16/01/2018

Powering Up: Rooftop Solar Installations Jump By Half To Hit Record 1GW In 2017

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Australians exceeded 1 gigawatts of rooftop solar panels for the first time last year, with the market set to expand further in 2018 amid ongoing worries about electricity prices, according to Green Energy Markets.
The country added about 1.078 gigawatts of new rooftop solar capacity last year, beating the previous record set in 2012 by 14 per cent, the consultancy said.


Chief Scientist calls for greater battery storage
Chief Scientist Alan Finkel says power bills will go up and energy supply will be less reliable unless Australia develops better storage systems.

The increase over 2016 was about 50 per cent.
"The surge is happening across every state ... and across all segments of the market," said Tristan Edis, director of analysis for Green Energy Markets.
"It's heavily driven by the electricity price hikes and the media attention around them, because it's become a political issue."
The tally is based on the number of renewable energy certificates (known as STCs) created by small-scale panel installations, and excludes the rapidly increasing utility-scale solar farms.
Rooftop installations last year grew a third last year to 172,152 units, snapping a four-year drop. Consumers are shifting to larger units, with 5-kilowatt systems increasingly typical of the market.
A shortage of installers means 2018 should also be off to a solid start for new solar PV as companies try to meet pent-up demand. Photo: Joe Armao JAA
The spurt of solar orders is likely to continue well into 2018 in part because installers have struggled to find staff to meet demand in recent months.
"The market was definitely constrained at the end of 2017," said Warwick Johnston, managing director of SunWiz, another consultancy.
Sun Metals Corporation's Solar Project Manager Lance Moody inspects progress of the solar panels at Sun Metals. 
Even though electricity price rises are expected to taper this year and next, solar demand is unlikely to flag soon.
"Module prices are low, awareness of electricity prices is huge, and momentum in commercial sales keeps on growing," Mr Johnston said.



Commercial break
The revival of the small-scale end of the solar industry began around mid-2016 after wholesale prices spiked in South Australia, Mr Edis said.
Debate over electricity intensified after a powerful storm knocked out power in the state in September of that year.
The events helped to reverse a trend of falling residential demand following the removal of state support schemes and slashed feed-in tariffs paid for exports to the grid.
Business demand had picked up some of the slack – and it has continued to grow.
Mr Edis estimates commercial demand for sub-100 kilowatt systems already made up almost 30 per cent of the market last year.
He expects about a third of firms will see their power contracts expire this year and will face very large hikes in energy charges that will make solar panels appealing.
Natalie Collard, an executive for industry development with the Clean Energy Council, said rooftop solar installations had risen 50-fold in the past decade.
"Today we are seeing farmers, airports, shopping centres, apartment buildings, homes and small businesses installing solar power and storage to take the heat out of their power bills," Ms Collard said.

'Huge year' ahead
The rooftop solar industry itself could be eclipsed within a year or two by the rapid expansion of large-scale solar farms.
According to the Clean Energy Council, there are 33 solar farms under way – including two with wind turbines – totalling 2.291 gigawatts of capacity.
"More large-scale solar farms managed to secure project finance than ever before in 2017, setting up the industry for a huge year [in 2018] in terms of investment and jobs," Ms Collard said.
"With states such as Queensland providing incentives to build solar farms in locations with some of the best sunshine in the world, solar is leading the new resources boom right now."
The increasing scale of the industry globally will also likely keep the pressure on prices.
Solar energy costs will fall about 35 per cent for every doubling of installed capacity between 2010 and 2020, according to a report released over the weekend by the International Renewable Energy Agency.
That pace is faster than the 21 per cent rate forecast for onshore wind and 14 per cent for offshore wind over the period, the report said.
The report found the global levelised cost of electricity for onshore wind now sits at US 6 cents (AUD 7.6 cents) a kilowatt hour, with solar energy at US 10 cents per kilowatt hour.
Fossil fuel energy costs for new plant typically range between US 5 and 17 cents per kilowatt hour.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

