03/04/2017

Climate Change's Mental Health Impacts Need Care Too, Group Says

InsideClimate News - Sabrina Shankman

Often overlooked, the mental part of dealing with extreme weather and other climate impacts is crucial, new report says.
The longterm impacts of climate-related events like the flooding in Louisiana in 2016 are important to address, a new report says. Credit: Getty Images
When a storm driven by climate change forces a family from its home, the impacts don't necessarily disappear once the waters recede and the damage is repaired. Though harder to spot, the impacts on people's mental health can be pervasive and enduring.
That is the thrust of a report released Wednesday by the American Psychological Association, Climate for Health, and ecoAmerica, called "Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance."
The report builds on previous work and examines the harm caused by the various manifestations of climate change, from extreme weather and wildfires to heat waves and the general "eco-anxiety" that comes from coping with the enormity of the climate crisis.
"We have this strange situation with climate change in our country that people don't talk about it much, and that means we don't have the opportunity to get prepared for it," said Susan Clayton, one of the report's authors. "That makes it scarier. It seems so amorphous."
The news about climate change can be so frightening, so overwhelming, that instead of shaking people into awareness, it can drive them toward denial. One study cited by the report found that people who received complex information about the threat of climate change felt more helpless and more likely to want to avoid hearing about it in the future.
"Talking about it makes it more manageable and concrete. It can also increase the political will to do something about it," said Clayton.
Climate change's potential impact on mental health isn't universal. Some groups, particularly children and the poor, can be particularly vulnerable.
The report pointed to the response to heat as an example.
By the end of the century, the average American will see between four and eight times as many days above 95 degrees as today, according to estimates cited in the report. Arizona could go from 116 days above 95 degrees to 205 by 2099.
When temperature rises, so does aggression, studies have shown. Heat can also muddle our minds, making it harder to settle disputes without violence.
"It's stressful to be hot, and that leads you to act out," said Clayton. "That has real social justice implications. Who can afford to have air conditioning, and who can't?"
Children are more sensitive to temperatures changes because their sweat glands are not fully developed, making them less able to cool themselves. They are also more prone to dehydration.
Climate impacts can also have longterm effects on their development. The report cited studies that found that children who have experienced a flood or a drought during key developmental periods are shorter, on average, as adults. Pregnant women exposed to heatwaves during their second and third trimesters have a higher chance of going into early labor and tend to have babies with lower birth weights.
And long after the events are over, children are more likely than adults to show severe distress, as well as higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Mona Sarfaty, the director of the Program for Climate and Health in the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, who was not a part of the study, said she has encountered this in her work on health care and climate change. After the severe flooding in Louisiana last August, when 30 percent of the state flooded and thousands of people were evacuated, many were fundamentally disoriented, she said. "There were children who became terrified every time it rained subsequently," she said.
With storms, drought and wildfires driven at least in part by climate change spreading to new areas of the country—like the fires in Tennessee and North Carolina last year—more people are being exposed to immediate climate hazards.
Sarfaty is the director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health, a new group that aims to help the public and policymakers understand how climate change is impacting health. The group represents more than half of the physicians in the country and includes 11 of the nation's leading medical societies.
The consortium recently released a study with similar goals to the mental health study. Both, Sarfaty said, can serve as tools for primary care physicians.
"Every physician needs to be thinking about the mental health impacts of climate change and know the vulnerabilities of their own community so they can help to strengthen people against the impacts," she said.
The mental health report outlined other ways to strengthen people, too.
Encouraging bicycling or walking, or choosing public transit over a car can help, according to the report. Physical activity has a direct connection to mental health, and using public transit fosters a sense of community.
Helping people find ways to prepare for and combat climate change in their own lives—like preparing for extreme events or building  local resilience—can also make it easier to cope with the stress that comes from knowing the world is changing.
"We like to feel secure in our jobs, our finances, our relationships, our homes," said Clayton. "Climate change has a real potential to make us feel insecure in many of those things."

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02/04/2017

If You Destroy It, They Will Come – Climate Change Displacement And The Trump Effect

The Conversation -  | 

Reuters/Carlos Barria
US President Donald Trump this week signed an executive order on “energy independence”. The order rescinds key elements of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan.
Trump’s order lifts requirements placed on American states to slash carbon emissions. It characterises policies mindful of climate change as costly and harmful to American jobs.
However, as Trump strips back strategies to mitigate the impacts of climate change, some coastal communities in the US are planning for a “managed retreat” from sea-level rise. In other words, when mitigation attempts are abandoned, more communities will be forced into adaptation.
This state of affairs is both impractical and unjust. The scale of the human displacement that will flow from unmitigated climate change impacts is too great for managed retreat strategies. And countries – particularly high-emitting ones like the US – owe a moral obligation to commit to emissions reduction targets, even if they identify these as out of sync with short-term economic goals.

Trump puts words into action
But Trump’s most recent action was hardly unexpected. He has followed through with his campaign promise to focus attention elsewhere in environmental policy, given his view that:
There is still much that needs to be investigated in the field of ‘climate change’.
IMAGE
 The image of Trump, flanked by joyous coal miners, signing this order and declaring “an end to the war on coal”, sends a chilling message to rest of the world.
The climate change denial movement in the US pervades the public sphere. Funded by donors ranging from Koch Industries and ExxonMobil to dozens of conservative foundations and think-tanks, an industry designed explicitly to confuse has been wildly successful.
However, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway argue in Merchants of Doubt:
Nobody can publish an article in a scientific journal claiming the sun orbits the earth, and for the same reason, you can’t publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal claiming there’s no global warming. Probably well-informed professional science journalists wouldn’t publish it either. But ordinary journalists repeatedly did.
Research conducted by Yale University reveals that although 71% of participants say they trust scientists about global warming, only 53% believe it is caused by human activity. The climate denial movement has convinced millions of the legitimacy of its junk science.
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The impacts of climate change are already here
Whether through ignorance of science or a misguided belief in “America First”, the Trump administration intends to proceed full steam ahead on a trajectory that inevitably ends in the collapse of earth systems.
In a cruel twist, many of the countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change are on the lower end of emissions. Poor and vulnerable countries also command the least power to lobby for the radical changes necessary to protect their people.
Trump is clearly not concerned with anthropogenic climate change at this moment. However, the risk that millions will face climate-change-induced displacement represents a humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented severity.
Climate change was this month identified as a source of great risk to national, global and human security by Trump’s own secretary of defence. Yet Trump’s strategy appears to be focused on short-term economic objectives, with an enhanced military capacity and tighter border protection to deal with the inevitable fallout.
The desire to protect privileges through the control of accumulated resources and economic opportunities is historically a significant driver to restrict the movement of people. A future with millions displaced by climate change will generate conflict around the world. And the most vulnerable populations will bear the greatest impact.

Climate change, displacement and human rights
As awareness has grown that climate change poses great risks to human security, an extensive body of literature has emerged to examine the human rights implications of climate change.
Some writers have engaged with the intersection of climate change-induced displacement and human rights. Jane McAdam’s work has been important in highlighting the urgent need for human rights analysis of displacement, particularly for Australia’s neighbouring Small Island Developing States in the Pacific.
The value of considering climate change impacts through a human rights lens is in revealing human stories, which can be obscured in scientific debates.
However, most of the existing literature fails to characterise climate displacement as a threat to collective human rights. A key concern in this context is the foundational right of self-determination. This right is protected by common Article 1(1) of the twin human rights covenants – the ICCPR and ICESCR:
All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
Populations facing territory loss and forced displacement due to climate change also face losing their capacity to self-determine. International law as it stands is not equipped to protect populations forced to migrate internally or across borders.
Such challenges seem even more grave in light of Trump’s back-peddling on climate change policy. Retreat to parochial policymaking and refusal to acknowledge genuine global concerns deepens the incapacity of the international system to respond.
Reuters/David Gray
Acting today to protect those displaced tomorrow
Yet Trump’s regressive stance on climate change action will be perceived as a monumental shift from Barack Obama’s leadership on the issue. Critics argue the previous administration was simply pushing a green neoliberalism that will lead to the same environmental endpoint.
IMAGE
However, the extent to which we are locked into system collapse remains to be seen. The new administration would prefer to ignore the problem rather than participate in global efforts, flawed as they may be. This rejection of science, reason and moral obligation is an assault on an international consensus to tackle anthropogenic climate change.
It also represents a shift towards a future where borders could become ever more violent, and those most impacted by climate change are prevented from leaving the affected areas. We have already seen how border walls are both ineffective in stemming migration and produce great human tragedy.
The international community must embed binding human rights obligations in international treaties governing climate change impacts before it is too late. A lack of perceived real consequences is an enabler for the kind of decision-making emanating from the Trump administration. In this context, the circumstances of people facing displacement must be at the centre – rather than the periphery – of concern.

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Climate Change: Global Reshuffle Of Wildlife Will Have Huge Impacts On Humanity

The Guardian - 

Mass migration of species to cooler climes has profound implications for society, pushing disease-carrying insects, crop pests and crucial pollinators into new areas, says international team of scientists
Tropical fish like this Blue-barred Parrotfish are expanding their distribution towards the poles and destroying economically important kelp forests in Australia. Photograph: Jason Edwards/NG/Getty Images
Global warming is reshuffling the ranges of animals and plants around the world with profound consequences for humanity, according to a major new analysis.
Rising temperatures on land and sea are increasingly forcing species to migrate to cooler climes, pushing disease-carrying insects into new areas, moving the pests that attack crops and shifting the pollinators that fertilise many of them, an international team of scientists has said.
They warn that some movements will damage important industries, such as forestry and tourism, and that tensions are emerging between nations over shifting natural resources, such as fish stocks. The mass migration of species now underway around the planet can also amplify climate change as, for example, darker vegetation grows to replace sun-reflecting snow fields in the Arctic.
“Human survival, for urban and rural communities, depends on other life on Earth,” the experts write in their analysis published in the journal Science. “Climate change is impelling a universal redistribution of life on Earth.”
This mass movement of species is the biggest for about 25,000 years, the peak of the last ice age, say the scientists, who represent more than 40 institutions around the world. “The shifts will leave ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in their wake, radically reshaping the pattern of human wellbeing … and potentially leading to substantial conflict,” the team warn. “Human society has yet to appreciate the implications of unprecedented species redistribution for life on Earth, including for human lives.”
Climate change driven by human greenhouse gas emissions is not just increasing temperatures, but also raising sea levels, the acidity of the oceans and making extreme weather such as droughts and floods more frequent. All of these are forcing many species to migrate to survive.
“Land-based species are moving polewards by an average of 17km per decade, and marine species by 72km per decade” said Prof Gretta Pecl at the University of Tasmania in Australia, who led the new analysis.
As temperatures increase and rainfall patterns change, pests such as mosquitoes are being pushed into new areas where people may have little immunity to the diseases they carry. Photograph: Anders Lindström/SVA
There are many documented examples of individual species migrating in response to global warming and some examples of extinctions. But Pecl said: “Our study demonstrates how these changes are affecting ecosystems, human health and culture in the process.”
The most direct impact on humans is the movement of insects that carry diseases, such as the mosquitoes that transmit malaria shifting to new areas as they warm and where people may have little immunity. Another example is the northward spread in Europe and North America of the animal ticks that spread Lyme disease: the UK has seen a tenfold rise in cases since 2001 as winters become milder.
Food production is also being affected as crops have to be moved to cooler areas to survive, such as coffee, which will need to be grown at higher, cooler altitudes, causing deep disruption to a global industry. The pests of crops will also move, as will their natural predators, such as insects, birds, frogs and mammals.
Other resources are being affected, with a third of the land used for forestry in Europe set to become unuseable for valuable timber trees in the coming decades. Important fish stocks are migrating towards the poles in search of cooler waters, with the mackerel caught in Iceland jumping from 1,700 tonnes in 2006 to 120,000 tonnes in 2010, prompting a “mackerel war” with neighbours in whose waters the fish had previously been.
The benefits to humans being provided by species, and the complex ecosystems they live in, are also at risk. Mangroves, for example, are migrating polewards in Australia and in the southern US, meaning the storm protection and fish nurseries provided are being lost in some places.
As mangroves migrate polewards in Australia and the southern US, the storm protection and fish nurseries they provide are being lost in some places. Photograph: Marta Jarzyna
The shifting of animals and plants into new areas can sometimes lead to drastic changes, as those areas have not evolved with the incomers and lack natural defences. In Australia’s seas, kelp forests are being destroyed by an influx of tropical fish that eat them, threatening the important rock lobster trade.
The scientists also warn of feedback effects that can exacerbate climate change, citing the poleward spread of bark beetles in northern hemisphere forests. The beetles attack trees that may already be weakened by warmer, drier conditions, leading to more severe pest outbreaks and tree deaths. This in turn provides more fuel for forest fires, releasing more planet-warming carbon dioxide.
“Climate-driven species redistributions shouldn’t only be a concern for conservation biologists – they should worry everyone,” said Nathalie Pettorelli, at the ZSL Institute of Zoology in the UK, and one of the analysis team. “The world as a whole isn’t adequately prepared to handle the range of issues emerging from species moving across local, national, and international boundaries.”
She said plans to cope with climate change urgently needed to take these issues into account and said everyone could play a part in collecting much needed data on shifting species. “Citizen science can really help,” she said, with people reporting when they see new species in a region and some schemes are already set up.

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Why Koalas Are Suddenly Drinking Extra Water

National Geographic - Heather Brady 
Koalas have been showing an uncharacteristic behavior: drinking water. Koalas typically meet most of their daily need for water just by eating leaves. But researchers from the University of Sydney have documented an increase in sightings of koalas looking for water. Cameras near watering spots around the New South Wales, Australia town of Gunnedah showed koalas coming to drink, a cute sight that nonetheless may signal increased pressure from climate change.

Australian koalas are drinking much more water than they used to—and it's likely because of hot, dry weather aggravated by climate change.
Koalas, which normally spend most of their time in the safety of eucalyptus trees, have begun to climb down and drink from artificial water stations provided by University of Sydney researchers. The koalas of Gunnedah, a town in southeastern Australia often referred to as the "Koala Capital of the World," were drinking from the stations for more than 10 minutes on average, according to a press release from the university.
Koalas are leaving their trees even when they would normally be asleep, according to university researchers. The animals can sleep up to 18 hours a day in trees, and their primary diet consists of eucalyptus leaves, which they often eat at night. They can eat up to two and a half pounds of leaves per day.
Researchers think the koalas' newfound thirst is because the leaves that used to keep them hydrated are drying out as Gunnedah gets hotter and drier. The leaves used to provide enough water for the koalas that they didn't need to drink in addition. In fact, prior research suggests that koalas reject leaves with water contents less than 55 to 65 percent.
"Increasing hot and dry conditions will mean more droughts and heat waves affecting the koalas' habitat," Valentina Mella, a University of Sydney postdoctoral researcher, said in a statement. "The scientific literature is filled with statements saying that koalas do not need to drink free water, but our results show that koalas could benefit from water supplementation."
Koalas are listed as a vulnerable species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, threatened by stressors such as heat waves, tree-felling, and disease. The koala population took a major hit during the 1920s and 1930s, when they were widely hunted. Reintroduction efforts have helped, but koalas need around a hundred trees per animal, and the amount of available Australian woodlands is shrinking.
Gunnedah has seen an increase in its koala population, but the town's koala population dropped by 25 percent in 2009 because of a heat wave. Heat is likely to harm the area's koalas further. The study was conducted in the winter, and researchers believe the problem they observed will get worse during hotter summer months.
Australia's most recent summer (December 2016 to February 2017) brought record-breaking heat across much of New South Wales, the province that contains Gunnedah. Australian and Dutch climate scientists recently showed that climate change makes these kinds of extreme temperatures at least 10 times likelier than they otherwise would be.
But with the help of artificial water stations, Mella thinks that conservationists could give koalas a better chance to thrive.
"We hope to use our findings to create a practical plan to manage Australia's rural lands for this iconic species," she said.

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01/04/2017

How Australia’s Animals And Plants Are Changing To Keep Up With The Climate

The Conversation - 

Flora and fauna can adapt to climate change, but some are more successful than others. allstars/shutterstock
Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing Australia’s wildlife, plants and ecosystems, a point driven home by two consecutive years of mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.
Yet among this growing destruction there is a degree of resilience to climate change, as Australian animals and plants evolve and adapt.
Some of this resilience is genetic, at the DNA level. Natural selection favours forms of genes that help organisms withstand hotter and drier conditions more effectively.
Over time, the environmental selection for certain forms of genes over others leads to genetic changes. These genetic changes can be complex, involving many genes interacting together, but they are sufficient to make organisms highly tolerant to extreme conditions.
Some of this resilience is unrelated to DNA. These are “plastic” changes – temporary changes in organisms’ physical and biochemical functions that help them deal with adverse conditions or shifts in the timing of environmental events.
Plastic changes occur more quickly than genetic changes but are not permanent – the organisms return to their previous state once the environment shifts back. These changes also may not be enough to protect organisms from even more extreme climates.

What about Australia?
In Australia there is evidence of both genetic and plastic adaptation.
Some of the first evidence of genetic adaptation under climate change have been in vinegar flies on the east coast of Australia. These flies have a gene that encodes the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase. This gene has two major forms: the tropical form and the temperate form. Over the past 30 years, the tropical form of the gene has become more common at the expense of the temperate one.
Plastic adaptation due to climate change has been demonstrated in common brown butterflies in southern Australia. Female butterflies are emerging from their cocoons earlier as higher temperatures have been speeding up their growth and development by 1.6 days every decade. According to overseas research, this faster development allows butterfly caterpillars to take advantage of earlier plant growth.
Higher temperatures are causing the common brown butterflies in southern Australia to come out of their cocoons earlier. John Tann/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
In many cases, it is not clear if the adaptation is genetic or plastic.
The average body size of Australian birds has changed over the the past 100 years. Usually, when comparing birds of the same species, birds from the tropics are smaller than those from temperate areas. In several widespread species, however, the birds from temperate areas have recently become smaller. This might be the direct result of environmental changes or a consequence of natural selection on the genes that affect size.
In the case of long-lived species like eucalypts, it is hard to see any adaptive changes. However, there is evidence from experimental plots that eucalypts have the potential to adapt.
Different eucalypt species from across Australia were planted together in experimental forestry plots located in various environments. These plots have unwittingly become climate change adaptation experiments. By monitoring the plots, we can identify species that are better at growing and surviving in extreme climatic conditions.
Plot results together with other forms of DNA-based evidence indicate that some trees unexpectedly grow and survive much better, and are therefore likely to survive into the future.

What’s next?
We still have much to learn about the resilience of our flora and fauna.
There will always be species with low resilience or slow adaptive ability. Nevertheless, plastic and genetic changes can provide some resilience, which will change the predictions of likely losses in biodiversity.
Much like how our worst weeds and pests adapted to local climate conditions, as demonstrated many years ago, our local plants and animals will also adapt.
Species with short generation times – a short time between one generation (the parent) and the next (the offspring) – are able to adapt more quickly than species with longer lifespans and generation times.
For species with short generation times, recent models suggest that the ability to adapt may help reduce the impacts of climate change and decrease local extinction rates.
However, species with long generation times and species that cannot easily move to more habitable environments continue to have a high risk of extinction under climate change.
In those cases, management strategies, such as increasing the prevalence of gene forms helpful for surviving extreme conditions and moving species to locations to which they are better adapted, can help species survive.
Unfortunately, this means doing more than simply protecting nature, the hallmark of our biodiversity strategy to date. We need to act quickly to help our animals and plants adapt and survive.

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Courts Now At Front Line In Battles Over Climate Change

Christian Science Monitor - Tamara Micner

As governments make commitments on emissions – or fail to do so – questions of follow-through increasingly lands in court. Vienna's airport is a case in point.
Heinz-Peter Bader/Reuters/File
In what some experts call a “landmark ruling,” Austria’s Federal Administrative Court took an unusual step last month: It became one of the first in the world to block a new infrastructure project on the basis of climate change.
The judges interpreted regional and national laws, and Austria’s commitments within the European Union and the UN Paris Agreement, to mean that the “public interest” in limiting the impact of climate change outweighs shorter term economic growth from adding a proposed third runway to Vienna’s airport.
“[C]limate change is already taking place in Austria, and will have far reaching impacts on humans, animals, plants and the environment,” the court wrote in its decision, as translated by Global 2000, citing impacts on agriculture, tourism, weather, biodiversity, and human health from airport expansion.
The decision comes amid a wave of court cases over government environmental obligations, collectively signalling that the legal system may play a rising role as arbiter of climate action, and raising the stakes in a debate over what role for courts is appropriate, when it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions.
To some degree, the stepped-up legal action surrounding climate change is simply the natural result of governments making more legal commitments to mitigate the effects of global warming, legal experts say.
“Governments have said lots of things about what they’re going to do, and how they’re going to do it,” says Justin Gundlach, at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, in New York. “And if they don’t – or people think they haven’t, even if they had – the role of the court is to provide everyone the answer.”

Cases extend to Global South
Examples include the Urgenda case, where Dutch citizens argued that the government is insufficiently protecting them from climate change (it’s now being appealed); a South African ruling blocking construction of a coal-fired power plant; and a Norwegian lawsuit launched by Greenpeace and Nature & Youth over new government licenses for offshore oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. In the US, a federal judge has allowed a case to move forward in which children are arguing that government actions, by causing climate change, are an unconstitutional violation of their rights to life, liberty, and property.
Mr. Gundlach notes that the South African case is significant (along with rulings in India and Colombia) in extending climate litigation beyond high-income countries to the Global South, which is home to about 85 percent of the human population and 30 of the world’s 36 “biodiversity hotspots.”
In the face of powerful fossil-fuel industries, these cases enable citizen and environmental groups to push politicians to make their commitments more than symbolic. And sometimes, as in Vienna, they are taking governments and the public by surprise.
“The case shows that the commitments that policymakers make to protect climate, to fight climate change, can make a difference on the ground,” says Verena Madner, professor of public and environmental law at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. She hopes politicians will realize that they can’t “have it all,” signing laws and treaties and then avoiding the follow-through.
“I hope that it’s also a wake-up call for the government and parliament to take action, and to really do climate policy – rather than the courts – in the long run,” Ms. Madner adds.
Johannes Wahlmüller, climate campaigner at Global 2000, a nongovernmental organization in Vienna, agrees. The Austrian judges “said it cannot be that politicians sign those treaties, have the commitments, have the targets, and then we do an approach that’s totally against it.”

Could lawsuits backfire?
The distribution of power between legislators and judges is a delicate balance, and one argument against the court strategy, says Gundlach, is that “you’re avoiding the democratic aspects of the process.”
Some Austrians have accused the judges of acting as policymakers. (One counter-argument is that mainstream politicians and media have overwhelmingly favored the third runway, skewing public debates around the issue.)
In the long run, the power of courts will be circumscribed by politics. Judges’ ability to block infrastructure projects will depend on a country’s legal framework and climate commitments, as set by public officials.
In Norway, too, some are concerned that “a legal elite is going to decide about environmental policies,” says Truls Gulowsen, head of Greenpeace Norway, who helped launch the lawsuit there.
He disagrees with that view, noting that the judges are considering laws made by elected politicians, “and normally the Norwegian population trusts the courts in ruling between right and wrong.”
He also says climate litigation can inspire more people to participate in environmental action than in the past, as legal professionals or as donors for legal expenses, which can be significant.
Magdalena Heuwieser, of System Change Not Climate Change in Vienna, says court cases are valuable in raising awareness of the need for climate policies.
“Finally, there is a discussion going on around the topic: Can climate mitigation, or the need of reducing our emissions, lead to decisions which are actually limiting economic growth in dirty sectors?” she says.
But she also thinks public discussion and pressure on politicians are crucial tactics.

Aviation and climate
Though nonmilitary air travel accounts for only 5 percent of global greenhouse emissions, that looks set to rise as more people become financially able to take plane trips (today only 7 percent of people fly). Aviation is now the fastest-growing economic sector in emissions – with a tripling expected by 2050.
And with electric planes not expected anytime soon, technological advances don’t hold the same pollution-cutting potential that they do for ground-based transport.
Another problem, policy experts say, is a lack of environmental regulation around aviation. The industry is effectively self-regulating. (It was excluded from both the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol.)
Most countries exempt aviation emissions from their national inventories, especially for international flights, which either come from or go to another country. (Global 2000 estimates that, if the Austrian government included air travel in its accounting system, it would add 9 percent to the country’s annual carbon emissions.)
The industry also has a competitive advantage over other modes of transport through government subsidies for airport expansion and exemptions on airport property tax, fuel tax and sales tax on tickets. These benefits make flying artificially cheaper compared to driving or taking trains, for example.

Calls for 'behavioral change'
In last year’s first International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) climate agreement, which is opt-in until 2027, the industry pledged only to offset rather than reduce its emissions – mainly through controversial carbon offset projects in the Global South (which costs less than reducing emissions in richer countries).
Critics say the agreement represents “greenwashing” more than substantive progress on emissions.
“It in no way is consistent with the headline goals of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change,” says Leo Murray, campaigner with British activist group AFreeRide.org.
For Roland Jöbstl, Policy Officer for Climate and Energy at the European Environmental Bureau in Brussels, air travel as we know it cannot continue if countries intend to meet the Paris targets.
“We’re going to have to have a behavioral change” when it comes to travel, he says.
Though the Vienna decision is being appealed, that process is likely to take about a year or longer. For now, the decision is keeping one case of expansion from getting off the ground.

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Environmental Groups Sue Trump Administration For Approving Keystone Pipeline

Reuters - Valerie Volcovici

U.S. President Donald Trump smiles after announcing a permit for TransCanada Corp's Keystone XL oil pipeline while TransCanada Chief Executive Officer Russell Girling (L), U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (C) and U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry (R) stand beside him.  REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Several environmental groups filed lawsuits against the Trump administration on Thursday to challenge its decision to approve construction of TransCanada Corp's controversial Keystone XL crude oil pipeline.
In two separate filings to a federal court in Montana, environmental groups argued that the U.S. State Department, which granted the permit needed for the pipeline to cross the Canadian border, relied on an "outdated and incomplete environmental impact statement" when making its decision earlier this month.
By approving the pipeline without public input and an up-to-date environmental assessment, the administration violated the National Environmental Policy Act, groups including the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and the Northern Plains Resource Council said in their legal filing.
"They have relied on an arbitrary, stale, and incomplete environmental review completed over three years ago, for a process that ended with the State Department’s denial of a cross-border permit," the court filing says.
In the other filing, the Indigenous Environmental Network and North Coast Rivers Alliance sought injunctive relief, restraining Transcanada from taking any action that would harm the "physical environment in connection with the project pending a full hearing on the merits."
U.S. President Donald Trump announced the presidential permit for the Keystone XL at the White House last week. TransCanada's Chief Executive Officer Russ Girling and Sean McGarvey, president of North America's Building Trades Unions, stood nearby.
Trump, a Republican, said the project would lower consumer fuel prices, create jobs and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.
His Democratic predecessor, former president Barack Obama, rejected the pipeline, saying it would lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions and do nothing to reduce fuel prices for U.S. motorists.
"This tar sands pipeline poses a direct threat to our climate, our clean water, wildlife, and thousands of landowners and communities along the route of this dirty and dangerous project, and it must and will be stopped," said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.
The lawsuits came on the heels of a lawsuit filed on Wednesday challenging other recent moves to undo Obama's climate change regulations.
Conservation groups and the Northern Cheyenne Native American tribe of Montana sued the administration on Wednesday for violating the National Environmental Policy Act when it lifted a moratorium on coal leases on federal land.
All lawsuits have been filed in U.S. District Court in Montana’s Great Falls Division.

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