The Netherlands Contemplates The World’s Toughest Climate Law

Vox - David Roberts

A new Dutch proposal would put climate at the center of national politics.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands. Jack Taylor/Getty Images

 A coalition of seven Dutch political parties recently unveiled a climate policy proposal that is breathtaking in its ambition. If it becomes law, it will codify the most stringent targets for greenhouse gas reductions of any country in the world.
There are still several steps between the proposal and passage, including debate in both houses of Parliament, and lawmakers may make changes. But given the broad political support — the parties involved control 113 of 150 seats in Parliament — it is widely expected to pass in something like its current form by late next summer.
It would be the world’s eighth national climate law (after the UK, Mexico, Denmark, Finland, France, Norway, and Sweden), but it boasts a few features that make it particularly notable.

It’s bipartisan! Or rather, heptapartisan.
Here in the US, we’ve grown depressingly accustomed to climate battles breaking down along partisan lines: Democrats push (inadequate) solutions; Republicans deny that the problem exists or that anything needs to be done about it.
In contrast, the Dutch proposal is supported by a coalition of parties ranging from the far left to the center-right, together representing a large majority of seats in the Dutch Parliament. (One notable absence: the right-wing populist party, Party for Freedom, led by notorious Islamophobe Geert Wilders.) The current prime minister, Mark Rutte, leads the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), which is one of the bill’s primary supporters.

Dutch Parliament. Carl Court/Getty Images

 The proposal represents a degree of social and political consensus that is almost unthinkable in the US — not only that climate change is “real” (an absurd debate only the US is having), but that it’s urgent and that national policy should support the goals agreed to in Paris. Those goals obligate developed countries like the Netherlands to virtually eliminate carbon emissions by mid-century.
It would be like John McCain throwing his weight behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s climate policies.

It’s ambitious AF!
If passed as proposed, the Dutch law would be the world’s most stringent, putting into statute the following targets:

• 49 percent reduction in greenhouse gases (relative to 1990 levels) by 2030
• 95 percent reduction by 2050
• 100 percent carbon-neutral electricity by 2050

The targets are based on a report last year from the country’s environmental agency, which revealed that the Netherlands (like every other country on Earth) would not accomplish its portion of the Paris targets with current policy. Paris targets imply that all developed countries need to be at or near carbon-neutral by 2050.
Hitting these goals will involve a wide range of investments in everything from district heating to carbon sequestration. The new government has also committed to phasing out coal by 2030, which will mean shutting down three coal plants that only finished construction recently.

It ensures climate will get ongoing attention
Under the bill, every year, the Dutch Parliament and the Cabinet will discuss and debate the year’s progress toward decarbonization goals. With independent advice from the Council of State, they will adjust programs as necessary to stay on track, in something analogous to a yearly budgeting process.
Then, on the fourth Thursday of October — “Climate Day” — the government will issue a public memorandum reviewing progress toward climate goals and laying out plans for the year ahead.
If nothing else, yearly reviews will keep climate in the forefront of Dutch politics, and in the public eye.

Queen Maxima (yes, that’s her name) of the Netherlands contemplates a wind turbine at an exhibition in Hamburg, Germany. Christian Augustin/Getty Images

 Every five years, the climate law will be revised and updated, to ensure the country stays in alignment with Paris targets.

It’s a miniature Paris agreement
The climate law does not specify any policies — only targets and timelines — and it says nothing about legal enforcement mechanisms to guarantee that targets are met. It implicitly relies on the power of transparency to do the work of forcing future governments to implement actual policies.
The assumption is that governments will be embarrassed and suffer politically if they report inadequate progress year after year. The Paris agreement relies on a similar dynamic: the power of reputational risk to do the work of accountability.
That aspect of the proposal has drawn some criticism. Dennis van Berkel of the Dutch NGO Urgenda, which sued the Dutch government in 2013 for failing to address climate change, told Green News that the law is a “paper tiger.” A legally binding target for 2030 was removed from the initial draft, he said, along with short-term carbon budgets.
“What remains is unfortunately a largely symbolic act which only ensures that a yearly climate debate is organised which reports on the route towards the 2050 target,” he said, “but which gives very little assurance that real action is taken.”
I get why Dutch climate campaigners want to keep the pressure on (that’s their job), but this seems a bit uncharitable. Since only the 2050 target is legally binding, it would be possible for Dutch politicians to fritter and fail for the next 30 years, to do nothing but have annual meetings to no effect, but to believe that will happen is to completely dismiss the power of transparency and democratic accountability. Politicians don’t want to be seen as failing!
The bill will ensure that climate change is put in the spotlight every year. And it contains an unambiguous long-term target, with required adjustments every five years. If Dutch politicians do fail on climate goals going forward, they won’t be able to hide or downplay it. The failure will be extremely public. That matters.

Netherland’s Prime Minister Mark Rutte speaks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Jack Taylor/Getty ImagesThe Dutch are now pushing Europe forward

Along with the newly aggressive domestic policy has come a newly aggressive posture toward European Union climate policy. Rutte recently called upon the EU to revise its collective carbon target up to 55 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. (Germany’s outgoing environment minister dismissed the call as “unrealistic.”)
Alongside the UK, which also recently signaled that it might aim for a zero-carbon goal, the Netherlands is going from laggard to leader on climate at a dizzying pace.
I wasn’t sure I’d live to see it, but it looks like a substantial bloc of nations is forming that is taking climate change science seriously and making policy around it. The more nations that put carbon neutrality on record as the appropriate mid-century goal, the more difficult it will become for other industrialized nations to justify planning otherwise.
Meanwhile, as countries across the world plot a course toward a sustainable future, US policy falls farther and farther behind. America, increasingly alone among nations, still clings, eyes shut tight, to the dirty past.

Links

• The Netherlands presents ambitious Climate Law
• The Implications Of The Paris Climate Agreement For The Dutch Climate Policy Objectives (pdf)
• Dutch coalition accord: the Netherlands goes for climate leadership in Europe
• Dutch Government’s new climate law met with mixed reaction
• The Climate Litigation Threat Is Getting Credible
• Four Climate Change Lawsuits To Watch In 2018
• From Australia To El Salvador To Vietnam, The Environment Is Finally Getting Its Day In Court
• More Than 20 Nations Seek Lead In Setting Tougher Climate Goals

Forget Trump: Europe Plans To Push For More Ambition On Climate

Bloomberg - Ewa Krukowska

• European long-term climate roadmap to be unveiled in November
• Current emissions-cut trajectory not enough to meet Paris goal

Photographer: Alessia Pierdomenico/Bloomberg

Trump or no Trump, the European Union is set to spur businesses to do more to meet the Paris climate accord goals.
Taking a long view and encouraging companies to front-load actions to cap future costs will be among the thrusts of the climate push for the bloc’s executive suites. In its longer-term strategy to be presented in November to achieve targets set under the Paris accord, the European Commission is considering options ranging from lowering greenhouse-gas discharges by 80 percent by 2050 compared with 1990 levels to net-zero emissions by mid-century.

“Having a 2050 perspective helps people accept more ambitious paths,” Mauro Petriccione, the director general for climate at the EU’s regulatory arm, said in an interview in Brussels. “That also means that people should start thinking now that at some point they will have to go beyond the 2030 target. You give them a signal now, you help them plan for the long-term.”

The steps are aimed at showing how determined the 28-nation bloc is to honor the accord’s targets even in the face of President Donald Trump’s decision to take the U.S. out of the 2015 agreement signed by almost all other countries in the world.

The EU currently has a binding target of cutting emissions by at least 40 percent by the end of the next decade. That’s not enough to meet the Paris objective of keeping global temperature growth well below 2 degrees Celsius, a move scientists say is needed to prevent catastrophic effects of global warming.

Not Enough
The EU has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by about 23 percent since 1990

Source: European Environment Agency

While the new European strategy won’t propose changing the bloc’s 2030 goal, it will set milestones for the following decades that could be turned into binding targets later on.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the EU will host a high-level conference in Brussels to consult companies, non-governmental organizations and researchers on the upcoming road map.

More Needed
“It is now time to look at the longer-term perspective and to set out a strategy for where EU climate policy is heading by 2050,” Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete said in a statement on Thursday. “The clean energy transition will be key, and achieving our climate objectives will require contributions from every part of the economy and society.”
For the EU, which wants to lead by example, the long-term strategy will also be a political tool to demand more at the next United Nations talks that start in December in Katowice, Poland. Envoys from more than 190 countries will aim to iron out a rule-book to implement the Paris deal and its mechanisms to step up carbon reductions worldwide.
“We have a reasonable chance of persuading the other large emitters in the developed and emerging world to follow us,” Petriccione said. “The only way to persuade them is to be successful. The only example people want to follow is success.”

Climate Streaks
Carbon-dioxide emissions over the past decade 

Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018

Europe cut its greenhouse-gas discharges by 23 percent by 2016 compared with 1990 levels, and is on track to beat its 2020 target of lowering them by a fifth. The price on carbon in its flagship cap-and-trade program, which puts emissions limits on almost 12,000 facilities owned by manufacturers and power producers, more than doubled over the past two years to around 16 euros ($18.7) per metric ton after an overhaul that alleviated a glut of permits.

No ‘Monsters’
As part of a push for more ambition at the UN climate talks in December, the EU may toughen its contribution to the Paris Agreement and submit a stricter goal of “slightly over 45 percent” by 2030. Deeper reductions will be possible after policy makers agreed to pursue stricter energy efficiency and renewables goals for 2030, Canete said last month.
To ensure its fight against climate change and shift to sustainable economy are effective, Europe must embrace a new approach to energy, going beyond incorporating renewables into the grid, according to Petriccione. As part of the transformation, the EU should also embrace new clean sources of energy, such as hydrogen, he said.
“It’s perfectly conceivable to diversify our sources of energy not only to replace fossil fuels but also according to what you actually want to do with the energy,” he said. “A power plant that feeds the electric grid of a large city is a monster. A power plant that feeds a steel plant is a monster. You don’t need to get energy from a monster to feed your house. This gives you a lot more options.”

Links

• EU Can Toughen Its Emissions-Cut Target Under Paris Climate Deal
• Former Coal Lobbyist Takes Over EPA From Embattled Chief Pruitt
• China, Europe fill the gap as US cedes global climate leadership
• UN Environment and European Union call for stronger action against climate-change-related security threat
• More than 20 nations seek lead in setting tougher climate goals

'Huge Step': Tourist Industry Wakes Up To Reef's Climate Risks

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Tourist operators on the Great Barrier Reef are shifting their stance on climate change, with the peak industry body opposing Adani's "mega coal mine", and acknowledging fossil fuel use has to be phased out.
In an unprecedented declaration, a year in the making, the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators (AMPTO) and Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) called on "all our political leaders...to fight for the future of our reef".

Great Barrier Reef tour operators are shifting their stance on climate change, and the threat it poses for corals in Australia and around the world. Photo: Dean Miller, Great Barrier Reef Legacy

"The carbon pollution from coal, oil and gas is heating the air and the oceans to dangerous levels," the statement said, noting the record marine heatwaves in 2016 and 2017 had damaged coral reefs worldwide. "It’s not too late to save our Reef but time is critical."
"On climate change, I'm sold," Col McKenzie, AMPTO's long-serving chief executive, told Fairfax Media. "It's a man-made issue."
The declaration has already drawn dozens of signatories among tourist businesses and adds to local calls for climate action from local government such as Douglas Shire council.
Imogen Zethoven, the society's reef campaign director, said the tourism industry had been "in a state of shock" after the first bout of mass coral bleaching in 2016, and had resisted discussing climate change.
But a second bout in 2017 brought a recognition that a warming planet "is an existential threat to the reef and the tourism industry", Ms Zethoven said.

'Overdue'
Tony Fontes, a dive operator based in the Whitsundays since the 1980s, called AMPTO's shift "a huge step".
"It's overdue but it is happening," Mr Fontes said. "Basically we need a mass campaign" to protect the reef.
How far the tourist industry push dovetails with the anti-Adani campaign remains to be seen.
Bob Manning, Cairns Regional Council mayor, doubts opposition to the Indian miner's proposed giant Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin "gets us anywhere".
Still, "Adani has done us no favour overseas", Mr Manning said. "It’s hard for us to say we are responsibly managing the reef...but at the same time we’re letting those coal ships through."
A spokeswoman for Adani said the company remains "100 per cent committed to the Carmichael project and are confident of securing finance".
"Strict safety and environmental standards already governing shipping along the Queensland coast will ensure there is no impact to the Great Barrier Reef,” she said.

'Global issue'
Ian Macfarlane, chief executive of the Queensland Resources Council, said coal from the basin "is high energy, lower emission coal when compared with lower quality, higher emission coals sourced from Indonesia and India".
"The addressing of climate change is a global issue and requires all countries to be involved in lowering emissions," he said.
Mark Read, acting director of field management at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, said the tourism industry's new stance comes even as visitor numbers rebound to record levels.
“These are the people who spend their lives taking people out, [who have] lived and breathed and tried to make a living through these tough times," Dr Read said.
Still, the authority is not in a position to discuss curbs on Australian coal, such as the Adani mine.
Climate change “is the thing that the global community most desperately needs to tackle if we’re going to...give the reef a real possible chance for a long-term future,” Dr Read said.

Links

• Reef Climate Declaration - FNQ Businesses
• 'Environment is our economy': Tourism wakes up to a reef in peril
• All-time heat records have been set all over the world during the past week
• Study of reefs reveals benefits of keeping global warming in check
• Australian teens more worried about climate change than adults

Climate Change Needs Behaviour Change

Yale University - Elise Gilchrist

Photo Credit: AG Sano

Today, nearly two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions are linked either directly or indirectly to human consumption.
What we buy, what we eat, how we travel, and how we dispose of our waste all contribute to climate change.
But this isn’t another sad story about a planet in peril.
In this story, humans are not only the cause, but also the solution.
With broad public support for climate action, the time is right to to elevate and celebrate creative solutions. In the United States alone, a majority of adults believe humans can reduce global warming[1], and 67% think that citizens themselves should be doing more to address the problem[2].
But too often, the traditional response to major environmental problems relies on rigid legislation, incremental policy changes, data-driven reports, and fines for rule breakers. But humans don’t always behave logically or rationally.
We’re social and emotional animals. And if climate change is driven by human behavior, then shouldn’t we turn to behavioral science to tackle the problem? In the end, addressing climate change requires an understanding of behavior change.
That is why several leading conservation organizations have teamed up to launch a global search for proven approaches to changing consumer behavior and curbing their carbon footprint.
Solution Search is a crowdsourcing competition sponsored by Rare, Conservation International, National Geographic, The Nature Conservancy, The United Nations Development Programme, and World Wildlife Fund.
The competition seeks to identify, spotlight, and reward nonprofits, governments, companies, or other organizations that are changing consumer habits using behavioral science principles. These include appealing to people’s emotions, creating new social norms, and making climate-friendly behaviors easier to adopt.
Solution Search: Climate Change Needs Behavior Change is the fifth Solution Search competition.  This year’s competition—the first to bring together the six organizations listed above—seeks to highlight the approach, not just the result.
Judges aren’t just after the new veggie burger that tastes like real meat, but rather, what is the way to motivate self-proclaimed carnivores to start eating them? Designing a bike share program in a new city is just one step in inspiring a movement of eco-friendly commuters.
How can behavioral science inform the adoption strategy? The methods and messages that drive an individual, group, or community to change their behavior have widespread implications for tackling an issue like climate change.
One of the best things about Solution Search is that even after the competition is over and the awards are won, the impact continues.
Solution Search finalists will attend a workshop in Washington D.C., led by the United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insights Team, their “nudge unit” of behavioral experts who work to apply what research tells us about human behavior and decision-making to improve policies and public services.
Solution Search also provides the opportunity for participants to continue to collaborate as part of a growing network of “solutionaries” from around the globe.
The most urgent environmental issues of today will be solved by people and the decisions they make. Solution Search is one part of this process.
If you have a project that is making a difference, apply by August 7, 2018, for the chance to win $25,000, gain international exposure, and expand your partner and donor networks. You can apply or nominate a group or individual doing great work here.

[1] Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C., Rosenthal, S., Cutler, M., & Kotcher, J. (2017) Climate change in the American mind: March 2018. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
[2] Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C., Rosenthal, S., Cutler, M., & Kotcher, J. (2017) Politics & Global Warming, March 2018. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Links

• The Power of Solutions
• Solution Search: Long After You Play, Conservation Wins
• Farming for Biodiversity
• A Global Search For Local Seafood Solutions
• Peru's alpine herders revive ancient technologies to face the future

Climate Change Will Get A Whole Lot Worse Before It Gets Better, According To Game Theory

Wired - Roger Highfield

A firefighter douses flames from a backfire in San Andreas, California. Getty Images / JOSH EDELSON / Stringer

It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.
According to new research published in Nature, humanity will witness marked sea level rises and frequent killer heatwaves before governments take decisive action against climate change.
And to predict the future, mathematicians have turned to game theory.
The paper, published by a team of mathematicians, uses game theory to explain why it is so hard to protect the environment, updating it so they could model the effects of climate change, overuse of precious resources and pollution of pristine environments.
The bad news is that the model suggests that, when it comes to climate change, things might have to get demonstrably worse before they can get better.
The good news, on the other hand, is that game theory could help policymakers to craft new and better incentives to help nations cooperate in international agreements.
The researchers used one of the best known social dilemmas in game theory — called the tragedy of the commons — to reach their predictions. The tragedy of the commons was first described in the 19th century by William Forster Lloyd, an Oxford University political philosopher. Lloyd analysed the overuse of common land (also known as a "common") by people who had rights to use it — to graze their sheep, for example — to air the idea that resources that do not clearly belong to an individual or a group are likely to be overexploited, since conserving them isn’t in the interest of the individual.
The idea was later made famous by American ecologist Garrett Hardin, in a 1968 paper published in the journal Science. The tragedy of the commons has become one of the most used metaphors among experts to illustrate our chronic inability to sustain a resource that everybody is free to use and, alas, just as free to abuse.
We see examples of this dilemma in our daily lives, from litter on the subway to the reluctance to empty the dishwasher in the shared student kitchen. The most extreme example, however, is the current environmental crisis.
Previous attempts to come up with a mathematical model of the environmental tragedy made the unrealistic assumption that the commons remained unchanged as people exploited them – they played the same game in every round of the model. These approaches could not study the effects of a degrading environment, such as an increasingly overfished sea or a river as it was being polluted, for example. In their new Nature paper Martin Nowak of Harvard University, working with Christian Hilbe and Krishnendu Chatterjee of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, and Stepan Simsa of Charles University in Prague, detail a more faithful way to model – and understand - the dilemma with mathematics.
“It is based on the simple idea that our actions today change the game we can play tomorrow,” Nowak says. The games in question involve encounters between people where they can either work together and cooperate or pursue their own selfish motives instead. “Depending on what you and I are doing, we move to another game so, as an example, you and I write an article together and, if we do well, we may do a book and, if this continues, we might set up a research institute.”
When they explored the new mathematical model, the scientists found that this dependence on players’ actions could greatly increase the chance that players cooperate, provided the right conditions were in place. “We have shown how environmental feedback can spur cooperation,” says Nowak, who has spent decades exploring the laws of cooperation.
These feedback factors include how quickly our resources — be it the ocean or the planet’s ozone layer — degrade. This might explain why relatively rapid action to ban chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons were prompted when a dramatic drop in atmospheric ozone that protects life from the Sun's harmful UV rays was detected by a British team working in Antarctica in 1985. A global agreement to protect the stratospheric ozone layer, the Montreal Protocol, was finalised in 1987 and went into force a couple of years later.
This is not the case with climate change. Although we know that glaciers are shrinking, sea levels are rising, and extreme weather events — from hurricanes to heatwaves — are becoming more intense, these effects are often complex and occur over longer timescales, so establishing a clear link between them and climate change is less straightforward. This, according to Nowak, might explain why it has been more difficult to come up with effective international cooperation to curb climate change driven by greenhouse gases.
The new mathematical model suggests the global environment has to deteriorate in a dramatic way – hurricanes becoming more intense, more droughts and heatwaves – before our eyes before governments will be spurred on to make things better. “When human activity leads to drastic environmental deterioration, through global warming, cooperation becomes the winning strategy,” Nowak says.
However, this new mathematical model also enables policymakers to explore future possibilities raised by climate models and explore next steps on a more rational basis. “This opens up many new possibilities,” says Nowak. Because key impacts of climate change occur over a long timescale, one option is not to rely on environmental decline to spur policymakers into action. Instead we need to devise incentives that work over much shorter timescales, say a year or so. “We even show which feedback is needed,” Nowak says.
“You could give people, cities or countries financial incentives to work together on a problem and, if they succeed, they get these incentives and can move to bigger and more complex problems, along with even larger rewards.” The financial incentives hinge on the actions of the players, whether they are people or countries. “Cooperation leads to more valuable games, defection to less valuable ones, and can be designed to occur quickly enough to make a difference,” Nowak says. “This new approach is a game changer.”

Links

• Data Shows Sea Level Rise Will Threaten Over 300,000 Homes
• How Scientists Tracked Antarctica's Stunning Ice Loss
• Endangered Species and the Case for ‘Sanctuary Cities’
• The Potential Pitfalls of Sucking Carbon From the Atmosphere
• Can a New Kind of Consumerism Help Fight Climate Change?
• Humans Tracked Iceland's Glaciers For Ages. Now, Tech Does

Why Climate Change Is A Security Matter

World Resources Institute - Kitty van der Heijden

Mopti riverfront
Photo by Mark Abel/flickr

On a satellite map of Mali, the Inner Niger Delta looks like a giant green smudge on a beige, sandy background.
It is remote, remarkable and a reminder of the complex interplay between some of the biggest issues facing Europe and climate change.
The delta itself is lush, blessed with a water supply from the Niger River that has turned this part of the semi-arid Sahel into a veritable oasis.
But it is also vulnerable.
The natural balance between its people, its ecosystem and the waters that give it life can easily be upset, with shockwaves reaching as far away as Europe. In the Netherlands, which is grappling with issues such as security and migration, the Niger Delta is a reminder of the irrevocable links between these issues and the impact of climate change.
The Sahel is no easy place to live, sandwiched between the blank expanse of the Sahara desert and the fertile coast of West Africa. The Inner Niger Delta stands out against the rest of this water-scarce region, fed by the great Niger River. It rises in the hills of Guinea before describing a giant crescent through Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, then down to Nigeria and its outlet on the Gulf of Guinea.
During its passage through Mali, something remarkable happens: not long after the regional capital of Mopti, the river splits, spreading out across the land in a myriad of channels, many of which sink into the earth as though absorbed by a sponge. As it leaves this landlocked delta, it regathers as a more regular river for the remainder of its journey.
Unsurprisingly, the watery wealth of this delta region has a profound impact on the landscape and its people. It supports a wealth of small-scale agriculture and fishing, with countless villages and settlements on tiny islands in between the channels. But the balance that sustains the delta is a fine one, and several factors make it complicated.

At the Edge of the Sahara
Up on the edge of the Sahara are the bases of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and training bases for the international coalition – including Dutch soldiers and police - that is combatting it. These insurgents are known to target delta communities, which are themselves being disrupted by discord between generations: ubiquitous mobile phones have contributed to a younger generation of delta residents becoming dissatisfied with the lives led by their elders.
Indeed, many migration routes from West Africa to Europe cut through the region, bringing the influence of the trafficking gangs. Upstream, dam projects in Guinea and Mali itself threaten to disrupt the flow of the Niger into the delta. Meanwhile, water-hungry commercial agriculture for crops such as sugar cane has arrived, funded by outsiders including the Chinese. And then there is the climate.
Few things have the capacity to disturb the balance of the Inner Niger Delta as much as climate change. Rising temperatures could destroy livelihoods, threaten the Malian economy and turn more people towards escape routes – whether to urban slums, migration routes north to Europe or the ranks of AQIM. Places like the Inner Niger Delta are ground zero for climate change. What happens there will also affect what happens in Europe.
The danger is evident, but what can be done about it? The first step is to recognize these critical linkages. That is why I recently attended a High Level Conference on Climate, Peace and Security in Brussels, convened by the Head of the European External Action Service, Federica Mogherini. One area that was discussed was the role of data in helping us understand what is happening in places like the Inner Niger Delta, and the complex interplay between natural and human factors.
World Resources Institute is currently one of the partners involved in a project called the Water, Peace and Security initiative, funded in part by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is aimed at combining data to produce an early warning system. Elsewhere, measures such as infrastructure spending or financial tools can be part of the solution. But these only serve to mitigate or warn about the problem.
The second step, then, is more familiar. We must continue – and increase – our efforts to slow down man-made climate change. Instead of thinking about a bald figure like 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), think of the impact of global warming in places like the delta. This underlines the urgency of our shift to a low-carbon circular economy.
This is not just about signing off on international commitments or future competitiveness, but our own fundamental security interests: the sustainability of vulnerable regions like the Inner Niger Delta is as critical for our own security as it is for those who call those places their home.

Links

• When It Comes to Climate and Security, “We’re All in the Same Canoe”
• Webinar: Introducing Climate Watch: A Tool for Researchers and Decision Makers
• 2017 Was the Second-Worst Year on Record for Tropical Tree Cover Loss
• The Human Cost of Climate Change

Global Temperature Rises Could Be Double Those Predicted By Climate Modelling

The Guardian - Lisa Cox

Researchers say sea levels could also rise by six metres or more even if 2 degree target of Paris accord met

Researchers say temperature and sea level rises could be much more extreme than previously believed. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP

Temperature rises as a result of global warming could eventually be double what has been projected by climate models, according to an international team of researchers from 17 countries.
Sea levels could also rise by six metres or more even if the world does meet the 2 degree target of the Paris accord.
The findings, published last week in Nature Geoscience, were based on observations of evidence from three warm periods in the past 3.5m years in which global temperatures were 0.5-2 degrees above the pre-industrial temperatures of the 19th century.
The researchers say they increase the urgency with which countries need to address their emissions.
The scientists used a range of measurements to piece together the impacts of past climatic changes to examine how a warmer earth would appear once the climate has stabilised.
They found sustained warming of one to two degrees had been accompanied by substantial reductions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and sea level rises of at least six metres – several metres higher than what current climate models predict could occur by 2100.
“During that time, the temperatures were much warmer than what our models are predicting and the sea levels were much higher,” said Katrin Meissner from the University of New South Wales’s Climate Change Research Centre and one of the study’s lead authors.
She said the effects today would mean populous urban areas around the world and entire countries in the Pacific would be underwater.
“Two degrees can seem very benign when you see it on paper but the consequences are quite bad and ecosystems change dramatically.”
Meissner said potential changes even at two degrees of warming were underestimated in climate models that focused on the near term.
“Climate models appear to be trustworthy for small changes, such as for low-emission scenarios over short periods, say over the next few decades out to 2100,” she said. “But as the change gets larger or more persistent ... it appears they underestimate climate change.”
The researchers looked at three documented warm periods, the Holocene thermal maximum, which occurred 5,000 to 9,000 years ago, the last interglacial, which occurred 116,000 to 129,000 years ago, and the mid-Pliocene warm period, which occurred 3m to 3.3 m years ago.
In the case of the first two periods examined, the climate changes were caused by changes in the earth’s orbit. The mid-Pliocene event was the result of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations that were at similar levels to what they are today.
In each case, the planet had warmed at a much slower rate than it is warming at today as a result of rising greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans.
“Observations of past warming periods suggest that a number of amplifying mechanisms, which are poorly represented in climate models, increase long-term warming beyond climate model projections,” Prof Hubertus Fischer of the University of Bern, one of the study’s lead authors.
“This suggests the carbon budget to avoid 2°C of global warming may be far smaller than estimated, leaving very little margin for error to meet the Paris targets.”

Links

• Global warming may be twice what climate models predict
• Adani coal port faces possible 'stop order' after traditional owners object
• How Australia's climate policies came to be poisoned by pragmatism
• Australia being 'left behind' by global momentum on climate change
• Climate change: global deal reached to limit use of hydrofluorocarbons
• Officials admit no modelling shows how Australia will meet Paris climate pledge
• Australia's emissions won't fall by 2030 without greater climate action, modelling shows
• Investors controlling $13tn call on G20 leaders to ratify Paris climate agreement
• Paris agreement is a strong signal that 'we will solve climate crisis', Al Gore says
• Australian politics cools off on climate change – even as the temperature rises