21/01/2022

(Conservation International) Climate Change, Extreme Weather Among Top Risks Facing Humanity: 3 Stories You May Have Missed

Conservation International - Vanessa Bauza

Editor's note: News about conservation and the environment is made every day, but some of it can fly under the radar. In a recurring feature, Conservation News shares three stories from the past week that you should know about.

Alder Fire in Yellowstone National Park (© Mike Lewelling, National Park Service)

1. 1,000 experts & leaders say "climate action failure" is perceived as top global risk
Climate change and environmental degradation are among the gravest threats to humanity, says a new report.

The story: The World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risk Report this year finds that the top five long-term risks to our world are all environmental — with climate action failure, extreme weather and biodiversity loss ranking as the most severe. Risks were gathered from surveys with approximately 1,000 experts and leaders, Ashira Morris reports for World War Zero. Though climate change has already arrived “in the form of droughts, fires, floods, resource scarcity and species loss, among other impacts,” current climate commitments are not sufficient to meet the challenge, according to the report.

The big picture: “The World Economic Forum finds public and private-sector leaders in broad agreement … decisive climate action cannot wait,” Conservation International CEO M. Sanjayan told World War Zero. “To date, the industrialized world has consistently failed to make good on their climate promises. As we look ahead to COP27,” — the international climate negotiations set for later this year in Egypt — “governments, companies and financial institutions must not only increase their own decarbonization ambitions — they must make fairness a priority [for] communities on the frontlines of climate change.”

Read more here.

2. The great Siberian thaw
Russia’s frozen lands contain vast amounts of carbon, which is being released as the permafrost melts.

The story: In northeastern Russia’s boreal forests, where permafrost can be a kilometer deep, annual temperatures have risen by more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since the Industrial Revolution — twice the global average, Joshua Yaffa writes for The New Yorker. Climate change, exacerbated by deforestation and wildfires, is melting the permafrost. As it thaws, once-frozen organic matter — everything from woolly mammoth remains to tree stumps — is releasing “a constant belch of carbon dioxide and methane,” writes Yaffa. This fuels a dangerous feedback loop: Greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere lead to higher temperatures, which in turn contribute to further melting these frozen soils.

The big picture: “Irrecoverable carbon” refers to the vast stores of carbon in nature that are vulnerable to release from human activity and, if lost, could not be restored by 2050 — when the world must reach net-zero emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Due in part to its massive land area, Russia contains the most irrecoverable carbon of any country, with high concentrations in its boreal peatlands and forests, according a recent study by Conservation International, which mapped irrecoverable carbon around the world — providing policymakers with the clearest view yet on the areas that most need to be protected.

One mountainous region, the East Russian taiga in the southeast corner of the county, contains 2 percent of Earth’s irrecoverable carbon — and the last Siberian tiger range — making it a priority for protection, experts say.

Read more here

3.

A third of commodity-hungry firms have no deforestation policy — report
Companies that supply the world’s commodities are also driving deforestation, according to a new report.

The story: Protecting forests is critical to limiting climate change, yet a third of the 350 companies most involved in commodities such as soy, beef and palm oil lack policies to ensure their products do not contribute to deforestation, reports Simon Jessop for Reuters. According to Global Canopy’s annual “Forest 500” report, 93 of the world's 150 leading financial institutions — providing US$ 5.5 trillion in finance — do not have a deforestation policy covering their lending to companies in key commodity supply chains.

The big picture: Each year, large swaths of tropical forests are destroyed to make room for palm oil, cattle, soy and other commodity-driven agriculture. But this destruction of nature comes at a climate cost; tropical deforestation accounts for 8 percent of annual emissions, equivalent to those released by the entire European Union.

In November, at the UN global climate summit known as COP26, more than 100 countries — accounting for about 86 percent of the world’s forests — committed to stop deforestation on their lands by the end of this decade. In addition, more than 30 financial institutions pledged to eliminate deforestation driven by agriculture from their portfolios and increase investments in nature-based solutions by 2025.

“The new political space created at COP26 can pave the way for stronger and more broadly applicable legal frameworks … but these proposals could be strengthened, and must be enforced, with clear accountability and penalties for breaches,” according to the “Forest 500” report.

Read more here.
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(Australian Museum) Impacts of Climate Change

Australian Museum

Climate change brings social, environmental and economic impacts.

Impacts of climate change

Climate change affects everything. It’s already putting pressure on our planet—on people and other living things, on economies and on governments.

The gases released through burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) create a blanket around the Earth, trapping heat. This heat creates more extreme and unpredictable weather. Heatwaves are becoming more frequent and more intense. We experience longer droughts, longer and more severe fire seasons, more intense storms, less ice and snow cover, floods, rising sea levels and our oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic.

Human communities around the world are increasingly losing habitable land, houses, and sites of cultural significance. Our sources of reliable food and fresh water are dwindling. Also, our health suffers with hotter summers and as air quality gets worse during the bushfire seasons. But we’re not the only species being deeply impacted. The impacts of climate change affect all life on Earth.

As the oceans warm, coral reefs bleach and die, which means many fish and other marine creatures lose their habitats. Animals and plants are also having to shift where they live to stay within comfortable living limits. Mammals, reptiles, fish, insects, plants, fungi and other species are maturing, reproducing, flowering or fruiting at different times now, to keep up with temperature changes. This means the food sources that each one relies on to feed themselves and their offspring are often not available when needed.

Climate change is damaging the Earth’s capacity to act as a life support system, for us and for Earth’s many other species.

We can slow down the damage.

Impacts of climate change in Australia

Australia is experiencing higher temperatures, more extreme droughts, fire seasons, floods and more extreme weather due to climate change. Rising sea levels add to the intensity of high-sea-level events and threaten housing and infrastructure.

The number of days that break heat records has doubled in the past 50 years. Heatwaves are of particular concern: they are occurring more often and are more intense than in the past. In recent decades more people have died in Australia in heat waves than all other natural disasters combined. Some parts of Australia – inland areas particularly, are expected to warm faster than along the coasts.

Higher temperatures create a range of extreme weather and climate events: longer droughts in some areas of the continent, and in others, heavier rainstorms due to greater evaporation. Marine heatwaves are on the rise devastating Australia’s kelp forests, seagrass meadows, coral reefs and all the underwater creatures that depend on them.

These impacts also affect humans—the creatures and habitats are sources of food and income. Coral bleaching has increased in frequency and severity on the Great Barrier Reef. It is now occurring so frequently that large areas are unlikely to ever recover.

As the oceans absorb not just heat but also excess carbon from the atmosphere, oceans and seas have become more acidic. This acidity reduces the capacity of crustaceans, hard corals, and coralline algae to draw out calcium carbonate from the water, to grow and strengthen their skeletons.

In our communities, the impacts of climate change are broad. It damages our health, including mental health, the livelihoods of industries that are suffering (tourism and hospitality particularly) and it adds to the stresses on our medical and emergency services.

In the words of the Climate Council:
“Our new extremes of heat and other severe weather mean we now need to re-imagine how our towns and cities function, ensure we provide essential climate safety services, and rethink how we go about our daily lives and care for others.”
To predict how severe these impacts will be, teams of scientists who model climate change impacts have established ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCPs) to track the concentrations of greenhouse gasses expected to be in the atmosphere by 2100, depending on how much effort is put into limiting emissions around the world. The impacts resulting from low to high effort have been estimated, making clear the extreme costs of inaction.

How are people responding to impacts of climate change in Australia?

There is a rising groundswell of people concerned about and taking action on climate change in Australia.

There is important work on climate change underway across Australia, in universities, academies and museums, in government research organisations such as CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, and commercial research and development groups. These researchers are working to document climate change impacts in Australia, to better model and predict future changes, safeguard biodiversity and communities, and to establish more – and more efficient – ways of reducing emissions and capturing carbon.

There are many groups bringing people together to support strong solutions to the human impacts on environment. Well-established groups – Greening Australia, 350.org Australia, 1Million Women, the Climate Council, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Seed and more – are creating collective efforts to reduce carbon emissions and better care for our planet. Groups within the community are banding together to advance positive action: Doctors for the Environment Australia, Australian Parents for Climate Action, and Farmers for Climate Action are just three examples.

Many businesses, industries and organisations in Australia are seeking investment in clean energy and technology, clean operations, insuring economic benefits and environmental protection. Investment in solar and wind power and electric car infrastructure is increasing at an unprecedented rate. As engineers from the Australian National University reported at the end of 2019, Australia is the “runaway global leader” in building and installing renewable energy. “In Australia,” they report, “renewable energy is growing at a per capita rate ten times faster than the world average.”

