15/03/2018

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

The Conversation - 

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.

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Extreme Winter Weather Becoming More Common As Arctic Warms, Study Finds

The Guardian - 

Scientists found a strong link between high temperatures near the pole and unusually heavy snowfall and frigid weather farther south.
Freezing weather conditions dubbed the ‘Beast from the East’ brought snow and sub-zero temperatures to the UK. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
The sort of severe winter weather that has rattled parts of the US and UK is becoming more common as the Arctic warms, with scientists finding a strong link between high temperatures near the pole and unusually heavy snowfall and frigid weather further south.
A sharp increase in temperatures across the Arctic since the early 1990s has coincided with an uptick in abnormally cold snaps in winter, particularly in the eastern US, according to new research that analyzed temperature data from 1950 onwards.
Extreme cold winter weather is up to four times more likely when temperatures in the Arctic are unusually high, the study found. Researchers compared daily temperatures from across the Arctic region with something called the accumulated winter season severity index, which grades winter weather based on temperature, snow fall and snow depth, across 12 US cities.
“There’s a remarkably strong correlation between a warm Arctic and cold winter weather further south,” said Judah Cohen, a climatologist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research. “It’s a complex story – global warming is contributing to milder temperatures but is also having unforeseen consequences such as this.”
The Arctic has just experienced its toastiest winter on record, with parts of the region 20C (68F) warmer than the long-term average, a situation scientists have variously described as “crazy,” “weird,” and “simply shocking”. The far north latitudes are warming around twice as quickly as the global average, diminishing glaciers and sea ice and imperiling creatures such as polar bears.
Two large winter storms recently swept the US east coast in less than a week, unloading up to three inches of snow per hour in places, resulting in several deaths, thousands of cancelled flights, closed schools and snarled traffic.
The cold front even reached Florida, contributing to a recent surge in manatee deaths. So far this year, 166 of the marine mammals have been found dead off the state’s coast, with stress from the cold the leading cause of mortality. “Manatees may join polar bears as one of the first iconic victims of extinction in the wild from climate change,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
The US storms follow freezing winds from Siberia – dubbed the ‘beast from the east’ – that battered parts of Europe, with the British army deployed to help liberate hundreds of stranded drivers on UK motorways.
“This winter is a great example of what we can expect from climate change,” said Cohen. “In the US we had the ‘bomb cyclone’ in January, followed by July-like warm weather in February that I’d never seen before. And now we’ve had a parade of powerful winter storms and the beast from the east. It’s mind boggling.”
The research didn’t look at the reasons behind the trend of see-sawing temperatures between the Arctic and areas to the south but Cohen said it was consistent with the theory that the polar vortex – which shot to public consciousness during a 2014 cold spell – is being disrupted as the earth heats up.
The polar vortex is a low pressure system that swirls around the polar region. Sometimes it can stray further south, bringing cold Arctic air with it. There is continuing conjecture over the impact climate change is having but some scientists believe warming temperatures could be weakening the polar vortex’s flow, allowing it to meander towards the equator.
This nuanced picture of the consequences of climate change has been derided by Donald Trump, with the president using Twitter to mockingly reference cold weather during almost every winter in recent years. In December, Trump tweeted that “perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming” amid plunging temperatures.
Scientists say this stance overlooks the complicated changes underway in the environment as the world warms due to human activity, by an average of around 1C over the past century. This temperature rise hasn’t been uniform across the globe and has fueled an array of conditions, from increased flood risk in some areas to drought conditions and heatwaves in others.
Richard Alley, a leading glacier and climate expert at Penn State who was not involved in Cohen’s research, said the study is “fascinating” and “important” but added the discrepancy between Arctic temperatures and winter weather elsewhere could have other drivers, such as a warm Gulf of Mexico feeding extra energy into storms along the US east coast.
“The broadest picture is that we are indeed warming the world’s climate, primarily from carbon dioxide release from fossil-fuel burning, and this will impact us and other living things,” said Alley.
The Arctic’s role is seen quite differently by some other scientists, however, who point out that occasional outbursts of cold weather haven’t altered the trend that winters in the US northeast have been getting warmer, particularly since the 1970s.
“There have always been cold outbreaks. The cold air has to go somewhere,” said Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
“The issue is whether the air stays put or gets loose. Some years it is contained, other years it breaks out. The question is where and what is the cause. This study reaffirms the relationship but not its cause. The Arctic likely plays a modest role in terms of feedbacks but it is unlikely it is a cause.”

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'Game Changer': New Vulnerability To Climate Change In Ocean Food Chain

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Excessive rates of carbon dioxide affects the health of key micro-organisms in the oceans, potentially undermining the base of critical marine food chains, according to new research by US scientists.
A team of researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) applied techniques from the emerging field of synthetic biology to understand how ocean acidification from the absorption of CO2 is affecting tiny plants known as phytoplankton.
Phytoplankton like these diatoms turn out to be sensitive to ocean acidification, according to new research. Photo: Scripps Institution/Nature


Phytoplankton are not only a key food source for global fisheries, they are also important to the removal of CO2, much like how trees absorb the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.
In a paper published on Thursday in Nature, the team demonstrated how the microscopic plants require carbonate ions to acquire iron from the water to grow.
As CO2 levels rise, the oceans have less carbonate, affecting phytoplankton's ability to secure sufficient nutrient iron for growth. In fact, the concentration of sea surface carbonate ions are on course to drop by half by the end of this century.
“Ultimately our study reveals the possibility of a ‘feedback mechanism’ operating in parts of the ocean where iron already constrains the growth of phytoplankton,”said Jeff McQuaid, lead author of the study who made the discoveries as a PhD student at Scripps Oceanography.
“In these regions, high concentrations of atmospheric CO2 could decrease phytoplankton growth, restricting the ability of the ocean to absorb CO2 and thus leading to ever higher concentrations of CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere.”
Phytoplankton off New York. The micro-organisms help remove carbon dioxide from the ocean. Photo: NASA
Andrew E. Allen, a biologist at Scripps and JCVI and the paper's senior author, said that while the genetics of common animals such as rats or rabbits was well known, the same was not true of marine microbes that play important roles in the global food chain.
The researchers inserted a mutated copy of a gene into phytoplankton cells and tested how it responded to changing ocean chemistry.
“It was a complete game changer,” Professor Allen told Fairfax Media, noting interest in who acidification impacts on phytoplankton had been "a pretty intensive topic of research for the past 10-20 years” given the implication for the food web. Progress, though, had been limited until the new techniques emerged.
“With [synthetic biological] tools like this we can really study the function of a protein in detail to really enable some breakthroughs.”
Professor Allen discovered several iron-responsive genes in diatoms - a type of phytoplankton - in 2008 that had no known function.
DNA analysis of samples that were collected by Mr McQuaid during a trip in the same year to Antarctica revealed one of Professor Allen’s iron genes was not only present in every sample of seawater, but that every major phytoplankton group in the Southern Ocean seemed to have a copy.
The subsequent research centred on the more common of two methods of iron take-up by diatoms.
"In the Southern Ocean, where the temperature decreases the solubility of carbonate, we should already be in the zone where the models project which start to limit iron uptake," Professor Allen said. "Certainly by 2100...the uptake of iron by this [primary] mechanism could be reduced by 45 per cent.”
While the micro organisms had a secondary way to extract the iron they needed to grow, that method was "a lot more energetically expensive and less efficient", Professor Allen said.
"If you take away one kind of iron substrate, there could be ripples through the microbial food web."
Professor Allen credited the now-Dr McQuaid for pulling together a wide-range of scientific fields - tapping experts in molecular evolution, iron and carbonate chemistry, synthetic biology and diatom biology - to "weave a coherent, integrated story”.

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14/03/2018

Should Climate Change Be Called Murder? What Do You Call Knowingly Killing People?

Washington Post - Tom Toles

Tom Toles
This seems like as good a time as any to shift the climate argument from the debate club to criminal court, and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger intends to do just that.
“I don’t think there’s any difference: If you walk into a room and you know you’re going to kill someone, it’s first-degree murder; I think it’s the same thing with the oil companies.”
Murder. Yes, it’s about time somebody started to use language that captures the actual effect of deliberately delaying the transition to carbon-free fuel. Will people really die as a result of climate change?
They already have, from the amplification of the power of storms, to more intense drought, wildfires and flooding.
The World Health Organization estimates that between 2030 and 2050, 250,000 people will die from climate change. EVERY YEAR. From malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress.
Of course, right now we’re living in a world where our current president can refute such concerns with the reasoned response of “FAKE NEWS!”
 Trump diddles while home burns. And the U.S. government has become a full orchestra of fellow diddlers, and everyone is afraid to yell fire in the crowded theater, which is actually ablaze.
Environmental Protection Agency Director Scott Pruitt, who is conducting this gruesome symphony of suicide, doesn’t believe in climate science.
But then he doesn’t believe in evolution either. And why should he? He is behaving like a sheep, and when he looks around at others in his party, all he sees is more sheep. And they are all ambling off together to the slaughter, and trying to lead the rest of us there as well.
If the rest of us humans don’t stand up and stop them, maybe Schwarzenegger should change his lawsuit to First-Degree Slaughter.

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New Climate Change Lawsuit In Colombia Part Of Growing, Worldwide Trend

OpenGlobalRights - Camila Bustos*

A new lawsuit in Colombia involving young plaintiffs seeks to protect their rights to life and health by preventing deforestation and holding the government accountable to its climate action pledges.
The group of plaintiffs beside the Director of Dejusticia César Rodríguez. Dejusticia
Climate change threatens the fulfillment of human rights around the world and we are not doing nearly enough to stop it. The slow progress of global climate negotiations, and the failure of governments to advance their plans to tackle emissions and adapt to a warming world, have led climate advocates to turn to a new strategy – climate litigation.
According to a UN Environment Programme report, as of March 2017, there were 654 climate lawsuits filed in the United States and 230 other cases in the rest of the world. While most of these cases are concentrated in the global North, there have also been climate change lawsuits in countries such as India, South Africa, the Philippines and Pakistan.
Indeed, climate litigation has become a global trend as advocates push for action on climate change through the courts. In most cases, plaintiffs are suing governments for failing to comply with their climate-related goals, for not adopting ambitious emissions mitigation policies, or for approving particular projects that contribute to climate change.
According to Australian lawyer Sophie Marjanac, the prospects of these kinds of lawsuits is improving because of two factors. First, there is an increasing number of governments that have made specific commitments on climate action, allowing them to be held accountable to those targets. And second, climate science is improving which means it is becoming easier to attribute specific harms (e.g. extreme weather) to climate change, thus bolstering arguments for liability.
According to a UN Environment Programme report, as of March 2017, there were 654 climate lawsuits filed in the United States and 230 other cases in the rest of the world.
Inspired by this wave of recent lawsuits, a Colombian NGO, Dejusticia, decided to support a legal action to tackle climate change and its devastating impacts on Colombia. The organization has a history of using strategic litigation as a way to highlight key national issues and to have a broader social impact.
This type of legal action has the potential of reaching the Constitutional Court, which in turn can hold accountable other branches of government for failing to guarantee Constitutional principles and fundamental rights. Such litigation can also stir public debate, and its effects may go beyond those of the case itself.
The case was launched by 25 young Colombians; they are suing the national government for failing to curb deforestation in Colombia’s Amazon region. Today, cattle ranching, the expansion of agriculture, and mining are driving the destruction of the Amazon forest in Colombia. The most recent data shows that the national deforestation rate increased by 44% in 2016. This is equal to 178,597 acres of forest loss, of which 39% was concentrated in the Amazon region.
The plaintiffs are arguing that deforestation is violating their constitutional right to a healthy environment, which in turn threatens their rights to life, water, food, and health. The case is launched by youth because as the future generation it is they who will have to face the impacts of climate change and deforestation. They come from 17 different municipalities in the country, which are most threatened as a result of climate change.
The plaintiffs include Yurshell Yanishey Rodríguez, a 23-year old environmental engineering student from the island of Providencia, the region in the country that is most at risk from climate change. By 2070, the temperature in the area will increase by 1.4° C and the rain volume will decrease by 32%.
Over a thousand kilometers away, another of the plaintiffs, Pablo Cavanzo Piñeros, a 13-year-old boy, lives in Bogota, where according to official projections, there will be an increase in temperature of 1.6°C by the year 2070.
There is an intrinsic connection between the Colombian Amazon and the water cycle that supplies the rest of the nation; deforesting one area could have a significant impact thousands of kilometers away.
The lawsuit demands that the government backs its international rhetoric on deforestation with concrete and effective actions on the ground. Not only is the destruction of forests the greatest source behind Colombia’s greenhouse gas emissions, but also a threat to local ecosystems and the populations that depend on them for their livelihoods.
The plaintiffs also demand that the government creates an inter-generational agreement on climate change – taking into account impacts on future generations – and outlining the measures that the government will adopt to reduce deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. Further, the lawsuit asks that this document will also include the adaptation and mitigation strategies each vulnerable municipality in the country will implement.
The plaintiffs believe that a court ruling in their favor will not be an exception, but part of a broader trend whereby advocates seek justice through climate change litigation. For example, in the Urgenda v. The Netherlands case, the Hague District Court found that the Netherlands government was not doing enough to meet its climate mitigation goals to avert the imminent danger of climate change.
The climate movement is evolving and, as it increases pressure on governments to act on climate change, it diversifies its toolkit and strategies to demand social change. Litigation is clearly one strategy worth pursuing.

 *Camila Bustos is a researcher at Dejusticia, in Colombia. She is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit launched by Dejusticia to demand government action on climate change.

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Commentary: Climate Change Needs Better Storytelling To Address Severe Threats

Channel NewsAsia - Benjamin P Horton*

The World Economic Forum says extreme weather events are the most likely and most severe threat facing humanity in 2018 yet climate change doesn’t get the attention it needs, says one expert from the Earth Observatory of Singapore.
Singapore experienced flash floods, hailstones, strong winds and a cool spell in January 2018. (Photo: Alex Lo, Facebook / Michael Wong)
SINGAPORE: The story about climate change arguably got its first big public hit more than ten years ago with Al Gore’s documentary about global warming An Inconvenient Truth.
But maintaining public attention and keeping the heat on climate change action have been tough.
People are hungry for news about the risk of climate change but boring, technical jargon is alienating them, said the United Nations top environment official Erik Solheim in December 2017.
People need to be excited and inspired to take action and change their behaviour, he added.
Yet “the language of environmentalists has been boring, so uninspiring ... If we just speak a technical language, with many acronyms and politically-correct phrases, no one will listen,” he said in an interview during a Bonn conference on landscapes.
Perhaps the consequences of human-driven climate change seem abstract, technical or too far away in the future.
Do these in turn cause readers to look at climate change news, shrug and then move on to other stories?
There’s a strong case to be made about the importance of communicating the priority we need to place on climate change.
Recent extreme weather pattern are giving us a glimpse into the catastrophe we might find ourselves in if we fail to act.
A woman pushing her car which stalled in a flood at Bedok North on Monday morning (Jan 8), after a heavy downpour over many parts of Singapore. (Photo: Twitter/SynCPositive) 
Extreme weather in early January
The start of 2018 has been marked by extreme weather with widespread impact on public safety, transport, energy and health around the world.
A major winter storm hit the United States Atlantic coast in early January, battering coastal areas with heavy snow, blizzards and strong winds and a drop in temperatures.
Boston suffered coastal flooding after it saw the highest ever recorded tide since 1921.
Flash flooding and deadly mudslides took place in southern California because of intense rain, in areas where protective vegetation have been destroyed by devastating wildfires in late 2017.
In Asia, central and eastern China saw heavy rain and snow in Shaanxi, Henan, Hubei, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces in early January, with monthly maximum rainfall levels broken in 92 counties.
In the southern hemisphere, Cape Town is running out of water, because reliable winter rains have vanished — a phenomenon one meteorologist calls a once-in-628-years weather event. 
If the rains do not materialise and consumption does not fall in Cape Town, people will be forced to use standpipes, officials say. (Photo: AFP/Rodger Bosch)
Australia was gripped by intense heat, with the weather station in Sydney reaching 47.3°C on Jan 7, the hottest in 80 years.
Flash floods, strong winds and hailstones in Singapore coupled with a bout of freakish cool weather, the longest cold spell experienced here in at least a decade showed we were not immune.

 Global warming a key culprit
These extreme weather events were both signals of a dangerous, human-made shift in Earth’s climate as much as they were a natural stretch of bad luck.
Monsoon surges that bring cool weather partially explains what transpired in Singapore.
Natural climate cycles, especially the interplay between upper atmospheric conditions over polar regions and mid-latitude conditions over the oceans and on land, were primary forces driving the extreme weather globally.
But natural cycles by themselves don’t explain the recent number of record-breaking extreme weather events.
The reality is that the forces undergirding is global warming – and it’s all coming to a head.
NASA's Terra satellite captured this visible light image of Tropical Cyclone Berguitta moving toward Mauritius. (Photo: NASA)
Hotter, with rising sea levels
The Earth is getting warmer, with significantly more moisture in the atmosphere. Decades of data show that a long-term build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is trapping heat and warming up lands, oceans, and the atmosphere.
17 of the 18 warmest years in the 136-year global temperature record all have occurred since 2001, with the exception of 1998.
The year 2016 ranks as the warmest on record globally and here in Singapore, which had a mean annual temperature of 28.4°C.
2016 was an El Niño year, and mainland Southeast Asia encountered its warmest monthly mean surface air temperatures in April 2016 since record-keeping began.
Apart from surpassing national temperature records in mainland Southeast Asia, this event disrupted crop production, imposed societal distress and resulted in peak energy consumption.
Battered by massive cyclones, El Nino-fuelled drought and swollen king tides, fragile Pacific island nations were one of the hardest hit countries in 2016. (Photo: AFP/Giff Johnson)
El Niño might have exacerbated the situation, but the temperatures would never have happened without the human-made shift in Earth’s climate.
Some models have predicted that the warming of the Earth’s climate could increase the average strength of hurricanes and typhoons.
Scientists are confident that rising sea levels are leading to higher storm surges and more floods - and the mean sea level in the Strait of Singapore has increased at the rate of 1.2mm to 1.7mm each year in the period 1975 to 2009.
By the end of the century, the average world temperature could increase by 5 °C, depending in part on how much carbon we emit between now and then.
The latest climate models concluded with high confidence that with continued warming projected for the rest of this century, Singapore and other countries in Southeast Asia will experience more frequent, record-breaking hot Aprils, just like the extreme weather event of 2016.
Workers in outdoor environments including those in construction and shipping are particularly at risk from heat-related health issues. (File photo: Ngau Kai Yan)
Most likely and most severe threat
The Global Risks Report 2018 of the World Economic Forum (WEF) states that extreme weather events are the most likely and most severe threat facing humanity in 2018 – because scientists expect the frequency of extreme weather events to increase substantially.
The trend towards more frequent extreme weather events only underscores how important it is that we enhance our ability to predict and manage them. So what can we do?
The solution has been clear for more than two decades: Governments must take aggressive action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The extreme weather lends greater urgency to climate change initiatives like those under the Paris Agreement.
An essential key to meeting the challenge of extreme weather is critical environmental intelligence. 
Just like the intelligence of the security world, intelligence in the environmental arena combines data, analysis, modelling, and assessment.
The smart approach to extreme weather is to attack all the risk factors, by designing crops that can survive drought, buildings that can resist floods and high winds, policies that discourage people from building in dangerous places - and of course, by shifting our economy to greener energy sources and reducing our greenhouse-gas emissions.
The Paris Agreement commits signatories to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, which is blamed for melting ice caps and glaciers, rising sea levels and more violent weather events. (Photo: AFP)
Singapore has taken steps to reduce the impact of extreme weather events by improving drainage to reduce flood-prone areas, developing weather-proof technologies, and cooling the island by growing urban green spaces such as rooftop gardens.
Where climate change poses a real danger, we cannot take the attitude that it’s someone else’s job to sort out. 
Indeed, the biggest challenge we must guard against in this battle against climate change is people tuning out to the message about global warming.
Erik Solheim mentioned this when he said:
For this to happen, we have to speak in a different language that is simpler and breaks down the science to explain to people what climate change really means for them, in their daily lives, here and now.
As individuals, we should seize everyday opportunities to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. We can recycle, reuse and reduce. Whenever we can, we should use public transport and walk.
Quite literally, small steps can lead to large-scale change when we, citizens of the earth, act together.

