23/02/2018

Bill Shorten Says There's A 'Role For Coal' And Adani Mine Just 'Another Project'

The Guardian - 

Labor leader’s comments come during visit to Queensland and follow CFMEU’s warning that ALP’s blocking of Carmichael mine would open divisive debate
Protesters gather in front of Parliament House on 5 February to campaign against the Adani coalmine. Labor has shown public signals it intends to toughen its position on the project. Photograph: Michael Masters/Getty Images 
Bill Shorten has declared there is a role for coal in Australia, and characterised the controversial Adani coalmine as just “another project” as he digs in for several days visiting marginal coastal electorates in Queensland, trumpeting local infrastructure commitments.
The positive public signal from the Labor leader on the future of coal followed a warning last week by the CFMEU’s national president, Tony Maher, that any move by Labor to block Adani’s controversial Carmichael coalmine would expose Labor politically in Queensland, and open a divisive debate within the ALP about the future of coalmines in Australia.
Maher told Guardian Australia last week that promising to block the Adani project would raise questions, like “what do you do with the next [coalmine], and the next one, and the one after that?”
Shorten has sent a number of clear public signals since the end of January that Labor intends to toughen its position on the Adani project, and policy work has been under way internally since before Christmas.
But despite all the signalling – which started just before the resignation of the Labor MP David Feeney, a development triggering a byelection in the inner-Melbourne electorate of Batman, where local anti-Adani sentiment is a significant issue – thus far the federal ALP has not revealed any detail about how it might move to stop the project.
In Townsville on Monday, Shorten told local reporters there was a role for mining in Australia, and “there is a role for coal in Australia” and he echoed Maher’s description of Adani as just “another project”.
Last week, Maher told Guardian Australia: “I see no reason for Labor to toughen its position. Why win Batman and lose in central Queensland?”
“The environment groups have worked themselves up into a passion about [Adani]. I don’t know why. Adani is just another project and it should be judged on its merits.”
In Adelaide the shadow infrastructure minister, Anthony Albanese, told 5AA that Labor had not taken any decision to oppose the mine.
“That’s not the decision that we have made,” Albanese said. “We have certainly been very questioning about the project, about its financial viability, whether it will go ahead.
“We’ve been quite rightly questioning about the impact on water and some of the environmental consequences of the project,” he said.
“But Labor has to stand up for Labor values and one of the things about Labor values is about jobs and making sure the economy can function.”
Shorten said in Townsville, while unveiling an expansion of the local port, that Labor would stand up for “real blue-collar jobs” and the next “pipeline of work”.
He said of the Adani project that it was highly unlikely to get finance, and the promised jobs associated with the project had not materialised. The Labor leader said his party’s position on Adani was it “has to stack up commercially and environmentally”.
There are a range of views within federal Labor about what to do about Adani. Labor sources have told Guardian Australia that internal consideration on legal mechanisms to potentially stop Adani remains ongoing, but the party is also focused on sending a clear message to Queensland that Labor will produce a regional industry policy that blue-collar workers can believe in.
The ALP and the Greens will go head to head in Batman, and anti-Adani activist groups are already active in the contest. Melbourne voters go to the polls on 17 March.

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Panacea for the Pacific? Evaluating Community-Based Climate Change Adaptation

Environmental Change and Security Program -  |  |  | 

The Australian government’s recent Foreign Policy White Paper has been criticized for its underwhelming climate change section.
Penny Wong, the current opposition leader in the Australian Senate, said that its acknowledgement of the need to support a more resilient Pacific region “rings hollow in light of the Abbott/Turnbull Government’s massive aid cuts.”
But despite these criticisms, the Australian government continues to support a range of climate change initiatives in the Pacific.
Increasingly, Australian Aid and its fellow donors, including USAID, JICA and GIZ, take a community-based approach to climate adaptation.
Germany’s GIZ, for example, carries out community-level adaptation activities for all beneficiaries in the Pacific; and USAID has highlighted its community-level projects as important models.
Our recent evaluation of some of these community-level adaptation programs in Vanuatu and Kiribati found that they provide some development benefits, including increased awareness, empowerment, cooperation, and self-esteem, but that it is too soon to tell whether this approach can reduce long-term vulnerability to climate change.

