperature-related economic impacts by half within less than 25 years.”

Such an approach would require immense investments in climate adaptation that would be especially difficult for poorer countries to afford.

Efforts to quantify the economic costs of climate change often overlook its human toll. For example, in just the summer of 2021 alone, Hurricane Ida claimed at least 82 lives, 242 died in the European floods, and likely over 1,000 were killed in the Pacific Northwest heat wave. The economic benefits of policies to curb climate change usually will outweigh the associated costs, especially if persistent climate damages slow economic growth.

But the non-economic benefits stemming from avoided deaths and the improved well being of future generations make the climate policy cost-benefit analysis more compelling yet.

On a more positive note, deaths caused by extreme weather events have declined since the 1970s thanks largely to improved hurricane and weather emergency early warning systems. However, more than 90% of the deaths related to weather disasters have occurred in developing countries, once again highlighting the inequity in climate change impacts.

For example, droughts in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Mozambique accounted for the most such deaths, at over 650,000 in total.

The results of this new research strengthen the case for ambitious climate policies. “The risk of costs being even higher than previously assumed reaffirms the urgency for fast and strong mitigation,” said ERL study co-author Paul Waidelich of ETH Zürich. “It shows that choosing to not reduce greenhouse gas emissions is an extremely risky economic strategy.”

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(Bloomberg) Property Value At Risk In Australian Climate Hot Spots, RBA Says

Bloomberg Green - 

Traffic controllers stand at the Hawkesbury River Bridge submerged by floodwaters in Windsor, New South Wales, earlier in March. Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg

Some property in parts of Australia exposed to climate change and wild weather could experience valuation declines that leave lenders with less protection in the event of a default, according to Reserve Bank research.

About 3.5% of dwellings in Australia already fall under an international definition of being at “high risk” from climate damage, RBA economists Kellie Bellrose, David Norman and Michelle Royters said in a research paper. 

But the RBA economists note that it’s the rise in climate risk that isn’t yet reflected in property prices that’s key when considering the banks’ exposures in climate-sensitive regions.

The problem could be acute in Australia, the world’s driest inhabited continent, as mortgages account for about two-thirds of major banks’ portfolios, according to the research. 

“Climate change creates risks for the Australian financial system that will rise over time to become substantial if they are not properly managed,” they wrote. “If current values do not fully reflect the longer-term risks of climate change, housing prices could decline, leaving banks with less protection than expected against borrower default.”

Chilly Winter

Australian house price growth has slowed since summer peak


Source: CoreLogic Inc.

To estimate potential climate change impact on mortgage books, the researchers translated estimated falls in housing prices in climate-sensitive suburbs by 2050 into an implied change in borrower leverage, as measured by loan-to-value ratios.

The outcome suggest climate change will result in around 400,000 more loans, or 2.5% of all loans, having a loan-to-value ratio greater than 80%. Within this, around half move to greater than 90%. 

Classifying a dwelling as “high risk” is based on the so-called value at risk -- that is, the annual expected cost of climate-related damage relative to the replacement cost of dwellings -- exceeding 1%. 

A VaR change of 0.4 percentage point is equivalent to roughly a 10% decline in housing prices due to climate risk, according to the paper. Increases in insurance premium costs “would be incurred every year, and therefore could result in sizable declines in property values.”

A park submerged by floodwaters in Richmond, New South Wales, in March. Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg
Under a different methodology used as a cross-check, the regions projected to see the biggest rise in the proportion of properties as high risk out to 2050 include populous areas in southeastern Queensland and northern New South Wales, which have a large number of houses at risk of coastal inundation.

The authors acknowledged limitations to this method. The risks to banks “may be overstated in this exercise because we assume that banks’ exposures will not change in the future,” though banks are expected to increasingly incorporate climate risks into their lending decisions.

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