Some of the research organisations developing important understanding and solutions to climate change in Australia, along with our own work here at the Australian Museum:

Climate change in the Pacific

Climate change has had a major impact on all countries and ecologies across the Pacific region for many decades. From the 1980s at least, Pacific Islanders have been sounding the alarm about the impacts of global warming on their islands. These are some of the lowest emitting nations in the world, yet they bear the full brunt of the impacts of climate change.

The rising temperatures caused primarily by heavy-emitting nations are causing sea level rise. This is because melting icesheets are adding water to the oceans—and water expands as it warms. This means in low-lying Pacific islands, coastlines, family lands, houses, and sacred sites are washed away by increasingly high tides and storm surges.

Cyclones are more intense as warm water evaporates more readily, creating super-charged storm systems. Hotter days and nights make everyday life harder and cause health problems for many people. Longer droughts, bigger floods, salt water intrusion into freshwater lenses, bleaching reefs and more storm damage: all these things make getting enough food, fresh water and shelter and maintaining health and wellbeing an increasingly hard challenge across the Pacific.

How are people responding to climate change in the Pacific?

Climate action groups have been outstandingly creative and powerfully outspoken for decades now, bringing voices from the Pacific to international climate policy forums. Social media has been providing increasing numbers of Pacific Islanders with wide-reaching channels for raising awareness and support for the push to switch to renewable energy and safeguard living systems. The slogan voiced by Islanders to powerful effect across social media platforms and at the UN Climate talks in Paris helped to set the optimal global target: “1.5 to Stay Alive”.

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(TIME) The Surprisingly Low Price Tag On Preventing Climate Disaster

TIME - Yuval Noah Harari

Illustration by Aldo Crusher for TIME

Author
Yuval Noah Harari is the author of Sapiens, Homo Deus and Sapiens: A Graphic History.
Data sources for this article can be found on bit.ly/2-percent-more
As the climate crisis worsens, too many people are swinging from denial straight to despair. A few years ago, it was common to hear people deny climate change, downplay the enormousness of the threat, or argue that it is far too soon to worry about it. Now many people say it’s too late. The apocalypse is coming, and there is nothing we can do to prevent it.

Despair is as dangerous as denial. And it is equally false. Humanity has enormous resources under its command, and by applying them wisely, we can still prevent ecological cataclysm. But exactly how much would it cost to stop the apocalypse? If humankind wanted to prevent catastrophic climate change, how big a check would we have to write?

Naturally enough, no one knows for sure. My team and I have spent weeks poring over various reports and academic papers, living in a cloud of numbers. But while the models behind the numbers are dizzyingly complex, the bottom line should cheer us up. According to the International Energy Agency, achieving a net-zero carbon economy would require us to spend just 2% of annual global GDP over what we already do on our energy system.

In a recent poll of climate economists conducted by Reuters, most agreed that getting to net zero would cost only 2% to 3% of annual global GDP. Other estimates put the cost of decarbonizing the economy a bit lower or a bit higher, but they are all in the low single digits of annual global GDP.

These numbers echo the assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which in its landmark 2018 report stated that in order to limit climate change to 1.5°C, annual investments in clean energy needed to increase to around 3% of global GDP. Since humankind already spends about 1% of annual global GDP on clean energy, we just need an extra 2% slice of the pie!

Generation Now: The Fight For Climate Justice | TIME 14min 06sec

The above calculations focus on the cost of transforming the energy and transportation sectors, which are by far the most important. However, there are other sources of emissions as well, like land use, forestry and agriculture. You know, those infamous cow farts. The good news is that a lot of these emissions can be cut on the cheap through behavioral changes such as reducing meat and dairy consumption and relying more on a plant-based diet. It doesn’t cost anything to eat more veggies, and it can help you (and the rain forests) live longer. 

We can quibble endlessly about the numbers, tweaking the models this way and that. But we should look at the big picture beyond the math. The crucial news is that the price tag of preventing the apocalypse is in the low single digits of annual global GDP. It is certainly not 50% of annual global GDP, nor is it 15%. Rather, it is somewhere below 5%, perhaps as low as investing an additional 2% of global GDP in the right places.

And note the word investing. We aren’t talking about burning piles of banknotes in some huge sacrifice to the spirits of the earth. We are talking about making investments in new technologies and infrastructure, such as advanced batteries to store solar energy and updated power grids to distribute it.

These investments will create numerous new jobs and economic opportunities, and are likely to be economically profitable in the long run in part by reducing health care expenditures and saving millions of people from sickness caused by air pollution. We can protect the most vulnerable populations from climate disasters, become better ancestors to future generations, and create a more prosperous economy in the process.

This wonderful piece of news has somehow been sidelined in the heated debate about climate change. We should bring it into focus, not merely in order to give people hope, but even more so because it can be translated into a concrete political plan of action. We have learned in recent years to define our goal in terms of one number: 1.5°C. We can define the means to do this with another number: 2%. Increase investment in eco-friendly technologies and infrastructure by 2 percentage points above 2020 levels.

Of course, unlike the 1.5°C figure, which is a scientifically robust threshold, the 2% figure represents only a rough guesstimate. It should be understood as a ballpark figure, helpful to frame the kind of political project humanity requires. It tells us that preventing catastrophic climate change is a totally feasible project, even though it would obviously cost a lot of money.

Since global GDP is now about $85 trillion USD, 2% currently totals about $1.7 trillion. It means that to save the environment, we don’t need to completely derail the economy or abandon the achievements of modern civilization. We just need to get our priorities right.

Signing a check for 2% of annual global GDP is far from the whole story. It won’t solve all our ecological problems, such as oceans brimming with plastic or the continued loss of biodiversity. And even to prevent catastrophic climate change, we’ll need to make sure that the funds are invested in the right places and that the new investments don’t cause their own negative ecological or social fallout.

If we destroy ecosystems to mine for rare metals that are needed for the renewables industry, we might arguably lose as much as we gain. We will also need to change some of our behaviors and ways of thinking, from what we eat to how we travel. None of that will be easy. But that’s exactly why we have politicians—their job is to deal with the hard stuff.

Politicians are actually very skilled at shifting 2% of resources from here to there. It is what they do all the time. The difference between the policies of right-wing and left-wing parties often amount to a few percentage points of GDP. When faced by a major crisis, politicians swiftly shift far more resources to fight it. For example, in 1945, the U.S. spent about 36% of its GDP on winning the Second World War.

During the 2008–09 financial crisis, the U.S. government spent about 3.5% of GDP to save financial institutions deemed “too big to fail.” Maybe humankind should also treat the Amazon rain forest as “too big to fail”?

 Given the current price of rain-forest land in South America and the size of the Amazon rain forest, buying the whole of it in order to protect local forests, biodiversity and human communities from destructive business interests would cost about $800 billion, or a one-off payment of less than 1% of global GDP.

In just the first nine months of 2020, governments around the world announced stimulus measures worth nearly 14% of global GDP to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. If citizens press them hard enough, politicians can do the same to deal with the ecological crisis. So can investment banks and pension funds. Pension funds hold about $56 trillion USD. What’s the point of having a pension if you don’t have a future?

At present, neither businesses nor governments are willing to make the additional 2% investment necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change. Where does the money go instead?

In 2020, governments expended $2 trillion USD on their militaries—that’s 2.4% of global GDP. Every two years, another 2.4% of global GDP is spent on food that goes to waste. Governments also spend about $500 billion annually on—wait for it—direct subsidies for fossil fuels!

Which means that every 3½ years, governments write a nice fat check for an amount equivalent to 2% of annual global GDP, and gift it to the fossil-fuel industry. It gets worse. When you factor in the social and environmental costs that the fossil-fuel industry causes but isn’t asked to pay for, then the value of these subsidies actually reaches a staggering 7% of annual global GDP each year.

Now consider tax evasion. The E.U. estimates that money hidden by the wealthy in tax havens is worth around 10% of global GDP. Every year, another $1.4 trillion in profits is stashed offshore by corporations, which is equal to 1.6% of global GDP. To prevent the apocalypse, we’ll probably need to impose some new taxes. But why not start with collecting the old ones?

The money is there. Of course, collecting taxes, cutting military budgets, stopping food wastage and slashing subsidies is easier said than done, especially when faced by some of the most powerful lobbies in the world. But it doesn’t require a miracle. It just requires determined organization.

So we shouldn’t succumb to defeatism. Whenever someone says, “It’s too late! The apocalypse is upon us!,” reply, “Nah, we can stop it with just 2%.” And when COP27 convenes in November 2022 in Egypt, we should tell the assembled leaders that it is not enough to make vague future pledges about 1.5°C. We want them to take out their pens and sign a check for 2% of annual global GDP.

Links - TIME Climate Change Articles
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