As the Climate Changes, So Does the Way We Respond
Even if global emissions stopped today, the IPCC predicts that we would continue to feel the impacts of climate change for centuries, so adapting to unavoidable impacts is a key component of aid programs in the Pacific.
How we will adapt, however, has evolved, with donors and practitioners shifting from ineffective “top-down” approaches driven by experts, to “bottom-up” interventions like community-based programs that involve greater participation by local stakeholders.
Researchers theorize that community-based adaptation can more effectively increase resilience, but does it actually work in practice?
To understand whether externally funded community-based adaptation programs can reduce vulnerability and increase resilience, we conducted focus groups and interviews across six communities in the Pacific island nations of Vanuatu and Kiribati to measure local perceptions of the appropriateness, effectiveness, equity, impact, and sustainability of these activities.


 Appropriate Community-Based Adaptation Improves Awareness
In Vanuatu, we found that the information provided by community-based adaptation programs was especially effective.
Communities in the program gained a better understanding of climate change, recognized the need to adapt, incorporated adaptation into their daily lives, and reported an increased ability to cope.
These results show that raising awareness is critical for reducing vulnerability. On the other hand, the lack of awareness activities in Kiribati was identified as a missed opportunity and was cited as an area for improvement.
For the most part, we found that adaptation activities were appropriate for the local contexts; they were delivered in local languages and catered to existing levels of skills and knowledge. In Vanuatu, the projects also consistently addressed the communities’ most pressing needs, such as food security.
But we did find some room for improvement: Local knowledge was often not integrated into designs, and activities were not always aligned with the participants’ existing schedules. And in Kiribati, the project activity did not address the community’s primary concern, which was water insecurity.

 Programs Found Lacking in Equity and Sustainability
The level of equity was highly variable across the adaptation programs—and a clear area for improvement in program design and implementation.
In Vanuatu, the communities largely perceived the programs as equitable, likely due to their gender-inclusive measures and consideration of pre-existing inequalities.
Exclusions, however, persisted; those with lower levels of education, the elderly, and members of a particular religious minority group were left out (an important reminder that we must not overlook religion when working in the Pacific). In Kiribati, men also felt excluded from activities.
Although some participants in Vanuatu believe that the programs’ trainings and practical demonstrations built their capacity to continue activities without support, we found an overall negative perception of the long-term sustainability of these programs.
The activities’ short-term nature, the projects’ insufficient agricultural output, and a lack of ongoing support from implementing organizations demotivated participants and led them to prioritize other commitments.
Furthermore, we also found that the communities were often overly dependent on outside aid to continue the projects, presenting a significant hindrance to successful community adaptation into the future.
As these activities were still relatively new when we evaluated them, it is particularly worrying that issues with sustainability emerged so soon after implementation.


Adaptation: An Effective Development Tool?
The community-based approach to adaptation—like other development-focused adaptation programs—ensures that regardless of the future climate change scenario, there are some positive, development-related improvements.
Our findings reflected this: Although project outputs included many failures, the projects always provided some benefits, including, for example, increased empowerment, community cooperation, and self-esteem, as well as short-term benefits in income and health.
However, it is too early to determine whether community-based adaptation can effectively reduce long-term vulnerability.
We need ongoing monitoring and evaluation to assess long-term performance. And due to its local nature, the impacts are highly contextual.
We also need to evaluate activities in other vulnerable regions, as well as in other countries in the Pacific, to reach a universal understanding of whether community-based adaptation works.
Sharing best practices from these studies will be crucial for the effective use of future resources by NGOs, donors and governments.
Based on our research, we recommend that donors and program designers should:
  • Better understand and integrate local contexts in design and implementation;
  • Use more participatory processes and integrate local knowledge into design stages;
  • Focus on and effectively implement awareness activities; and,
  • Support longer-term projects.
One thing is certain: We need to act on climate change in the Pacific.
By moving away from the ineffective top-down processes of the past, community-based adaptation programs offer new hope.
But are they really the panacea for effective future adaptation? Only time will tell.

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Why The World Is Looking To The Philippines For Climate Justice

The Conversation -  |  | 

Shutterstock
Corporations and governments around the world increasingly stand accused of causing or failing to prevent the damaging effects of climate change. Test cases are being filed in many countries to establish who is responsible and what action should be taken.
In 2016, after a series of particularly violent typhoons hit the Philippines, a group of Filipino citizens and civil organisations, including Greenpeace, accused 47 corporations of having significantly contributed to climate change, and called for them to be held accountable. Dubbed the “Carbon Majors”, these included the likes of Shell, BP and Chevron.
The group asked the Philippines Human Rights Commission to investigate the Carbon Majors’ responsibility for alleged breaches of Filipinos’ human rights to “life, health, food, water, sanitation, adequate housing and self determination” that are associated with climate change.
The Carbon Majors petition bases its claims on a study by climate expert Richard Heede which attributes “the lion’s share of cumulative global CO2 and methane emissions since the industrial revolution” to the world’s largest producers of crude oil, natural gas, coal and cement.
The Philippines Human Rights Commission is investigating a petition against 47 multinational corporations, dubbed the Carbon Majors, for having significantly contributed to climate change that has caused devastation in the country. Shutterstock
Taking on the big guns
In an unprecedented move, in December 2017, the commission agreed to investigate the Carbon Majors petition. Its powers are relatively modest: the commission can only make recommendations to the Filipino authorities and those found to have breached human rights, but it cannot award damages and it has no enforcement powers. Still, its decision could be a game changer for climate change litigation.
In 2005, a group of Inuit petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to assert the United States’ responsibility for human rights violations associated with climate change in the Arctic. But the petition was dismissed on procedural grounds. So what has changed since then?
In recent years, a long string of United Nations Human Rights Council resolutions has emphasised the role of human rights in tackling climate change. The most recent international climate change treaty – the 2015 Paris Agreement – explicitly links human rights and the obligations of climate change law. These developments seem to have emboldened efforts to use human rights law as a means to tackle climate change.
Far from being an isolated complaint, the Carbon Majors petition is part of a global upsurge in climate change litigation. Yet, there are complex legal obstacles to attributing responsibility for breaches of human rights caused by climate change.
First, applicants have to demonstrate that the obligations of corporations encompass human rights violations associated with the adverse effects of climate change. Second, they have to prove that a specific corporation has contributed to climate change, in such a way that amounts to a breach of human rights.
But a balance has to be struck between environmental protection and other legitimate interests, such as providing energy for consumers. However, John Knox, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, has pointed out that this cannot result in unjustified, foreseeable breaches of human rights. He has also suggested that improved scientific knowledge, such as that used to identify the Carbon Majors, has made it easier to trace the links between particular emissions and resulting harm.
Campaigners believe that climate change caused by the Carbon Majors is breaching the rights of Filipino people to basics such as food, water and shelter whenever a typhoon strikes and destroys entire communities. Shutterstock
A petition for justice
All of these elements come together in the Carbon Majors petition, which concerns harm caused by corporations that was largely foreseeable. Recent research suggests that corporations have long known about climate change and its likely consequences, but have failed to act on it.
So the petition can be likened to ground-breaking litigation for harm caused by smoking tobacco or by driving cars. Before successful court cases were brought, liability for either of these hazardous activities was hard to establish. It was only when courts started to attribute responsibility that victims were provided with redress, and dedicated insurance schemes and liability regimes were created.
The decision of the Philippines Human Rights Commission to investigate the Carbon Majors petition is, then, potentially revolutionary. In 2018, the commission will carry out a series of fact-finding missions and public hearings in the Philippines, London and New York to establish whether multinational corporations can be held responsible for human rights violations associated with climate change and, if so, recommend ways to mitigate them.
Far from being a symbolic gesture, this acknowledgement of multinationals’ role in causing climate change would be a primer, and could potentially spark a domino effect in climate change litigation elsewhere.
Corporations are already being brought to court in the US, where the cities of New York and San Francisco are seeking to hold the world’s biggest oil companies responsible for present and future damage caused by climate change.
All eyes are now on the Philippines to see what conclusions its Human Rights Commission will draw; for many, it has already made history by deciding to investigate the Carbon Majors petition in the first place.

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22/02/2018

Environmental Activists Are Suing Governments Over Climate Change — And Winning

Futurism - Kyree Leary

Creative Commons
In Brief
An environmental organization has won its third court case over the UK government regarding its failure to adequately address air pollution. These cases are part of a global trend toward litigation over climate change that is expected to include several high-profile cases in the U.S. this year.     
On Wednesday, the High Court in London ruled the UK government’s current stance on air pollution is “unlawful.”
The ruling came about because the government has failed to impose new policies on 45 local authority areas with illegal levels of air pollution.
According to the Royal College of Physicians, air pollution contributes to nearly 40,000 deaths in the UK each year.
This is the third court case the UK government has lost to ClientEarth, an organization of environmental activist lawyers. As reported by The Guardian, the new ruling will require clean air policies to be overseen by the courts rather than ministers and local officials.
“The history of this litigation shows that good faith, hard work, and sincere promises are not enough and it seems court must keep the pressure on to ensure compliance is actually achieved,” said Justice Garnham, the judge who heard the case.
ClientEarth lawyer Anna Heslop explained in a statement that the initial air pollution issue was meant to be solved 8 years ago, but the government’s failure to implement any solutions has allowed the problem to go unchecked.
While it would be difficult to predict whether the court case will improve the UK’s air pollution problem, it may stand a better chance being monitored by the courts — which have taken note of the government’s past failures to rectify the issue.