 *Professor Benjamin P Horton is principal investigator at the Earth Observatory of Singapore at Nanyang Technological University.

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13/03/2018

Companies 'Failing' To Deal With Climate Change Risk

Fairfax - Ruth Williams

Too many big Australian companies are failing to reveal plans for tackling climate change or to explain how climate change may impact their businesses, according to new research.
The report, to be released Wednesday by climate NGO Market Forces, is based on public information from 73 big listed companies operating in sectors considered high-risk on climate change.
It found that 84 per cent of the companies had not released a plan to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, 60 per cent did not have an emissions reduction target, and less than half had identified climate change as a material business risk.
APRA has warned of the financial risks of climate change.
Market Forces is now calling for the disclosure of climate change-related risks to be made mandatory for companies, saying too many were failing to adhere to voluntary standards.
“This is a stark reminder that while Australian companies largely acknowledge the need to decarbonise, they are dragging their feet on implementing concrete steps to actually manage climate risk,” said Market Forces analyst Dan Gocher, the report's author.
“For many companies, climate change poses a material risk to shareholder returns so we expect to see investors stepping up to the plate to hold companies to account.”
The research follows last year's release of guidelines nailed down by the G20's Financial Stability Board taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosure, known as the TCFD, which have been endorsed by big investors world-wide and companies including BHP, AGL and National Australia Bank.
The guidelines push companies to disclose climate change risks using different scenarios for how the world may deal with climate change, focusing on the Paris agreement's pledge to keep global warming to "well below" 2 degrees.
Regulators in Australia and elsewhere have been warning of the risks posed by climate change to the global financial system, with the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority encouraging financial institutions to run stress tests on climate risk scenarios. But the Market Forces research shows that that only 10 of the 73 companies examined had published some form of scenario analysis.
Among the companies examined, Mr Gocher said AGL, BHP, Santos, South32 and Aurizon had made most comprehensive public disclosures, while among the big four banks Westpac and ANZ were "marginally ahead of the others".
But Market Forces highlighted many companies it says need to improve, including petrol retailer and supplier Caltex - among many that had not yet disclosed emissions reduction plans or targets - supermarket giant Woolworths, which had not yet produced scenario ​analysis or an emissions reduction plan; and financial institutions including Bendigo and Adelaide Bank; which had not disclosed potential risks and benefits posed by climate change to the company's operations or discussed whether climate change posed a material risk.
Some of the companies have promised more disclosure soon. Caltex said it would be disclosing a "range of actions" related to climate risk in its upcoming annual report, while Woolworths said had already pledged to do more work "assessing the impacts of a two-degree world and their applicability to our group", saying more would be disclosed in its 2018 Corporate Responsibility Report.
Bendigo and Adelaide Bank pointed to its long-time disclosure of carbon emissions and its practice of not lending to projects in the coal and coal seam gas sectors.  "The above actions have come about as a result of ongoing discussions within the group about the potential of climate change to impact our business and we will continue to have these discussions," it said.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission is currently monitoring companies' climate risk reporting practices, with the Turnbull government last week backing, in principle, a senate committee recommendation that ASIC review its guidance on risk reporting to ensure it adequately reflected "evolving asset measurement implications of carbon risk".
The Market Forces research assesses companies' disclosure across eight measures, including whether they had released a carbon emissions target and a plan for how those reductions would be achieved, who in the company carried responsibility for climate change risk, and whether the company considered climate change to be a material risk.

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative