10/08/2019

Australian Government Brushes Off UN’s Urgent Climate Warning

SBS - SBS | AFP | AAP

 Humanity faces increasingly painful trade-offs between food security and rising temperatures within decades unless emissions are curbed and unsustainable farming and deforestation halted, according to a landmark climate assessment.


UN World Warning: Humanity Faces Painful Trade-Offs

The federal emissions reduction minister has defended Australia's land management practices after a new United Nations climate change report called for changes in the way the world produces and consumes food.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned efforts to limit global warming while feeding a booming population could be wrecked without swift and sweeping changes to how we use the land we live off.
The report on land use and climate change highlighted the need to protect remaining tropical forests as a bulkhead against future warming.
Greenpeace activists hold a banner in front of the United Nations before a news conference on the Special Report on Climate Change and Land after IPCC's 50th session in Geneva, Switzerland, 08 August 2019.  EPA/MARTIAL TREZZINI
It offered a sobering take on the hope that reforestation and bio-fuel schemes alone can offset mankind's environmental damage, underlining that reducing emissions will be central to averting disaster.
"Land is a source of emissions as well as a sink," IPCC chair Hoesung Lee told AFP.
"Obviously you want to reduce emissions from land as much as possible. But that has a lot to do with what's happening to the other side of the equation: greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from the energy sector."
But Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor said Australia is already absorbing emissions from land management.
"This is a very, very important success story in Australia. Farmers, in particular, haven't been given the credit they deserve for the role, the enormous role, they've played on this front," he told ABC News on Friday.
But the minister brushed off concerns about the role meat-heavy diets play in climate change, suggesting the report was "forcing" people to become vegan.
Federal Minister for Energy Angus Taylor
"We're not going to tell people what they should be eating, that's just not the role of government," he said.
Land is intimately linked to climate. With its forests, plants, and soil it sucks up and stores around one-third of all man-made emissions.
Intensive exploitation of these resources also produces huge amounts of planet-warming CO2, methane and nitrous oxide, while agriculture guzzles up 70 percent of Earth's freshwater supply.
National Farmers Federation president Fiona Simson said the food warning should send "a shiver down your spine".
The Australian red meat industry has a target to be carbon neutral by 2030, she added, noting the local agriculture industry produced ust a fraction of the world's food and fibre.
But Ms Simson was surprised the report flagged reducing food waste as a means to reduce climate change.
"There are tonnes and tonnes of food that is wasted at the point of production," she told ABC News.
"Sometimes it's about misshapen vegies, carrots that look weird or those sorts of things, but also sometimes we just haven't got the labour to pick the produce in the fields.
President of the National Farmers Federation Fiona Simson
As the global population balloons towards 10 billion by mid-century, how land is managed by governments, industry and farmers will play a key role in limiting or accelerating the worst excesses of climate change.
Farmers for Climate Action want the federal government to implement a national strategy on climate change and agriculture, and to speed up the transition to clean energy.
"With NSW marking one year since it was 100 per cent drought-declared ... and farmers across the country hurting from droughts, heatwaves and other extreme weather events, it is clear that climate change is already hurting Australian agriculture," the group said in a statement.
"Farmers are adopting climate-smart agricultural practices, including soil carbon sequestration. But agriculture cannot be left to carry the burden on this alone."
Teenage climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, who along with a group of activists presented IPCC co-chairs with a thank you letter in Geneva, said she hoped governments would act on the report's findings.
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"Of course if you are a very powerful person in a very powerful position then I think you should definitely read it," the 16-year-old said.
"I just hope that the conclusion of this report becomes in a way common knowledge, so everyone knows the importance of those numbers and facts within a bigger perspective."

Trade-offs
The IPCC is the world's leading authority on climate change. Last year it warned that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees - the optimal level aimed for in the Paris climate deal - would be impossible without a drastic draw down in greenhouse gas emissions.
Its land-use report presented a string of looming trade-offs in using land for climate change mitigation.
Forests, an enormous carbon sink, can be regenerated to cool the planet. But with industrial farming covering a third of land today, there's limited space.
Hoesung Lee, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. AAP
Bioenergy in the form of vegetation used to sequester carbon also has potential. But room for that must be carved from cropland, pastures or existing forests.
The report said that a "limited" allocation of land for bioenergy schemes could indeed benefit the climate.
It warned however that deployment at a scale needed to draw down billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year "could increase risks for desertification, land degradation, food security, and sustainable development."

Devastating impacts
The 1,000-page report takes a deep dive into the systems we use to feed ourselves and the devastating impacts they are wreaking.
Not only does agriculture and its supply lines account for as much as 37 percent of all man-made emissions, but current industrialised production and global food chains also contribute to vast food inequality.
The report noted that while there are currently two billion overweight or obese adults, 820 million people still don't get enough calories.
In addition, a third of all food produced is currently either lost or wasted, adding to mankind's carbon footprint.


David Attenborough briefs British MPs on climate change

The IPCC summary paper mostly steered clear of the controversial call to limit meat consumption but did burnish the credentials of "plant-based foods" and their ability to mitigate global emissions.
"There's a wide range of food systems that rely on meat, and many people rely on meat for protein," Cynthia Rosenzweig, a NASA climatologist, and report author told AFP.
"But we do need to develop low greenhouse gas meat-producing systems."

Temperature matters
The report considers a quintet of human development projections, from a low-consumption global society that feeds itself sustainably, to a resource-intense future where arable land is squeezed out by huge-scale bioenergy projects.
But under all scenarios, one axiom held true: the higher the temperature, the higher the risk.
"New knowledge shows an increase in risks from dryland water scarcity, fire damage, permafrost degradation, and food system instability, even for global warming of around 1.5C," said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, an IPCC co-chair.
At 2C the risk of food insecurity ticks over to "very high".
"It's not only about reducing emissions," said Ms Thunberg.
"The science says that to stay below 1.5C of global temperature rise we need to make unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.
"Those are not my words. Those are their words."

Links
  • Climate Change and Land — IPCC
  • Land is a Critical Resource, IPCC report says
  • Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet
  • Report: Adapt plant-based diets and 'look after the land' to tackle climate change
  • Eat less meat to save the Earth, urges UN
  • Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report: Climate Change and Land
  • Climate crisis reducing land’s ability to sustain humanity, says IPCC
  • How climate’s impact on land threatens civilisation – and how to fix it
  • Commonwealth Bank Warns Climate Change Could Slash Farm Productivity
  • Action Now’: The Farmers Standing Up Against ‘Wilful Ignorance’ On Climate
  • This Is A $15 Trillion Opportunity For Farmers To Fight Climate Change
  • Act Now On Emissions Says Farmers For Climate Action
  • The Future Of Farming In The Era Of Climate Change
  • Greta Thunberg: World leaders must prove they've listened to climate activists
  • Qantas CEO Alan Joyce warns against climate change panic
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    Farmers Call For National Strategy On Climate Change And Agriculture

    The Guardian - 
    The IPCC special report on climate change and land found limiting global heating to below 2C can only be achieved by reducing emissions from all sectors – including land and food. Photograph: Tim Wimborne / Reuters/REUTERS
    An Australian farming group has called for a fully funded national strategy to deal with climate change and agriculture, warning farmers don’t have enough support to manage increasing risks associated with global heating.
    It comes as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report on climate change and land, released in Geneva on Thursday, found limiting global heating to below 2C can only be achieved by reducing emissions from all sectors – including land and food.
    That will involve transforming food production and land management, given agriculture, forestry and other types of land use account for 23% of human-induced greenhouse emissions globally.
    The report finds even the current levels of global heating are increasing the risks of water scarcity, soil erosion, vegetation loss, fire damage, coastal degradation, permafrost thawing and declines in crop yields.
    It finds the climate crisis is affecting all aspects of food security – including availability, price and nutrition – but that coordinated action to cut global emissions could simultaneously improve land resources, food security and nutrition and help to address hunger.
    Verity Morgan-Schmidt, the chief executive of Farmers for Climate Action, said Australian farmers were already dealing with the effects of global heating, including worsening droughts, changing frost conditions and heatwaves.
    But as the risks associated with global heating increase, she said it was becoming more difficult for farmers to adapt on their own.
    Farmers are responsible for managing much of Australia’s ecosystem, with 48% of Australia’s land privately owned or leased for agricultural production.
    Morgan-Schmidt said industry-wide measures were already being developed to reduce the sector’s climate footprint, including a grains industry sustainability framework that is under development and the red meat sector’s target to become carbon neutral by 2030.
    She said individual farmers were also taking action through increased soil carbon sequestration, revegetation, and the adoption of “climate-smart” agricultural practices.
    But she said an overarching government strategy for the agriculture sector was still lacking and farmers were looking to the federal government to better coordinate currently disparate efforts by industry, government and the non-government sector to deal with climate.
    “What we still don’t have in the year 2019 is a national strategy on climate change in agriculture. There’s still no actual framework to help farmers manage these risks and implement solutions,” she said.
    “That’s why we’re calling for a fully funded national strategy on climate change and agriculture.
    “There’s a lot of good things happening but there is more work to do and we need support to do that.”
    The minister for energy and emissions reduction, Angus Taylor, said: “The government recognises the importance of the land sector to Australia and is partnering with industry to improve productivity, sustainability and resilience.”
    “Our suite of policies include the establishment of a Future Drought Fund, a national program of water reform, and the Emissions Reduction Fund which supports Australian businesses, farmers and land managers to take practical actions to reduce emissions and improve the environment.”
    Mark Howden, the director of the ANU Climate Institute and an IPCC vice-chair, is one of the report’s authors.
    He said the climate crisis was “rapidly ramping up existing threats to the land, reducing its ability to feed and support populations around the world and impacting on ecosystems”.
    “At the same time, the land sector is currently contributing to climate change, even as it potentially offers some of the solutions to reducing greenhouse gases,” he said.
    Howden said the land sector alone could not address the crisis and that cutting emissions from fossil fuels remained “absolutely vital”.
    But he said improving land management would have multiple economic, environmental and health benefits.
    “Better land management not only delivers win-wins for farmers, communities, governments and biodiversity but also helps address climate change,” he said.
    Dermot O’Gorman, CEO of the World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia, says there “is tremendous potential for vegetation and soil to suck up and store greenhouse gases to help achieve a 1.5-degree future”.
    “Right now too much of Australia’s soil is degraded or being eroded away. Too many forests have been lost and remaining trees continue to be cut down.
    “Australia can turn this around by protecting our remaining forests, transforming marginal grazing or cropping land into profitable carbon farms by returning trees, and adopting innovative farming techniques.”

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    Big Money Starts To Dump Stocks That Pose Climate Risks

    Bloomberg - Kelly Gilblom

    After years of meetings and shareholder resolutions, some funds are starting to simply divest from coal and oil stocks.
    Exxon persuaded the SEC to block a shareholder resolution that pushed the oil giant to do more to address climate risks. 
    Earlier this year, one of Meryam Omi’s deputies at Legal & General Investment Management sat down with board members and managers from Exxon Mobil Corp. to discuss how the oil giant could address climate change. LGIM, which manages about $1.3 trillion, is one of Exxon’s top 20 shareholders.
    The Exxon delegation listened, but it didn’t accept the suggestions, says Omi, LGIM’s head of sustainability and responsible investment strategy. Around the same time, Exxon persuaded the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to block a shareholder resolution that pushed the oil giant to do more to address climate risks.
    So, in June, London-based LGIM announced that it had dumped about $300 million worth of its Exxon shares and would use its remaining stake to vote against the reappointment of Exxon Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods. “There’s got to be an escalation,” Omi says.
    As the risks of climate change have become more pronounced, so have efforts by major investment firms to push companies in greener directions. They tried talking. Then they started backing shareholder resolutions. Now, LGIM is at the forefront of a more aggressive, and controversial, tactic: divesting.
    “You cannot have the same conversation for 15 years with no results,” Omi explains. (Exxon responded to LGIM’s announcement by saying that it publishes an annual tally of emissions from its operations and is on track to meet targets for reducing methane emissions.)
    Momentum is gathering, says Mark Lewis, who leads climate change investment research for Paris-based BNP Paribas Asset Management. He likens it to the divestment campaign that forced companies participating in apartheid-era South Africa to change course, and he invokes the spirit of Gandhi: “They’ve ignored us and laughed at us. I think now they’re fighting us. So next we win.”
    But he knows it won’t be easy.
    In March, as he helped the BNP Paribas press team put the finishing touches on an announcement that its actively managed funds would exit almost €1 billion ($1.1 billion) of coal stocks as early as next year, he thought the news might cause a few “ripples” and not much more. In fact, Lewis was bombarded with emails and calls, not all of them polite. “It surprised me how big the reaction was,” he says.
    Lewis, who earlier in his career was a utilities analyst at Deutsche Bank AG and deputy head of investor relations for German power company EON SE, had formed close business relationships, even friendships, with coal executives. He says the decision to cut coal was painful, but ultimately he had to face the economics.
    Demand for thermal coal, the kind used to generate electricity, is declining in much of the world as governments seek to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Some asset managers are deciding it’s risky—for their clients and the planet—to keep shoveling capital into companies with environmentally unsustainable business strategies.
    This year almost every major public oil company faced at least one shareholder resolution about climate change. Those proposals won record support. (Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, in June launched an effort to phase out every U.S. coal-fired power plant by 2030.)
    Most money managers prefer engagement to divestment, and funds designed to track indexes have no choice. Climate-Action 100+, a group of money managers overseeing more than $33 trillion, works to influence the largest corporate emitters of greenhouse gases. So far the organization has persuaded Royal Dutch Shell Plc to set short-term climate targets and publish a report on its lobbying of governments.
    Members backed a shareholder resolution that asked BP Plc to detail how each new capital investment aligns with the Paris Agreement adopted at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2015. That resolution, supported by BP’s management, won the approval of 99% of shareholders in May. Mining company Glencore Plc has agreed to limit coal production.
    Climate Action 100+ members “use this engagement, both the process and the outcomes, to inform their own voting and investment decisions,” says Stephanie Maier, the director of responsible investment at HSBC Global Asset Management, who also serves as chairman of Climate Action 100+’s steering committee. “For certain investors this may ultimately include divestment, but that would only be when all other options have failed.”
    Climate activists say the awakening of the world’s money to the perils of global warming is too little, too late. But for some people inside money management, the speed of change is hard to believe. At LGIM, Nick Stansbury says he remembers the day in December 2016 when he was called into a meeting with about 25 of his fellow portfolio managers. Understanding the implications of climate change was going to become a priority, they were told.
    Stansbury says he already had deep misgivings about the future of the oil market. Oil companies’ value depends on investors believing that demand for crude will always grow. For 100 years, that belief had been justified.
    But if renewable-energy sources gain market share and crude demand stutters, the market would go haywire, he says. That could trigger a huge re-rating of major oil companies—of which LGIM holds more than $12 billion in shares. “It was a lightbulb moment,” he says.
    He spent a year analyzing different parts of the energy market to try to draw some conclusions. But he knew his clients wanted more. On an airplane from Oslo to London in early 2018, staring at a blank piece of paper, he pondered how to build a comprehensive financial model. He’d need data (lots of it), a team of analysts, and months to work on it. He got what he needed. When the model ran for the first time in October, it took hours to go through its paces.
    The results confirmed his fears: Tiny tweaks to government policies could cause oil demand to halve or to almost double by 2050. The crude market could become exceptionally volatile, and investors would probably start fleeing within the next five years.
    The model helped LGIM rank companies most at risk to climate change. “Uncertainty around the level of demand growth creates massive instability in the way oil markets work, and that has all sorts of implications for investors,” says Stansbury, who’s now head of commodities research.
    LGIM’s Omi says this kind of rigorous analysis has persuaded big companies, typically resistant to change, to begin making serious strategic shifts.
    When LGIM divested some oil company stocks last year, she says, some of the fund managers protested, “These are really good stocks!” She replied, “I know they might be good stocks for you, but these are the rationales. This makes sense for our clients.”

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    09/08/2019

    IPCC Climate Change Report Calls For Urgent Overhaul Of Food Production, Land Management

    ABC Science - Nick Kilvert

    Changes to land management, deforestation and food production are necessary to combat climate change. (Getty Images: Ted Mead)

    Key points:

    • Land sector produces around a quarter of global emissions
    • Diets need to move to low emissions sources
    • Desertification will hit poorest and arid nations hardest
    We must urgently revolutionise what we eat, how we grow it and the way we use land if the world is to combat dangerous climate change, according to today's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
    Transforming to clean energy, clean transport and industry alone will not cut global emissions enough to avoid dangerous warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report authors warn.
    Today's IPCC Special Report: Climate Change and Land builds on last year's dire warning from the panel on the consequences of 1.5C and 2C warming, which we're currently on track to reach by 2040 and the 2060s respectively.
    "The stability of food supply is projected to decrease as the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events that disrupt food chains increases," today's report authors state.
    "At around 2C of global warming the risk from permafrost degradation and food supply instabilities are projected to be very high."
    Shifting our farming practices presents an opportunity to cut emissions and improve health, the report states. (Getty Images: Glow Images)
    Improving land management, reforestation, and soil regeneration are essential steps in reducing emissions from the land sector, according to report co-author Annette Cowie from the University of New England.
    "We really do need to take drastic action urgently to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," Professor Cowie said.
    "When we plant trees, when we do sustainable land management practices that build organic land and soil, we actually take carbon out of the atmosphere and we store it in the land."
    Emissions from the global food system, including peripheral activities like packaging and transport, are estimated to comprise between 21 per cent and 37 per cent of the world's human-generated greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report.
    "About a quarter of the Earth's ice-free land area is subject to human-induced degradation," the authors state.
    And changing the way we farm could improve things for ourselves, as well as for the planet: "Balanced diets featuring plant-based foods such as those based on coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetable, nuts and seeds and animal-sourced food produced in resilient, sustainable and low-greenhouse-gas-emission systems present major opportunities for adaptation and mitigation while generating significant co-benefits in terms of human health."
    In Australia, where our meat consumption is particularly high on a global average, that means things like switching to low-emissions meat sources, ditching non-essential foods, and sourcing locally grown produce.
    Reducing food waste is also identified as a key area to gain efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of agriculture.
    Between 25 and 30 per cent of food is wasted worldwide, including crop waste, transport and store loss and personal waste.
    "By 2050, reduced food loss and waste can free several million square kilometres of land," the authors write.
    The report confirms the world has a double-edged sword hanging over its head, according to IPCC vice-chair Mark Howden.
    "We ignore the interactions between climate change and the land at our peril."

    Reforestation key to carbon reduction
    Reforestation can help draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. (ABC Newcastle: Robert Virtue)
    Systemic changes to agriculture to reverse soil erosion, rehabilitate degraded lands, minimise water and fertiliser use and increase carbon capture and storage are all identified as short- and long-term strategies for reducing greenhouse gases.
    IPCC scientist Peter Newman from Curtin University said that while the energy sector has surged ahead in forging a path to low-to-no emissions, the land sector is dragging behind globally.
    "Land has been a laggard because across the world there has been continued deforestation, which is fundamental to keeping carbon in the landscape," Professor Newman said.
    "If you're cutting trees down more than you're planting, then that's not a great success story. And that has started to increase in recent years."
    Deforestation in the Amazon has surged recently, but Australia's own deforestation rate has also climbed, drawing comparisons to Brazil.
    "There was a lot of reforestation occurring right across Australia. It was certainly helped with the carbon tax because that was one way you could offset," Professor Newman said.
    "[But] there's been an increase in deforestation, especially in Queensland, and that means we haven't been able to do nearly as well as the Federal Government has been saying."
    One essential action that can immediately help reduce emissions, the report suggests, is protecting carbon-storing ecosystems such as forests, peatlands, rangelands and mangroves.
    And rehabilitating these carbon-sink ecosystems can also achieve significant greenhouse-gas draw-down in the near future.
    Recent research estimated that reforesting a billion hectares of degraded land globally could stall atmospheric carbon dioxide increase by around 20 years.
    This could buy precious time while we continue to clean our energy, land-use, transport and industrial sectors, the researchers told the ABC earlier this year.
    And there are dual benefits to reforesting and restoring ecosystems, according to today's report.
    They include increasing habitat for threatened species, reducing invasive species and improving human health.
    Alleviating poverty and empowering women in developing nations are two strategies that could improve land management and slow population growth, said ecologist Hugh Possingham from the University of Queensland and the Nature Conservancy.
    "If you improve women's education and give them autonomy over reproduction and their lives, birth rates drop and infant mortality drops," Professor Possingham said.
    "Everything is win-win — you can't complain about women's education and you can't complain about children not dying."

    Impacts will hit the poor and arid nations hardest
    Desertification is expected to increase under climate change. (Getty Images: Alexander Nicholson)
    Under future climate change scenarios, droughts are predicted to become more intense and more common. While this is the first IPCC report to have been produced with a majority (53 per cent) of authors from developing countries, it is developing nations that will likely feel the worst effects of food security, according to report co-author Priyadarshi Shukla.
    "We will see different effects in different countries, but there will be more drastic impacts on low-income countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean," he said.
    Desertification in arid regions, including Australia, is expected to increase as tropical and subtropical climate zones expand poleward.
    This is projected to put increasing pressure on already stretched agricultural sectors, driving up prices and threatening food security.
    "Asia and Africa are projected to have the highest number of people vulnerable to increased desertification," the report says.
    "The tropics and subtropics are projected to be most vulnerable to crop yield decline."
    Already, the impacts of desertification are being felt due to land-use changes and climate change.
    "The frequency and intensity of dust storms have increased over the last few decades due to land use and land-cover changes and climate-related factors," the report states.
    "[Which is causing] increasing negative impacts on human health in regions such as the Arabian Peninsula and broader Middle East [and] Central Asia."
    As well as educating and empowering women in developing nations, restoring indigenous land management practices can help rehabilitate land and curb emissions, according to the report.
    "Agricultural practices that include indigenous and local knowledge can contribute to overcoming the combined challenges of climate change, food security, biodiversity conservation, and combating desertification and land degradation," the report states.
    That position has the support of environment groups including the Nature Conservancy, according to country director Richard Gilmore.
    "Give Aboriginal people the tools and resources to manage their land as they have done for thousands of years," he said.
    "The Roman Empire was around 2,000 years ago, Aboriginal people have been managing the land here for 2,000 generations."

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    Commonwealth Bank Warns Climate Change Could Slash Farm Productivity

    Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

    Climate change could slash the viability of farms in some parts of Australia over the next forty years as rainfall totals shrivel and days of heat stress increase, the Commonwealth Bank said in a new report.
    The bank - which also reported a modest drop in annual profit and a plan to exit lending to thermal coal by 2030 - said it had done the analysis to "understand the risks [and] identify ways to support our customers".
    Hard times down on the farm - and they may get even harder as climate change bites, Australia's biggest bank says. Credit: Christopher Lorrimer

    The bank found grain-growing regions could see profitability declines as productivity falls by 50 per cent in some areas by 2060, compared with a 2018 baseline, with "changes in predicted rainfall" the driver.For the livestock sector, profitability could drop by 40 per cent over the same time period because of a decline in pasture quality and quality.
    The dairy industry, too, faces "falls in most regions" of as much as 40 per cent drop in profitability by 2060 because of the rising likelihood of significant heat stress, the bank said. After five consecutive days of extreme conditions, cows can stop lactating and producing milk.
    The CBA sees climate change hitting farming hard in some parts of the country. Credit: Glenn Hunt

    The Commonwealth Bank is among the first big lenders to signal concern about farming productivity in the future.The bank, though, said "adaptive measures" could be moderate and even reverse those declines, such as the introduction of genetically modified grain able to increase the crop's resilience to extreme weather.
    Similarly, new technology could help reduce overgrazing, while shade and water sprays could help keep cows cool, the bank said.
    Even so, conditions may still deteroriate too much for some farms to cope.
    "[T]he trend of declining rainfall could result in some regions becoming significantly less viable for crop production in the long term," the bank said.
    Erwin Jackson, director of policy at Investor Group on Climate Change, said the physical effect of climate change was "increasingly recognised as a systemic financial risk requiring the same levels of governance and active management as any other dimension of material financial performance".
    "Sophisticated investment tools are rapidly emerging to strengthen the resilience of infrastructure, the economy and our communities to the effects of climate change," he said.
    "However, there are a number of practical barriers to investing in and supporting climate change adaptation [and] governments have a clear role in helping overcome these barriers."

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    How The World’s Dirtiest Industries Have Learned To Pollute Our Politics

    The Guardian - 

    The fossil-fuel lobby is threatened by public concern over the climate crisis. So it’s buying influence to get the results it wants
    A fracking rig in the US. Photograph: grandriver/Getty Images
    The tragedy of our times is that the gathering collapse of our life support systems has coincided with the age of public disservice. Just as we need to rise above self-interest and short-termism, governments around the world now represent the meanest and dirtiest of special interests. In the United Kingdom, the US, Brazil, Australia and many other nations, pollutocrats rule.
    The Earth’s systems are breaking down at astonishing speed. Wildfires roar across Siberia and Alaska – biting, in many places, deep into peat soils, releasing plumes of carbon dioxide and methane that cause more global heating. In July alone, Arctic wildfires are reckoned to have released as much carbon into the atmosphere as Austria does in a year: already the vicious twister of climate feedbacks has begun to turn.
    Torrents of meltwater pour from the Greenland ice cap, sweltering under a 15C temperature anomaly. Daily ice losses on this scale are 50 years ahead of schedule: they were forecast in the climate models for 2070. A paper in Geophysical Research Letters reveals that the thawing of permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic now exceeds the depths of melting projected by scientists for 2090.
    In the US, legislators in 18 states have put forward bills criminalising protests against pipelines
    While record temperatures in Europe last month caused discomfort and disruption, in south-west Asia they are starting to reach the point at which the human body hits its thermal limits. Ever wider tracts of the world will come to rely on air conditioning, not only for basic comfort but also for human survival: another feedback spiral, as air conditioning requires massive energy use. Those who cannot afford it will either move or die. Already, climate breakdown is driving more people from their homes than either poverty or conflict, while contributing to both these other factors.A recent paper in Nature shows that we have little hope of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating unless we retire existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Even if no new gas or coal power plants, roads and airports are built, the carbon emissions from current installations are likely to push us past this threshold. Only by retiring some of this infrastructure before the end of its natural life could we secure a 50% chance of remaining within the temperature limit agreed in Paris in 2015. Yet, far from decommissioning this Earth-killing machine, almost everywhere governments and industry stoke its fires.
    The oil and gas industry intends to spend $4.9tn over the next 10 years, exploring and developing new reserves, none of which we can afford to burn. According to the IMF, every year governments subsidise fossil fuels to the tune of $5tn – many times more than they spend on addressing our existential predicament. The US spends 10 times more on these mad subsidies than on its federal education budget. Last year, the world burned more fossil fuels than ever before.
    Icebergs near Ilulissat, Greenland, in August 2019. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
    An analysis by Barry Saxifrage in Canada’s National Observer shows that half the fossil fuels ever used by humans have been burned since 1990. While renewable and nuclear power supplies have also risen in this period, the gap between the production of fossil fuels and low-carbon energy has not been narrowing, but steadily widening. What counts, in seeking to prevent runaway global heating, is not the good things we start to do, but the bad things we cease to do. Shutting down fossil infrastructure requires government intervention.
    But in many nations, governments intervene not to protect humanity from the existential threat of fossil fuels, but to protect the fossil fuel industry from the existential threat of public protest. In the US, legislators in 18 states have put forward bills criminalising protests against pipelines, seeking to crush democratic dissent on behalf of the oil industry. In June, Donald Trump’s administration proposed federal legislation that would jail people for up to 20 years for disrupting pipeline construction.
    Global Witness reports that, in several nations, led by the Philippines, governments have incited the murder of environmental protesters. The process begins with rhetoric, demonising civil protest as extremism and terrorism, then shifts to legislation, criminalising attempts to protect the living planet. Criminalisation then helps legitimise physical assaults and murder. A similar demonisation has begun in Britain, with the publication by a dark money-funded lobby group, Policy Exchange, of a report smearing Extinction Rebellion. Like all such publications, it was given a series of major platforms by the BBC, which preserved its customary absence of curiosity about who funded it.
    Secretly funded lobby groups – such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs – have supplied some of the key advisers to Boris Johnson’s government. He has also appointed Andrea Leadsom, an enthusiastic fracking advocate, to run the department responsible for climate policy, and Grant Shapps – who until last month chaired the British Infrastructure Group, which promotes the expansion of roads and airports – as transport secretary. Last week the Guardian revealed documents suggesting that the firm run by Johnson’s ally and adviser Lynton Crosby has produced unbranded Facebook ads on behalf of the coal industry.
    What we see here looks like the denouement of the Pollution Paradox. Because the dirtiest industries attract the least public support, they have the greatest incentive to spend money on politics, to get the results they want and we don’t. They fund political parties, lobby groups and thinktanks, fake grassroots organisations and dark ads on social media. As a result, politics comes to be dominated by the dirtiest industries.
    We are told to fear the “extremists” who protest against ecocide and challenge dirty industry and the dirty governments it buys. But the extremists we should fear are those who hold office.

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    08/08/2019

    Climate Change Is A National Security Issue

    The Interpreter Lowy Institute - Pat Conroy

    The Morrison government’s Pacific “Step Up” will stumble before it starts unless global warming is taken seriously.
    An Australian army vehicle in floodwaters near the Queensland town of Bowen in March 2017 following Cyclone Debbie (Photo: Peter Parks via Getty)
    If only a minister of the Morrison government would be as forthright in identifying climate change as a massive destabilising force in Australia’s region as the Chief of the Defence Force Angus Campbell has been.
    In a private speech in Bowral in June, General Campbell is reported to have sounded a clear warning that climate change and Australia’s national security are inextricably linked. We live in the most disaster-prone region in the world – he is reported to have said – and a further rise in global temperatures would likely put more pressure on the Australian Defence Force’s ability to respond.
    In 2016, Australia’s Defence White Paper identified the risk that climate change would drive natural disasters and political instability in the Pacific. As the number of disasters increase, so do the number of disaster relief missions that are likely to involve the Australian Defence Force.
    Since that White Paper the ADF has supported disaster relief missions in Fiji, Tonga, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and New Zealand, as well as in Queensland and the Northern Territory following cyclones, and New South Wales and South Australia following floods. Those missions involve thousands of troops at a time, some times more than Australia deployed at the height of our involvement in Afghanistan. For example, we sent 1,000 troops to support Operation Fiji Assist, about 1,600 to help after Cyclone Debbie hit Queensland, and close to 3,000 to help North Queensland clean up after floods earlier this year.
    Flooding from the sea leaves damaged roads in Kirbati (Photo: Jonas Gratzer via Getty)
    Disaster relief takes resources. Indeed, the largest vessels our Navy has ever deployed – HMAS Adelaide and HMAS Canberra – are more often likely to be contributing to humanitarian missions in response to climate-related disasters than fulfilling a traditional combat role. General Campbell reportedly reiterated what Pacific leaders have been telling us for years – that climate change is a threat to their very existence, and they are looking to Australia to do more. Through loss of land, undermined economies, and threatened sustainability, an influx of climate refugees from affected islands would be a humanitarian disaster that could destabilise the region.
    As early as 2007, then senior Papua New Guinean diplomat Robert Aisi, representing the Pacific Islands Forum, told the United Nations Security Council that Pacific islands were already impacted by climate change. Aisi spoke about how Cyclone Heta had left one-fifth of the population of Niue homeless in 2004. How the Cook Islands had experienced five cyclones in one month when previously they were uncommon. How PNG was experiencing more malaria and dengue fever. And how rising sea temperatures and winds were expected to push major tuna stocks westwards, causing economic problems. He said:
    the impact of climate change on small islands was no less threatening than the dangers guns and bombs posed to large nations.
    Leaders from Fiji and the Solomon Islands have made similar pleas. And as recently as last month, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winton Peters said that any country that wanted to “step up” in the Pacific needed to take climate change concerns seriously.
    It is not that climate change itself causes conflict, but it puts pressure on natural resources, on the security of land, water, health and food which are critical to human survival.
    In the US, the military understands the risk climate change poses to security. US military combatant commands are integrating climate-related impacts into their planning cycles. They are doing this because the Pentagon understands that climate change will “aggravate problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and weak political institutions that threaten stability in a number of countries”.
    In April, the US Air Force Chief of Staff General David L. Goldfein, cited the conflict in Syria as an example of how climate change’s impact is already destabilising some nations. “Most don’t remember what caused the Syria conflict to start,” he told a Senate Armed Forces Committee. “It started because of a 10-year drought.”
    It is not that climate change itself causes conflict, but it puts pressure on natural resources, on the security of land, water, health and food which are critical to human survival.
    The Pacific is a foreign policy priority for the Morrison government, yet its “Step Up” in the region, important as it is, is being undermined by the Government’s inaction on climate change.
    The Pacific Islands Forum’s Boe Declaration, signed last year, identified climate change as the number one existential threat to the region, yet it’s well known that the Australian government did everything it could to seek to water down that declaration. In diplomatic forums in the Pacific, Australia is seen to be acting to remove words around climate change from communiques and negotiating positions. This undermines the entire region’s attempts to adapt to climate change, and would appear to undermine what General Campbell says is the ADF’s position, in that they have been preparing for the impact of climate change “for years”.
    Recently Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape agreed to work towards elevating the relationship between our countries to the status of a Comprehensive Strategic and Economic Partnership, a move which Labor welcomes.
    But without adequate development funding and without addressing climate change, the Morrison Government’s Pacific Step Up stumbles before it starts.
    Morrison must, as General Campbell does, recognise the intrinsic link between climate change in the Pacific and Australian national security. The Government must act to mitigate climate change – making sure the Paris Treaty is implemented properly so that we limit global warming, the effects of climate change in the Pacific and the potential destabilisation of our region.

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    Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative