How To Change The Climate Story: Paul Hawken

Eco-Business - Vaidehi Shah

Want to avoid climate disaster? Abandon the “wussy” language of climate mitigation as well as war metaphors, and develop more positive ways of thinking about the issue, said American environmentalist Paul Hawken at a recent conference in Sydney.

Paul Hawken speaks at Purpose 2018 in Sydney, Australia. Image: Purpose

To generate effective, universal action that will solve the problem of climate change, the global community needs to abandon the “wussy” language of climate mitigation and rethink the “negative” sports and war metaphors that are pervasive in discussions about the issue.
This was the advice offered by American environmentalist, author and activist Paul Hawken at the recent Purpose conference in Sydney.
Speaking to a 500-strong audience at Commune in Sydney, Hawken said that the term “climate mitigation”, which is commonly found in government policies, international negotiations in the annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference, and scientific reports isn’t strong enough.
“When you are heading down the wrong road towards a cliff, the only thing that makes sense is not to slow down and go over the cliff slowly, but to stop and turn around,” said Hawken.
This is why, instead of the prevailing narrative of mitigating climate change, Hawken champions the notion of reversing global warming. Last year, Hawken co-founded the Drawdown Project, which maps, measures, models, and describes the 100 most effective, economically viable and scaleable solutions to reverse global warming.
The project has entailed a global research programme to identify and rank climate solutions, with academics from institutions around the world participating in the project; its findings were published in a book titled ‘Drawdown—The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming‘.
Drawdown is the only global initiative to focus on reversing global warming rather than mitigating it, said Hawken.

The Drawdown Project’s list of 10 most promising solutions to reverse global warming. Image: Drawdown Project

The project has identified refrigerant management—that is, phasing out hydrofluorocarbons, synthetic coolant chemicals which are extremely potent greenhouse gases—as the single most effective strategy to slash emissions. The initiative will cost some US$903 billion by 2050, but save almost 90 gigatonnes of emissions.
For Australia, regenerative agriculture is the most important solution that the country can take, said Hawken. This is a farming method that doesn’t till the soil, use pesticides or synthetic fertilisers, while practising multiple crop rotations and using cover crops to prevent the soil from being exposed to the environment.
“The land (in Australia) is so fragile, and commercial agriculture has deteriorated its condition,” he noted.

When you are heading down the wrong road towards a cliff, the only thing that makes sense is not to slow down and go over the cliff slowly, but to stop and turn around.

But globally, “the number one solution to reversing global warming is the empowerment of girls and women,” said Hawken, indicating that two of the top 10 gender-specific solutions identified by the Drawdown Project—educating girls and family planning—could together reduce about 120 gigatonnes of carbon emissions while costing very little.
When a girl gets to stay in school until high school age, she has an average of two children, whereas girls who are pulled out of education when they hit puberty tend to have about five children each, Hawken said. So educating girls not only ensures better economic outcomes and resilience for women, it also slows down population growth.
“It’s a form of family planning, but a woman has chosen that by being supported instead of being told what to do,” Hawken explained.
Giving women access to voluntary, high quality family planning can also improve their well-being and health, while addressing the population issue in a way that steers clear of problematic approaches such as governments forcing the birth rate down through policies or people in rich countries telling people in poor countries to stop having children, he added.
In addition to specific solutions and strategies, the global community needs to change the language that is common in climate change narratives, Hawken said.
“Talk of carbon war rooms, and fighting or combating climate change is so negative,” said Hawken. Worse, it positions the problem “as something out there that we have to fight and win, when in reality, we are the problem and not the climate,” he added.
The process of othering the natural world from humans is what has caused today’s environmental problems, said Hawken. “We cannot solve the problem the same way; we have to think differently.”
One way to do this may be to not talk about the climate at all, he told Eco-Business in an interview. Rather than the relatively intangible idea of addressing climate change, people are more concerned with things that affect them on a daily basis, he said. In this vein, the next project he is working on is a book titled ‘Regeneration: How to create 1 billion jobs’.
Research has shown that emerging sectors that could help address climate change will also create millions of jobs in the future. For instance, the Business and Sustainable Development Commission estimates that sustainable business models in sectors like agriculture, energy, cities, and health could create 230 million jobs in Asia alone.
“The way you motivate people is to give them meaningful, purposeful, living wage jobs that give them respect for themselves and their community,” he said. “What people want is security and jobs that are meaningful, and the outcome in terms of reversing global warming is secondary,” he said.

Links

• Drawdown—The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming
• Carbon management: the next Copernican mindset shift?
• Global projections of drought hazard in a warming climate: a prime for disaster risk management
• Cities can change the fate of the world’s climate outlook: Christiana Figueres

What A Century Of Climate Change Has Done To France’s Biggest Glacier

The Conversation - Kieran Baxter

Dundee University, Author provided

Like a one-man Google Earth, Swiss aviation pioneer Eduard Spelterini flew a gas-filled balloon from the French town of Chamonix to Switzerland on August 8, 1909 – a distance of 100 miles over the Alps. While the flight was extraordinary for being the first aerial crossing of the central Alps from west to east, it now holds a special significance of which Spelterini was unaware. The balloonist was also a photographer who captured a series of glass-plate images of the Mer de Glace (“sea of ice”) glacier that descends from the Mont Blanc Massif in a dramatic sweep.
Spelterini’s interest in recording the alpine landscape was both scientific and aesthetic, and the results are striking. This collection of images survives today as a record of the glacier that is unique in its detail and antiquity. But crucially, they can be used to measure how much this landscape has changed in the intervening years. In 1909, no one could have guessed how significant these glaciers would become to environmental science, or just how rapidly they would be affected by rising temperatures in the century that followed.

Digital analysis
The flight over the Mer de Glace was unusual because Spelterini’s aerial photographs rarely focused on the glaciers, instead more often framing the peaks and other geological features. He was also unaware that the distribution of his photographs along the balloon’s flight path, pictured below, would make excellent material for digital analysis more than 100 years later.

The flight path of Eduard Spelterini’s balloon in 1909. James Gentles, Author provided

By identifying common features in the photographs, which can in turn be linked to surveyed features in the landscape, a 3D representation of both the balloon flight and the historical topography can be reconstructed using photogrammetry – the science of taking measurements from photography. While the oblique angle of the photographs limits the measurable accuracy of the resulting data, compared to the vertical mapping photographs taken in the decades that followed, they still provide a unique and compelling glimpse into a past landscape.
In Spelterini’s image below, the oblique aerial view taken at a sideways angle towards the horizon gives a sense of place that is part way between the familiar ground level view and the high vertical perspective like that of a map. In the foreground the newly completed Montenvers cogwheel railway is visible, perched over the voluminous Mer de Glace glacier which leads the eye to the spires of the Mont Blanc Massif in the background.

The Montenverscog railway in the foreground was recently completed when Spelterini took this photograph. Eduard Spelterini, Author provided

The photographs are carefully composed, designed to serve as both record and artwork. Their oblique angle makes them less abstracted and more relatable, despite their height above the ground and the scale of the landscape they depict. All of these factors make them an ideal point of reference for visualising the changing nature of the alpine landscape.

Follow that balloon
In October 2017, a team of photographers and researchers from the University of Dundee returned to Chamonix to replicate the path of the historic flight and recreate the sequence of photographs using a helicopter. Spelterini’s balloon rapidly ascended to around 2,000m above the Chamonix valley before passing Mer de Glace. Such heights are virtually inaccessible to unmanned drones, meaning that a manned aircraft was needed.
The results are documented in The 100-year Time-Lapse Project. GPS coordinates derived digitally from Spelterini’s photographs were used to return to the same locations to capture current-day equivalents of both his individual photographs and the 3D surface reconstruction. While the rate of change in the Mer de Glace glacier has been studied in great detail, using digital technology in this way allows for a visual comparison of the landscape then and now to reveal the staggering reduction in the ice surface that has taken place over the last century.

Kieran Baxter and Kieran Duncan/YouTube.

Today, visitors alighting at the Montenvers railway station are no longer confronted with the Mer de Glace at close range, but instead look down upon a largely empty valley and debris-covered glacier far below. Here the ice surface has dropped around 100 metres compared to its height in 1909. Scientists have calculated that, overall, the glacier has lost around 700m cubic metres of water since the beginning of the 20th century.While the facts and figures alone should be enough to narrate the impact that the previous century of greenhouse gas emissions have had on our climate and environment, images like these help drive the point home. Eduard Spelterini was not just a pioneer of aviation but also of aerial photography as a way of better understanding the natural world. His images capture an emotive sense of place while providing insights into aspects of the landscape that are not available from the ground.

Kieran Baxter/YouTube.

Today, despite the heavy carbon footprint that comes with manned aviation, we continue to rely on aerial views to interpret our environment, from Landsat satellite imagery to low-level drone photography. By repurposing archival aerial photographs and continuing the legacy of photographers like Spelterini, with the help of current technology, we can explore new and compelling ways to visualise our rapidly changing glacial landscapes.As well as serving to convince hearts and minds in the present political debates surrounding climate change, these images will also form a poignant record of magnificent landscapes that will no longer be around for future generations to experience.

Links

• Burning fossil fuels is responsible for most sea-level rise since 1970
• Has Everest’s iconic Hillary Step really collapsed? Here’s the science
• Antarctic glacier’s unstable past reveals danger of future melting
• New Zealand’s Southern Alps have lost a third of their ice

Climate Change Promotes The Spread Of Mosquito And Tick Borne Viruses

EU Science Hub

Spurred on by climate change, international travel and international trade, disease-bearing insects are spreading to ever-wider parts of the world.
This means that more humans are exposed to viral infections such as Dengue fever, Chikungunya, Zika, West Nile fever, Yellow fever and Tick-borne encephalitis.
For many of these diseases, there are as yet no specific antiviral agents or vaccines.
Global warming has allowed mosquitoes, ticks and other disease-bearing insects to proliferate, adapt to different seasons, migrate and spread to new niche areas that have become warmer.
These are the findings of a JRC report that aims to raise awareness about the threat posed by the spread of arboviruses (arthropod-borne viruses).

The growing spread of arboviruses
Aedes mosquitoes spread several arboviruses, including  Dengue, Chikungunya, Zika, West Nile and Yellow fever viruses.
These mosquitoes thrive in urban settings due to the lack of natural predators and the ready availability of food and habitats in which to procreate.
They have existed in Africa and Asia for many years and are now becoming more and more widespread.
They have recently become established in some European countries and the Americas, largely as a result of international travel and trade.
Their alarming spread poses a problem for public health. They are difficult to eradicate - their larvae can survive for months, even in suboptimal humidity and temperature conditions.
The tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV) has been found in several European countries, including Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Sweden and, more recently, the Netherlands.
One of the more recently reported vectors for the virus, the Dermacentor reticulatus tick species, is rapidly spreading through Europe. It has a high reproduction rate, is cold resistant and can live underwater for months.
Humans can be infected by a tick bite or through consuming unpasteurised dairy products that do not meet EU safety standards and have come from infected animals. Luckily, TBEV can be vaccinated against.

Zika virus – a serious concern for Europe
Zika virus has received a lot of media attention due to its association with neurological disorders such as Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) and the development of microcephaly (abnormally small head) in foetuses.
It is difficult to diagnose and there is no cure or vaccine. First identified in 1947 in the Zika forest of Uganda, its spread is a serious concern given the growing presence of its main vector, the mosquito  Aedes albopictus, in temperate zones including Europe and America.
The first documented outbreak of ZIKV infection was reported in 2007 in Micronesia. Since then it spread to French Polynesia and Brazil, where it infected up to 1.3 million people in 2015.
More than 70 territories worldwide have confirmed autochthonous (indigenous) cases of ZIKV. By March 2017, 2 130 Europeans were reported to have travel-associated ZIKV infections.

Mosquito control strategies
The report describes and discusses several methods that have been used to control the spread of mosquitoes, including insecticides, mosquito traps, genetic modification, land reclamation and habitat surveillance.
Currently, the safest and most readily available and effective methods of controlling mosquitoes are mosquito traps (for relatively small areas) and nets, and the reduction of potential breeding sites (standing water).
While the research team behind the study advocate better control of mosquito populations, they also warn that it would be unwise to remove mosquitoes completely from the ecosystem.
They are part of the food web for some species, and pollinate many plants. Wiping them out completely could have negative effects on nature, and consequently on humans.

Links

• Toward Climate Change Impact: Vectors carrying viral infection
• Hazards and risks of climate change impacts
• Climate change mitigation
• Impacts of climate change
• Monitoring of climate and climate change

The Temperature Is Rising ... And So Is The Death Toll

Fairfax - Professor Hilary Bambrick*

I've investigated the impact of climate change driven extreme weather on public health for 20 years.
The research shows the links between the two couldn't be clearer - extreme weather events such as severe heatwaves, bushfires and supercharged storms are placing Australian lives at risk.

The threats to our lives from extreme weather isn't limited to heatwaves, but extends to more severe storms and floods and more intense and 'out of season' bushfires. Photo: AFP

As we continue to burn fossil fuels such as coal and gas, more carbon pollution is released into our climate system, causing more intense, more severe and more frequent extreme weather events, which in turn, will continue to place increasing pressure on health systems, emergency services and our communities.
Globally, we've just experienced the hottest five year period ever recorded, stretching from 2013 to 2017, and this month parts of Queensland were hit with a severe heatwave, breaking February averages by more than  10 degrees.
The reality is that Australia will become warmer and drier as a direct result of intensifying climate change as heatwaves continue to become hotter, longer, and more frequent.
Severe heatwaves are silent killers, causing more deaths since the 1890s than all of Australia's bushfires, cyclones, earthquakes, floods and severe storms combined.
Over the past decade, severe heatwaves around Australia have resulted in deaths and an increased number of hospital admissions for heart attack, stroke, respiratory illness, diabetes and kidney disease.
Older people, young children, and those with chronic health conditions are at high risk, but so are outdoor workers and our emergency responders.
In January 2009, Melbourne suffered three consecutive days of above 43 degrees, while elsewhere in Victoria it came within a whisker of 49.
There were 980 heat-related deaths during this time, which was around 60% more than would normally occur at that time of year.
Morgues were over capacity and bodies had to be stored in refrigerated trucks.
A few years earlier in 2004, Brisbane experienced a prolonged heatwave with temperatures reaching up to 42 degrees in February, which increased overall deaths by 23%.
The threats to our lives and livelihoods from extreme weather isn't limited to heatwaves, but extends to more frequent and more severe storms and floods, more intense and 'out of season' bushfires, and widespread and prolonged drought.
Of course, we’re used to extreme weather in Australia, so much so that it is embedded in our cultural identity.
From ancient Indigenous understandings of complex seasons and use of fire to manage landscapes, to Dorothea McKeller’s 1908 poem My Country, to Gang Gajang’s 1985 anthem Sounds of Then (This is Australia), we sure like to talk about the weather.
But climate change is making these events more and more deadly, and we can’t afford to be complacent.
So what do we do to protect ourselves and our loved ones from extreme heat and other events?
We can check in with our friends, family and neighbours on extreme heat days and we can strive to make our health services more resilient and responsive, but this doesn't deal with the cause.
Without rapid effective action to reduce carbon emissions we're locking ourselves into a future of worsening, out of control extremes.
Ultimately, to protect Australians from worsening extreme weather events and to do our fair share in the global effort to tackle climate change, we have to cut our greenhouse gas pollution levels quickly and deeply.
Reducing our carbon pollution means a healthier Australia, now and in the future, with fewer deaths, fewer ambulance call-outs, fewer trips to the hospital, and reduced costs to the health system.
The only thing standing in the way of Australia tackling climate change is political will.

*Professor Hilary Bambrick is a member of the Climate Council and heads the School of Public Health and Social Work at QUT.

Links

• Australia Among Countries Growing Hotter Faster: Report
• 'Significant' Heatwave Roasts South-Eastern Australia As Global Records Melt
• Penrith Swelters While Florida Freezes: Climate Disruption Is To Blame
• BOM Annual Climate Statement Shows 2017 Was Australia's Third-Warmest Year On Record
• Sydney Hits Its Highest Temperature Recorded Since 1939 With Penrith Reaching 47.3c
• Global Hot Spot: Exceptional Heat Pushes Up Ocean Temperatures Off Australia
• Health Savings Outweigh Costs Of Limiting Global Warming: Study
• With Political Leaders On The Sidelines, Sport Could Take The Lead On Climate Change
• Why Climate Change Is Worsening Public Health Problems
• How Climate Change Can Spread Respiratory Infection
• Study: Climate Change Is Damaging The Health Of Millions Of People
• How Climate Change Affects The Building Blocks For Health
• Doctors Call On Health Super Funds To Pull $1.7 Billion Out Of Coal And Oil Companies

If Business Leaders Want To Regain Our Trust, They Must Act On Climate Risk

The  Guardian - Ian Dunlop*

Empty rhetoric from corporates is not enough as climate change is accelerating far faster than expected

‘Already one of the world’s largest carbon polluters when exports are included, Australia is complicit in destroying the conditions which make human life possible’ Photograph: Dan Peled/AAP 

Business leaders seem astonished that community trust in their activities is at an all-time low, trending toward the bottom of the barrel inhabited by politicians. To the corporate leader dedicated to the capitalist, market economy success story of the last 50 years, that attitude is no doubt incomprehensible and downright ungrateful.
But it is hardly surprising given continuing scandals and declining ethics across the corporate and banking worlds, driven by the pernicious impact of short-termism, rising inequality and undue political influence; in large part the outcome of the oxymoron of “pay-for-performance” remuneration. So how is trust regained? The need for stronger leadership, ethics, greater transparency, open communications and improved culture feature prominently in current responses.
But a far more fundamental requirement is ignored, namely that business must lead on really critical issues, particularly the point raised long ago by economist Kenneth Boulding: “Anyone who considers economic growth can continue indefinitely in a finite system is either a madman or an economist”. The constraints Boulding anticipated have now arrived, as burgeoning population and economic growth crash into global biophysical limits which cannot be circumvented.
Those constraints, encompassing resource shortages, biodiversity loss and pollution in various guises, do not feature in the capitalist economic lexicon, as technology and the market are supposed to overcome all as we march toward the sunlit uplands of the neoliberal nirvana. In the real world, the entire growth model under which Australia and global economies operate, is no longer sustainable; it sowed the seeds of its own destruction some time ago and is rapidly driving itself into the ground as growth rates decline. This is the great “black elephant” of business and politics; a known, knowable fact that no one wants to acknowledge – the unmentionable in the recent Business and Governance Summits around the country, as our leaders strive to compound the problem with self-defeating subterfuges to maximise growth, not least corporate tax cuts and trade agreements.
To the community, these constraints are increasingly obvious as the quality of life for the average person deteriorates in myriad ways. The rhetoric of much-vaunted corporate social responsibility no longer holds water when our supposed leaders are not prepared to address the issues that really count for our survival, let alone prosperity.

These range from basic considerations such as ensuring food and water availability, to the creation of genuinely sustainable global societies. However, the first priority must be human-induced climate change, manifest as the lack of an atmosphere into which we can continue dumping carbon pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, agriculture and deforestation, without causing catastrophic consequences.
Climate change is accelerating far faster than expected, to the point where it now represents an existential threat to humanity, that is a threat posing permanent large negative consequences which will be irreversible, an outcome being locked in today by our insistence on expanding the use of fossil fuels. This should be a major concern in Australia given that we are more exposed than most, but instead our leaders would have us embark on massive fossil fuel expansion. Already one of the world’s largest carbon polluters when exports are included, Australia is complicit in destroying the conditions which make human life possible. There is no greater crime against humanity.
The economic and social impacts will be devastating unless that policy is rapidly reversed. The unprecedented hurricane season in the Atlantic, bushfires in the Californian winter, extreme heat in many parts of South Asia and rapid heating of the Arctic with associated instability in the northern hemisphere weather system, are only the most recent portents of what is to come. The worst outcomes can only be avoided now by emergency action, akin to restructuring economies on a war-footing.
It finally seems to be dawning on corporate and investor leadership that climate change is a real and present danger which is not going away.
Company directors are personally liable for failing to assess and act upon climate risk, but the greenwash continues. Major corporates parade their credentials in support of serious climate action, but none of their scenarios and policies are in line with the Paris objective of constraining global temperature increase “well below 2.0C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.50C”.
Fortunately, as understanding of the risks improves, regulatory pressure mounts. The recommendations triggered by Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, via the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) are gradually being taken up, with companies voluntarily disclosing the impact which a 2C policy framework would have on their organisation, assuming such a framework was ever put in place (by governments?). Progress, but reactive and certainly not leadership. The question that must be answered is: “what are you doing proactively as a company to create a 2C world” – more realistically closer to 1.5C, as it is now patently clear that 2C is far too high?
If business genuinely wishes to regain trust, it must proactively face up to the challenge posed by climate change and initiate emergency action. Beyond that, it must open up honest debate on a new economic model to replace conventional growth. It is the only way business will be sustainable in the 21st century with a real social licence to operate.
In Churchill’s words: “Sometimes we have to do what is required”.

*Ian Dunlop was formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors

Links

• Arctic warming: scientists alarmed by 'crazy' temperature rises
• Hostage to myopic self-interest: climate science is watered down under political scrutiny
• Maintaining the social licence to operate: 2018 KPMG - AICD Trust Survey
• World’s great forests could lose half of all wildlife as planet warms – report
• Extreme winter weather becoming more common as Arctic warms, study finds
• Greens electric car push: end sale of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030
• Weatherwatch: Over Southern Ocean, clouds are made to a different recipe
• Burning coal may have caused Earth’s worst mass extinction
• Climate change is a disaster foretold, just like the first world war

Rain Or Shine: New Solar Cell Captures Energy From Raindrops

The Guardian - Damian Carrington

New device is designed to prevent power output plummeting when the sun isn’t shining – but practical application is still some years off

Researchers want to create a hybrid device that harvests kinetic energy from water as well as solar power from the sun. Photograph: Getty Images

A solar panel that can generate electricity from falling raindrops has been invented, enabling power to flow even when skies cloud over or the sun has set.
Solar power installation is soaring globally thanks to costs plunging 90% in the past decade, making it the cheapest electricity in many parts of the world. But the power output can plummet under grey skies and researchers are working to squeeze even more electricity from panels.
The new device, demonstrated in a laboratory at Soochow University in China, places two transparent polymer layers on top of a solar photovoltaic (PV) cell. When raindrops fall on to the layers and then roll off, the friction generates a static electricity charge.
“Our device can always generate electricity in any daytime weather,” said Baoquan Sun, at Soochow University. “In addition, this device even provides electricity at night if there is rain.”
Other researchers have recently created similar devices on solar panels, known as triboelectric nanogenerators (Tengs), but the new design is significantly simpler and more efficient as one of the polymer layers acts as the electrode for both the Teng and the solar cell.
“Due to our unique device design, it becomes a lightweight device,” said Sun, whose team’s work is published in the journal ACS Nano. “In future, we are exploring integrating these into mobile and flexible devices, such as electronic clothes. However, the output power efficiency needs to be further improved before practical application.”
Sun said the field was developing fast and expects to produce a prototype product in three to five years. Other scientists in China have also used Tengs on solar cells to harvest some power from the wind, an approach Sun said could be added to his device. The top layer of the Teng is also grooved to help focus more light on the solar cell.
“The idea is interesting – a hybrid device that harvests kinetic energy from water without destroying the output of the solar cell during sunny times,” said Varun Sivaram, at the Council on Foreign Relations, US, and author of a new book on solar power. “There’s lots of nice engineering, like using one layer to do double duty as a component of the Teng as well as trap light for the solar cell.”
However, Varun said the power the device generates from falling rain needs to be significantly higher to start making an overall difference to a solar panel’s output. “It’s really not clear whether this is a big deal or not – I suspect it’s not.”
Prof Keith Barnham, at Imperial College London, said the hybrid device gave an important advantage in making it more compact and efficient. But he said: “Wind power is clearly the most effective and complementary power source to PV – and it works equally well in the rain!”
Other innovations in solar panel design include using the mineral perovskite as a flexible and efficient material, using so-called “quantum dots” and researching artificial photosynthesis, which uses sunlight to produce liquid and gas fuels.

