17/01/2021

Air Pollution Will Lead To Mass Migration, Say Experts After Landmark Ruling

The Guardian - 

Call for world leaders to act in wake of French extradition case that turned on environmental concerns

People wearing facemasks to protect themselves against air pollution in Beijing, China, in 2018. Photograph: Wu Hong/EPA-EFE

Air pollution does not respect national boundaries and environmental degradation will lead to mass migration in the future, said a leading barrister in the wake of a landmark migration ruling, as experts warned that government action must be taken as a matter of urgency.

Sailesh Mehta, a barrister specialising in environmental cases, said: “The link between migration and environmental degradation is clear. As global warming makes parts of our planet uninhabitable, mass migration will become the norm. Air and water pollution do not respect national boundaries. We can stop a humanitarian and political crisis from becoming an existential one. But our leaders must act now.”

He added: “We have a right to breathe clean air. Governments and courts are beginning to recognise this fundamental human right. The problem is not just that of Bangladesh and the developing world. Air pollution contributes to around 200,000 deaths a year in the UK. One in four deaths worldwide can be linked to pollution.”

The comments follow a decision by a French court this week, which is believed to be the first time environment was cited by a court in an extradition hearing. The case involved a Bangladeshi man with asthma who avoided deportation from France after his lawyer argued that he risked a severe deterioration in his condition, and possibly premature death, due to the dangerous levels of pollution in his homeland.

The appeals court in Bordeaux overturned an expulsion order against the 40-year-old man because he would face “a worsening of his respiratory pathology due to air pollution” in his country of origin.

Yale and Columbia universities’ environmental performance index ranks Bangladesh 179th in the world for air quality in 2020, while the concentration of fine particles in the air is six times the World Health Organization’s recommended maximum.

Dr David R Boyd, UN special rapporteur on human rights and environment, agreed with Mehta’s analysis, telling the Guardian: “Air pollution causes 7 million premature deaths annually, so it is understandable if people feel compelled to migrate in search of clean air to safeguard their health. Air pollution is a global public health disaster that does not get the attention it deserves because most of the people who die are poor or otherwise vulnerable.”

He explained: “My work is really focused on increasing recognition and implementation of everyone’s right to live in a healthy environment, which surely includes clean air. I’m involved in a couple of really important lawsuits on this issue in South Africa and Indonesia. The good news is that we have solutions that simultaneously address air pollution and climate change primarily by rapidly phasing out fossil fuel use.”

Alex Randall, coordinator at the Climate & Migration Coalition, said safe and legal routes to allow people to migrate needed to be established.

“Cases such as this, where air quality or other pollution become a reason for preventing deportation, are certainly important steps forward. They may potentially lay the foundations for other future cases in which the impacts of climate change provide grounds for allowing people to stay. In fact, several other cases mostly relating to people from climate vulnerable Pacific island nations have started to do this.

“However, these cases do not usually set legal precedents and people moving across borders due to climate change impacts remain in a legal grey area.”

According to the Environmental Justice Foundation, one person every 1.3 seconds is forced to leave their homes and communities due to the climate crisis but millions lack legal protection. It has called on all countries to rapidly and fully implement the Paris climate agreement.

A ruling by the United Nations human rights committee a year ago found it is unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by the climate crisis.

Tens of millions of people are expected to be displaced by global heating in the next decade.

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The Planet Is Dying Faster Than We Thought

Live Science - 

A triple-threat of climate change, biodiversity loss and overpopulation is bearing down on Earth.

Charred trees are seen along Pallet Creek Road during the Bobcat Fire in Valyermo, California, September 18, 2020. Climate change is poised to exacerbate the frequency and intensity of annual wildfires. (Image: © Kyle Grillot/ Getty)
Humanity is barreling toward a "ghastly future" of mass extinctions, health crises and constant climate-induced disruptions to society — one that can only be prevented if world leaders start taking environmental threats seriously, scientists warn in a new paper published Jan. 13 in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science.