1.5 C Climate Goal 'Very Unlikely' But Doable: Draft UN Report

Agence France Presse

With only a single degree Celsius of warming so far, our planet is already coping with a crescendo of climate impacts including deadly droughts, erratic rainfall, and storm surges engorged by rising seas
dpa/AFP/File / Oliver Berg
The Paris Agreement goal of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius will slip beyond reach unless nations act now to slash carbon pollution, curb energy demand, and suck CO2 from the air, according to a draft UN report.
Without such efforts, "holding warming to 1.5 C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the 21st century [is] extremely unlikely," said the 1,000-page report, prepared by hundreds of scientists.
"There is a very high risk that under current emissions trajectories, and current national pledges, global warming will exceed 1.5 C above preindustrial levels."
On current trends, Earth's thermometer will cross that threshold in the 2040s, said the report.
The greenhouse gas emissions guaranteeing that outcome will have been released within 10 to 15 years.
Under any scenario, there is no model that projects a 66-percent-or-better chance of holding global warming below 1.5 C, the synthesis of recent scientific studies concluded.
With only a single degree Celsius of warming so far, our planet is already coping with a crescendo of climate impacts including deadly droughts, erratic rainfall, and storm surges engorged by rising seas.
The landmark, 197-nation climate treaty, inked in 2015, calls for limiting global warming to "well under" 2 C, and "pursuing efforts" for the 1.5 C cap.
All countries made voluntary carbon-cutting pledges, running out to 2030.
At the same time, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) was mandated to prepare a special 1.5 C report covering impacts and feasibility.
The final version, vetted by governments, will be unveiled in October.

Moral hazard
Pressure for the lower temperature target and the report came from nations whose fate could turn on the half-degree difference between a 1.5 C and 2 C world.
Rising seas, for example, threaten the existence of small island states and could displace tens of millions in Bangladesh, Vietnam and other counties with densely populated river deltas.
"There is a tipping point on sea level rise" -- driven mainly by melting icesheets on Greenland and Antarctica -- "somewhere between 1.5 C and 2 C," said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
"With 2C, according to our models, sea level will just keep on rising," he told AFP.
A pregnant Somali woman sits by a tree trunk outside Dadaab. Photo: AP
The pathways that do exist for stabilising at 1.5 C would require breaching that threshold and then dialling down Earth's surface temperature by drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere and then using if for fuel or storing it underground.
None of technologies that do this exist today on an industrial scale, and some experts fear the long-shot 1.5 C target could pose problems of its own.
"Any scenario for 1.5 C stabilisation likely requires a dubious dependence on 'negative emissions' technologies, whereas 2 C stabilisation is still possible without that," said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.
The lure of silver-bullet fixes, he and others point out, could weaken resolve to reduce greenhouse emissions at their source -- an unintended side-effect known as "moral hazard".
Ensuring even a 50/50 chance of a 1.5 C world would require the equivalent of a climate change Marshall Plan, the study concluded.

Lifestyle changes
By 2050, carbon dioxide emissions would need to fall to "net" zero, meaning that any CO2 released into the air would have to be offset. Renewable energy sources -- mainly solar and wind -- would by then be the dominant energy source, and burning coal a distant memory.
Other planet-warming gases such as methane and HFCs would also have to be drastically reduced.
"Rapid and large-scale behaviour and lifestyle changes," such as a shift away from eating meat, will also be essential, the report said.
"We don’t have any margin for less than total commitment," said Chris Field, Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment in California and a former co-chair of the IPCC's Working Group II.
"Tackling climate is making serious investments more than making exactly the right mix of investments."
IPCC officials and scientists cautioned that the report -- which has already gone through three rounds of editing by scientists -- is bound to change before it is approved by governments at a meeting in October.
"Drafts are collective works-in-progress that do not necessarily represent the IPCC's final assessment," said IPCC spokesman Jonathan Lynn.
The current review cycle is the first in which government officials will submit comments.
"The final approval process is a dialogue between governments -- which have requested and will use the report -- and the scientists who have written it," he told AFP.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

15/01/2018

How Can We Best Communicate The Impacts Of Climate Change?

Reuters - Sarah Hurtes*

How can we talk about climate without sending people into a downward spiral of depression?
A man walks through floods waters and onto the main road after surveying his property which was hit by Hurricane Harvey in Rockport, Texas, U.S. August 26, 2017. REUTERS/Adrees Latif
Between 2000 and 2016, the number of vulnerable people exposed to heat wave events has increased by approximately 125 million. This is set to get worse. Dengue fever has doubled every decade since 1990, reaching 50 to 100 million infections annually, in part because of climate change.
As I read the Lancet Countdown 2017 report sitting at my desk, with the task of having to help communicate its findings to the wider public, I can only think of one thing: basically, we're screwed. So how should I tackle my job as a so-called climate communicator, without sending those who care enough to read about this, into a downward spiral of depression?
It’s a problem many of us are struggling with. An article published in New York Magazine in the summer of 2017 entitled The Uninhabitable Earth, began: “Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: what climate change could wreck - sooner than you think”. It became last year's most widely shared article on climate change, with over 800,000 shares on social media.
Some of my friends, who never once engaged on this topic, posted it on their Facebook channel, their post was infused with panicked comments echoing my initial reaction to the Lancet Countdown report. This makes us climate communicators ask: How effective is such a piece of text in communicating climate change? It makes the issue feel more important, but on its own, it paralyses, leaving us feeling overwhelmed, disempowered.
Additionally, each and every one of us have a limited amount of concern to go round. I for one can’t think of a birthday present for my dad. For some such concerns might extend to military threats, access to contraception, or other severe daily problems that take precedence in comparison to the distant humming buzz of climate change.
This is just human nature - but climate communicators have often exacerbated the problem by focusing on events that are going to happen a long way into the future and geographically far away. When looking at NASA´s forecasts, with warnings about the Arctic Ocean likely to become ice free in the summer before mid-century, I feel concerned, but not exactly worried.
I was particularly worried when I moved to Germany, which had recently been shaken by unusual storms and flooding. That storm in Berlin which nearly smashed my window with my own plant, or those floods in the nearby area where my family lives, are a clear reality check of what's to come as extreme weather becomes the norm.
Besides, I'm only just beginning to get the extent to which extreme weather has immediate health impacts: drowning, getting injured by hitting things, catching illnesses from contaminated water and food, or mess with my own mental well-being. Such information about the potential health impacts of climate change creates a powerful way in to talking about climate change.
Health professionals are increasingly being called upon to be champions in this area, encouraged to speak out to their own patients and local policymakers on the health dangers of climate change such as asthma, allergies and the spread of certain diseases.
Organisations such as the Global Climate and Health Alliance, Health and Environment Alliance or Health Care Without Harm are important bodies that already engage with the public around such issues.
An important part of their work, however, is also to show that many of the steps we take to combat climate change have immediate health benefits. The massive increase in wind and solar energy helped prevent the premature deaths of up to 12,700 people over a nine-year period in the United States.
Despite all the interesting research out there, tweaks to language can only do so much. Even when applying the above solutions to making climate change appear relevant and urgent, it might be that the person you’re talking to just doesn't care. This is why the social science of human behaviour and communication is just as important as the science of climate change and sustainability.
In a recent book, communication experts Adam Corner and Jamie Clarke argue that using the right language is about starting a productive dialogue, not winning an argument. Using messages and telling stories that speak to people’s values.
For example in the United States, research suggests the values of ingenuity, independence, prosperity and leadership matter a great deal, while in India, togetherness, respect for nature and self-reliance are more important. Research also shows that many people intrinsically care about the wellbeing of others and the environment.
As for people like Trump, perhaps our only chance is to show them a recent report that made me laugh out loud in a meeting - “Climate Change: Good for sex, bad for sperm” - about a working paper which shows that 80 degree Fahrenheit days correspond to lowered birth rates nine months later.

*Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

Climate Journalism Focuses Too Much On Trump And Not Enough On Extreme Weather, New Reports Find

Media Matters - Evlondo Cooper
Sarah Wasko / Media Matters
Two new studies highlight different troubling trends in climate change reporting.
First, a disproportionate amount of climate journalism in 2017 was focused on the Trump administration's actions and statements, meaning that other climate stories got less coverage than they warranted. Second, media last year consistently failed to explain how events such as extreme weather are connected to climate change.
A research group at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the International Collective on Environment, Culture and Politics (ICE CaPs), produced the findings that illustrate how much climate coverage has been driven by President Donald Trump.
It examined coverage last year in five major American newspapers: The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times. In the 4,117 stories in those papers that mentioned "climate change" or "global warming," the word “Trump” appeared 19,184 times -- an average of nearly 4.7 times per article.
Credit: Boykoff, M., Andrews, K., Daly, M., Katzung, J., Luedecke, G., Maldonado, C. and Nacu-Schmidt, A. (2018) A Review of Media Coverage of Climate Change and Global Warming in 2017, Media and Climate Change Observatory, Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado
The researchers argued that Trump-centric coverage can crowd out other reporting on climate change: “Media attention that would have focused on other climate-related events and issues instead was placed on Trump-related actions, leaving many other stories untold.”
Public Citizen, a non-profit organization that advocates for consumer rights, took a different approach in examining climate coverage in 2017. It searched a wide array of U.S. newspapers and TV and radio news programs for stories on extreme weather and pest-borne illness and then checked whether those stories mentioned climate change.
The vast majority did not. At the high end, 33 percent of pieces on record heat included the words "climate change" or "global warming." At the low end, just 4 percent of pieces discussing Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, or Nate mentioned climate change. Or, in other words, 96 percent of stories about 2017’s historic hurricane season did not note the role of climate change in making hurricanes more damaging.
Public Citizen's findings align with studies done by Media Matters last year that found TV news outlets repeatedly failed to report on how climate change is linked to more intense hurricanes, heat waves, and wildfires.
These two new alarming reports bolster the argument that we need better reporting on climate change. It is natural that Trump’s statements and actions as president will drive some climate journalism, particularly because his administration is unraveling a wide variety of climate protections.
But too often the focus is on Trump himself instead of the ways his administration's moves will affect millions of Americans and others around the world. And the inordinate attention given to even Trump's minor utterances and tweets displaces national discourse around important aspects of climate change, such as its impact on extreme weather.
No matter what latest Trump scandal plays out on cable news or the front pages of newspapers, climate reporters still need to focus on how climate change is happening in the real world and how climate policy affects real people. In 2017, there were too many underreported or unreported climate stories.
Will 2018 be any better?

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

14/01/2018

Which Works Better: Climate Fear, Or Climate Hope? Well, It's Complicated

The Guardian - 

Communication is everything when it comes to the climate change debate – and there isn’t just one way to speak to people’s emotions
The Perito Moreno glacier in Los Glaciares national park, southern Argentina, breaks. ‘It seems the hope and fear camps of the climate debate are each seeing only part of the puzzle.’ Photograph: Ariel Molina/EPA
There’s a debate in climate circles about whether you should try to scare the living daylights out of people, or give them hope – think images of starving polar bears on melting ice caps on the one hand, and happy families on their bikes lined with flowers and solar-powered lights on the other.
The debate came to something of a head this year, after David Wallace-Wells lit up the internet with his 7,000-word, worst-case scenario published in New York magazine. It went viral almost instantly, and soon was the best-read story in the magazine’s history. A writer in Slate called it “the Silent Spring of our time”. But it also garnered tremendous criticism and from more than the usual denier set.
Beyond quibbles with the science, critics including the illustrious climate scientist Michael Mann took issue with the piece’s “doomist framing” because, as he wrote at the time, there’s “a danger in overstating the science in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness”.
But others say scaring people is the only way to make them care. Perhaps the most famous purveyor of climate scare tactics is Guy McPherson. Described by the New York Times as an “apocalyptic ecologist”, McPherson’s doomsday theory of “near-term extinction” has attracted something of a following. McPherson wrote on his website, which includes links to suicide hotlines, that the David Wallace-Wells piece “largely captures my message”.
Rather than treat emotions as levers to be pulled, they should be seen as part of a dynamic interplay
Both sides are wrong, from a psychological standpoint. Emotions are complicated and can vary tremendously from person to person. Trying to crudely manipulate them doesn’t work.
That’s the conclusion from behavioral scientists at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Daniel Chapman, Brian Lickel and Ezra Markowitz, who, in a recent paper published in Nature Climate Change, seek to bring the lessons of psychology to bear on communicating the importance climate change.
A still from a recent video showing a starving polar bear. Photograph: National Geographic
To attempt to either scare or inspire people “simultaneously oversimplifies the rich base of research on emotion while overcomplicating the very real communications challenge advocates face by demanding that each message have the right ‘emotional recipe’ to maximize effectiveness”, they write.
Climate experts, after all, are not experts on human behavior and the people who are say there are better ways to communicate the climate problem. Rather than treat emotions as levers to be pulled for a desired effect, they should be seen as part of a dynamic interplay among factors that shape our behavior, exquisitely specific to the human being inhabiting them.
What’s more, since the vast majority of us are not very good at getting people to feel the way we want them to based on the words coming out of our mouths alone, the best approach, it would seem, is one of humility – that is, to spend more time listening, and also, to know our own limits.
“Practitioners in different fields have varying perspectives on the issue,” Chapman told me. “In general, I think we need researchers and practitioners attending in an honest way to what research does and does not tell us about how to engage the public with climate change.”
For those intent on communicating climate change in psychologically adept ways, there are some takeaways from the science.
For instance, though we’ve been conditioned to think of anger as an undesirable emotion, research has shown it to be an important emotion for motivating action in the face of social injustice. And the pairing of certain feelings, like fear and efficacy, can be helpful too.
Like a patient who’s given both a diagnosis and a course of treatment, people respond better to risks when given both a reason and a way to act. In this sense, it seems the hope and fear camps of the climate debate are each seeing only part of the puzzle.
But even in places where the science is relatively strong, researchers caution against simplistic applications. Rote formulas like “three parts hope to one part scary” won’t translate from one person to another. Indeed, to use such information responsibly requires, if not some level of sophistication, then at least considerable forethought, as well as a concerted, ongoing effort to meet people where they are.
That means, above all, knowing your audience and what’s relevant to them. Are they considering chopping down a nearby forest or putting their houses up on stilts? Do they need to rebuild or relocate? Parsing people’s needs and sensitivities is critical in any form of communication, but particularly when it comes to talking about climate science, with its great technical complexity, profound personal impact, and tremendous political polarization.
Above all, it means remembering that climate change is a very big story. It isn’t monolithic, and communication of it looks like many things – be it climate scientists talking to lay-people or Leonardo DiCaprio making a movie.
The overwhelming problem in climate communication, after all, isn’t how it’s talked about so much as whether it’s being talked about at all. A 2016 report from Yale’s programme on climate communication found one in four Americans say they “never” hear someone discussing it.
Looked at that way, David Wallace-Wells’ apocalyptic horror story cum viral sensation is the best thing that’s happened in climate communication some time.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

Leaked Draft Of Landmark Climate Change Report Pours Cold Water On 1.5°C Goal

Futurism - Lou Del Bello

Creative Commons
Missed Targets
Bar a concerted global effort to reduce emissions and remove carbon from the atmosphere, the world is highly likely to exceed the most ambitious climate goal set by the Paris Agreement by the 2040s, according to a leaked draft of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report obtained by Reuters.
The IPCC is expected to release the final version of their highly anticipated Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C in October. The preliminary version obtained by Reuters was submitted to a small group of experts and government officials for review and was not meant for public release.
Every few years, the IPCC publishes an Assessment Report containing the available research about the current state of climate change. This year’s special report is the first focused on what is possibly the Paris Agreement’s most controversial climate goal: limiting global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.



Though some countries are in strong support of taking action to ensure the world meets this climate goal, research has shown that we are highly unlikely to do so.
The draft of the special report obtained by Reuters seems to confirm this low probability of success: “There is very high risk that […] global warming will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels [should emissions continue at the current pace].”
The draft also states that meeting the climate goal would require an “unprecedented” leap from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy and extensive reforms everywhere from industry to agriculture.
Additionally, while curbing global temperatures would help reduce some of the worst impacts of climate change, including sea level rise and droughts, it would not be enough to protect the planet’s most fragile ecosystems, including polar ice caps and coral reefs.

Political Motives?
While the findings currently included in the report confirm what the public may consider the worst-case scenario, scientists who have read the report are not surprised by its contents.
“The report is unexceptional,” Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics at the University of Cambridge, told Futurism. “It was already clear to every climate scientist that a 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit would be breached by 2050 (in fact, probably much earlier) in the absence of drastic carbon capture measures.”
Gabriel Marty, a climate change analyst and former U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) delegate for France, told Futurism that it’s too soon to speculate on the content of the final report.
However, once it is released, he said readers should note the treatment of the uncertainties and risks of the so-called “bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)” technologies designed to suck carbon emissions out of the atmosphere.



“The risks associated [with heavily relying on these technologies] must be clearly outlined,” said Marty. “They do not exist yet, the scale that would be needed would be enormous, and the adverse impacts on land and water resources would likely be huge.”
According to sources familiar with the IPCC’s proceedings, the panel has been criticized in the past for being too coy about the limitations of BECCS and for understating their risks in order to present the 2 degrees Celsius target as “still viable.”
Wadhams also mentioned the possibility that the IPCC’s hesitation to release the special report itself could be politically motivated.
“The IPCC has long since become a political rather than a scientific organization, so their secretiveness and sensitivity about a perfectly ordinary report has some political motive,” he told Futurism.
“A lot could still change between now and the final version.”
Buildings are seen in heavy smog during a polluted day in Jinan, Shandong province, China, December 20, 2016. REUTERS/Stringer
Roz Pidcock, head of communications for the IPCC Working Group 1, told Futurism that that’s not the case. She said the fact that the special report is currently confidential has nothing to do with a lack of transparency on the part of the panel — they simply aren’t finished with it yet.
“All of the expert and government review comments that come in over the next few weeks are taken on board […] Just to give an idea of what that involves, the first draft of this report received 12,895 comments from nearly 500 expert reviewers around the world,” said Pidcock. “A lot could still change between now and the final version.”
We will need to wait until October for the IPCC’s final take on the viability of the extremely ambitious 1.5 degrees Celsius limit, but whatever the contents of the report, we can’t let it discourage us from taking the strongest action possible to prevent further damage to our planet.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

13/01/2018

Act Now To Protect Millions From Floods — Study

Deutsche Welle - Ruby Russell

Scientists say millions more are at risk of flooding over the decades to come based on climate change already in the pipeline. In order to survive, the time to adapt is now.
Peru suffered devastating flooding in March, displacing hundreds of thousands of people
 When we think of climate catastrophes, flooding is pretty high on the list of nightmare scenarios. But it's not just rising sea levels that are threatening communities with inundation: New research shows that ever more of us are at risk from rivers bursting their banks.
As the global temperature rises, water evaporates into the air, humidity increases, clouds form — and what goes up must come down. It's among the laws of physics: Warmer air holds more moisture, meaning bigger clouds that can travel further, resulting in even more extreme storms.
Since the mid-1980s, climate scientists have recorded a 20 percent increase in record-breaking rainfall around the world — with devastating consequences.
In 2017, flooding across India, Bangladesh and Nepal affected 40 million people, and more than 1,200 died. In flooding in Sierra Leone, more than 1,100 people perished. As Peru recorded 10 times the normal level of rainfall, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and at least 70 killed.
To round out the inventory of flooding's impact for last year, lives were also lost to flooding in China, the Philippines, Italy, and Vietnam, among other locations.
And 2018 has carried the trend forward. This week, at least 17 people were killed as dramatic storms swept California. Roads looked like rivers and homes were destroyed.

Predicting disaster
But according to scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research (PIK) in Germany, this is just the beginning. Around the world, many millions of people who have so far stayed safe and dry will face flooding unless action is taken to protect them, the researchers say.
In a bid to quantify the problem, PIK researchers created computer models based on existing data from rivers around the world to predict how important increased flood protection will become over the coming two decades.
"The findings should be a warning to decision-makers," one of the report's authors, Anders Levermann, said in a press release. "If they choose to ignore the issue, sadly enough, disaster will come. Doing nothing will be dangerous."
PIK found the areas that need to adapt most are in Indonesia — where the National Disaster Mitigation Agency reported 787 floods last year — along with India, Africa, the United States and even Western Europe, including the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
Authorities in these countries will need to build dikes, improve flood management systems, put new building regulations in place or even relocate entire communities, the study says.
Flooding in Jakarta last year. The PIK study ranked Indonesia among countries with the greatest need for adaptation
Rich countries also at risk
"More than half of the United States must at least double its protection level within the next two decades if they want to avoid a dramatic increase in river flood risks," the study's lead author, Sven Willen, said.
Sabine Minninger of nongovernmental organization Bread for the World said she hoped the report would serve as a wake-up call to United States President Donald Trump, who has withdrawn his country's support for climate change adaptation.
"The report comes at just the right moment to show that climate change doesn't know borders," said Minninger. "No one is immune to its impacts."
The study found that richer countries with higher levels of protection would have to invest a lot to maintain their current levels of protection.
The number of North Americans threatened by the worst 10 percent of flooding will increase from 100,000 to 1 million, the study said.
"With respect to climate change adaptation, not just poor countries but also rich countries, like Germany where we are sitting, have much to do," Leverman told DW.
The report comes in the wake of intense flooding on the Rhine River, as a result of heavy rainfall.
Floods sweep across Germany: Life on the edge
The rise in water levels is not only a threat to urban areas but also to low-lying fields and nature. The habitat of animals is just as much in jeopardy as that of humans, with floods sometimes resulting in irreparable damages to the eco-system. With climate change causing natural catastrophes more frequently, even the most developed countries can be caught off-guard when disaster strikes. Sertan Sanderson 
Millions more at risk
In Germany, where the overflow of rivers this past week across the country halted boat traffic, inundating streets and monuments, 700,000 people could be at risk from flooding in the next two decades.
But compared to figures for other the risks of European countries, that isn't even so bad. The study found that number of Brits threatened by flooding will increase 28-fold. In France, a 15-fold increase is predicted.
In South America, the number of people threatened by flooding is expected to rise from 6 million to 12 million, in Africa from 25 to 34 million, and in Asia from 70 to 156 million.
And these estimates do not take population growth or increasing urbanization into account — the final numbers could be substantially higher.
Minninger said those most affected by floods today are those in the poorest parts of the world who already struggle to survive. They need to adapt not just to the future risk predicted by PIK, but also to protect people from the very real climate change impacts they are already suffering.
"If even the richest countries need to double their protection, why aren't they providing finance for the rest of the world to adapt?" Minninger said.
The Addicks Resevoir reached capacity during Hurricane Harvey, flooding west Houston
Far-reaching impacts
For the world's poorest people, the dangers of rivers overflowing can go way beyond the immediate inundation of homes and destruction of infrastructure.
"Flood events were the main cause of internal displacement in 2008 to 2015," Sven Harmeling of international aid group Care told DW, saying there was no guarantee they would ever be able to return home as many poor people lack clear legal rights to their land.
Outbreak of disease is an immediate risk, but there are also longer-term health impacts, including psychological.
"Flood catastrophes may tear apart families and separate children from their parents," Harmeling said. "Sometimes thousands of children are acutely malnourished over weeks, which may have long-term adverse health consequences."
Floods can have long-lasting damaging effects, also on infrastructure
More money for adaptation
Yet Minninger said countries like the US could learn from poorer parts of the world, which are already dealing with dangerous new climatic conditions.
"In communities have no resources to protect themselves, for example in the Bangladeshi delta which are regularly flooded, concepts of community-based disaster prevention and management are applied and working very well — the people have learned to protect themselves with joint community-based efforts, for example in building dams," she said.
Environmental and development groups say not nearly enough progress is being made on raising the funds promised for adaptation by the Paris Agreement.
And unless we speed up measures to slow down global warming, the bill to prepare for the worst will keep going up.
2017 Devastating effects of climate change: Deadly combination
Armed conflicts are pushing millions of people to leave their homes or live in terribly precarious situations — and climate change is making it worse. A lack of natural resources increases the risk of conflict and makes life even harder for refugees. South Sudanese families, for instance, are escaping to neighboring countries like Uganda and Kenya — countries already suffering from drought.


Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:
Subscribe to: Comments ( Atom )

Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative