26/01/2017

Changing Climate Has Stalled Australian Wheat Yields: Study

The Conversation - Zvi Hochman | David L. Gobbett | Heidi Horan

Fields of gold: Australia’s wheat industry contributes more than A$5 billion to the economy each year. Wheat image from www.shutterstock.com
Australia’s wheat yields more than trebled during the first 90 years of the 20th century but have stalled since 1990. In research published today in Global Change Biology, we show that rising temperatures and reduced rainfall, in line with global climate change, are responsible for the shortfall.
This is a major concern for wheat farmers, the Australian economy and global food security as the climate continues to change. The wheat industry is typically worth more than A$5 billion per year – Australia’s most valuable crop. Globally, food production needs to increase by at least 60% by 2050, and Australia is one of the world’s biggest wheat exporters.
There is some good news, though. So far, despite poorer conditions for growing wheat, farmers have managed to improve farming practices and at least stabilise yields. The question is how long they can continue to do so.

Worsening weather
While wheat yields have been largely the same over the 26 years from 1990 to 2015, potential yields have declined by 27% since 1990, from 4.4 tonnes per hectare to 3.2 tonnes per hectare.
Potential yields are the limit on what a wheat field can produce. This is determined by weather, soil type, the genetic potential of the best adapted wheat varieties and sustainable best practice. Farmers’ actual yields are further restricted by economic considerations, attitude to risk, knowledge and other socio-economic factors.
While yield potential has declined overall, the trend has not been evenly distributed. While some areas have not suffered any decline, others have declined by up to 100kg per hectare each year.
The distribution of the annual change in wheat yield potential from 1990 to 2015. Each dot represents one of the 50 weather stations used in the study. David Gobbett, Zvi Hochman and Heidi Horan, Author provided
We found this decline in yield potential by investigating 50 high-quality weather stations located throughout Australia’s wheat-growing areas.
Analysis of the weather data revealed that, on average, the amount of rain falling on growing crops declined by 2.8mm per season, or 28% over 26 years, while maximum daily temperatures increased by an average of 1.05℃.
To calculate the impact of these climate trends on potential wheat yields we applied a crop simulation model, APSIM, which has been thoroughly validated against field experiments in Australia, to the 50 weather stations.

Climate variability or climate change?
There is strong evidence globally that increasing greenhouse gases are causing rises in temperature.
Recent studies have also attributed observed rainfall trends in our study region to anthropogenic climate change.
Statistically, the chance of observing the decline in yield potential over 50 weather stations and 26 years through random variability is less than one in 100 billion.
We can also separate the individual impacts of rainfall decline, temperature rise and more CO₂ in the atmosphere (all else being equal, rising atmospheric CO₂ means more plant growth).
First, we statistically removed the rising temperature trends from the daily temperature records and re-ran the simulations. This showed that lower rainfall accounted for 83% of the decline in yield potential, while temperature rise alone was responsible for 17% of the decline.
Next we re-ran our simulations with climate records, keeping CO₂ at 1990 levels. The CO₂ enrichment effect, whereby crop growth benefits from higher atmospheric CO₂ levels, prevented a further 4% decline relative to 1990 yields.
So the rising CO₂ levels provided a small benefit compared to the combined impact of rainfall and temperature trends.

Closing the yield gap
Why then have actual yields remained steady when yield potential has declined by 27%? Here it is important to understand the concept of yield gaps, the difference between potential yields and farmers’ actual yields.
An earlier study showed that between 1996 and 2010 Australia’s wheat growers achieved 49% of their yield potential – so there was a 51% “yield gap” between what the fields could potentially produce and what farmers actually harvested.
Averaged out over a number of seasons, Australia’s most productive farmers achieve about 80% of their yield potential. Globally, this is considered to be the ceiling for many crops.
Wheat farmers are closing the yield gap. From harvesting 38% of potential yields in 1990 this increased to 55% by 2015. This is why, despite the decrease in yield potential, actual yields have been stable.
Impressively, wheat growers have adopted advances in technology and adapted them to their needs. They have adopted improved varieties as well as improved practices, including reduced cultivation (or “tillage”) of their land, controlled traffic to reduce soil compaction, integrated weed management and seasonally targeted fertiliser use. This has enabled them to keep pace with an increasingly challenging climate.

What about the future?
Let’s assume that the climate trend observed over the past 26 years continues at the same rate during the next 26 years, and that farmers continue to close the yield gap so that all farmers reach 80% of yield potential.
If this happens, we calculate that the national wheat yield will fall from the recent average of 1.74 tonnes per hectare to 1.55 tonnes per hectare in 2041. Such a future would be challenging for wheat producers, especially in more marginal areas with higher rates of decline in yield potential.
While total wheat production and therefore exports under this scenario will decrease, Australia can continue to contribute to future global food security through its agricultural research and development.

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Government To Keep Renewable Energy Targets Despite Trump Concerns: Frydenberg

ABC News - Henry Belot

The Government ratified the Paris climate change agreement before Mr Trump's inauguration. (AAP/AP)
Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg says the Government has no plans to scrap its renewable energy targets (RET), despite internal criticism and concerns US President Donald Trump may withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement.
The Federal Government has set a target of producing 33,000 gigawatt-hours of renewable energy by 2020, although this was downgraded from 41,000 gigawatts hours under the Tony Abbott government.
"We have no plans to change that renewable energy target for 2020," Mr Frydenberg told ABC News.
"It does have an impact on electricity prices, but it is a much more moderate target than what we are seeing being proposed in Parliament by our political opponents.
"It's a real challenge for us to meet that target and I want people to be under no misapprehension about that — it is going to be challenging to meet that target."
Mr Frydenberg dismissed calls from former prime minister Mr Abbott to make cancelling the RET the first order of business for 2017.
Mr Abbott — along with a number of other conservative MPs — has claimed the RET will destroy heavy industry in South Australia due to rising electricity costs.
"The RET is not cost free but large, heavy industry is actually exempt," Mr Frydenberg said.
The Federal Government ratified the Paris climate change agreement in November before Mr Trump's inauguration.
Mr Trump vowed to cancel the agreement in early 2016, claiming it would give foreign bureaucrats control of how much energy the US uses.
He can cancel the executive order used by former US president Barack Obama to sign the agreement and bypass the Republican-controlled Senate.
"I'm not going to hypothesise about what Donald Trump does, but in terms of our international commitments, we have committed to a 26-28 per cent target," Mr Frydenberg said.
"Dare I say it — we are doing very well in terms of trying to meet our 2030 target as well as our 2020 target which we are on track to beat by more than 224 million tonnes."
The Energy Minister's comments come after Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce said Australia was known as "an honourable negotiator".
"We don't sign agreements to pull out of them," he told ABC Radio on Monday.
"We go into them; we negotiate with the belief that, if you sign a piece of paper, you should be sticking to it."

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Donald Trump, Climate Vandal, Springs To Action On The Environment

Fairfax - 

Washington: He lied – again. President Donald Trump had car manufacturers in on Tuesday, giving them the rounds of the kitchen for locating their factories abroad – but assuring them he'd reduce "out of control" environmental regulations.
And lest he be seen as the climate vandal that most in the environmental movement fear he is, Trump touted his greenie credentials at the meeting – "I'm a very big person when it comes to the environment – I've received awards on the environment."

Trump approves controversial pipeline
US President Donald Trump signs executive orders on the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines angering both environmental and American Indian groups. 

 Nope! And when reporters asked for a list of the awards, the White House referred them to a book. Nope, again – instead of listing what the President had won, it listed what the author, Trump's longtime environmental consultant, thought he should have won.
But Trump's encounter with the car makers proved to be just a warm-up act for his inner vandal – later in the morning fears that he would drag the US back towards the yesteryears of fossil fuels were confirmed with his decision to revive two controversial projects, the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access oil pipelines.
It's hard not to conclude that this is all about money: on news of his election victory shares in companies making solar panels and wind turbines dropped by up to 10 per cent, but shares in Peabody Energy – the biggest US coal company – were up more than 50 per cent.
And viewed through the prism of the Trump dealmaker's logic, there might even be some commercial sense in the environmentalist notion that Trump is the last man who can help energy firms who find themselves stranded in a fast-changing world, because they are still sitting on huge fossil energy reserves fast being rendered useless by advances in renewable energy.
British activist writer George Monbiot writes: "Trump is the man who will let them squeeze every last cent from their oil and coal reserves before them become worthless.
"They need him because science, technology and people's demands for a safe and stable world have left them stranded. There is no fight they can win. So their last hope lies with a government that will rig the competition."
President Donald Trump speaks during his meeting with automobile leaders in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington. Photo: AP
Trump's move on the two pipelines was part of a first-days-in-office smashing of things precious to his predecessor – who for all his sober handling of so many issues was passionate on the issue of climate change.
So, within minutes of Trump swearing the oath of office on Friday, the White House website that showcased the Obama administration's climate change policies disappeared into the ether, and was replaced with a statement on Trump's energy policy, which promises to reduce "burdensome regulations on our energy industry".
Happy days are here to stay longer? Exxon Mobil's Billings Refinery in Billings, Montana.  Photo: AP
And within hours, a government-wide memo was dispatched by Trump's White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus – he was ordering a freeze on new or pending regulations, halting a raft of Energy Department efficiency standards that analysts argue will save consumers billions of dollars over time in reduced energy consumption by airconditioners, walk-in coolers, freezers, boilers and some power supply systems.
And within days, an Environmental Protection Agency for environmental research and improvement, worth about $US4 billion a year for environmental research and improvement, was snap frozen.
Oklahoma Attorney-General Scott Pruitt, nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Photo: Bloomberg
Here, in a few words, are Trump's many plans on environmental issues – he had vowed to cancel the Paris global accord to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 28 per cent by 2025. He wants to shred a raft of energy and environmental regulation. He is committed to opening swaths of federal land to oil, gas and coal drilling and production. He thinks the Environmental Protection Agency should be all but neutered.
And he plans to put an axe through Obama's Clean Power Plan, which was to pressure electricity firms to reduce carbon emissions and the Waters of the US rule, which protects the country's big rivers and their smaller tributaries.
Ford Motors CEO Mark Fields, left, and General Motors CEO Mary Barra, walk to speak with reporters outside the White House in Washington. Photo: AP
In the transition team and the cabinet he is assembling Trump has included a small army of climate change sceptics.
Trump's pick for EPA administrator is one of the agency's greatest enemies – Oklahoma Attorney-General Scott Pruitt, who repeatedly led or joined legal challenges seeking to block Obama's efforts to regulate climate change. Pruitt's LinkedIn profile boasts that he's a "leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda".
A semi-submersible drilling unit as it arrives in Port Angeles, Washington.  Photo: AP
He twice sued the EPA, trying to derail regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
He joined the fight to make coal-fired power plants reduce mercury emissions and later, he led the charge against Obama's Clean Power Plan.
He fought the EPA's expanded oversight of water pollution. And according to reports on his record in Oklahoma, his decisions on how to handle cases seemed to have been made on the basis of the political donations he received.
Some environmentalists seem utterly defeated – Bill McKibben, founder of the climate action group 350.org, told The Washington Post: "I really don't know ... We'll do what we can, but truthfully, the path forward is not all that clear to me."
Others are girding for a fight. Recalling the early days of the George W. Bush administration, Friends of the Earth president Erich Pica, said: "[We] utilised the courts, the Senate filibuster, watchdogged political appointees and galvanised the public to take action – we'll have to take these same actions ... the environmental movement is stronger than we've ever been."
Both Pruitt and Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who as a presidential candidate could not remember the name of the Energy Department as one he intended to abolish, but who will lead that department under Trump, conceded in their Senate confirmation hearings that human activity had an impact on the climate, but they also showed themselves to be sceptics – either waffling or by bouncing questions as "academic" or "immaterial".
All but the last 330 metres of the 1880-kilometre Dakota Access pipeline, to move oil from the North Dakota shale oil reserves to Illinois, has been built – but in December a stop was ordered to allow alternate routes to be considered for the last stretch in the face of American Indian protests that their water supplies could be affected.
Analysts say that the potential for job creation or environmental damage from the Keystone XL pipeline, which is intended to carry 800 000 barrels a day from Canada to the Gulf coast, is minimal – but the project became a lightning rod as a test of Washington's preparedness make a call either to promote energy production or act to protect the environment. Obama dithered for years, but ultimately rejected the project on the eve of the Paris emissions conference, arguing that to proceed would have diminished US leadership in weaning the world off carbon fuel.
At his meeting with the auto makers, Trump promised easier regulation: "We're going to make the process much more simple for the auto companies and for everyone else who wants to do business in the US. You're going to find this to be [a shift] from being very inhospitable to extremely hospitable."
And trying to at least be seen to be environmentally conscious, he added: "I am, to a large extent, an environmentalist – I believe in it. But it's out of control and we're going to make it a very short process.
"And we're going to either give you your permits or we're not going to give you your permits – but you're going to know very quickly and, generally speaking, we're going to be giving you your permits."

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25/01/2017

Climate Change Driving More Risks Than Ever Before

Insurance Business - Jordan Lynn

The impact of climate change is being felt in more ways than ever, according to one industry expert.
Geoffrey Au, APAC chief risk officer for Zurich, said Asia Pacific is among the most vulnerable regions to the effects of climate change.
"Climate change is exacerbating more risks than ever before in terms of water crises, food shortages, constrained economic growth, weaker societal cohesion and increased security risks," Au told Insurance Business.
"The social and economic development in the region has resulted in a rapid transition to more urban living, meaning its cities are more densely populated and the impact of natural catastrophes is amplified."
Climate change was listed as the number two underlying risk in the recently released Global Risks Report 2017, released by the World Economic Forum in association with Marsh and Zurich.
The report also found that, for the first time, all five environmental risks were ranked both high-risk and high-likelihood as extreme weather events were named the single most prominent risk facing the world.
Australia particularly remains on the front line of climate risk. With temperatures hitting record highs across the country in January, the impact climate risk can have remains front and centre for businesses and the public at large.
Au noted that while much has been done in terms of climate risk, a quicker response is still needed.
"2016 did see some progress to address climate and other environmental risks, reflecting firm international resolve on the transition to a low-carbon global economy and on building resilience to climate change.
"However, the pace of change is frankly not fast enough in Asia Pacific or anywhere else."
Au stressed that the role of the insurance industry is inextricably linked to climate risk. Global insurers can advocate for closer cooperation to develop responses to the challenges that arise in the future.

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China Eyes An Opportunity To Take Ownership Of Climate Change Fight

The Guardian - Li Shuo*

The economic and environmental cost of pollution will drive Beijing’s policies regardless of what Donald Trump does
Smog in Liaocheng in eastern China. Reducing carbon emissions is a priority for Beijing’s leadership, which could influence the global battle against climate change. Photograph: Sipa Asia/REX/Shutterstock
Twenty years ago, climate change was believed by many in Beijing to be a conspiracy cooked up by the western world to contain China’s development.
Since then, China has performed an about-turn, not only recognising climate change as a major global challenge but also, ahead of Davos this week, vowing to lead the world’s effort in combating it.
The election of Donald Trump, who, labelling climate change a “hoax” created by China, has reversed the conspiracy, casts a dark shadow on the prospect of future international climate cooperation. But for China, now could be a moment of opportunity.
Since the catastrophic Copenhagen failure in 2009, China has anchored climate actions at the core of its political agenda. There are three main reasons for this, and over the next four years, they will be the drivers that will propel China’s climate action forward regardless of the political situation in the US.
First, the calculus of cost and benefit has shifted.
For a long time, environmental protection was positioned on the opposite side of economic prosperity – the pursuit of one could only sacrifice the other. In China, this binary has fallen apart, as the enormous health impacts of air pollution have galvanised both political and public opinion against polluting industry, and as the booming clean energy industry shows the possibility to make both environmentally and economically sound investments.
Second, China feels an increased – and increasing – sense of global responsibility, as displayed in phrase after phrase of Xi Jinping’s speeches in Davos and Geneva this week. Beijing was quick to learn from its mistakes in Copenhagen. In the run up to the Paris conference, it managed to forge consensus on the most difficult political questions with other key players ahead of time.
Many of these political breakthroughs, such as on common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) and the issue of transparency, will require China to move beyond its previous positions and take more ambitious action. In addition, China has started to implement its own south-south cooperation scheme, aimed at helping other developing countries to pursue climate action. China is slowly but surely re-defining its international responsibilities and shifting to a more active and cooperation oriented climate diplomacy.
Third, China’s leaders have started to take ownership of combating climate change.
This new dynamic could bear promising prospects over the next few years. US-China cooperation on climate in the Obama era helped to elevate climate change to the very top of the Chinese leadership’s agenda. This has ensured the unprecedented direct engagement of the Chinese leaders for multiple years, and not only familiarised them with the technicality and politics of climate change, but also allowed them to see the strategic value it can generate.
With Xi soon entering his second five-year tenure, he might well take a leaf out of the outgoing US president’s book and try to secure climate action as one of his political legacies. This could mean further investment in and greater leadership on climate action.
These three reasons, coupled with the fundamental trend of China’s economic transition and the associated coal consumption decline, present a real opportunity for China to project further international leadership on climate change.
What China urgently needs now is a comprehensive strategy that sets climate change as a diplomatic priority. For the past years, China’s policy circle primarily considered climate change through the lens of managing US-China relations and as an issue subordinate to the most important bilateral relationship in the world.
As the political winds shift in Washington, climate change now deserves an independent strategy that takes into account but is not dependent on the US-China relationship. Chinese leaders should be confident in such an approach and not underestimate the country’s potential for global leadership. The establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the One Belt, One Road initiative both demonstrate that, when the issue is given political priority, China is not only able to participate in international diplomacy, but can also actively lead.
None of these is to say China should step in for the US. Climate change is a crisis larger than any single country. And it is neither feasible nor fair to expect other countries to fill the hole left by the US. But for China, if what it takes to move from a climate villain to a reluctant leader is the short five years of the first half of this decade, it is not completely unreasonable to expect the country to become a true leader by the end of this decade.
As Trump drops Obama’s legacy, Xi might well establish one of his own.

*Li Shuo is Greenpeace’s east Asia senior climate policy adviser based in Beijing.

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Mayors To Trump: ‘Don’t Get In Our Way’

Think Progress

As Trump takes office, leaders of the country's biggest cities are preparing to continue the climate fight.
The Los Angeles city skyline. CREDIT: AP Photo/Nick Ut
On the eve of President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti had a message for an incoming administration with notoriously backwards views on climate policy.
"Don't get in our way," he told a small group of reporters at the United States Conference of Mayors' winter meeting.
There are projects, Garcetti continued, where federal support would certainly be looked upon favorably — helping Los Angeles reduce its dependence on imported water, for instance, or transition its public transportation fleet from natural gas to electricity. But in the absence of a strong federal ally, the best case scenario for cities under Trump would be the autonomy to carry out their climate policies unencumbered.
"We'd love a federal partner that can help accelerate this, but at the very least, just don't get in our way," Garcetti reiterated.
The age of Trump ushers in an unsettling future for American climate policy: as a candidate, Trump promised to unleash fossil fuel extraction on federal lands and along the nation's coasts, roll back environmental regulations, and withdraw from the international leadership role the previous administration worked so hard to build.
As president-elect, his decisions have been equally antagonistic towards climate action — he and his transition team have named climate deniers to every major environmental cabinet position, sought information on career employees that worked on Obama-era climate policies, and pledged to cut entire programs from the Department of Energy.
Meanwhile, the consequences of human-caused climate change are becoming increasingly clear and increasingly dire. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) just officially named 2016 the hottest on record, breaking previous records set in 2015 and 2014. Extreme weather events are becoming more common — and climate change definitively played a role in dozens of floods, heat waves, and droughts throughout 2016.
As city leaders, mayors are familiar with both the consequences and the causes of climate change. Population density and geographic location — the fact that many cities are located along the coast, for instance — make them especially vulnerable to the kinds of extreme weather events and sea level rise fueled by climate change. But cities are also responsible for 75 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, meaning action taken at the local level can go a long way towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
That's a fact mayors like Garcetti are taking to heart. The city has plans to enact sweeping climate policies — from pledging to go completely carbon neutral in its electricity sector to planning a vast expansion of the city's public transportation system. Those are initiatives, Garcetti said, that can be accomplished at a local level but can have national and international implications. Mayors, it is said, are a notoriously competitive bunch — if one city enacts a policy that both benefits the environment and saves money, other cities are likely to follow. Last year, for instance, Los Angeles made the decision to purchase electric vehicles for all new non-patrol police vehicles — a move that saved the city 60 percent on fleet maintenance.
"You can't be a good mayor without talking about how you're going to convert your street lights to LED. You can't be a good mayor without saying where your EV plug-ins are going to be for people. It's become normalized," Garcetti said. "It's not just our city. It's Michigan, it's Colorado, it's Texas, it's Indiana, it's South Carolina, it's North Carolina, it's Ohio, it's Nevada. We've got cities everywhere. It's small, it's big, it's in between. And it's growing."
The economic case for climate action — the fact that Los Angeles' $57 million worth of LED lights paid for themselves with returns on energy efficiency in just six years, for instance — is one mayors are hoping will get through to the jobs-focused administration. In Boston, a study is underway to test autonomous vehicles on the city streets, a move that could both lower emissions and fundamentally transform the city's economy.
"As that program gets vetted and moves forward, the Trump administration might not look at the savings on the environment side of that, but they're certainly going to look at the business side of that," Boston mayor Marty Walsh said.
Electric vehicles in Los Angeles. CREDIT: AP Photo/Nick Ut, File
Both Garcetti and Walsh noted that for many mayors, climate action is not the partisan issue it has become at the federal level. Walsh said that when Boston started talking about making a pledge to become carbon-neutral by 2050, a Republican mayor from a small town nearby signed onto the pledge and even dedicated staff and resources to the issues. Garcetti brought up Jim Brainard, the Republican mayor of Carmel, Indiana, who has worked to make his city more climate-friendly during his 21-year tenure in office.
"We really have a ton of allies who understand," Garcetti said. "Republicans represent a lot of outdoors people who are seeing the change on the frontline when they are out there, people who spend a lot of time seeing those impacts and even having to fight them."
But while cities can take significant steps to reduce their carbon footprints and improve environmental policies — "the federal government can't force me to make my buildings more polluting, or to emit more energy or use more water," Garcetti said — there are things the federal government can do to slow that progress. Trump has promised to essentially zero out federal funding for the research and development of renewable energy, which would significantly undermine the United States' green energy sector.
"I think we would take some steps backwards with some very important things that are clearly about the Trump agenda: for national security and for manufacturing jobs, for batteries, for electric vehicles, for solar power," Garcetti said of cuts to federal funding. "We can see those only being done in other places, or we can retain those jobs here. I think if this administration looks at what are the high-paying jobs of the future, which I know they are laser-focused on, you can't take out green jobs because the ideology that somebody in the administration has says that this is combating a problem that doesn't exist."
Another concern is that a Trump administration — bolstered by a Republican majority in Congress — will prove so opposed to climate action that they take steps to preempt any progressive climate action at the state or local level. Trump's nominee for EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, stoked these fears during his confirmation hearing when he refused to promise Democratic lawmakers from California and Massachusetts that he would uphold a waiver that allows California to set stricter vehicle emissions standards than the national average.
"I think it would be not only bad for California but bad for the nation," Garcetti said of preemption strategies like denying California's waiver. "If we're settling for being average, I don't see that this country will have much progress."
"If we're settling for being average, I don't see that this country will have much progress."
"We will very strongly fight against attempts to roll back California's independence to chart its own path," he added. "It has been good for jobs and great for the country."
But even if the federal government tries to slow — or halt — climate action at a local level, mayors like Garcetti are prepared to fight back, arguing that a Trump administration can only slow, not stop, progress.
"In a worst case scenario, the federal government can take away maybe 20 or 30 percent of our progress, and I'd rather have 100 percent than 70 or 80 percent, but I feel like that 70 or 80 percent of further progress is inevitable based on the leadership that we've already had," he said.
Boston's Walsh agreed.
"You're talking about on the ground where you can actually make a difference, not a policy coming down from Congress," Walsh added. "It's actually something being carried out on the streets of our cities in America."

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24/01/2017

Bangladesh Struggles To Turn The Tide On Climate Change As Sea Levels Rise

The Guardian - 

From incessant rains to flooded rice fields, the economic impact of global warming has been keenly felt in the coastal town of Cox’s Bazar
Women work at a dry fish yard in the Bangladeshi coastal resort of Cox’s Bazar. Changing weather conditions have hit the business hard. Photograph: Noor Alam/Majority World for the Guardian
Bangladesh is already one of the most climate vulnerable nations in the world, and global warming will bring more floods, stronger cyclones. At the dry fish yards, close to the airport at the coastal town of Cox’s Bazar, women are busy sorting fish to dry in the sun. They say the process, which begins in October, can continue through to February or March if the weather is good.
But Aman Ullah Shawdagor, a dry fish businessman who employs 70 people, says high tides and seasonal changes have hit his business hard. Last year there were four cyclones, more than ever before. In 2015, there was only one.
“My business is not doing so well because of the changing weather conditions,” says Shawdagor. “This is a dry season business. But for the last couple of years, the rain has become more frequent. It rains not only in the rainy season but also in the winter. There have also been more signals [storm warnings] with the rise in high tides. When the high tide comes, it frequently covers the whole of the land here. It is very bad for the dry fish.”
Nurul Hashem, a schoolteacher from Kutubdia Para, a nearby shanty town where many of the dry fish workers live, has also noted the trend. “We believe the water level is getting higher here,” he says. “Last year, my home was under water three or four times.”
Scientists predict that, by 2050, as many as 25 million people in Bangladesh will be affected by the rising sea level. Hashem and Shawdagor believe that they are already seeing the effects of a changing climate, however.

Kutubdia
Along the coast lies Kutubdia, an island in the Bay of Bengal where lush green rice fields give way to acres and acres of flat fields. Consisting of small rectangles of varying hues of brown, they are salt fields. The encroachment of saline water from rising tides has made rice farming impossible.
Abdus Shukur, 50, a former agricultural farmer, says he learned to farm salt 10 years ago, when sea water flooded the land he rents. It took him six months to learn the craft and he finds it back-breaking work.
“I was an agricultural farmer before,” says Shukur. “But the embankment broke down and saline water came on to the land. We had no choice but to adapt.”
Salt farming, he says, brings in more money that crops. But it is harder.
Flooded salt fields on the island of Kutubdia. Photograph: Noor Alam/Majority World for the Guardian
“Farming crops, I worked two or four hours a day. I’m now earning double what I earned before. But in the salt fields I have to work from morning till evening, the whole day.”
The small island, which has halved in size over the past 20 years due to erosion and sea level rise, is surrounded by a three-metre high concrete embankment, built by the Bangladeshi government to protect it from disappearing into the sea. But it is broken in several places and the sea water enters the land.
“The coastal belt is facing many problems of salinity,” says Mokbul Ahmed, a project co-ordinator for Coast, an organisation that helps local communities affected by the changing climate. “Day by day, salt water enters the land. In Kutubdia, every year, the government builds the embankment and every year, it is destroyed.”

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