11/03/2019

Striking For The Future: From Australia To Japan To India, Youths Will Skip School On March 15 To Protest Against Climate Change

South China Morning Post - Zoe Low

  • Students from at least six Asian countries will take part in Global Strike for Future
  • But authorities in some countries have warned students not to disrupt classes
A carnival float depicts the school strikes ‘Friday for Future’ with Greta Thunberg during a traditional carnival parade in Düsseldorf, Germany, on March 4. Photo: AP
On March 15, students from at least six countries in Asia will be part of a global school strike to demand concrete action from governments to tackle climate change.
They come from secondary schools and universities in Australia, Bangladesh, India, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, and will join their peers in the Americas and Europe to take part in the Global Strike for Future.
“We are the ones who will inherit this earth. We deserve to have a say about the kind of future we have, which at this stage could be non-existent unless we stand up and show the politicians how important this is to us,” said 18-year-old Sophie Handford, who has completed high school and is coordinating the strikes in New Zealand.
The protest comes a month after about 10,000 youngsters staged a nationwide school strike across 60 cities in Britain, showing how a grass roots movement inspired by a Swedish girl last summer had taken off.
Students taking part in a climate change protest in London on February 15. Photo: EPA


Greta Thunberg, 16, had planted herself in front of the Swedish parliament in August handing out fliers that said: “You grown-ups do not give a s*** about my future.” Many students around the globe have also been striking every Friday since Thunberg started her protest.
The students interviewed for this article said the movement was largely decentralised, with them learning about the strike on social media. Some kept in touch with other coordinators from abroad through encrypted messaging apps.
A number of them wrote an open letter that British newspaper The Guardian published on March 1. “We demand justice for all past, current and future victims of the climate crisis, and so we are rising up,” the letter said.
“There have been fires in some places where it has become so dry and rising sea levels are hitting our friends in the Pacific hard. We are also fighting for them so they are able to remain in their homes,” said Handford.
This is the first time that New Zealand’s young people will be striking in 24 cities including Auckland and Christchurch to demand the government to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Some of their demands include fast tracking paths to reach emission targets and stopping all exploration and extraction of fossil fuels.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. Photo: AFP
In Bangladesh, another first time strike is being organised in Dhaka, Sundarbans and Sylhet by 24-year-old Sabbir Ahmed, who emphasises that this country’s low-lying areas will be most affected by rising sea levels caused by climate change. Sabbir graduated in 2017 and has been working with youth groups to develop professional skills.
“Bangladesh has already seen some unusual weather patterns. Temperatures in the summer rise up to 38 degrees Celsius or more, and last rainy season the floods caused heavy losses to agricultural production,” said Sabbir, who wants governments of industrialised nations to take more responsibility for reducing emissions.
The impact of climate change is already being felt throughout the world, but lower-income countries across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East do not have the resources to adapt to the changes, said Harald Heubaum, an associate professor in global energy and climate policy at the SOAS University of London.
He said developed countries in Europe and North America need to do more in terms of reducing emissions to mitigate the effects of climate change.
“The main polluters, including China and increasingly, India as well, need to invest a lot more so the least developed countries – those that haven’t caused problems, but face [the] consequences because they can’t adapt – can deal with this effectively,” Heubaum said.
China, the United States and India have the highest emissions in the world in 2015, according to the independent Union of Concerned Scientists.
An Indian man cools himself under a public fountain on a hot afternoon in New Delhi. Photo: AP
Indian teen Vidit Baya is demanding his government take action. “Our future is in their hands and we want them to take action not just for us but for the sake of the planet, its people and its survival,” said 17-year-old Baya, who is one of the organisers of the strike in India.
He said India’s status as a developing nation means the government needs to invest in renewable energy such as solar power instead of sticking to “ancient technology” like coal. “With seven out of the 10 most polluted cities in the world in India, it is a shame our condition is getting worse,” he said.
Strikes will take place in Delhi and Udaipur next Friday, and Baya’s team is organising more mass rallies every two months. His group is also working to educate people by going door-to-door and holding open meetings every Friday for youths to share ideas on how to create a better future.
However, Baya said schools and parents have reservations about allowing their children to take part in activism. “Many parents fear their kids might get in trouble with the wrong people. They also think we should focus on our studies and think only about our careers,” he said.
“But our parents and schools do not understand the land is dying,” said Baya, adding many schools refused to let students join environmental campaigns and activities organised by non-governmental organisations and the government.
Hong Kong’s Education Bureau is also opposed to the strike, saying on February 28 that the movement would disrupt order in schools.
Australians protesting against climate change in Brisbane in December. Photo: EPA
In Australia, where 15,000 students walked out of their schools on November 31 last year, students have also been warned against taking part in the upcoming strike. New South Wales education minister Rob Stokes said in an interview that students and teachers who did not show up would be punished, which earned him a swift rebuttal from Greta Thunberg herself.
“Your statement belongs in a museum,” wrote Thunberg on Twitter.
School principals in New Zealand have also warned students who strike they will be marked as truants, local media reported on Thursday.
Yet, the youth movement has caught the attention of climate scientists worldwide, who have written a letter of support for the young strikers published in The Guardian on February 13.
“The global youth movement and organisation is indeed impressive,” said Peter deMenocal, director of the Centre for Climate and Life at Columbia University in New York.
“The breadth and authenticity of this youth movement can turn the tide of public opinion,” said deMenocal, who has worked with leaders of the strike in the US.
An open-cut coal mine in Singleton in Hunter Valley north of Sydney. The Australian government has continued to push for coal as an energy source. Photo: AFP 
This really is a grass-roots movement organised by the youthAustralian organiser Zel Whiting
 Australian organiser Zel Whiting, who has worked with a larger team to pull together not just the Australian protest but internationally as well, is adamant the strikes are necessary. “Climate-based decisions are decisions that can’t be undone in 20 years’ time,” said the 13-year-old.
Whiting is frustrated with the current Australian government, which has continued to push coal as an energy source for the country. “That will devastate our environment, but we’re starting to sway the general public to our side, which is really good,” he said.
The Australian youth has also managed to gain the support of labour unions, but at the same time, Whiting said, the hardest hurdle to overcome is convincing dismissive adults who think the kids are being used by politicians.
“This really is a grass-roots movement organised by the youth, and climate justice should be totally apolitical and focus on communicating with governments,” said Whiting. “People need to realise that climate change is going to be a problem for their future and for their children for a long time.”

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Woman Fest Founder Plans Training Camp For Climate Rebels

The Guardian - 

Spring Uprising festival in Bristol will feature bands and civil disobedience instruction
School pupils gathered in Parliament Square last month to protest against government inaction over climate change. Photograph: Guy Smallman/Getty Images 
The woman behind the UK’s first female-only festival is setting up a climate activism training camp to instruct hundreds of young people in civil disobedience before a series of environmental protests planned for the coming weeks.
Tiana Jacout is putting on the Spring Uprising festival in Bristol this month for people taking part in the ongoing school strikes and the Extinction Rebellion protests planned for 15 April.
The two-day event will offer the usual festival diet of live bands and DJs alongside civil disobedience training and sessions on climate solutions.
Jacout said: “With thousands of people coming together to face the climate and ecological emergency, this event is intended to help people prepare, organise and celebrate for this historic moment in time together.”
Last month more than 10,000 young people took to the streets across the UK as part of the growing school strike movement. Up to 150,000 people around the world are expected to take part in a global school strike on 15 March.
Separately, thousands of protesters are expected to descend on London on 15 April as part of a global climate action organised by Extinction Rebellion.
The group, known as XR, has established groups in countries around the world and has the support of hundreds of senior academics and scientists.
It is demanding that the UK government tell the truth about the scale of the ecological crisis and enact legally binding policies to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025. It also wants the creation of a citizens’ assembly to oversee the transformation to a sustainable economy.
Activists closed down five London bridges for several hours in November, and they say this time they intend to bring widespread disruption to London until their demands are met.
 Tiana Jacout
Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer 
Jacout said the festival was a chance for people who were considering getting involved in climate campaigns to “come together, get trained, get organised and have a damn good time doing it”.
She added: “One of the real challenges of being in this movement is that every week there is a new scientific study coming out that shortens the time we have left to take action. That is why we need to come together and look after each other. Taking part in civil disobedience is high adrenaline and you need to be looked after and cared for. That, along with training and preparation, is what this festival is about.”
The event, on 16 and 17 March, has sold more than 700 tickets and has the backing of music industry and festival organisers such as Boomtown, Buddhafield and Burn Punk. A dozen music acts including Sam Lee, Dizraeli, Mesadorm, Bellatrix, Pete the Temp, Honeyfeet, Nick Mulvey and the High Breed have been confirmed.
Jacout, who staged Woman Fest last year, said that although non-violent civil disobedience was at the heart of the emerging environment protest movements, “many of the people who have come forward to join may not have been in that situation before”.
“As we saw from our demonstrations in November we are entirely peaceful and although there were lots of police around it was all calm and friendly, but we think that people can’t be too well trained or briefed and the more support we can give each other the more successful the rebellion can be,” she said.
The event will include a talk from school strike activists and video linkups with XR groups around the UK and the rest of the world.
“This is the next step in our response to the threat to life we all face, a potentially life-changing event for attendees,” Jacout said. “For people who have not been involved in XR before, this is perfect moment to come down and see what we are about, to meet and make friends and get properly involved.”

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Veterans Are Concerned About Climate Change, And That Matters

The Conversation -  |  | 


Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, the Navy’s largest base, is endangered by sea level rise. Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ernest R. Scott
News that the Trump administration plans to create a panel devoted to challenging government warnings about climate change has been met with opposition from members of the U.S. military. Citing concerns about the effects of climate change on national security, more than four dozen top-ranking military officials came out in opposition to the Trump administration’s plan.
Military concern about the effects of climate change on national security is not new. Months before former Secretary James Mattis left the Defense Department in January 2019, he acknowledged that increased coastal flooding and tropical storms, resulting from rising average global temperatures, pose a threat to as many as one-third of U.S. military bases.
In addition to its potential effect on military infrastructure, climate change could pose threats to global security. A recent IPCC report predicts that rising global temperatures, drought and other extreme weather patterns are likely to become more frequent and severe across the globe. This could create competition and conflict for increasingly scarce water and agricultural resources, particularly in the developing world or in fragile states.
Although climate change could pose major risks to national security, few have asked current and veteran members of the armed forces what they think about climate change and its potential effects. Our new survey research finds that most U.S. veteran members of the armed services in our sample think that the planet is warming, and many of them are concerned about what climate change means for U.S. security.

Combating climate change: A call to arms?

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, pictured Nov. 26, 2018 in Doral, Florida. Brynn Anderson/AP Photo
Past and present members of the military are more likely to support politically conservative views than politically liberal ones. But to characterize the military as uniformly conservative misses an important element of nuance.
Numerous surveys of active duty service members and veterans in the early 2000s demonstrated that enlisted members of the military tended to vote in patterns similar to their civilian counterparts. However, recent research has pointed to a shift rightward within the military and found that higher-ranking officers and younger vets are especially more likely to be conservative, identify as Republicans, and support President Trump than nonveterans.
Despite their conservative tendencies, there is reason to suspect that armed forces members are concerned about the effects of climate change – a position held most commonly by ideological liberals. Service members might, for example, have observed the impact of major storms or rising sea levels on the day-to-day functioning of military bases. Or they could have used weapons systems that run on renewable energy sources, including aircraft, tanks and solar energy-powered backpacks.
The Pentagon is continuing to take steps to address climate change, despite President Trump saying such preparation should stop. U.S. military personnel are thus likely to have more experience with climate change effects, solutions to it or both.

Our study
To study past and present military personnel’s attitudes about climate change, we conducted a survey between Jan. 17-21, 2019 of 293 U.S. active duty or veteran service members, recruited via the online service Lucid. While this sample is not perfectly representative of the military writ large, it is both ideologically and demographically diverse. Our sample closely resembles veteran population benchmarks on race, educational attainment, and, perhaps most importantly, party identification.
We asked two related questions. First, we asked respondents which of the following statements is closest to their view: (1) “The Earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity such as burning fossil fuels;” (2) “The Earth is getting warmer mostly because of natural patterns in the Earth’s environment; (3) "There is no solid evidence that the Earth is getting warmer;” or (4) “not sure.”
If respondents answered that the Earth is getting warmer, we then asked how likely it is that “U.S. military bases in coastal or island regions will be damaged by flooding or severe storms” and that “Drought and famine will cause international military conflict for food and water resources.”
First, the survey results showed that even though veterans and active duty service members tend to be politically conservative, their levels of belief in human-caused climate change are virtually the same. In our sample, 44 percent of veterans and active duty service members expressed belief in anthropogenic climate change. This tracks closely with nationally representative estimates of anthropogenic climate change consensus in the U.S. adult population. A 2016 Pew survey that featured a question identical to ours found about 48 percent believed in anthropogenic climate change (although some surveys asking other versions of this question, like this 2018 survey from Gallup, sometimes find higher levels). The results also track closely with a recent survey on the Lucid platform, used to conduct our study, which found that about 50 percent of Americans believe in human-caused climate change.
Second, we found that many veterans and active duty service members are concerned about the effects that climate change might have on security. More than three-quarters, 77 percent, of respondents consider it fairly or very likely that military bases in coastal or island regions will be damaged by flooding or severe storms as a result of climate change. Fewer veterans and active duty service members – 61 percent – consider drought and famine-driven international military conflict over food and water resources fairly or very likely to occur.
Third, we found that veterans and active duty service members who accept the scientific consensus on the causes of climate change are considerably more likely to be concerned about its effects on national security than those who do not.
To be specific, 87 percent of veterans and active duty service members who accept anthropogenic climate change consider damage to U.S. military bases in coastal or island regions due to flooding or severe storms fairly or very likely to occur, compared to 64 percent of those who do not accept anthropogenic climate change. And, 70 percent of veterans and active duty service members who accept anthropogenic climate change consider drought and famine causing international military conflict for food and water resources fairly or very likely to occur, compared to 49 percent of those who do not accept anthropogenic climate change.

Why this matters

U.S. citizens appreciate and respect veterans. Some believe that veterans’ views on climate change could influence others. fiyaazz/Shutterstock.com
Belief in climate change among past and active military personnel is noteworthy, because veterans are an important and influential voting block in American politics. Veterans comprise about 7 percent of the U.S. voting population, and millions of dollars are spent every year trying to win their political support, and advance their policy priorities US$13 million in independent expenditures.
Service members’ views could also affect the views of civilians, thus also pressuring political leaders to take action. The American public is deferential to and has a high degree of trust in the military. If enough veterans express concern about climate change, this reliably conservative voting bloc may push Republican officials to take policy action on climate change.

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Generation Greta Will Step Up Their Climate Strikes On 15 March

Medium - Alexander Verbeek

On this cold and rainy morning, I joined Greta Thunberg in front of the Swedish parliament for her climate strike.



It is just 29 weeks ago that she sat there for the first time. All alone, since nobody she had asked wanted to join her. But she didn’t give up and she is now the founder of an international youth movement that challenges the world’s leaders to act on climate change.
Her ‘Fridays For Future’ protest has inspired and mobilised hundreds of thousands of students all over the world. Together they ask us, the grown-ups, to look into the mirror. We have to shamefully admit that our generation made a mess of our global environmental responsibilities, as well as quite a few other tasks to keep this planet a liveable place.
Today, on International Women’s Day, she was awarded as ‘Woman of the Year’ by two Swedish newspapers.
Many famous, inspiring leaders would never have been recruited if you would have asked a specialised agency to find you a new leader. And I guess that 16-year old Greta would not have met any of the criteria a recruitment office would use to search for a new inspiring global leader. But for me, and millions of others, she is a source of inspiration. Her direct communication is the wake up call that the world needs. Especially now that we have nearly run out of time to act.
Last November, I saw her speak at the Stockholm TEDx event, not far from where her climate strike had started in the summer. The huge conference hall seemed even more intimidating when the small, then 15-year old, Greta walked on stage. But she captivated the audience with the most clear call for climate action I had ever heard. There is no time to lose for a rapid reduction of greenhouse gas reductions, we don’t need to wait for more research, and all of us, including our leaders, need to act now.
Soon after, she travelled by public transport to COP24 in Katowice, where she told world leaders to stop behaving like children: “you are not mature enough to tell it like it is, even that burden you leave to us children”.
When she arrived by train in Davos, she told the world’s business leaders it is insane for a record 1500 of them to arrive by private jet to discuss climate change.
The movement that Greta started is still growing. On Friday 15 March, 860 actions are planned in 75 countries, and the list is still growing.
This massive youth movement seems to become an intergenerational conflict at a scale that we have not seen since the late 1960s. While politicians tell them to go back to school, there is no stopping them and it may soon be about more than just climate change.
While Greta keeps focussed on the climate message, other young people will add governance, economy, equality, justice and power relations on Generation Greta’s wish list for change. Politicians better pay attention.
Every year on 10 December, I am surprised that we still don’t have a Nobel Prize for the Environment. But until that issue is resolved, I hope that Greta Thunberg will be this years’ Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

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10/03/2019

25 Female Climate Leaders Shaping 2019

The Ecologist - Arthur Wyns

Think Equal. Build Smart. Innovate for Change. That is the theme for International Women’s Day this year.
Greta Thunberg
We have compiled a list of 25 inspirational female climate leaders who will be shaping the climate agenda in 2019 to mark International Women's Day.
We have consulted close to 100  people in the field to compile the definitive list.
We feature some well-known activists such as Greta Thunberg and also place the spotlight on people such as the Vietnames activist Nguy Thi Khan who are doing incredible work without the same intensity of media interest. 
Greta Thunberg
Student Activist, Sweden
This 16 year old Swedish student has sparked a global youth movement to take a bold stance on climate action. Greta has challenged world leaders with her powerful speeches, most recently at the World Social Forum in Davos in January and during the UN Climate summit in Poland in December 2018; “You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes”.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
US Congresswoman, United States
The youngest woman to be ever elected to congress, and an example of a millennial in power, AOC has been using her political position to draw attention to social and environmental issues as well as women’s rights and equality. Her work on and in promoting the Green New Deal in the U.S. has made her the voice of climate change concern in a political environment heavily criticised for climate change denial.
Patricia Espinosa
Executive Secretary of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Mexico
Espinosa was appointed the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2016, giving her a key role in designing the implementation processes of the Paris Agreement. As the highest diplomat for the UN climate space, she will be safeguarding the implementation of the Paris Agreement from 2020 onwards.
Christiana Figueres
Former Executive Secretary of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Costa Rica
As executive secretary of the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2010 to 2015, Figueres was a driving force in the creation of the Paris Agreement. Since leaving office, she has continued throwing her diplomatic prowess in the balance through her organisation Mission 2020, pressing countries around the world to raise their climate ambition.
Tasneem Essop
Executive Director of Climate Action Network International (CAN), South Africa
Tasneem was recently appointed as director for the largest network of environmental organisations in the world, CAN, bringing along her experience as provincial environment minister of South Africa and climate advisor at WWF. Essop is known for her work promoting the links between social justice and climate change, in her own words:  “Climate Change is a Poverty Issue”.
‏Yamide Dagnet
Senior Associate at the World Resources Institute (WRI), Guadeloupe
Dagnet is a climate change scholar leading the research team on the implementation of the Paris Agreement at WRI, a leading environmental think tank. Dagnet previously worked as the manager of the UK greenhouse gas inventory (NAEI) and was the UK Deputy Focal Point for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Nirupabai
Environmental Activist, India
As a Kawar Adivasi woman from Korba, an Indian coal mining district, Nirupabai has been displaced twice by coal mines in her region. She has lead dozens of legal battles to halt the expansion of coal mining activities in the region and has helped affected women gain recognition and compensation from several coal companies.
Jane Goodall
Activist and Primatologist, United Kingdom
World famous primatologist, Jane Goodall has worked for decades on the research of Chimpanzees and on forest conservation. At age 84 she continues to raise awareness and promote education and understanding of the environment and is in the running for the 2019 Nobel Peace Price.
May Boeve
Executive Director, 350.org, United States
May runs one of the largest climate change movements in the world, 350.org, and has helped shape, the People’s Climate March, the Keystone XL pipeline protests, and the global divestment movement. In 2019 her organisation will continue building bridges between movements to gather collectively behind the climate banner.
Jacinda Ardern
Prime Minister, New Zealand
Elected in 2017, Jacinda is currently the youngest female head of government in the world. She is known for supporting same-sex marriage, being an advocate for women in the workplace, and pushing for New Zealand to be proactive in achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement: “Acting on climate change is about being on the right side of history.”
Sharan Burrow
General Secretary, International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), Australia
Recently re-elected for another 4-year term, Sharan will be leading the largest workers union in the world to promote a Just Transition for workers and their communities in the light of climate action. The theme of Just Transition has received renewed attention since the UN climate summit in Poland, and will be an important theme throughout 2019.
Laurence Tubiana
CEO of the European Climate Foundation (ECF), France
Laurence was the French ambassador for international climate negotiations in the lead up to the creation of the Paris Agreement and now runs the European Climate Foundation. She founded the Institute of Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) in 2002 and currently advises French president Emmanuel Macron as part of the country’s High Council on Climate Change.
Nguy Thi Khanh
Founder and Director of the Green Innovation and Development Centre, Vietnam
Growing up in the shadow of a coal mine in rural Vietnam, Khanh has dedicated her life to developing networks of social and environmental organisations, as well as state agencies, that work towards sustainable energy solutions to meet Vietnam's rapid development. She strongly opposes the 16 additional coal power-plants the Vietnamese government is planning to build and is working closely with said govenment to achieve the goal of 21% renewable energy by 2030.
Maria Neira
Public Health Director, World Health Organization (WHO), Spain
Maria has been spearheading the global fight against air pollution as director at the World Health Organization. In 2019 she will play a key role in achieving international political recognition of the links between climate change and human health.
Yeo Bee Yin
Minister of Environment, Science, Technology and Climate Change, Malaysia
The 35 year old Minister is one of only four women in the Malaysian Government. She is successfully implementing an ambitious plan to transition Malaysia from a fossil fuels based economy to renewable-energy: "affordable, reliable, sustainable, and also long term energy security for Malaysia”.
Yugratna Srivastava
Program Coordinator at Plant for Planet, India
Yugratna has been a voice of youth engagement in international climate negotiations since she was 13 years old. She has led  the UN Youth body at the climate negotiations (YOUNGO) for many years and is now a program coordinator at Plant for the Planet, an organisation that has already planted 14 billion trees, with the goal to plant enough to eventually offset as much as half of man-made atmospheric carbon.
Gunhild Stordalen
Philanthropist, Norway
A physician and former model, Stordalen is a Co-Founder of the Stordalen foundation, and founder of the EAT initiative, promoting the links between human health, diet, and sustainability. Most recently, the EAT - Lancet commision designed a planetary health diet, hoping to transform the way we consume food.
Stella Gama,
Climate Diplomat, Malawi
Stella is a gender advocate at the UN climate talks, and has helped create a Gender Action Plan as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). She represents Malawi at the UN forestry program (REDD+) and coordinates the group of Least Developed Countries at the UN climate talks.
Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim
Indigenous Peoples Leader, Chad
Hindou is part of a semi-nomadic community from Chad, and has experienced the effects of climate change on her community and way of living first-hand. She represents the interests of indigenous people at the UN climate talks and is Co-chair of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC).
Jennifer Morgan
Executive Director, Greenpeace International, United States
Jennifer has been leading the environmental organisation Greenpeace since 2016. A long-time activist and climate leader, she has previously worked at WRI, E3G and WWF, and is a member of Germany's Council for Sustainable Development; “When it comes to climate change, it's often the poor and marginalised who suffer the most. But we can change the rules of the global economy to benefit people and the planet alike.”
Vandana Shiva
Environmental Sholar, India
Vandana is an author, scholar, environmental activist and food sovereignty advocate. She founded Navdanya, a movement for biodiversity conservation and farmers’ rights, as well as the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy (RFSTN), an organization devoted to developing sustainable methods of agriculture. “I don't want to live in a world where five giant companies control our health and our food.”
Naomi Klein
Activist, Author, and Journalist, Canada
An award-winning writer and journalist, her 2014 book, This Changes Everything, has lead to a shift in discourse surrounding the interaction of climate change and economics. Klein continues to be a public voice on social and economic justice, women’s rights, and the importance of climate action.
Rachel Kyte
CEO of Sustainable Energy for All, United Kingdom
Chief Executive Officer and Special Representative to the UN Secretary-General of Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), Kyte is also the Co-Chair of UN-Energy. Operating at the highest diplomatic level, Kyte’s work is instrumental to achieving the 2030 sustainable development goals (SDGs) for the universal access, efficiency, and sustainability of energy.
Bindu Bhandari
Activist, Nepal
As a dedicated grassroots activist, Bhandari has worked hard to raise youth awareness for climate change in Nepal, particularly the effects of glacial melt on fresh water sources. She plays key roles in both the Integrated Centre for Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and Wendy Global, a women’s leadership development program in Asia.

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How Greta Thunberg’s Lone Strike Against Climate Change Became A Global Movement

Rolling Stone - 

The 16-year-old Swedish activist’s #FridaysForFuture protests have galvanized young people around the world
Greta Thunberg at a nature reserve outside Stockholm in January
Photograph by Anna Tärnhuvud
At the end of a record-hot summer in Sweden last August, then-15-year-old Greta Thunberg decided she would not be going back to school.
Frustrated by the lack of attention paid to the existential threat of global warming — not least by politicians campaigning for upcoming elections — she set up outside the Swedish parliament with a water bottle, her rucksack filled with books and snacks and a homemade sign announcing her “School Strike for Climate.”
“I tried to bring people along to join me,” she says — she’d been inspired by the Parkland, Florida, students who walked out of class to protest gun violence — “but no one was really interested, and so I had to do it by myself.”
Thunberg wasn’t alone for long. By the end of the first week, her strike had drawn coverage from Sweden’s biggest newspapers. As reporters flocked and she handed out fliers bearing the message “You grownups don’t give a shit about my future,” supporters dropped by to join the homespun protest on their lunch breaks. After three weeks of missed classes, Thunberg finally went back to school — mostly. She still strikes every Friday.
Now she’s become the unexpected founder of an international youth movement. Since the summer, tens of thousands of students in nearly 300 towns and cities from Australia to Uganda to the U.S. to Japan have joined her #FridaysForFuture protest. In Belgium, at the end of January, more than 30,000 students walked out of classes.
A worldwide strike is planned for March 15th, with events planned in more than 50 countries. “Before I started, I didn’t expect anything,” Thunberg says. “I could have never imagined this reaction. It’s crazy.”
Her stark truth-telling and cherubic face caught fire online after she spoke at the U.N. climate talks in Poland in December, where, “Emperor’s New Clothes”-style, she called out a room of statesmen and dignitaries three and four times her age, telling them, “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children.”
Thunberg’s movement comes amid an onslaught of increasingly dire warnings about the climate. Scientists recently announced that the world’s oceans are warming 40 percent faster than was previously thought.
In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that global temperatures could rise by the dreaded benchmark of 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels in just 12 years. “We are living in a very interesting time, where something is going to happen,” Thunberg says. “Change is on the horizon, but to see that change we also have to change ourselves."
At home, Thunberg persuaded her parents to swear off air travel and stop eating meat. “They were frequent fliers and high consumers,” she says. “And then I showed them articles and films and I told them about the situation. You can’t really stand up for something without walking the walk. That’s what I did.”
Thunberg has Asperger’s syndrome, and has cited her neurodiversity for her dedication to the issue. “I see the world kind of black-and-white,” she says. “Everyone says that there is no black-and-white issue, but I think this is. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t.”
Although she finds all the sudden personal attention a little strange, she says, “As soon as they write about me they have to write about the climate, so that’s good.
“In five years, I hope I don’t work on the climate because that would mean that everything is OK,” says Thunberg. “But I probably will, and many other people will because of where we are at. We see the consequences of it today, and we will see it more clearly then.”

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09/03/2019

These Women Are Changing The Landscape Of Antarctic Research

National Geographic - Elizabeth Rush

 Polar science used to be dominated by men. An expedition to Thwaites Glacier is helping change that.
Rebecca Totten Minzoni of the University of Alabama prepares the Megacore machinery for drilling into sediment in Antarctica, to better understand how climate change is impacting melting glaciers. Photograph by Linda Welzenbach, Rice University
Elizabeth Rush
Elizabeth Rush is the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore. She teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.
Amundsen Sea, Antarctica: Up on the helicopter deck Meghan Spoth and Victoria Fitzgerald practice setting up camp. Just over Spoth’s shoulder a mile-wide tabular iceberg slides past, revealing the piercing cobalt at the berg’s cold center. Spoth pulls at the brim of her condor-embroidered ballcap and tosses a roll of duct tape to Fitzgerald.
The two young researchers, who hail from the University of Maine and Alabama respectively, have come to the Amundsen Sea, a rarely explored corner of the Antarctic continent, to better understand the rate at which the Thwaites Glacier disintegrated in the past so that modelers might make more accurate estimates of how fast sea levels will rise in the coming century.
The women lash their tarp tent to the deck. Sharp blasts of air rattle the plastic lean-to. They slide underneath to practice maneuvering in total darkness, a prerequisite for the kind of luminescence dating methods they plan to employ. This is a simulation of the work that Spoth and Fitzgerald will carry out in the coming days on the Lindsey and Schafer Islands, archipelagos so remote that human foot-fall has never before rung from many of these glacially scoured mounds. The team, headed up by Brenda Hall of the University of Maine, will be looking for paleontological records—things like seal skin and penguin bones—to help them better understand just how quickly the ice withdrew during the last deglaciation.
Their work is part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a five-year effort to gather data that will create more accurate models of sea-level rise rates for the coming century. This field season, the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer is sailing to Thwaites’ calving front. Nicknamed by news-media the “Doomsday Glacier,” this is a threshold system, the 150 kilometer-wide ice front that reaches all the way back to the wet heart of the West Antarctic Ice Shelf.
Unlike East Antarctica, where the ice sheets tend to ride on solid ground, much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet rests on land that lays up to two kilometers below sea level, making the system inherently unstable, and runaway ice sheet collapse a possibility. Thwaites is the choke-point, holding much of the ice sheet in place. But the toe-hold it has on the solid earth—also known as the glacier’s grounding line, which also rests below sea level—recently began to recede.
Today the ice sheet is retreating as fast as 1.2 kilometers per year. It might not sound like much, but that is up to five times the rate of retreat during the transition between the Pleistocene and Holocene, when global sea levels rose about sixty feet every 1,000 years. Translate those numbers to the human time-scale and you get the rough equivalent of six feet of rise every century.
“That retreat, when the grounding line moves all the way to the inner shelf around 10,000 years ago, that is nowhere near as rapid as what we are witnessing now,” says Rebecca Totten Minzoni, assistant professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama. “Thwaites Glacier is probably the most important part of the Antarctic contribution to global sea-level rise this century. It is not just a problem for our science community it is problem for the global community,” she adds.
Minzoni, who decided to study Antarctic ice sheet retreat after her family home flooded during Hurricane Katrina, hopes that the data collected on this excursion can lead to more informed public policy surrounding sea-level rise readiness and equity.

Women explorers
The day after the tarp-tent test, the first sediment core from just off the Abbott Ice Shelf is brought onboard. Minzoni, who is Fitzgerald’s adviser, coaches her through the process of taking samples from each layer of the milk-chocolate colored mud that they have extracted from the deep. They work shoulder to shoulder in bright orange jumpsuits, peeling back the layers of the meters-long cylinder of silt.
While the science taking place on board the Palmer is exceptional—many of the places we collect data from are marked as “open and uncharted” on the map of the region we have pinned to the wall of the Dry Lab—equally exceptional is the number of women scientists and crew members involved. Of the 57 people on board, 16 are women; a figure that would have been all but unthinkable a few decades ago. And if you only count the scientists the ratio (9 of 22 overall) skews significantly higher; one of whom, Anna Wåhlin, of the University of Gothenburg, just broke records by being the first person to send an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle under the Thwaites Ice Sheet.
But for much of human civilization’s engagement with Antarctica women weren’t welcome. When New York Times journalist Walter Sullivan wrote of the first all-women scientific expedition to the great southlands in the late 1960s he described the undertaking as ‘an incursion of females’ into ‘the largest male sanctuary remaining on this planet.”
It wasn’t until 1974 that Alice McWinnie, the first woman to head an Antarctic research station, wintered-over there, with her required “assistant” a biologist and nun named Sister Mary Odile Cahoon. According to Julia Wellner, one of the principle investigators in the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, “The first woman allowed in the Marine Antarctic Program in the United States was, I believe, in the late 70s. That is because the U.S. ran all of their marine science through the Coast Guard and the Coast Guard simply didn’t allow women on ships.”
Giant icebergs are calving off the Antarctic ice sheets in a process scientists are trying to better understand. Photograph by Elizabeth Rush
Many of the more established career scientists involved in this collaborative effort to better understand Thwaites, Wellner included, had next to no female mentors. A simple fact that some have suggested played a significant role in determining not only the gender parity onboard vessels but also the science taking place there.
“Scientific studies themselves can be gendered, especially when credibility is attributed to research produced through typically masculine activities or manly characteristics, such as heroism, risk, conquests, strength, self-sufficiency, and exploration,” writes Mark Carey in his recent study investigating the interplay between gender, glaciers, and the science employed to better understand the latter. The characteristics he lists have long defined the stories we tell about Antarctica, limiting the way we understand this complex and interconnected, difficult to fathom and even harder to predict, place that only two hundred years ago was a blank space on many of our maps.

Counting penguin bones
Come morning the deck of the Palmer is coated in a thin film of ice from the storm that blew through the previous night. The wind-chill is -14 degrees Fahrenheit. Spoth, Fitzgerald, Kelly Hogan and Scott Braddock don layer after layer of long underwear, overtopped by plastic raingear and bright orange jackets known as “float coats,” which are meant to provide both warmth and buoyancy in case the scientists topple overboard on their journey from the Palmer out to the islands.
They pile pick axes, shovels, the tarp tent, GPS units, and hundreds of plastic specimen bags into a Zodiac. Once they have unloaded all their gear on the shore, including the 40-pound survival kits the National Science Foundation requires researchers who leave the vessel to cart along; and once they have changed out their soggy gloves and socks, they climb to the island’s highest point and look east. There they let out a collective sigh of relief. The telltale terracing of the island’s ancient beaches that Hall had seen in blurry satellite images, now lay in front of them, as real as the penguin-poo-covered rock beneath their feet.
Hogan and Spoth take the lower set of beaches while Fitzgerald and Braddock aim high. I join Spoth and Hogan on the far side of the island. Every couple hundred yards, I dig a small hole. The two women lay on the ground, draw their faces close to the stones I have heaped up on the lip of the pit, and begin to sift through them with meticulous care. “I’ve got one,” Hogan calls out over the wind. She cups her hands around the specimen she wishes to sample—the tip of a penguin rib, no more than half an inch long—and waits for Spoth to note the GPS coordinates in her field notebook. Then tweezers out, camera out, slip the sliver of bone into bag, number it and tuck it into the burlap sack.
There is so little ice-free land in this remote corner of the Amundsen Sea that before this study was conducted there was only one data point used to model the relative rate of sea-level rise in the region. Which means that the 200 or so samples collected in the field will dramatically improve not only our understanding of past deglaciation events but also the potential futures these ice sheets might breed. To get an accurate estimate of the rate of recent glacial retreat and relative sea-level rise, the scientists need to know just how quickly these islands “rebounded” after the glacier withdrew and to what height.
Joee Patterson and Jack Greenberg deploy the Megacore off the R/V Palmer research ship. Photograph by Elizabeth Rush
“Without an understanding of those longer-term trends that tell us how the ice behaved in the past, it is quite difficult to separate out and analyze the modern change we are witnessing now, and even harder still is predicting possible future ice loss,” says Hogan.
Back in the Palmer’s hold, as we transit to our next scientific site, Spoth and Braddock fold tinfoil boats to hold the specimens drying in the oven. Hogan and Fitzgerald, who are actually onboard to analyze sediment samples, rejoin their respective teams and prepare for the next week’s work. The level of collaboration on board is impressive, with groups sharing scientists and equipment as each experiment demands.
That wasn’t always the case, says Rob Larter, the chief scientist and one of the only people onboard who has been doing science in Antarctica long enough to remember when women on the vessels were an anomaly. “A bunch of men on a ship can be a bit more confrontational,” he says over a cup of tea in his cabin. But Larter is reticent to point to gender as the sole driver of change determining how the science on board the Palmer is conducted.
The urgency surrounding the question of how quickly Thwaites is collapsing and its potential contribution to global sea levels fuels our need to understand this dynamic system in an integrated way. If Thwaites goes, it could take the whole of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet with it. Sea levels could rise as much as twelve feet, drowning not only significant portions of our coastal cities, but also rural areas where property taxes are low and innovative infrastructure solutions difficult to fund.
“The thing about the Thwaites program is that this is one of the first times we have created such a comprehensive view of one glacier system,” says Hogan. “Oceans, ice, over-ice, marine bed, airborne surveys, we are collecting this data all in one go to try to really understand the system in a holistic way.”
While it impossible to separate out the impact of the gender of the scientists onboard from the interdisciplinary nature of the international collaboration, one thing is certain: change has come both to the Southern Ocean and to the bellies of the ships that ply these waters. Today 55 percent of the members of the International Association of Polar Early Career Scientists identify as women. But just how long will it take for the culture surrounding Antarctic exploration and the stories we tell about this place to change?
“In my experience somebody who sometimes treats you like a girl will, in the end, always treat you like a girl and someone who treats you like a colleague will always treat you like a colleague,” says Joee Patterson, one of the boat’s marine technicians, the creative group of people who build contraptions like the tarp tent and who helm the small boats that deliver the researchers to shore.
Patterson slips on her hard hat, which has her name and a heart painted on the back in pink, sparkly letters, and clicks the last of the twelve Plexi-tubes on the 1,600-pound Megacore driller into place. Then she clips herself into her safety belt and begins lowering the device over the starboard side deck. Soon the sun will briefly set on our little corner of Antarctica.
Come morning we will motor over to the coring site to continue the work of peering into the past to better understand the present and our collective future. If Minzoni, Fitzgerald, Spoth, Wåhlin, Hogan, Patterson, and the many other women scientists and technicians on board the Palmer are any indication, as the far south tips out of balance, the gender of the researchers working here—the questions they pose and the manner they go about attempting to answer them—might, for the first time, arrive at a different kind of equilibrium.

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