Links

• After the 'sunrush': what comes next for solar power?
• Time to shine: Solar power is fastest-growing source of new energy
• Solar energy and moonshine politics
• Inside Glanrhyd, the first solar 'eco hamlet' in Wales
• US energy shakeup continues as solar capacity set to triple
• Solar Impulse 2 completes first ever Atlantic crossing by solar plane
• UK solar eclipses coal power over month for first time
• Renewable energy smashes global records in 2015, report shows
• UK solar power installations plummet after government cuts
• Australia's Solar Power Boom Could Almost Double Capacity In A Year, Analysts Say
• Australia Rooftop Solar Boom Continues With Best January Ever
• Shorten Hails Cheap Wind And Solar, But Will He Stop Adani?
• Plunging Costs Make Solar, Wind And Battery Storage Cheaper Than Coal
• CEFC Finances Solar Farm At Coleambally In NSW
• Surging Power Bills Spark Rush For Household Solar In Australia
• Powering Up: Rooftop Solar Installations Jump By Half To Hit Record 1GW In 2017
• Outback Couple Build Solar Farm To Prove Fringe-Of-Grid Power Generation Need
• Four Decades And Counting: New NASA Instrument Continues Measuring Solar Energy Input To Earth
• Queensland Chooses Sunshine Over Coal, To Relief Of Solar Industry
• Community Solar Heads For Rooftops Of NYC’s Public Housing Projects

IPCC Cities Conference Tackles Gaps Between Science And Climate Action On The Ground

The Conversation - Jago Dodson

The IPCC’s first cities conference revealed the challenges in bridging the gaps between scientific knowledge and policy practice, and between cities in developed and developing nations. Cities IPCC/Twitter

Some 600 climate scientists, urban researchers, policymakers and practitioners attended the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) first ever conference on cities last week. Hosted in Edmonton, Canada, it was organised as a forum to share knowledge and advice in support of the sixth IPCC Assessment Report (AR6) due in 2021.
The significance of a UN-organised global scientific conference on climate change and cities should not be underestimated. Urbanisation has been a United Nations concern since 1963. Policy attention strengthened in the 1970s when the UN Habitat agency was established. This focus was redoubled in the mid-2000s when it was reported that more than half of the global population was now urban.
Climate change has been a topic of UN action since 1988, with policy attention intensifying in the late 1990s and mid-2010s. Appreciation has since grown that with 55% of the world’s people now living in cities, this is where where efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change must be focused.

A collision of science, practice and politics
By venturing onto urban terrain the IPCC faces some interesting scientific questions. To a large degree biological or physical systems can be studied as objective phenomena that behave according to discoverable and predictable patterns. Carbon dioxide objectively traps solar radiation leading to climatic warming; biological species die at temperatures above their tolerance.
By contrast cities are riven with historical, social, economic, cultural and political dynamics. The theoretical and conceptual frames that scientists apply to cities are subject to many biases.
We certainly can calculate the emissions a city produces and chart the likely impacts on it from a changing climate. But the reasons why a city came to emit so much and how it responds to the need to reduce emissions and adapt to impacts are highly contingent. Objective validation and verification are difficult. Identifying causality and forward pathways is very difficult.
There is also a vast divide between the physical and social science of cities and the policymakers and practitioners who shape urban development. Research shows that most urban professionals simply do not read urban science. Instead they draw on practice knowledge acquired from peer practitioners via an array of non-scientific channels and networks.
These difficulties were observable at the IPCC cities conference. It was scientific in purpose but a subtle politics was at play. Rather than being convened by a scientific body, the conference was co-ordinated as an instrument of the world’s national polities and the IPCC, organised by a mix of UN organisations and NGO networks, and sponsored by a local, provincial and national government.
Fewer than two-thirds of delegates were scientists; the remaining 40 per cent were policy officials and practitioners. The problem of connecting scientific and practice knowledge was often on display.
Many cities have accepted the clear scientific evidence on climate change and accompanying global targets. These cities are striving at the local scale to cut emissions and adapt to changing climate patterns. For many, their main need is for knowledge of practical policies and programs, rather than more evidence of climate change impacts or mitigation technologies.
Often these cities are racing far ahead of slow and certain science. They are sharing practical experience of mitigation and adaptation strategies via self-organising peer-city networks. Finding ways to link inventive but unsystematic practice knowledge with the formal peer-reviewed processes of orthodox science will be a critical task for climate change scientists and policymakers.
Policymakers are also grappling with how to implement global agreements within complex international arrangements. There face myriad tiers of national, regional, city and local governance, involving a plethora of discrete public, private and civic actors.
For this group, their priorities at the IPCC cities conference concerned policy processes and institutional design, political commitment and implementation instruments. Their needs are for policy, institutional and political science as much as for further scientific detail on climate change.

What did these encounters reveal?
The conference generated many fascinating insights. One major theme was the question of informality.
Many cities beyond the developed world are weakly governed. Multiple dimensions of urban life, including housing and infrastructure, are organised via informal institutions. Achieving effective action in these circumstances is a considerable policy problem.
A related problem is the gross geographical imbalance in scientific effort and focus on urban climate questions. Most research focuses on the cities of the developed West. And most of those are comparatively well resourced to respond to climate change.
In contrast, the cities of the developing world lack a systematic data and research base to enable effective and timely climate action. Yet these are the cities where many of the most severe climate impacts will be felt. Resolving this inequity is a fundamental international scientific challenge, as is growing the capacity to build a better evidence base.
Another question the IPCC needs to navigate is the boundary between science and politics in urban climate policy. During conference plenaries, the moderator — a former city mayor — excluded questions about specific political representatives’ stances on climate change according to apolitical IPCC rules. Yet questions about the effects on cities of neoliberalism were deemed permissible.
Urban scientists will require an especially nuanced framing of their research agenda if they are to address the very material politics of urban climate policy via theoretical abstraction alone.
The conference also provided some memorable highlights. William Rees, the originator of ecological footprint theory, lambasted delegates for not adequately appreciating the absolute material limits to resource exploitation. And the youth delegates received a standing ovation as the cohort who will be grappling with urban climate effects long after their older peers have departed.

William Rees explains the origins of the ecological footprint.

An agenda for urban climate action
The conference released a research agenda. This outlines the urgent need for inclusive and socially transformative action on climate change, improved evidence and information to support climate responses, and new funding and finance mechanisms to make this possible. It’s a very high-level guide for climate and urban scientists seeking to better understand climate change impacts on cities.
The conference appears to have met the IPCC’s needs to compile and review a large volume of scientific and practice insight for its assessment reporting. Whether it will have a wider effect on climate policy and action in cities remains unclear.
The participating scientists and practitioners certainly shared a general commitment to advancing the urban climate agenda. But it remains uncertain whether methodical scientific processes will be timely enough to meet the accelerating and expanding demands of urgent urban climate action.

Links

• This is why we cannot rely on cities alone to tackle climate change
• How American cities & states are fighting climate change globally
• While nations play politics, cities and states are taking up the climate challenge
• World Scientists, Local Leaders Map Research Agenda for Cities and Climate Change for Coming Years
• Ecological footprint