The UK isn’t the only country embroiled in lawsuits related to environmental issues, but ClientEarth’s third win in the country could serve as a warning to other nations. If anything, it demonstrates that legal action can successfully promote change; a precedent that could be particularly influential for groups that have, or are considering, perusing legal action against governments over climate change.
As Reuters reported in December, a number of high-profile climate change cases are expected to take place in the United States this year. Similar lawsuits in Germany and Norway could also make headlines.
Whether the lawsuits involve governments or fossil fuel companies, each case is aimed at those perceived of either knowingly causing — or failing to take action against the progression of — climate change.
Back in December, eight northeastern states moved to sue the Environmental Protection Agency. The suit sought to require the EPA to enforce new restrictions on Midwestern states generating air pollution, which the east coast states claimed was, essentially, blowing over to its cities.
In January, the state of New York, led by Mayor Bill de Blasio, sued multiple fossil fuel companies for their contributions to climate change through knowingly burning harmful fossil fuels and “intentionally mis[leading] the public to protect their profits.”
At the time, ClientEarth’s Sophie Marjanac told Reuters that there was a trend toward litigation around climate change and that “the lack of political action in the United States may increase that trend.”
One thing is clear: citizens have taken notice that those in charge aren’t doing everything in their power to curb climate change. Those that are simply aren’t making changes fast enough: if recent studies are any indication, we’re running out of time for our actions to make a difference.

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Every One Of Europe’s 571 Cities Is Destined For Worse Heat Waves, Droughts, Or Floods

Quartz - 

Floods are set to rise in 85% of UK cities that have a river. (Darren Staples/Reuters)
A new analysis of climate change across Europe found that under several probable future climate scenarios, European cities will be hit harder by floods, droughts, and heat waves than previously understood.
A study published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters used all available climate models to assess what is likeliest to happen to Europe under a scenario in which the world fails to dramatically reduce carbon emissions, while population continues to grow. That scenario—dubbed RCP8.5 in scientific literature—is often pointed to as a proxy for a worst-case (though still absolutely possible) future emissions scenario, in which temperatures increase 2.6°C to 4.8°C from the 1850–1900 global average by 2050-2100.
In that scenario, there can be a lot of variation in how climate systems respond, so the researchers tested what would happen to European cities in low-, medium-, and high-impact climate outcomes. In every outcome, Europe gets battered by more intense droughts, floods, and heat waves.

Droughts will hit everywhere, but especially southern Europe
For example, under the low-impact scenario, southern Europe will be the hardest hit by drought, with cities like Malaga and Almeria, both in Spain, likely to experience droughts that are twice as severe as they were from 1951 to 2000. Under the high-impact scenario, droughts worsen on a mass scale: 98% of European cities would have to cope with worse droughts, and in southern Europe, drought are likely to become 14 times worse than they are now.
“Although southern European regions are adapted to cope with droughts, this level of change could be beyond breaking point,” Selma Guerreiro, a hydrology and climate-change researcher at Newcastle University and lead author on the paper said in a statement.
The European capital cities which will see the greatest increase in drought severity and frequency, according to the paper, are:
  • Athens, Greece
  • Lisbon, Portugal
  • Madrid, Spain
  • Nicosia, Cyprus
  • Sofia, Bulgaria
  • Valleta, Malta
Floods will rise, especially in the UK
The UK is expected to be hit hard by flooding by the second half of the century; 85% of UK cities that have rivers flowing through them (like London) would face more floods than before in the low-impact scenario. Under the high-impact scenario, certain cities will see dramatic spikes in the severity of floods. For example, Cork, Ireland, is expected to be inundated with 115% more water per flood. Glasgow, Scotland is likely to see 77% more water per flood, and Wrexham, Wales is likely to see 80% more water.
The European capital cities which will see the greatest increase in flooding severity and frequency are:
  • Dublin, Ireland
  • Helsinki, Finland
  • Riga, Latvia
  • Vilnius, Lithuania
  • Zagreb, Croatia
Heat waves will go up, and central Europe will roast most
Under all three scenarios, the number of heat wave days and their maximum temperature will increase for all 571 cities in the European Union’s official database of cities. Those in central Europe are likely to see the biggest spikes in temperatures during heat waves: 2°C to 7°C in the low-impact scenario and 8°C to 14°C in the high-impact scenario.
The European capital cities which will see the greatest increase in heat wave severity and frequency are:

  • Athens, Greece
  • Nicosia, Cyprus
  • Prague, Czech Republic
  • Rome, Italy
  • Sofia, Bulgaria
  • Stockholm, Sweden
  • Valleta, Malta
  • Vienna, Austria
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Sea Levels Could Rise An Extra 60cm If Emission Reductions Are Delayed Until 2035, Study Finds

ABC Science - Nick Kilvert

Scientists say sea levels will continue to rise until at least 2300. (Getty Images: Brook Mitchell)
Key points:
  • Sea levels are projected to rise between 0.7 and 1.2m above 2000 levels by 2300
  • Delaying peak emissions between 2020-2035 results in 20cm rise for each 5-year period missed
  • A 2C temperature increase this century could result in a sea-level rise of at least 1.5m
Global sea levels will continue to rise until at least 2300 regardless of how much we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, according to new research published today.
But for every five years until 2035 that we delay reaching net-zero carbon emissions, as committed to under the Paris agreement targets, sea levels will rise by about an extra 20 centimetres, the researchers found as part of the study published in Nature Communications.
They estimated average global sea levels would be between 0.7 and 1.2 metres above 2000 levels by 2300, depending on how quickly we can reduce our emissions.
The Paris agreement, to which Australia is a signatory, has a core aim of limiting global temperature rise this century to "well below" 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to keep the rise below 1.5 degrees.
However, the authors argue that a 2C-temperature increase would result in a sea-level rise of at least 1.5 metres.
"Even if we only look at 2020 to 2035, we can say we need to start greenhouse reduction as soon as possible to reduce the damage," study co-author Alexander Nauels from the University of Melbourne said.
"We will have to adapt to sea-level rise, but it's really a question of how much and how bad it will be."
Time to 'put our money where our mouth is'
The researchers created a computer climate model using the major drivers of sea-level rise — thermal expansion of the ocean, melting of mountain glaciers, and the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
Scientists say uncertainty about Antarctic melting means sea levels could be higher than projected (Supplied: NASA)
They then plugged in a range of different parameters based on different possible scenarios of emissions-reduction rates, and emissions-peak years under the Paris agreement, and ran each scenario 600 times up until the year 2300.
Their results showed that every delay in peaking emissions by five years between 2020 and 2035, created a 20-centimetre increase in sea levels by 2300.
"Under the Paris agreement, current mitigation commitments by nations to 2030 are at the upper level of the emissions scenarios considered [in the study]," Professor John Church from the Climate Change Centre at UNSW, who was not involved in the study, said in a statement.
"Mitigation efforts will need to be increased significantly and urgently if a rise of more than 1 metre by 2300 is to be avoided."
The most extreme end of the study's results showed a possible sea-level rise of more than 4 metres by 2300. However, the average and median results fell well below that figure.
A Sea-level rise of two metres would mean Sydney's Circular Quay and Botanic Gardens, Brisbane Airport, Melbourne's Docklands, Elizabeth Quay in Perth, and significant areas of the Gold Coast and Darwin would be underwater, according to modelling done last year.
The uncertainty in projections comes from the limited knowledge regarding how positive feedbacks will affect the rate and extent of melting in the Antarctic.
Positive feedbacks occur where one effect amplifies the process that causes it, such as melting ice exposing darker ground, which absorbs more heat resulting in more melting ice.
Modelling for positive feedbacks becomes difficult and means that extreme scenarios cannot be dismissed.
"Even a sea-level rise of up to 3 metres until 2300 cannot be ruled out completely," study author Matthias Mengel said.
"We are not yet fully certain how the Antarctic ice sheet will respond to global warming."
A number of climate scientists have commented on the study, reiterating the importance of immediate and strong action to curb global greenhouse-gas emissions.
"This study tells us it's time to put our money where our mouth is. I think we should encourage all the climate sceptics and big fossil-fuel investors to live smack on the shorefront," Professor Bill Laurance, director of tropical and sustainability science at James Cook University, said.
"That way, if they're right about climate change they'll be happy as clams. But if they're wrong they can just live with the clams, then let's see how happy they are."

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21/02/2018

Humans Are Responsible For Nearly All Modern Global Warming

Mother Jones - Kevin Drum

No special reason for this post, but in case anyone ever suggests to you that, sure, global warming is real, but we don’t know how much is caused by humans—well, yes we do:


This is from the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which states with high confidence that “the likely contributions of natural forcing and internal variability to global temperature change over that period [1951-2010] are minor.” If you want to see all the human causes broken down further, here you go:


We humans have done things that both increase and decrease the amount of solar heat being trapped on the earth. However, they don’t balance out: the increases are far greater than the decreases. The result is global warming.

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