In the paper, a team of 17 researchers based in the United States, Mexico and Australia describes three major crises facing life on Earth: climate disruption, biodiversity decline and human overconsumption and overpopulation.

Citing more than 150 studies, the team argues that these three crises — which are poised only to escalate in the coming decades — put Earth in a more precarious position than most people realize, and could even jeopardize the human race.

The point of the new paper isn't to scold average citizens or warn that all is lost, the authors wrote — but rather, to plainly describe the threats facing our planet so that people (and hopefully political leaders) start taking them seriously and planning mitigating actions, before it's too late.

"Ours is not a call to surrender," the authors wrote in their paper. "We aim to provide leaders with a realistic 'cold shower' of the state of the planet that is essential for planning to avoid a ghastly future."

What will that future look like?

For starters, the team writes, nature will be a lot lonelier.

Since the start of agriculture 11,000 years ago, Earth has lost an estimated 50% of its terrestrial plants and roughly 20% of its animal biodiversity, the authors said, citing two studies, one from 2018 and the other from 2019.

If current trends continue, as many as 1 million of Earth's 7 million to 10 million plant and animal species could face extinction in the near future, according to the new paper.

Such an enormous loss of biodiversity would also disrupt every major ecosystem on the planet, the team wrote, with fewer insects to pollinate plants, fewer plants to filter the air, water and soil, and fewer forests to protect human settlements from floods and other natural disasters, the team wrote.

Meanwhile, those same phenomena that cause natural disasters are all predicted to become stronger and more frequent due to global climate change.

These disasters, coupled with climate-induced droughts and sea-level rise, could mean 1 billion people would become climate refugees by the year 2050, forcing mass migrations that further endanger human lives and disrupt society.

Overpopulation will not make anything easier.

"By 2050, the world population will likely grow to ~9.9 billion, with growth projected by many to continue until well into the next century," the study authors wrote.

This booming growth will exacerbate societal problems like food insecurity, housing insecurity, joblessness, overcrowding and inequality.

Larger populations also increase the chances of pandemics, the team wrote; as humans encroach ever farther into wild spaces, the risk of uncovering deadly new zoonotic diseases — like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 — becomes ever greater, according to a study published in September 2020 in the journal World Development.

While we can see and feel the effects of global warming on a daily basis — like record-setting heat across the world and increasingly active hurricane seasons, for instance — the worst effects of these other crises could take decades to become apparent, the team wrote.

That delay between cause and effect may be responsible for what the authors call an "utterly inadequate" effort to address these encroaching environmental threats.

"If most of the world's population truly understood and appreciated the magnitude of the crises we summarize here, and the inevitability of worsening conditions, one could logically expect positive changes in politics and policies to match the gravity of the existential threats," the team wrote. "But the opposite is unfolding."

Indeed, just last week a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change revealed that humans have already blown past the global warming targets set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, and we are currently on track to inhabit a world that is 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 degrees Celsius) warmer than average global temperatures in the pre-industrial era — slightly more than halfway to the United Nation's "worst-case scenario."

Nations have similarly failed to meet basic biodiversity targets set by the U.N. in 2010, the authors note.

NASA: 2020 tied for the hottest year on record, matching 2016.

The dark future described in this paper is not guaranteed, the authors wrote, so long as world leaders and policymakers start immediately taking the problems before us seriously.

Once leaders accept "the gravity of the situation," then the large-scale changes needed to conserve our planet can begin.

Those changes must be sweeping, including "the abolition of perpetual economic growth … [and] a rapid exit from fossil-fuel use," the authors wrote. 

But the first step is education.

"It is therefore incumbent on experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being to … avoid sugar-coating the overwhelming challenges ahead and 'tell it like it is,'" the team concluded.

"Anything else is misleading at best … potentially lethal for the human enterprise at worst."

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David Attenborough's Heartbreaking Plea After Admitting ‘I Don’t Have Long Left’

Daily Express  - 

SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH has made a heartbreaking plea to humanity to change its relationship with nature after the legendary TV presenter admitted "I don't have long left"
BBC legend Sir David Attenborough. (Image: GETTY)
 
Best known for his appearances in numerous documentaries over the years, Sir David has also been a lifelong climate change activist. 

The 94-year-old first found fame after working in the BBC production team in the Sixties and soon cemented his place as a national treasure. 

 Since then, he has travelled to every continent on the globe, and Netflix’s new film ‘A Life On Our Planet’ was released in September as a testament to his defining moments.

But the naturalist revealed during an interview with 60 Minutes why working on the documentary was particularly tough for him.

He said: “Even the biggest and most awful things that humanity has done pale into insignificance when you think of what could be around the corner.

“There could be whole areas of the world where people can no longer live.

“The hottest temperatures ever have been recorded in Death Valley, yet we are such optimists that we say ‘well, that’s interesting isn’t it?’

“No, wait a few months, wait another year, and see it again.”

David Attenborough made a heartbreaking plea. (Image: GETTY/YOUTUBE)


60 Minutes

Sir David explained some of the heartbreaking changes he has seen to the planet over the years.

He added: “Coral reef is one of the most dramatic, beautiful and complex manifestations of life you can find anywhere.

“But during my last trip it was like a cemetery – all the coral had died.

“That’s because of the rising temperature and acidity.

David Attenborough first started presenting in the Sixties. (Image: GETTY)

“We live in a finite world, we depend on the natural world for every mouthful of food that we eat and every lung-full of air that we breathe.

“If it wasn’t for the natural world then the atmosphere would be depleted of oxygen tomorrow.”

In a call to action, Sir David pleaded with humanity to make a change while it still can.

He added: “If there were no trees we would suffocate.

“I think the pandemic is helping people to discover that they need the natural world for their very sanity.

“People who have never listened to a bird’s song are suddenly thrilled, excited and inspired by the natural world.

Sir David at a Christmas show in London zoo. (Image: GETTY)

Prince Charles and Princess Anne meet David Attenborough at Lime Grove Studios. (Image: GETTY)



“They realise they are apart of it. By saving nature we are saving ourselves.”

It comes just two years after Sir David admitted he does not think he has long left to live and "can't bear" to think of the future after he is gone.

Speaking to The Guardian in 2019, he said: "I don’t spend time thinking about that because I can’t bear it.

“I’m just coming up to 93, and so I don’t have many more years around here. 

“I find it difficult to think beyond that because the signs aren’t good.”

He added that not enough work has been done in his lifetime to prevent the devastating effects of climate change.

He said: “My generation is no great example for understanding – we have done terrible things.”

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16/01/2021

Climate Crisis: Record Ocean Heat In 2020 Supercharged Extreme Weather

The Guardian - 

Scientists say temperatures likely to be increasing faster than at any time in past 2,000 years

A surfer at Huntington beach on the Pacific coast of the US. Scientists expect about 1 metre of sea level rise by the end of the century. Photograph: Allen J Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Rex/Shutterstock.

The world’s oceans reached their hottest level in recorded history in 2020, supercharging the extreme weather impacts of the climate emergency, scientists have reported.

More than 90% of the heat trapped by carbon emissions is absorbed by the oceans, making their warmth an undeniable signal of the accelerating crisis.

The researchers found the five hottest years in the oceans had occurred since 2015, and that the rate of heating since 1986 was eight times higher than that from 1960-85.

 Reliable instrumental measurements stretch back to 1940 but it is likely the oceans are now at their hottest for 1,000 years and heating faster than any time in the last 2,000 years.

Warmer seas provide more energy to storms, making them more severe, and there were a record 29 tropical storms in the Atlantic in 2020.
                  
The world's oceans were the hottest ever recorded in 2020
Heat absorbed by oceans compared to 1981–2010 average (zettajoules)
Guardian graphic. Source: Cheng et al, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences 2021

Hotter oceans also disrupt rainfall patterns, which lead to floods, droughts and wildfires. Heat also causes seawater to expand and drive up sea levels.

Scientists expect about 1 metre of sea level rise by the end of the century, endangering 150 million people worldwide.

Furthermore, warmer water is less able to dissolve carbon dioxide. Currently, 30% of carbon emissions are absorbed by the oceans, limiting the heating effect of humanity’s burning of fossil fuels.

“Ocean warming is the key metric and 2020 continued a long series of record-breaking years, showing the unabated continuation of global warming,” said Prof John Abraham, at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota, US, and one of the team behind the new analysis.

“Warmer oceans supercharge the weather, impacting the biological systems of the planet as well as human society. Climate change is literally killing people and we are not doing enough to stop it.”

Recent research has shown higher temperatures in the seas are also harming marine life, with the number of ocean heatwaves increasing sharply.

The oceans cover 71% of the planet and water can absorb thousands of times more heat than air, which is why 93% of global heating is taken up by the seas. But surface air temperatures, which affect people most directly, also rose in 2020 to the joint highest on record.

The average global air temperature in 2020 was 1.25C higher than the pre-industrial period, dangerously close to the 1.5C target set by the world’s nations to avoid the worst impacts.

The latest research, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, showed the oceans absorbed 20 zettajoules more heat than in 2019.

This is equivalent to every person on Earth running 80 hairdryers all day, every day, or the detonation of about four atomic bombs a second.

The analysis assessed the heat absorbed in the top 2,000 metres of the ocean. This is where most of the data is collected and where the vast majority of the heat accumulates.

Most data is from 3,800 free-drifting Argo floats dispersed across the oceans, but some comes from torpedo-like bathythermographs dropped from ships in the past.

The study also reported that the sinking of surface ocean waters and upwelling of deeper water is reducing as the seas heat up. This means the surface layers heat up even further and fewer nutrients for marine life are brought up from the depths.

The worldwide lockdowns resulting from the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 cut carbon emissions by about 7%. While this was a record drop, it was “not even a blip” in terms of the total CO2 in the atmosphere and had no measurable effect on ocean heating.

“The fact the oceans reached yet another new record level of warmth in 2020, despite a record drop in global carbon emissions, drives home the fact that the planet will continue to warm up as long as we emit carbon into the atmosphere.” said Prof Michael Mann, at Penn State University in the US, and one of the study team. “It is a reminder of the urgency of bringing carbon emissions down rapidly over the next several years.”

Prof Laure Zanna, of New York University, said: “Continuous ocean temperature measurements, as presented in this study, are crucial to quantify the warming of the planet.”

Rising sea level driven by heating, as well as the melting of glaciers and ice caps was important, she said. “That directly impacts a significant fraction of the world’s population.”

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Worried About Earth’s Future? Well, The Outlook Is Worse Than Even Scientists Can Grasp

The Conversation -  |  | 

Daniel Mariuz/AAP

Authors
  •  is Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University
  •  is Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles
  •  is President, Center for Conservation Biology, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University     
Anyone with even a passing interest in the global environment knows all is not well. But just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.

The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world. We outline the likely future trends in biodiversity decline, mass extinction, climate disruption and planetary toxification. We clarify the gravity of the human predicament and provide a timely snapshot of the crises that must be addressed now.

The problems, all tied to human consumption and population growth, will almost certainly worsen over coming decades. The damage will be felt for centuries and threatens the survival of all species, including our own.

Our paper was authored by 17 leading scientists, including those from Flinders University, Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles. Our message might not be popular, and indeed is frightening. But scientists must be candid and accurate if humanity is to understand the enormity of the challenges we face.

Humanity must come to terms with the future we and future generations face. Shutterstock

Getting to grips with the problem

First, we reviewed the extent to which experts grasp the scale of the threats to the biosphere and its lifeforms, including humanity. Alarmingly, the research shows future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than experts currently believe.

This is largely because academics tend to specialise in one discipline, which means they’re in many cases unfamiliar with the complex system in which planetary-scale problems — and their potential solutions — exist.

What’s more, positive change can be impeded by governments rejecting or ignoring scientific advice, and ignorance of human behaviour by both technical experts and policymakers.

More broadly, the human optimism bias – thinking bad things are more likely to befall others than yourself – means many people underestimate the environmental crisis.

Numbers don’t lie

Our research also reviewed the current state of the global environment. While the problems are too numerous to cover in full here, they include:
  • A halving of vegetation biomass since the agricultural revolution around 11,000 years ago. Overall, humans have altered almost two-thirds of Earth’s land surface
  • About 1,300 documented species extinctions over the past 500 years, with many more unrecorded. More broadly, population sizes of animal species have declined by more than two-thirds over the last 50 years, suggesting more extinctions are imminent
  • About one million plant and animal species globally threatened with extinction. The combined mass of wild mammals today is less than one-quarter the mass before humans started colonising the planet. Insects are also disappearing rapidly in many regions
  • 85% of the global wetland area lost in 300 years, and more than 65% of the oceans compromised to some extent by humans
  • A halving of live coral cover on reefs in less than 200 years and a decrease in seagrass extent by 10% per decade over the last century. About 40% of kelp forests have declined in abundance, and the number of large predatory fishes is fewer than 30% of that a century ago.
Major environmental-change categories expressed as a percentage relative to intact baseline. Red indicates percentage of category damaged, lost or otherwise affected; blue indicates percentage intact, remaining or unaffected. Frontiers in Conservation Science
A bad situation only getting worse

The human population has reached 7.8 billion – double what it was in 1970 – and is set to reach about 10 billion by 2050. More people equals more food insecurity, soil degradation, plastic pollution and biodiversity loss.

High population densities make pandemics more likely. They also drive overcrowding, unemployment, housing shortages and deteriorating infrastructure, and can spark conflicts leading to insurrections, terrorism, and war.

Essentially, humans have created an ecological Ponzi scheme. Consumption, as a percentage of Earth’s capacity to regenerate itself, has grown from 73% in 1960 to more than 170% today.

High-consuming countries like Australia, Canada and the US use multiple units of fossil-fuel energy to produce one energy unit of food. Energy consumption will therefore increase in the near future, especially as the global middle class grows.

Then there’s climate change. Humanity has already exceeded global warming of 1°C this century, and will almost assuredly exceed 1.5 °C between 2030 and 2052. Even if all nations party to the Paris Agreement ratify their commitments, warming would still reach between 2.6°C and 3.1°C by 2100.

The human population is set to reach 10 billion by 2050. Shutterstock

The danger of political impotence

Our paper found global policymaking falls far short of addressing these existential threats. Securing Earth’s future requires prudent, long-term decisions. However this is impeded by short-term interests, and an economic system that concentrates wealth among a few individuals.

Right-wing populist leaders with anti-environment agendas are on the rise, and in many countries, environmental protest groups have been labelled “terrorists”. Environmentalism has become weaponised as a political ideology, rather than properly viewed as a universal mode of self-preservation.

Financed disinformation campaigns against climate action and forest protection, for example, protect short-term profits and claim meaningful environmental action is too costly – while ignoring the broader cost of not acting. By and large, it appears unlikely business investments will shift at sufficient scale to avoid environmental catastrophe.

Changing course

Fundamental change is required to avoid this ghastly future. Specifically, we and many others suggest:
  • Abolishing the goal of perpetual economic growth
  • Revealing the true cost of products and activities by forcing those who damage the environment to pay for its restoration, such as through carbon pricing
  • Rapidly eliminating fossil fuels
  • Regulating markets by curtailing monopolisation and limiting undue corporate influence on policy
  • Reigning in corporate lobbying of political representatives
  • Educating and empowering women across the globe, including giving them control over family planning.

The true cost of environmental damage should be borne by those responsible. Shutterstock

Don’t look away

Many organisations and individuals are devoted to achieving these aims. However their messages have not sufficiently penetrated the policy, economic, political and academic realms to make much difference.

Failing to acknowledge the magnitude and gravity of problems facing humanity is not just naïve, it’s dangerous. And science has a big role to play here.

Scientists must not sugarcoat the overwhelming challenges ahead. Instead, they should tell it like it is. Anything else is at best misleading, and at worst potentially lethal for the human enterprise.

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Countries Adapting Too Slowly To Climate Breakdown, UN Warns

The Guardian - 

Report says not enough funding is being made available to deal with effects of extreme weather

A flooded road after heavy rains hit Turkey’s north-western province of Edirne earlier this week. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Millions of people around the world are facing disaster from flood, droughts, heatwaves and other extreme weather, as governments fail to take the measures needed to adapt to the impacts of climate breakdown, the UN has warned.

Nearly three-quarters of countries around the world have recognised the need to plan for the effects of global heating, but few of those plans are adequate to the rising threat, and little funding has been made available to put them into force, according to the UN environment programme’s Adaptation report 2020, published on Thursday.

Last year was the joint hottest on record, with a heatwave in Siberia, wildfires in Australia and the US, a destructive Atlantic hurricane season and storms and floods in many parts of Asia.

But spending on measures to adapt to extreme weather has failed to keep pace with the rising need, according to UNEP. 

Only about $30bn (£22bn) is provided each year in development aid, to help poor countries cope with the effects of the climate crisis, which is less than half of the $70bn currently estimated to be needed. Those costs are set to increase further, to between $140bn and $300bn by the end of the decade.

About half of global climate finance should be devoted to adaptation, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, has said, with the rest going to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

 However, while private companies are often willing to provide funding for some projects to reduce emissions, such as profitable renewable energy generation schemes in rapidly emerging economies, projects that help people adapt to the impact of climate change, such as early warning systems, flood barriers or storm drains, are often more difficult to finance.

A back-burning operation in New South Wales, Australia, which was hit by devastating wildfires in 2020. Photograph: Getty Images
Many countries will also struggle to find the resources for climate adaptation because of the coronavirus pandemic, the UN warned.

The economic impacts of Covid-19 have pushed adaptation further down the political agenda across the world, while in the longer term the consequences of the pandemic are likely to put additional pressures on public finances, and “might change national and donor priorities in support of climate action”.

The UK government recently slashed its overseas aid budget, though the climate spending portion has been maintained.

Yet if countries were to prioritise a “green recovery” in their Covid-19 economic stimulus packages, they could help to solve many of these problems, UNEP noted. 

Economic studies have shown that measures to increase resilience to the impacts of the climate crisis – including planting trees, building flood barriers, restoring natural landscapes and protecting and updating infrastructure such as transport and communications networks – can all provide “shovel-ready” jobs of the kind needed to lift economies out of recession.

That opportunity will be missed if countries stick to the economic rescue packages announced to date, which so far have failed to focus on a green recovery, according to the report.

The report also found that nature-based solutions should be prioritised. 

 These include planting trees to act as carbon sinks, and as natural flood barriers; restoring mangrove swamps as buffers against coastal storms and sea level rises; halting the destruction of coral reefs; re-wetting bogs and wetlands; and allowing areas of degraded land to regenerate naturally. 

 These tend to be among the most cost-effective ways to adapt to extreme weather, and many also help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as healthy soils, vegetation, seas and landscapes store more carbon than degraded land and seas.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while an important priority, will not be enough to erase the need to adapt to increasing extreme weather. 

The report found that the world would face a rising toll from climate impacts, even if the goals of the Paris agreement – limiting temperature rises to well below 2C, with an aspiration of holding heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – are met. 

Temperatures have already risen by 1C above the historic norm.

Inger Andersen, the executive director of UNEP, said: “We are not saying we can adapt our way out of climate change, but the impacts of failing to invest in adaptation to climate change will be very severe, and it is the poorest in wealthy countries and the poorest in the world who will pay the highest price, and who are most exposed to these impacts.”

She said extreme weather events were already taking a toll, so governments should see adaptation as an urgent issue. 

“The more we can expedite adaption investments, the lower the human costs and the economic costs will be,” she said. “It makes good sense for society.”

While governments are struggling with the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, they should plan to use stimulus money with a view to making their countries more resilient to the impact of the climate crisis.

“There is a massive injection of the next generation’s money into the Covid recovery – are we going to leave the next generation with a massive debt as well as a broken planet?”

She said the first wave of stimulus spending had not prioritised green investment, but that further waves of spending should do so. “There are opportunities here,” she added.

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15/01/2021

Positive Tipping Points Offer Climate Hope

Cosmos - 

Analysing cases of successful societal shift points the way.

Solar panels may be reaching a tipping point in Australia. Credit: Sven Hagolani / Getty Images

While tipping points are often used to describe the negative impacts of climate change, researchers have found some points of optimism as well.

A new study has highlighted examples of positive “tipping points” in human societies that could rapidly slash carbon emissions.

Timothy Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter and Simon Sharpe, deputy director in the UK Cabinet Office COP 26 unit highlight examples that have contributed to the world’s fast low-carbon transitions in road transport and power generation. 

“We focus on two sectors – light road transport and power – where tipping points have already been triggered by policy interventions at individual nation scales,” they write in their paper published in the journal Climate Policy. 

They say that “small coalitions of countries” could trigger “upward-scaling tipping cascades” to achieve more. 

“Limiting global warming to well below 2⁰C now requires transformational change and a dramatic acceleration of progress,” says Lenton. “Many people are questioning whether this is achievable. But hope lies in the way that tipping points can spark rapid change through complex systems.” 

In Norway, policies have made electric vehicles (EVs) the same price to buy as conventional cars, leading to EVs accounting for 50% of car sales. Globally, this figure sits at 2–3%. 

The authors say a global tipping point will come when EVs cost the same to manufacture as conventional cars. They suggest a small number of key locations could help drive this change, such as China, the EU and California – who together make up half the world’s car sales. 

Another example the researchers highlight is the decarbonisation of the power sector in the UK. In recent years, the UK has carried this out faster than any other large country. 

The combination of a carbon tax and an EU emissions scheme made gas cheaper than coal. With increasing renewable energy generation, coal was tipped into unprofitability. The researchers suggest a tipping point will occur when the capital cost of coal plants falls below that of wind and solar in all countries. 

“If either of these efforts – in power or road transport – succeed, the most important effect could be to tip perceptions of the potential for international cooperation to tackle climate change,” Lenton says. 

Mark Holdem from the Australian National University (ANU) says that in Australia, a similar lesson might be learned from the roll out of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells in Australia. 

In 2019, the Australian PV Institute reported that installation increased in residential, commercial and large-scale solar markets and by the end of October 2020, more than 2.59 million rooftop solar power systems had been installed. 

“If you push out PV at a very large scale, that pushes down the price of panels and also the price of installation. Newer, better and cheaper ways of installing the panels come in,” Holdem says.  

“That also generates an alteration of the energy market and [puts pressure on] regulation to remove barriers for renewables coming into the market.”

Holdem adds the solar PV rollout has led to a reduction in electricity prices, which leads to more panels being installed, driving down prices even further.

“You get this feedback system: some panels drives more panels, which drives more panels. All of that drives down greenhouse emissions, which takes the foot off the climate change accelerator.”

Lenton and Sharpe highlight that these tipping points are by no means inevitable and that policies will be required to overcome the many barriers to transition. Holdem agrees. 

“We need a consistent and forward-looking policy framework which integrates climate policy with energy, industry and science policy, as well as framing this as something Australia has to do to be part of the climate change solution. It’s actually in our interests to do really well and be doing proactively.”

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