11/08/2019

The Animals That Will Survive Climate Change

BBC Future - Christine Ro

With one in every four species facing extinction, which animals are the best equipped to survive the climate crisis? (Spoiler alert: it’s probably not humans).

“I don’t think it will be the humans. I think we’ll go quite early on,” says Julie Gray with a laugh. I’ve just asked Gray, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Sheffield, which species she thinks would be the last ones standing if we don’t take transformative action on climate change. Even with our extraordinary capacity for innovation and adaptability, humans, it turns out, probably won’t be among the survivors.
This is partly because humans reproduce agonisingly slowly and generally just one or two at a time – as do some other favourite animals, like pandas. Organisms that can produce many offspring quickly may have a better shot at avoiding extinction.
It may seem like just a thought experiment. But discussing which species are more, or less, able to survive climate change is disturbingly concrete. As a blockbuster biodiversity report stated recently, one in every four species currently faces extinction. Much of this vulnerability is linked to climate change, which is bringing about higher temperatures, sea level rise, more variable conditions and more extreme weather, among other impacts.
Some caveats are in order. While the seriousness of climate change is undeniable, it’s impossible to know exactly how those effects will play out for species vulnerability, especially far into the future. Methods of forecasting vulnerability are ever evolving, while limited and inconsistent data, plus the complex interactions of policies, land-use changes, and ecological effects, mean that projections aren’t set in stone. Climate change vulnerability assessments have had biases and blind spots (just as humans do more generally). (Read more about how our cognitive biases prevent climate action). Moreover, the indirect effects that are responsible for many climate change impacts on populations, such as in the food chain, are more complex to model than direct effects.
Some species of Australia’s quolls already have been made locally extinct by invasive species, a trend that will intensify with climate change (Credit: Getty Images)
Another source of uncertainty has to do with life forms’ capacity to adapt. Take ectotherms (cold-blooded animals like reptiles and amphibians), which have historically been slower to adapt to climatic change than endotherms. For one thing, they are less able to adjust their body temperatures. But there are exceptions, like the American bullfrog, which may actually find more habitable environments as a consequence of warming.
The American bullfrog could be one of few species to benefit from global warming (Credit: Getty Images)



And, of course, there is an alternative: we humans could get our acts together and stop the climate crisis from continuing to snowball by adopting policies and lifestyles that reduce greenhouse gases. But for the purposes of these projections, we’re assuming that’s not going to happen.

Tenacious trends
Even with the uncertainties, we can make some educated guesses about broad patterns.
Heat tolerant and drought resistant plants, like those found in deserts rather than rainforests, are more likely to survive. So are plants whose seeds can be dispersed over long distances, for instance by wind or ocean currents (like coconuts), rather than by ants (like some acacias). Plants that can adjust their flowering times may also be better able to deal with higher temperatures. Jen Lau, a biologist at Indiana University Bloomington, suggests that this may give non-native plants the advantage when it comes to responding to climate change.
We also can look to history as a guide. The fossil record contains signs of how species have coped with previous climatic shifts. There are genetic clues to long-term survival too, such as in the hardy green microalgae that adapted to saltier environments over millions of years – a finding only made in September 2018 by Fatima Foflonker of Rutgers and colleagues.
Importantly, though, the uniquely devastating nature of the current human-made climate crisis means that we can’t fully rely on benchmarks from the past.
“The climate change that we see in the future will differ in many ways from the climate change that we’ve seen in the past”, notes Jamie Carr, an outreach officer for the Climate Change Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission.
The historical record does point to the tenacity of cockroaches. These largely unloved critters “have survived every mass extinction event in history so far”, says Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a soil biogeochemist at the University of California, Merced. For instance, cockroaches adapted to an increasingly arid Australia, tens of millions of years ago, by starting to burrow into soil.
Cockroaches have survived every mass extinction event in history thus far (Credit: Getty Images)
This shows two characteristics, says Robert Nasi, the director general of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR): an “ability to hide and protect in buffered conditions (e.g. underground)” and a long evolutionary history, as in general “ancient species appear more resilient than younger ones”. These are among the traits that, Nasi says, are linked to surviving large catastrophic events which triggered major changes in climate.
Cockroaches also tend to not be picky eaters. Having broad diets means that climate change will be less of a threat to the food sources of species that are not too fussy about their food, such as rats, opportunistic birds, and urban raccoons.
As a comparison, take an animal like the koala. Koalas eat primarily eucalyptus leaves, which are becoming less nutritious due to increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. As a result, climate change is increasing their risk of starvation.
Climate change is increasing the risk of starvation for koalas (Credit: Getty Images)
As well as having a specialised diet, koalas have low genetic diversity – one reason that chlamydia has ravaged wild koala populations. These are worrying traits in terms of extinction risk. “In many cases, specialised species are those that we expect to see disappear first,” says Carr. This extends to species in microhabitats like high elevation montane forests, or those in narrow ranges, like some tropical birds or small-island plants. Also vulnerable are species that depend on pristine environments.
That’s compared to the “early successional” species that succeed in disturbed habitats, such as grasslands and young forest. These species “might do well under climate change because they thrive in states of change and transition”, says Jessica Hellmann, who leads the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. “For example, deer (in the US) are common in suburban areas and thrive where forests have been removed or are regularly disturbed.”
Species that Carr calls “mobile generalists”, which can move and adapt to different environments, are likely to be more durable in the face of climate change. While this adaptability is generally positive, it might come at a cost to other parts of an ecosystem. Invasive species like cane toads, which are poisonous, have led to local extinctions of other species like quolls (carnivorous marsupials) and monitors (large lizards) in Australia. And Hellmann says that the versatility of invasive plant species “leads to the worry that, in addition to losing vulnerable species, a warmer world will be a weedier world”. The weeds typically found along roadsides may be especially long-lasting in comparison with other plants.
Deer, which thrive in states of change and transition, may be more resilient (Credit: Getty Images)
Of course, many organisms are intrinsically less mobile. Most plants will be unable to move quickly enough to keep pace with rapid heating, although they’ve done so in response to the slower climatic changes of the past.

Buffer zones
The good news is that some specialised species might have a buffer known as climate change refugia: areas that are relatively protected from climate change’s consequences, such as deep sea canyons. Although deep sea zones are heating up and declining in oxygen concentrations, Jonathon Stillman, a marine environmental physiologist at San Francisco State University, suggests that deep sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems, specifically, might be one bright spot in an otherwise mostly bleak situation.
“They are pretty much uncoupled from the surface of our planet and I doubt that climate change will impact them in the least,” he says. “Humanity didn’t even know they existed until 1977. Their energy comes from the core of our Earth rather than from the Sun, and their already extreme habitat is unlikely to be altered by changes happening at the ocean surface.”
Similarly, Douglas Sheil, a tropical forest ecologist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, suggests that “at some point in the future the only vertebrate species surviving in Africa might be a blind cave fish deep underground”. As in the deep sea hydrothermal vents, “many species remain undiscovered and thus unknown – Europe’s first cave fish was only found in Germany in 2015.”
Heat-adapted organisms and microbes living in extreme environments are likely to be less affected by climate change (Credit: Getty Images)
Thermophiles (heat-adapted organisms) living in extreme environments like volcanic springs are also likely to be less affected by surface temperature changes. Indeed, the organisms best able to live in severe circumstances are microbes, as noted by many of the scientists I’ve surveyed. Computer modelling suggests that only microbes would be able to survive increasing solar intensity. Soil biogeochemist Berhe says of archaea, one of the major types of microbes, “these critters have figured out how to live in the most extreme of environments”.
Not quite as tiny but also nearly indestructible are tardigrades, commonly known as water bears. Environmental physiologist Stillman enthuses: “They can survive the vacuum of outer space, extreme dehydration, and very high temperatures. If you are a Star Trek fan, you have learned about them in a sci-fi setting, but they are real creatures that live across most habitats on Earth.”
The future will have not only more extreme environments, but also more urban, human-altered spaces. So “resistant species would likely be the ones that are well attuned to living in human-modified habitats such as urban parks and gardens, agricultural areas, farms, tree plantations, and so on”, says Arvin C Diesmos, a herpetology curator at the Philippine National Museum of Natural History.
CIFOR’s Nasi sums it up. “The winners will be very small, preferably endotherms if vertebrates, highly adaptable, omnivorous or able to live in extreme conditions.”
In the words of the IUCN’s Carr, “It doesn’t sound like a very pretty world.”
Endangered plants like the Brodiaea are likely to be increasingly vulnerable with climate change (Credit: Getty Images)
Of course, to some extent we already know what’s needed to limit the bleakness of the future natural world. This includes reducing greenhouse gases; protecting biodiversity; restoring connectivity between habitats (rather than building endless dams, roads and walls); and reducing interrelated threats like pollution and land harvesting. Even species that are close to extinction, like Saiga antelopes, can be brought back from the brink with enough conservation effort. To reflect the power of sustained conservation, scientists are developing a Green List of species on the road to recovery and full health, to complement the IUCN’s Red List of threatened species.
The political barriers are daunting. But scaling them, it seems, would beat surrendering the planet to the microbes.

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Don't Ask How To Pay For Climate Change. Ask Who

Wired - 

Bela and Jaques Sebastiao begin the process of cleaning up their home after after it was heavily damaged by Hurricane Michael, on October 17, 2018 in Mexico Beach, Florida. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Henry Farrell
Henry Farrell is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.
Last week, CNN announced plans to host a climate crisis town hall with the Democratic presidential candidates on September 4. MSNBC scheduled a multiday climate change forum with the presidential hopefuls later that month.
In both venues, some version of the perpetual question will undoubtedly be raised: “How will you pay for the costs of dealing with climate change?”
Despite its pervasiveness, this is a profoundly wrongheaded line of inquiry. Asking how to pay for the impact of climate change implies that these costs are a matter of choice. The reality is that global warming will impose massive costs, regardless of whether policymakers respond or not. Thus, the real question is not “How would you propose to pay?” but instead “Who is going to pay?” and “How much?”
People are already paying for climate change with their lives. Rising temperatures are killing more than 150,000 people every year. This death toll is estimated to increase to 1.5 million people annually by the turn of the century. Some are confronting the likelihood of failed crops; others have been forced to flee floodplains.
Those currently paying for the effects of climate change are the most vulnerable—people in the developing world, the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the very young. As the world changes, more people are going to suffer the cost of heat waves, rising water, damaged or dying ecosystems, and flooded coastal cities. This will create what political science and public policy experts describe as “existential politics,” in which different groups fight to preserve their entire way of life.
On one side of this existential fight will be those who want things to continue mostly as they are. Oil companies have trillions of dollars worth of petroleum still in the ground. An entire energy infrastructure has been built on the back of fossil fuel extraction. If fossil fuels become “stranded assets”— economic assets that suddenly lose most or all of their value—crucial sectors of today’s economy will be utterly transformed, hurting the interests of the businesses that run them. Unsurprisingly, these businesses are fighting back. So, too, are industrial workers such as coal miners whose way of life is threatened.
Meanwhile, others will suffer the effects of continued inaction. People who live on coasts will face the risks and costs of flooding, while many of those who live inland will have to deal with changing weather patterns, droughts, and unbearable heat waves.
This fight has already started to play out. Fossil fuel interests are rich, politically influential, and well organized. They are able not only to pay for lobbyists in Washington, DC, but to organize an entire political movement at the state level. The Koch-funded “grassroots” organization Americans for Prosperity pushes to protect fossil fuel interests in individual states. The group has become intimately intertwined with the Republican party.
The interests on the other side are broader, less well organized, and less influential. This is in part because everyday Americans don’t really understand that they will be on the hook for many of the costs of climate change unless there is a dramatic change in policy.
If we continue on our current trajectory, the lives of ordinary voters will be fundamentally transformed while fossil fuel companies continue to make vast profits. Any serious policy response to global warming needs to transfer some of the costs from voters to the fossil fuel interests, where they belong.
Some might disagree with this approach, advocating instead for a consensus among all parties. The problem with this rejoinder: The politics of global warming are necessarily divisive, and one side of the divide is already mobilizing to protect its own narrow interests.
To fight global warming, we need to organize a broad public counterweight against the sectoral interests that are trying to block action. Building an effective “Green New Deal” will require financial resources to unite a coalition in favor of climate action, and to split the counter-coalition. Such policy will also need to remake the international political economy to build both cross-national solidarities and domestic alliances.
Yet before all of this can be done, it is crucial to change the terms of debate and acknowledge reality. We are going to have to pay for global warming, one way or another. The key question is who will pay—and how we can distribute those costs fairly.

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This Is Why We Talk Of Extinction

Future Today - Jeremy Leggett

A slideshow precis/analysis for-the-busy of the latest UN IPCC report


This is why we talk of extinction - a slideshow precis/analysis for-the-busy of the latest UN IPCC scientists report on the climate crisis from Jeremy Leggett
print or digital copy

UN scientists this week reviewed the impacts of observed and predicted global heating on land, plus adaptation and mitigation response options.
This is a vital report, with many life-or-death messages for governments at the climate negotiations, and indeed everyone who worries about the existential threat global heating and climate chaos pose for civilisation and the natural world.
I have prepared a slideshow precis / analysis of the the first part of the report, on impacts.
In it, I try to make the urgent messages clear, but also the pulled punches that are inevitable in a report written by a huge committee, and subject to bad-actor lobbying.

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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.
IMAGE
Instagram
"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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    Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative