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Climate Activists Turn To Lawsuits To Force Action On Global Warming
Nature - Nisha Gaind
Citizens and organizations have filed more than 1,300 cases worldwide since 1990.
Fossil fuels in Pakistan: in 2015, a farmer sued the government for failing to implement its climate policy. Credit: Muhammed Muheisen/AP/ShutterstockCitizens and organizations have filed more than 1,300 lawsuits related to climate change in at least 28 countries around the world, an analysis has found.
Of the 1,328 suits filed from 1990 to May 2019, more than three-quarters were in the United States (see ‘Climate in court’). But the report’s authors note that the share of lawsuits filed in low- and middle-income countries such as Pakistan and Uganda is on the rise. The vast majority of suits have been filed since 2006.
Source: J. Setzer and R. Byrnes. Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation: 2019 Snapshot (LSE, 2019)The count includes cases against governments and businesses. It also includes suits registered with international courts and bodies such as the Court of Justice of the European Union and the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
Most of the legal battles are against governments, in attempts to bolster action against global warming. Many cases seek to strengthen climate policies — for instance, in a landmark 2015 case in the Netherlands, a court ruled in favour of citizens who said their government should accelerate emissions reductions.
Others seek to ensure that existing climate policies are properly enforced. In another 2015 case, a farmer in Pakistan sued the national government for failing to implement its 2012 climate policy. A court ruled in the farmer’s favour and directed government ministries to strengthen their endeavours to combat climate change.
A minority of lawsuits seek to undermine efforts against climate-change, the report found.
The analysis, conducted by policy researchers at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, notes that cases are increasingly drawing on ‘attribution science’, which aims to establish causal links between human-induced climate change and certain extreme weather events.
Links
Citizens and organizations have filed more than 1,300 cases worldwide since 1990.
Fossil fuels in Pakistan: in 2015, a farmer sued the government for failing to implement its climate policy. Credit: Muhammed Muheisen/AP/ShutterstockCitizens and organizations have filed more than 1,300 lawsuits related to climate change in at least 28 countries around the world, an analysis has found.
Of the 1,328 suits filed from 1990 to May 2019, more than three-quarters were in the United States (see ‘Climate in court’). But the report’s authors note that the share of lawsuits filed in low- and middle-income countries such as Pakistan and Uganda is on the rise. The vast majority of suits have been filed since 2006.
Source: J. Setzer and R. Byrnes. Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation: 2019 Snapshot (LSE, 2019)The count includes cases against governments and businesses. It also includes suits registered with international courts and bodies such as the Court of Justice of the European Union and the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
Most of the legal battles are against governments, in attempts to bolster action against global warming. Many cases seek to strengthen climate policies — for instance, in a landmark 2015 case in the Netherlands, a court ruled in favour of citizens who said their government should accelerate emissions reductions.
Others seek to ensure that existing climate policies are properly enforced. In another 2015 case, a farmer in Pakistan sued the national government for failing to implement its 2012 climate policy. A court ruled in the farmer’s favour and directed government ministries to strengthen their endeavours to combat climate change.
A minority of lawsuits seek to undermine efforts against climate-change, the report found.
The analysis, conducted by policy researchers at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, notes that cases are increasingly drawing on ‘attribution science’, which aims to establish causal links between human-induced climate change and certain extreme weather events.
Links
- Australia Climate Change Profile: Legislation, Targets, Litigation
- Global trends in climate change litigation: 2019 snapshot
- Climate Change Laws of the World
- Droughts, heatwaves and floods: How to tell when climate change is to blame
- US Supreme Court allows historic kids’ climate lawsuit to go forward
- Landmark court ruling tells Dutch government to do more on climate change
- Climate change lawsuits expand to at least 28 countries around the world
- Markets must back climate mitigation
- Climate change made Europe’s mega-heatwave five times more likely
- Win–wins for health and climate — new report
Categories: External websites
David Attenborough Takes Aim At Australia For Lack Of Climate Action
SBS - Maani Truu
Legendary natural historian, David Attenborough, has outlined a dire future for the world if climate change is not addressed immediately.
David Attenborough appearing as a witness during the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee meeting in London. UK ParliamentLegendary natural historian David Attenborough has slammed Australia for a lack of action on climate change, as he issued a stark warning to British politicians that mass migration and social unrest would occur if the issue is not addressed immediately.
The 93-year-old told members of the Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy committee that large areas of Africa would become "even less inhabitable" than they are now if "radical" climate action is not taken.
These actions, he said, would need to include lifestyle changes including raising the price of "extraordinarily cheap" airline tickets.
"We cannot be radical enough with dealing with these issues," he told politicians on Wednesday.
"If the world climate change goes on as it is we are going to be facing huge problems with immigration. Large parts of Africa will become even less inhabitable than they are now and there is going to be major upsets in the balance between our national boundaries."
Mr Attenborough, who has been making nature documentaries for almost 70 years, named Australia in his damning speech as one of the countries worst affected by climate change.
"I will never forget diving on the [Great Barrier] reef about 10 years ago and suddenly seeing that instead of this multitude of wonderful forms of life, that it was stark white, it had bleached white because of the rising temperatures and the increasing acidity of the sea," he said of his return since first diving there in the 1950s.
And in response to a question about climate change sceptics, he said the "voice of disbelief" should not be stamped out but that he hoped leaders in Australia and the US would come on board.
"Australia is already facing, having to deal with some of the most extreme manifestations of climate change," he said.
"But both Australia and America those voices are clearly heard."
Known for his nature documentaries, Mr Attenborough said he was hopeful that the world was on the cusp of great social change due to young people speaking out about the climate crisis, comparing the forthcoming attitude shift to how views changed regarding slavery.
"There was a time in the 19th century when it was perfectly acceptable for civilised human beings to think that it was morally acceptable to actually own another human being for a slave. And somehow or other, in the space of 20 or 30 years, the public perception of that totally transformed," he said.
"I suspect that we are right now at the beginning of a big change. Young people, in particular, are the stimulus that’s bringing it about."
Speaking about his shift from entertainer to climate advocate, Mr Attenborough said he didn't have a choice.
"If you become aware of what is happening, you don't have any alternative," he said.
"I feel an obligation. The only way you can get up in the morning is to believe that, actually, we can do something about it. And I suppose I think we can."
Links
Legendary natural historian, David Attenborough, has outlined a dire future for the world if climate change is not addressed immediately.
David Attenborough appearing as a witness during the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee meeting in London. UK ParliamentLegendary natural historian David Attenborough has slammed Australia for a lack of action on climate change, as he issued a stark warning to British politicians that mass migration and social unrest would occur if the issue is not addressed immediately.
The 93-year-old told members of the Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy committee that large areas of Africa would become "even less inhabitable" than they are now if "radical" climate action is not taken.
These actions, he said, would need to include lifestyle changes including raising the price of "extraordinarily cheap" airline tickets.
"We cannot be radical enough with dealing with these issues," he told politicians on Wednesday.
"If the world climate change goes on as it is we are going to be facing huge problems with immigration. Large parts of Africa will become even less inhabitable than they are now and there is going to be major upsets in the balance between our national boundaries."
Mr Attenborough, who has been making nature documentaries for almost 70 years, named Australia in his damning speech as one of the countries worst affected by climate change.
"I will never forget diving on the [Great Barrier] reef about 10 years ago and suddenly seeing that instead of this multitude of wonderful forms of life, that it was stark white, it had bleached white because of the rising temperatures and the increasing acidity of the sea," he said of his return since first diving there in the 1950s.
And in response to a question about climate change sceptics, he said the "voice of disbelief" should not be stamped out but that he hoped leaders in Australia and the US would come on board.
"Australia is already facing, having to deal with some of the most extreme manifestations of climate change," he said.
"But both Australia and America those voices are clearly heard."
Known for his nature documentaries, Mr Attenborough said he was hopeful that the world was on the cusp of great social change due to young people speaking out about the climate crisis, comparing the forthcoming attitude shift to how views changed regarding slavery.
"There was a time in the 19th century when it was perfectly acceptable for civilised human beings to think that it was morally acceptable to actually own another human being for a slave. And somehow or other, in the space of 20 or 30 years, the public perception of that totally transformed," he said.
"I suspect that we are right now at the beginning of a big change. Young people, in particular, are the stimulus that’s bringing it about."
Speaking about his shift from entertainer to climate advocate, Mr Attenborough said he didn't have a choice.
"If you become aware of what is happening, you don't have any alternative," he said.
"I feel an obligation. The only way you can get up in the morning is to believe that, actually, we can do something about it. And I suppose I think we can."
Links
- David Attenborough takes aim at Australia for lack of climate action
- Australia on track to become one of the 'world's worst' climate damagers
- Australia is at a crossroads on climate change, according to Al Gore
- The City of Sydney has officially declared a climate emergency
- VIDEO: David Attenborough Climate Change TV Show A 'Call To Arms'
- Sir David Attenborough Warns Of ‘Man-Made Disaster On Global Scale’ In Climate Change Film
- Extinction Rebellion And Attenborough Put Climate In Spotlight
- David Attenborough Gave The Natural World A Voice. Now He’s Talking About Climate Change Like Never Before.
- David Attenborough And Prince William Take World Leaders To Task On Environment
- David Attenborough Tells Davos: ‘The Garden Of Eden Is No More’
Categories: External websites
Australia On Track To Become One Of The World’s Major Climate Polluters
ACF
A new report finds Australia is on track to be one of the worst climate change contributors because of its fossil fuel exports.
If government and industry projections for fossil fuel expansions are realised, and if the rest of the world adopts policies consistent with the Paris Agreement, Australia could be responsible for up to 17 per cent of global emissions by 2030, according to new research.
When emissions from Australia’s current coal, oil and gas exports (3.6 per cent of global total) are added to domestic emissions (1.4 per cent of global total), Australia’s contribution to the global climate pollution footprint is already about 5 per cent, the research by Berlin-based science and policy institute Climate Analytics finds.
“This report confirms Australia is on track to become one of the world’s worst contributors to climate damage,” said the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Climate Change & Clean Energy program manager, Gavan McFadzean.
“Burning coal and gas is the number one cause of the climate crisis and Australia is now the number one exporter of both, with quantities projected to increase dramatically in coming years.
“When we add Australia’s exported emissions to our domestic emissions, Australia rockets to equal fifth on the list of major global climate polluters, alongside Russia and behind only India, the European Union, the USA and China.
“With planned coal and gas expansions, Australia could account for up to 17 per cent of global emissions by 2030, with Australian coal responsible for 12 per cent of global emissions by then.
Panorama of the Anglesea open cut coal mine in Victoria, Australia. Takver CC BY-SA 2.0“If Adani’s mine and all the other coal mines proposed for the region reach full production by 2030, the Galilee Basin on its own could account for up to 5.45 per cent of global climate pollution in 2030.
“Liquified natural gas is also a large and growing pollution problem, with Australia on track to become the world’s biggest LNG exporter, producing around a fifth of the world’s LNG.
“Based on government and industry projections, Australia’s domestic and exported gas emissions could account for up to 3.4 per cent of global climate pollution by 2030.
“Australia’s planned fossil fuel expansions contradict global efforts to address climate change and are completely inconsistent with the global energy transition that is needed to meet the critical Paris Agreement goals of keeping global warming under a 2°C threshold and pursuing efforts to avoid passing a 1.5°C threshold.
“Instead of encouraging new fossil fuel projects, a responsible Federal Government would recognise that most of Australia’s fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground and would facilitate the necessary rapid transition to clean, renewable energy, while working actively to support communities that will be affected by this transition.”
Australia's domestic and exported gas emissions as share of global fossil fuel combustion emissions. Source: Climate Analytics’ calculations based on nationally reported quantities of gas consumed domestically and exported, national inventory emissions factors, and global CO2 estimates from the Global Carbon Project. Climate Analytics’ estimate of reservoir and fugitive CO2 emissions, and a share of CH4 emissions are also included.
Links
A new report finds Australia is on track to be one of the worst climate change contributors because of its fossil fuel exports.
If government and industry projections for fossil fuel expansions are realised, and if the rest of the world adopts policies consistent with the Paris Agreement, Australia could be responsible for up to 17 per cent of global emissions by 2030, according to new research.
When emissions from Australia’s current coal, oil and gas exports (3.6 per cent of global total) are added to domestic emissions (1.4 per cent of global total), Australia’s contribution to the global climate pollution footprint is already about 5 per cent, the research by Berlin-based science and policy institute Climate Analytics finds.
“This report confirms Australia is on track to become one of the world’s worst contributors to climate damage,” said the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Climate Change & Clean Energy program manager, Gavan McFadzean.
“Burning coal and gas is the number one cause of the climate crisis and Australia is now the number one exporter of both, with quantities projected to increase dramatically in coming years.
“When we add Australia’s exported emissions to our domestic emissions, Australia rockets to equal fifth on the list of major global climate polluters, alongside Russia and behind only India, the European Union, the USA and China.
“With planned coal and gas expansions, Australia could account for up to 17 per cent of global emissions by 2030, with Australian coal responsible for 12 per cent of global emissions by then.
Panorama of the Anglesea open cut coal mine in Victoria, Australia. Takver CC BY-SA 2.0“If Adani’s mine and all the other coal mines proposed for the region reach full production by 2030, the Galilee Basin on its own could account for up to 5.45 per cent of global climate pollution in 2030.
“Liquified natural gas is also a large and growing pollution problem, with Australia on track to become the world’s biggest LNG exporter, producing around a fifth of the world’s LNG.
“Based on government and industry projections, Australia’s domestic and exported gas emissions could account for up to 3.4 per cent of global climate pollution by 2030.
“Australia’s planned fossil fuel expansions contradict global efforts to address climate change and are completely inconsistent with the global energy transition that is needed to meet the critical Paris Agreement goals of keeping global warming under a 2°C threshold and pursuing efforts to avoid passing a 1.5°C threshold.
“Instead of encouraging new fossil fuel projects, a responsible Federal Government would recognise that most of Australia’s fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground and would facilitate the necessary rapid transition to clean, renewable energy, while working actively to support communities that will be affected by this transition.”
Australia's domestic and exported gas emissions as share of global fossil fuel combustion emissions. Source: Climate Analytics’ calculations based on nationally reported quantities of gas consumed domestically and exported, national inventory emissions factors, and global CO2 estimates from the Global Carbon Project. Climate Analytics’ estimate of reservoir and fugitive CO2 emissions, and a share of CH4 emissions are also included.
Links
- Climate Analytics Report: Evaluating the significance of Australia’s global fossil fuel carbon footprint (pdf)
- Evaluating the significance of Australia’s global fossil fuel carbon footprint
- Minister knew controversial WA uranium mine approval could lead to extinction of species
- Agriculture review overlooks role of national law in protecting biodiversity
- Public submission on BHP Olympic Dam EPBC referral
- Adani – what's next?
- Queensland’s tick-and-flick groundwater approval for Adani could spell disaster for ancient oasis
- We won! – ACF defeats Morrison Government in Adani court case
Categories: External websites
The Health Impacts Of Climate Change And Why Calls For Action Are Growing Louder
ABC Health & Wellbeing - Olivia Willis
WHO estimates that climate change is already causing tens of thousands of deaths every year. (Getty Images: d3sign)We tend to think about climate change as an environmental problem.
But it's the impending impacts on our health that have medical experts sounding the alarm.
Last November, planetary health professor Tony Capon co-authored the first national report to track Australia's progress on climate change and human health.
It coincided with the release of a global report from leading medical journal The Lancet, which warned climate change is "the biggest global health threat of the 21st century".
"When we understand the connections between climate change and human health, it makes it clear that this is urgent," Professor Capon said.
Since then, calls for climate action from health bodies and medical professionals have grown louder.
In November, the World Health Organisation director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned the world could no longer "sleepwalk through this health emergency".
In April, some of Australia's leading health bodies published an open letter calling on political parties to recognise "the significant and profound health impacts of climate change to Australian people".
And last week, more than 1,000 doctors in the UK and 70 public health bodies in the US called for "radical action".
But how exactly does a warming climate pose risks to our physical and mental health?
Rising temperatures and heatwaves
Australian cities are declaring a 'climate emergency'. What does that actually mean?
The City of Sydney has become the latest local government to declare a climate emergency. So does that carry any legal clout?
In Australia, heatwaves cost more lives than all other natural hazards combined.
They lead to an increase in heat-related illnesses, such as heat exhaustion and heat stroke, and drive up hospital admissions and death rates, particularly among older people and people with chronic illnesses.
At a global level, 157 million more people were exposed to heatwave events in 2017 compared with 2000, according to The Lancet report.
Executive director of the Climate and Health Alliance Fiona Armstrong said heatwaves were getting "longer, hotter, and more frequent".
"They don't just affect people's health. They impact our power supply, transport systems, and water supply," she said.
Infectious disease
Even small changes in temperature, rainfall, and humidity can create the right conditions for infectious disease to spread, according to Professor Capon.
"One of the pathways is the changing distribution and abundance of mosquitoes," he said.
"In certain parts of the world, mosquitoes that transmit malaria are now able to breed at a higher altitude."
In Australia, changes to the distribution and abundance of mosquitoes has meant people are contracting dengue fever and Ross River virus in areas where they weren't previously at risk.
"There is also potential in a warming climate for higher rates of food-borne diseases, which are very sensitive to air temperatures," Dr Capon added.
The same goes for water-borne diseases, such as cholera, which can arise as a result of water scarcity (during droughts) and water pollution (during floods).
“Climate change is recognised as the most significant health threat of the 21st century by the World Health Organisation.”
Dr George Crisp @DrGCrisp on #MatterOfFactABC with @JezNews pic.twitter.com/Hw2s7QD8Wu— ABC News (@abcnews) August 9, 2018Extreme weather events
If we already get droughts and floods, what's the big deal, you ask?
The latest IPCC report on climate change predicts that under warming of just 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is already a near certainty, both droughts and floods are likely to become more frequent and intense.
Extreme weather events can cause physical injuries, respiratory problems, psychological distress, and in some cases, death, Professor Capon said.
"The changing frequency, distribution, and intensity of extreme weather events has a range of health implications, both direct and indirect," he said.
Indirect consequences include food and water insecurity and the onset of mental illness, which can be exacerbated by the destruction of people's homes and livelihoods.
"With prolonged droughts and desertification, there's also concern about the availability of food, and prospects for famine," he said.
By some projections, climate change — if left unmitigated — is expected to result in a further 1.4 billion instances of people being exposed to drought per year, and 2 billion instances of people being exposed to floods by the end of the century.
Weather extremes can also lead to the displacement of millions of people. (Unsplash)Air pollution
People in more than 90 per cent of cities around the world are currently breathing air that is "toxic" to their cardiovascular and respiratory health, according to The Lancet's global report.
"Between 2010 and 2016, air pollution concentrations worsened in almost 70 per cent of cities around the globe, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries," the authors wrote.
"In 2015 alone, fine particulate matter was responsible for 2.9 million premature deaths, with coal being responsible for more than 460,000 of these deaths."
Closer to home, it's not just people living near coal-fired power stations that are affected, Fiona Armstrong said.
"People in our cities are being exposed to dangerous air pollution every day."
Mental health
Babies born today will be 22 when warming hits 1.5C. What will life be like?
Meet Casey X. The year is 2040, and she is 22 years old. The town where she lives is in the middle of a heatwave.
While the causes of food insecurity are complex, climate change has already been shown to affect Australia's (and the world's) agricultural production.
"The changes in our prevailing weather patterns, whether it's increasing heat waves or longer, unprecedented and unrelenting drought, is really impacting our ability to grow food," Ms Armstrong said.
In addition to the direct damage to crops, research suggests rising temperatures can affect their nutritional quality.
Subsequent reductions in farm yields can lead to increased food prices — especially of fresh, healthy food — which can compound issues of food affordability and accessibility, most notably in low-income communities.
"This has impacts right across the population, and really affects people who are already struggling to access healthy food," Ms Armstrong said.
Perhaps more urgently, the declines seen in farming productivity pose challenges to rural community morale and the mental health of farmers and their families, Professor Capon said.
"In relation to the very deep drought we're having in Australia at the moment, we're concerned about the mental health impacts on farmers and farming communities," he said.
Last year's Australian report identified for the first time an association between mean annual maximum temperatures (driven up by climate change) and suicide rates across states and territories.
"In Australia, hot days have a damaging effect on whole-population mental health equivalent to that of unemployment and predict hospitalisation for self-harm," the authors wrote.
Health benefits of climate action
The silver lining to all this, according to Professor Capon, is the many health benefits that come from combating climate change.
"If we transition to more sustainable ways of living … then as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, there are health benefits from the reduction in toxic pollution from the burning of coal," he said.
Both the Lancet papers stressed the need for governments to focus on decarbonising economies, in order to reduce rates of cardiovascular and respiratory disease, and reduce risk factors linked to infectious disease and mental illness.
Professor Capon said policies focused on mitigating climate change were most urgent, as was a focus on vulnerable communities.
"The people who are least responsible for climate change — people living in low income countries and in poor communities — are the most vulnerable to these health impacts," he said.
"[Climate change] is affecting the health of Australians and people around the world.
"This is not a future issue. It's already happening."
Links
WHO estimates that climate change is already causing tens of thousands of deaths every year. (Getty Images: d3sign)We tend to think about climate change as an environmental problem.
But it's the impending impacts on our health that have medical experts sounding the alarm.
Last November, planetary health professor Tony Capon co-authored the first national report to track Australia's progress on climate change and human health.
It coincided with the release of a global report from leading medical journal The Lancet, which warned climate change is "the biggest global health threat of the 21st century".
"When we understand the connections between climate change and human health, it makes it clear that this is urgent," Professor Capon said.
Since then, calls for climate action from health bodies and medical professionals have grown louder.
In November, the World Health Organisation director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned the world could no longer "sleepwalk through this health emergency".
In April, some of Australia's leading health bodies published an open letter calling on political parties to recognise "the significant and profound health impacts of climate change to Australian people".
And last week, more than 1,000 doctors in the UK and 70 public health bodies in the US called for "radical action".
But how exactly does a warming climate pose risks to our physical and mental health?
Rising temperatures and heatwaves
Australian cities are declaring a 'climate emergency'. What does that actually mean?
The City of Sydney has become the latest local government to declare a climate emergency. So does that carry any legal clout?
In Australia, heatwaves cost more lives than all other natural hazards combined.
They lead to an increase in heat-related illnesses, such as heat exhaustion and heat stroke, and drive up hospital admissions and death rates, particularly among older people and people with chronic illnesses.
At a global level, 157 million more people were exposed to heatwave events in 2017 compared with 2000, according to The Lancet report.
Executive director of the Climate and Health Alliance Fiona Armstrong said heatwaves were getting "longer, hotter, and more frequent".
"They don't just affect people's health. They impact our power supply, transport systems, and water supply," she said.
Infectious disease
Even small changes in temperature, rainfall, and humidity can create the right conditions for infectious disease to spread, according to Professor Capon.
"One of the pathways is the changing distribution and abundance of mosquitoes," he said.
"In certain parts of the world, mosquitoes that transmit malaria are now able to breed at a higher altitude."
In Australia, changes to the distribution and abundance of mosquitoes has meant people are contracting dengue fever and Ross River virus in areas where they weren't previously at risk.
"There is also potential in a warming climate for higher rates of food-borne diseases, which are very sensitive to air temperatures," Dr Capon added.
The same goes for water-borne diseases, such as cholera, which can arise as a result of water scarcity (during droughts) and water pollution (during floods).
“Climate change is recognised as the most significant health threat of the 21st century by the World Health Organisation.”
Dr George Crisp @DrGCrisp on #MatterOfFactABC with @JezNews pic.twitter.com/Hw2s7QD8Wu— ABC News (@abcnews) August 9, 2018Extreme weather events
If we already get droughts and floods, what's the big deal, you ask?
The latest IPCC report on climate change predicts that under warming of just 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is already a near certainty, both droughts and floods are likely to become more frequent and intense.
Extreme weather events can cause physical injuries, respiratory problems, psychological distress, and in some cases, death, Professor Capon said.
"The changing frequency, distribution, and intensity of extreme weather events has a range of health implications, both direct and indirect," he said.
Indirect consequences include food and water insecurity and the onset of mental illness, which can be exacerbated by the destruction of people's homes and livelihoods.
"With prolonged droughts and desertification, there's also concern about the availability of food, and prospects for famine," he said.
By some projections, climate change — if left unmitigated — is expected to result in a further 1.4 billion instances of people being exposed to drought per year, and 2 billion instances of people being exposed to floods by the end of the century.
Weather extremes can also lead to the displacement of millions of people. (Unsplash)Air pollution
People in more than 90 per cent of cities around the world are currently breathing air that is "toxic" to their cardiovascular and respiratory health, according to The Lancet's global report.
"Between 2010 and 2016, air pollution concentrations worsened in almost 70 per cent of cities around the globe, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries," the authors wrote.
"In 2015 alone, fine particulate matter was responsible for 2.9 million premature deaths, with coal being responsible for more than 460,000 of these deaths."
Closer to home, it's not just people living near coal-fired power stations that are affected, Fiona Armstrong said.
"People in our cities are being exposed to dangerous air pollution every day."
Mental health
Babies born today will be 22 when warming hits 1.5C. What will life be like?
Meet Casey X. The year is 2040, and she is 22 years old. The town where she lives is in the middle of a heatwave.
While the causes of food insecurity are complex, climate change has already been shown to affect Australia's (and the world's) agricultural production.
"The changes in our prevailing weather patterns, whether it's increasing heat waves or longer, unprecedented and unrelenting drought, is really impacting our ability to grow food," Ms Armstrong said.
In addition to the direct damage to crops, research suggests rising temperatures can affect their nutritional quality.
Subsequent reductions in farm yields can lead to increased food prices — especially of fresh, healthy food — which can compound issues of food affordability and accessibility, most notably in low-income communities.
"This has impacts right across the population, and really affects people who are already struggling to access healthy food," Ms Armstrong said.
Perhaps more urgently, the declines seen in farming productivity pose challenges to rural community morale and the mental health of farmers and their families, Professor Capon said.
"In relation to the very deep drought we're having in Australia at the moment, we're concerned about the mental health impacts on farmers and farming communities," he said.
Last year's Australian report identified for the first time an association between mean annual maximum temperatures (driven up by climate change) and suicide rates across states and territories.
"In Australia, hot days have a damaging effect on whole-population mental health equivalent to that of unemployment and predict hospitalisation for self-harm," the authors wrote.
Health benefits of climate action
The silver lining to all this, according to Professor Capon, is the many health benefits that come from combating climate change.
"If we transition to more sustainable ways of living … then as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, there are health benefits from the reduction in toxic pollution from the burning of coal," he said.
Both the Lancet papers stressed the need for governments to focus on decarbonising economies, in order to reduce rates of cardiovascular and respiratory disease, and reduce risk factors linked to infectious disease and mental illness.
Professor Capon said policies focused on mitigating climate change were most urgent, as was a focus on vulnerable communities.
"The people who are least responsible for climate change — people living in low income countries and in poor communities — are the most vulnerable to these health impacts," he said.
"[Climate change] is affecting the health of Australians and people around the world.
"This is not a future issue. It's already happening."
Links
- The MJA–Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: Australian policy inaction threatens lives
- 2018 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: shaping the health of nations for centuries to come
- Letter: Doctors Against Climate Catastrophe
- Climate Crisis Seriously Damaging Human Health, Report Finds
- Strengthen Health Systems To Cope With Climate Change Challenges
- Doctors Warn Australian Health System Not Prepared For Climate Change
- Australian Doctors Declare A Climate Emergency
- Why Fear And Anger Are Rational Responses To Climate Change
- Climate Change Will Expose Half Of World’s Population To Disease-Spreading Mosquitoes By 2050
- Climate Change And The Risk To Civilisation: The Doctors' Prescription
- Save Millions Of Lives By Tackling Climate Change, Says WHO
- The Climate Apocalypse Is Now, And It’s Happening To You
Categories: External websites
How Taxpayers Are Funding A Huge Corporate Expansion In The Murray-Darling Basin
ABC Four Corners - Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop | Mary Fallon | Lucy Carter | Michael Slezak
Webster has received $41 million in Commonwealth funds to grow its empire in the Murrumbidgee Valley.
Key points
The scheme is intended to recover water for the rivers by giving farmers money to build water-saving infrastructure, in return for some of their water rights.
Some of the beneficiaries of the scheme are partly foreign-owned corporations that have used the money to transform vast tracts of land along the threatened river system, planting thirsty cotton and nut fields.
One of the biggest operators is Webster Limited, a publicly traded company that produces 90 per cent of Australia's walnuts and is 19.5 per cent owned by Canadian pension fund PSP.
Webster has received $41 million from the water infrastructure scheme to grow its empire in the Murrumbidgee Valley, in south-west New South Wales, where it has bought hundreds of square kilometres of land.
The funding covers more than half of an ambitious $78 million capital works program by Webster Limited to build dams to store more than 30 billion extra litres of water and irrigate an extra 81 square kilometres of land, developing much of it into prime, irrigated cotton country.
Maryanne Slattery, a former director at the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, says it is horrifying that a scheme designed to help the environment is allowing irrigators to use more water.
"That program was supposed to reduce the amount of water that was going to irrigation, when it's actually increased the opportunities for irrigation … all subsidised by taxpayers," she said.
"I think Australian taxpayers will be really shocked to find out that that money is actually going to foreign investors as well."Maryanne Slattery was a director at the Murray-Darling Basin Authority before she quit in disgust, concluding the basin plan was a fraud on the taxpayer. (ABC News: Neil Maude)Dams paid for by the Commonwealth
On the Hay Plains, one of the flattest places on earth, Webster is one of several agribusinesses building dams to store huge volumes of water to irrigate new cotton fields on the outer reaches of the Murrumbidgee River.
UNSW river ecologist Professor Richard Kingsford, who has been studying the area for more than 30 years, says the new dams are trapping water that would have otherwise flowed downstream into habitats and farming communities in the Murray-Darling Basin.
"I find that astounding. I mean, why are we building these large dams for private gain at public cost?" he said. "Essentially it increases the take from the river system and ultimately decreases the amount of water in the river. That to me is where, in fact, we may be seeing more water taken out of the rivers than water savings."
Ms Slattery says the region, where temperatures regularly soar into the 40s, is unsuitable for dams because of the high rate of evaporation.
"You just see dam after dam after dam, these massive on-farm dams, in a place that is as flat as a table, that just should not have dams," said Ms Slattery, who is now a senior water researcher at the Australia Institute.
"And then when you realise they're being paid for by the Commonwealth, under a supposedly environmental program, that's just horrifying."
No checks or oversight on water scheme
The water infrastructure scheme was designed to recover water for rivers in the basin. (ABC News)Former government officials have revealed to Four Corners that no-one in government monitors whether the work paid for by the water infrastructure scheme delivers on its promised water savings.
Farmers say that to get a grant, they give the Federal Government an estimate of how much water their proposed new infrastructure will save, but that figure is never checked or monitored, even after millions of dollars in Commonwealth funds are handed over.
What is the Murray-Darling Basin Plan?
The Murray-Darling Basin Plan has remained controversial ever since its introduction back in 2012. So, what is it again and why is it back on the agenda?
Ms Slattery says the scheme is a fraud on the taxpayer.
"There's no government checking in that process at all. There is no confidence that that process has been done independently and is able to be verified," she said.
"Governments are very motivated to get the savings on paper, and they've got deep pockets … you'd have to expect that some of the savings aren't real, and that money has gone to projects that haven't yielded what they were supposed to."
UNESCO chair in water economics Professor Quentin Grafton has been calling for measurements on the impacts of the scheme since it was introduced, but he says the Federal Government has ignored him and tried to discredit his work.
"It's been incredible to say this, that we can spend [$4 billion] to date yet we haven't done those basic measurements to allow us to know what in fact we've got, net, in terms of the impact for the environment," he said.
"In the best case scenario it's less than half of what the Government claims, and in the worst case scenario we've gone backwards, not forwards; that in fact the amount of water in the environment has actually declined as a result of these efficiency subsidies.
"We don't know because we need a water audit, a hydrological audit of what's going on in the basin."
Farmers say Government overpaid them for water
Glen Andreazza says as a taxpayer, he doesn't agree with the water infrastructure scheme. (ABC: Neil Maude)Farmers have also told Four Corners that they believe the Government has overpaid them for water under the scheme, and in many cases they have been paid to build infrastructure they would have built anyway.
Julie Andreazza and her husband, Glen, received more than $100,000 for earthworks to reduce water runoff from their farm.
"Those works were things that we were going to always do anyway," Ms Andreazza told Four Corners.
"Obviously, cost was a problem, so we were going to do it down the track. But when this opportunity turned up for available funds to be used, well of course we jumped at it."
Why did SA decide to have a royal commission?
South Australians were outraged to discover NSW irrigators were taking billions of litres of water earmarked for the environment. Find out what happened next.
Glen Andreazza estimates the Government paid double what it should have on the water buy-back on his farm.
"I'm a taxpayer, I don't agree with the scheme. I think it's too expensive," he said. The Andreazzas were later able to buy back the same amount of water they had surrendered for the grant, and they got it on the market for a lower price.
Professor Grafton says the scheme could have delivered huge benefit for the environment and communities along the Murray-Darling, but instead it has been squandered.
"We chose to put it into pipes, we chose to put it into concrete and we chose to deliver private benefits with public money, and that is a national scandal," he said.
The Hay Plains in western New South Wales is flat, hot, and, experts say, unsuitable for dams.Webster Limited has also been expanding its nut business, planting vast new walnut and almond orchards, as part of a boom in the nut industry, which is placing the river system under increased strain.
Nut trees are extremely thirsty, requiring water throughout every year — unlike crops such as cotton, which can be planted only when there is enough water to sustain them.
Webster Limited's deals with the Australian Government are confidential, however the company has confirmed to Four Corners it received $41 million in water infrastructure subsidies in return for surrendering water licences it valued at $22 million.
Those licences were part of an enormous water portfolio the company most recently estimated to be worth $350 million.
Under the scheme, details of who receives the subsidies and how they are spent are not publicly available. The Government has not measured what effect Webster's huge irrigation expansion will have on the river system.
Webster declined to give Four Corners figures on how its taxpayer-backed expansion had changed its water usage, but said the funding had led to a decrease in water use per hectare and was intended to make the farms more productive and efficient.
According to its environmental impact statements, the works allowed Webster to pump and store huge volumes of what they call "opportunity water" — water from heavy rain events that would have otherwise flowed downstream.
The upgrade enabled Webster to activate a stockpile of unused licences for the cheaper water, known officially as "supplementary water".
Webster says its projects have been independently audited and reported in accordance with the Government's guidelines.
The $41 million was provided to Webster via companies that are contracted by the Federal Department of Agriculture and Water Resources to distribute water infrastructure funding and administer the program.
The department relies on the companies, known as "delivery partners", to submit independently validated evidence of changes to Webster's farming practices.
Links
Webster has received $41 million in Commonwealth funds to grow its empire in the Murrumbidgee Valley.
Key points
- Billions of dollars in Commonwealth funds have been handed out to irrigators under a scheme designed to help the environment
- Partly foreign-owned corporation Webster Limited received more than $40 million and has expanded its irrigation operations
- Farmers say no-one is checking whether grants given under the scheme are delivering their promised water savings
The scheme is intended to recover water for the rivers by giving farmers money to build water-saving infrastructure, in return for some of their water rights.
Some of the beneficiaries of the scheme are partly foreign-owned corporations that have used the money to transform vast tracts of land along the threatened river system, planting thirsty cotton and nut fields.
One of the biggest operators is Webster Limited, a publicly traded company that produces 90 per cent of Australia's walnuts and is 19.5 per cent owned by Canadian pension fund PSP.
Webster has received $41 million from the water infrastructure scheme to grow its empire in the Murrumbidgee Valley, in south-west New South Wales, where it has bought hundreds of square kilometres of land.
The funding covers more than half of an ambitious $78 million capital works program by Webster Limited to build dams to store more than 30 billion extra litres of water and irrigate an extra 81 square kilometres of land, developing much of it into prime, irrigated cotton country.
Maryanne Slattery, a former director at the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, says it is horrifying that a scheme designed to help the environment is allowing irrigators to use more water.
"That program was supposed to reduce the amount of water that was going to irrigation, when it's actually increased the opportunities for irrigation … all subsidised by taxpayers," she said.
"I think Australian taxpayers will be really shocked to find out that that money is actually going to foreign investors as well."Maryanne Slattery was a director at the Murray-Darling Basin Authority before she quit in disgust, concluding the basin plan was a fraud on the taxpayer. (ABC News: Neil Maude)Dams paid for by the Commonwealth
On the Hay Plains, one of the flattest places on earth, Webster is one of several agribusinesses building dams to store huge volumes of water to irrigate new cotton fields on the outer reaches of the Murrumbidgee River.
UNSW river ecologist Professor Richard Kingsford, who has been studying the area for more than 30 years, says the new dams are trapping water that would have otherwise flowed downstream into habitats and farming communities in the Murray-Darling Basin.
"I find that astounding. I mean, why are we building these large dams for private gain at public cost?" he said. "Essentially it increases the take from the river system and ultimately decreases the amount of water in the river. That to me is where, in fact, we may be seeing more water taken out of the rivers than water savings."
Ms Slattery says the region, where temperatures regularly soar into the 40s, is unsuitable for dams because of the high rate of evaporation.
"You just see dam after dam after dam, these massive on-farm dams, in a place that is as flat as a table, that just should not have dams," said Ms Slattery, who is now a senior water researcher at the Australia Institute.
"And then when you realise they're being paid for by the Commonwealth, under a supposedly environmental program, that's just horrifying."
No checks or oversight on water scheme
The water infrastructure scheme was designed to recover water for rivers in the basin. (ABC News)Former government officials have revealed to Four Corners that no-one in government monitors whether the work paid for by the water infrastructure scheme delivers on its promised water savings.
Farmers say that to get a grant, they give the Federal Government an estimate of how much water their proposed new infrastructure will save, but that figure is never checked or monitored, even after millions of dollars in Commonwealth funds are handed over.
What is the Murray-Darling Basin Plan?
The Murray-Darling Basin Plan has remained controversial ever since its introduction back in 2012. So, what is it again and why is it back on the agenda?
Ms Slattery says the scheme is a fraud on the taxpayer.
"There's no government checking in that process at all. There is no confidence that that process has been done independently and is able to be verified," she said.
"Governments are very motivated to get the savings on paper, and they've got deep pockets … you'd have to expect that some of the savings aren't real, and that money has gone to projects that haven't yielded what they were supposed to."
UNESCO chair in water economics Professor Quentin Grafton has been calling for measurements on the impacts of the scheme since it was introduced, but he says the Federal Government has ignored him and tried to discredit his work.
"It's been incredible to say this, that we can spend [$4 billion] to date yet we haven't done those basic measurements to allow us to know what in fact we've got, net, in terms of the impact for the environment," he said.
"In the best case scenario it's less than half of what the Government claims, and in the worst case scenario we've gone backwards, not forwards; that in fact the amount of water in the environment has actually declined as a result of these efficiency subsidies.
"We don't know because we need a water audit, a hydrological audit of what's going on in the basin."
Farmers say Government overpaid them for water
Glen Andreazza says as a taxpayer, he doesn't agree with the water infrastructure scheme. (ABC: Neil Maude)Farmers have also told Four Corners that they believe the Government has overpaid them for water under the scheme, and in many cases they have been paid to build infrastructure they would have built anyway.
Julie Andreazza and her husband, Glen, received more than $100,000 for earthworks to reduce water runoff from their farm.
"Those works were things that we were going to always do anyway," Ms Andreazza told Four Corners.
"Obviously, cost was a problem, so we were going to do it down the track. But when this opportunity turned up for available funds to be used, well of course we jumped at it."
Why did SA decide to have a royal commission?
South Australians were outraged to discover NSW irrigators were taking billions of litres of water earmarked for the environment. Find out what happened next.
Glen Andreazza estimates the Government paid double what it should have on the water buy-back on his farm.
"I'm a taxpayer, I don't agree with the scheme. I think it's too expensive," he said. The Andreazzas were later able to buy back the same amount of water they had surrendered for the grant, and they got it on the market for a lower price.
Professor Grafton says the scheme could have delivered huge benefit for the environment and communities along the Murray-Darling, but instead it has been squandered.
"We chose to put it into pipes, we chose to put it into concrete and we chose to deliver private benefits with public money, and that is a national scandal," he said.
The Hay Plains in western New South Wales is flat, hot, and, experts say, unsuitable for dams.Webster Limited has also been expanding its nut business, planting vast new walnut and almond orchards, as part of a boom in the nut industry, which is placing the river system under increased strain.
Nut trees are extremely thirsty, requiring water throughout every year — unlike crops such as cotton, which can be planted only when there is enough water to sustain them.
Webster Limited's deals with the Australian Government are confidential, however the company has confirmed to Four Corners it received $41 million in water infrastructure subsidies in return for surrendering water licences it valued at $22 million.
Those licences were part of an enormous water portfolio the company most recently estimated to be worth $350 million.
Under the scheme, details of who receives the subsidies and how they are spent are not publicly available. The Government has not measured what effect Webster's huge irrigation expansion will have on the river system.
Webster declined to give Four Corners figures on how its taxpayer-backed expansion had changed its water usage, but said the funding had led to a decrease in water use per hectare and was intended to make the farms more productive and efficient.
According to its environmental impact statements, the works allowed Webster to pump and store huge volumes of what they call "opportunity water" — water from heavy rain events that would have otherwise flowed downstream.
The upgrade enabled Webster to activate a stockpile of unused licences for the cheaper water, known officially as "supplementary water".
Webster says its projects have been independently audited and reported in accordance with the Government's guidelines.
The $41 million was provided to Webster via companies that are contracted by the Federal Department of Agriculture and Water Resources to distribute water infrastructure funding and administer the program.
The department relies on the companies, known as "delivery partners", to submit independently validated evidence of changes to Webster's farming practices.
Links
- Four Corners: Cash Splash
- Forests flooding while rivers run dry: two tales of one river system
- Basin authority facing $750m negligence claim from Murray River irrigators
- Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission won't look at fish kills
- Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission slams authority for 'maladministration'
- Billions spent on Murray-Darling water infrastructure: here’s the result
- The Murray-Darling Basin scandal: economists have seen it coming for decades
- The Darling River is simply not supposed to dry out, even in drought
- We wrote the report for the minister on fish deaths in the lower Darling – here's why it could happen again
- Aboriginal voices are missing from the Murray-Darling Basin crisis
Categories: External websites
Directors Are In The Crosshairs Of Corporate Climate Litigation
The Conversation - Lisa Benjamin
Melting glaciers threaten the village of Huaraz, Peru. Uwebart/Wikimedia, CC BY-SAThe directors of RWE, a German energy company, had probably never heard of the small village of Huaraz, Peru before 2015. But Saúl Lliuya, a mountain guide and farmer there, sued RWE for climate-related harms that year.
Lliuya’s lawyers, supported by Greenpeace, argued that RWE’s historic green house gas emissions have contributed to increased global temperatures, which have, in turn, caused the glaciers around Lake Palcacocha to melt. The lake sits above Huaraz, where more than 50,000 residents now face an increased risk of severe flooding.
The Higher Regional Court of Hamm, in Germany, agreed with Lliuya’s arguments and let the case proceed to the evidentiary stage. No matter what the outcome, the court’s statements that climate harms can, in principle, give rise to corporate liability, is historic — no other court has made this decision before.
The intersection between climate change, energy and corporate law is a fast-emerging area. This case is part of a second wave of litigation against corporations, and has implications for directors and their legal duties. Corporate fiduciary duties and corporate law have traditionally been insulated from environmental and climate concerns, but as the impacts of climate change escalate, this may no longer be true.
The second wave of climate litigation
The directors of RWE are not alone. There has been an explosion of climate litigation launched against fossil-fuel intensive, or “carbon major” corporations.
The cities of Oakland and San Francisco have sued, as have New York and Baltimore. So have counties in California, Washington and Colorado, the state of Rhode Island and fishermen in Oregon and California.
Most recently, non-governmental organizations in the Netherlands have launched suits, and others are being considered in Toronto and Victoria.
These cases have been dubbed the second wave of climate litigation against carbon majors. There has never been a successful case against corporations for climate-induced harm — yet.
The first wave
The first wave of litigation against carbon majors is less than a decade old. It was characterized by several unsuccessful cases, including American Electric Petroleum vs. Connecticut in 2011, and Native Village of Kivalina vs. ExxonMobil in 2012.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case of the Alaskan village of Kivalina against oil companies. The village, seen here in 2006, is being washed into the ocean due to rising sea levels, sea ice loss and eroding permafrost. (AP Photo/Northwest Arctic Borough via The Anchorage Daily News)These cases against carbon majors failed largely due to problems in proving causation under tort or public nuisance claims. That is, the plaintiffs had difficulties tracing climate harms to specific emissions made by particular corporations.
The judges in these cases were also reluctant adjudicators. They felt the systemic nature and complexity of climate change was a global issue best left to governments to manage. In the American Electric Petroleum case, for example, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a unanimous decision that the issue was governed by the federal Clean Air Act and that the court should not intervene further.
Scientific research has evolved dramatically since then. In a 2013 study, Richard Heede, from the Climate Accountability Institute, attributed 63 per cent of industrial carbon dioxide and methane emissions released from 1751-2010 to 90 carbon major entities. Heede’s work has been cited in almost all claims by plaintiffs in the second wave of corporate climate litigation.
Lliuya is claiming that RWE’s emissions contributed to the glacial melt that is endangering his community. Heede’s study established that RWE was responsible for 0.47 per cent of historic global emissions. Lliuya is asking of 0.47 per cent of the cost it will take for his community to adapt to climate change. The case may remain an outlier for some time, but it’s a historic legal development, with the court taking a broad view of causation.
Tobacco litigation
In 2018, two California cities were unsuccessful in their lawsuit against fossil fuel companies. Like Justice Ginsburg, Judge Alsup said the courts were not the place to address the issue. He also noted that the historic benefits of fossil fuels far outweighed the harm being caused by them.
Subsequent U.S. cases have been more strategic in their pleadings. Plaintiffs have tried to ground their cases more closely at the state level in order to avoid the federal barriers of the Clean Air Act. Instead, they have cited breaches of product liability statutes, failure to warn, design defect, as well as negligence and trespass.
They have patterned their pleadings more closely on tobacco litigation cases, as well as those against opioid and asbestos manufacturers.
Even if these corporate climate litigation cases are ultimately unsuccessful, they have implications for directors’ fiduciary duties.
Why these cases matter for directors
Fiduciary duties, as interpreted under Delaware law, where many of these carbon-majors are headquartered, require directors to pay attention to the risks faced by the corporation and to make informed decisions.
U.S. federal agencies such as the Department of Defense have identified climate change as a long-range, emerging threat that could adversely impact national security. Climate change is a threat to global fiscal stability, putting at risk one-third of global manageable assets.
Corporate climate litigation highlights the bidirectional risks of climate change: corporations emit greenhouse gases that increase climate impacts, but those impacts also directly affect corporations. Courts want to know that directors have considered all material information reasonably available to them, and the increasing impacts and risks of climate change to businesses mean climate risks and opportunities are now material.
Failing to monitor and manage climate risk and disclose these risks to shareholders could put directors in breach of their legal duties. Climate change poses tremendous risks to carbon major corporations whose assets and infrastructure are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
The impacts of wildfires, for example, have led PG&E to seek bankruptcy protection, and a recent case in the Supreme Court in Canada determined that a bankrupt oil company was still responsible for the costs of remediating its abandoned wells.
As the impacts of climate change escalate, bankruptcies and other corporate financial woes are likely to only increase.
Climate change, misrepresented
Corporate law and securities law are also being used by plaintiffs in this second wave of climate litigation, raising the stakes even further for directors of these carbon majors. New York claims ExxonMobil defrauded shareholders and a separate civil suit alleges ExxonMobil and its executives misrepresented the impacts of climate change on its business.
Directors must now consider and assess the risks of climate change to their businesses in order to comply with their fiduciary duties, particularly in corporations highly exposed to the risks of climate change. Investors will continue to be concerned about climate litigation as well as climate risks, and the issue will continue to raised by them at annual general meetings. It is likely that these are issues that RWE’s directors are now carefully considering.
Links
Melting glaciers threaten the village of Huaraz, Peru. Uwebart/Wikimedia, CC BY-SAThe directors of RWE, a German energy company, had probably never heard of the small village of Huaraz, Peru before 2015. But Saúl Lliuya, a mountain guide and farmer there, sued RWE for climate-related harms that year.
Lliuya’s lawyers, supported by Greenpeace, argued that RWE’s historic green house gas emissions have contributed to increased global temperatures, which have, in turn, caused the glaciers around Lake Palcacocha to melt. The lake sits above Huaraz, where more than 50,000 residents now face an increased risk of severe flooding.
The Higher Regional Court of Hamm, in Germany, agreed with Lliuya’s arguments and let the case proceed to the evidentiary stage. No matter what the outcome, the court’s statements that climate harms can, in principle, give rise to corporate liability, is historic — no other court has made this decision before.
The intersection between climate change, energy and corporate law is a fast-emerging area. This case is part of a second wave of litigation against corporations, and has implications for directors and their legal duties. Corporate fiduciary duties and corporate law have traditionally been insulated from environmental and climate concerns, but as the impacts of climate change escalate, this may no longer be true.
The second wave of climate litigation
The directors of RWE are not alone. There has been an explosion of climate litigation launched against fossil-fuel intensive, or “carbon major” corporations.
The cities of Oakland and San Francisco have sued, as have New York and Baltimore. So have counties in California, Washington and Colorado, the state of Rhode Island and fishermen in Oregon and California.
Most recently, non-governmental organizations in the Netherlands have launched suits, and others are being considered in Toronto and Victoria.
These cases have been dubbed the second wave of climate litigation against carbon majors. There has never been a successful case against corporations for climate-induced harm — yet.
The first wave
The first wave of litigation against carbon majors is less than a decade old. It was characterized by several unsuccessful cases, including American Electric Petroleum vs. Connecticut in 2011, and Native Village of Kivalina vs. ExxonMobil in 2012.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case of the Alaskan village of Kivalina against oil companies. The village, seen here in 2006, is being washed into the ocean due to rising sea levels, sea ice loss and eroding permafrost. (AP Photo/Northwest Arctic Borough via The Anchorage Daily News)These cases against carbon majors failed largely due to problems in proving causation under tort or public nuisance claims. That is, the plaintiffs had difficulties tracing climate harms to specific emissions made by particular corporations.
The judges in these cases were also reluctant adjudicators. They felt the systemic nature and complexity of climate change was a global issue best left to governments to manage. In the American Electric Petroleum case, for example, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a unanimous decision that the issue was governed by the federal Clean Air Act and that the court should not intervene further.
Scientific research has evolved dramatically since then. In a 2013 study, Richard Heede, from the Climate Accountability Institute, attributed 63 per cent of industrial carbon dioxide and methane emissions released from 1751-2010 to 90 carbon major entities. Heede’s work has been cited in almost all claims by plaintiffs in the second wave of corporate climate litigation.
Lliuya is claiming that RWE’s emissions contributed to the glacial melt that is endangering his community. Heede’s study established that RWE was responsible for 0.47 per cent of historic global emissions. Lliuya is asking of 0.47 per cent of the cost it will take for his community to adapt to climate change. The case may remain an outlier for some time, but it’s a historic legal development, with the court taking a broad view of causation.
Tobacco litigation
In 2018, two California cities were unsuccessful in their lawsuit against fossil fuel companies. Like Justice Ginsburg, Judge Alsup said the courts were not the place to address the issue. He also noted that the historic benefits of fossil fuels far outweighed the harm being caused by them.
Subsequent U.S. cases have been more strategic in their pleadings. Plaintiffs have tried to ground their cases more closely at the state level in order to avoid the federal barriers of the Clean Air Act. Instead, they have cited breaches of product liability statutes, failure to warn, design defect, as well as negligence and trespass.
They have patterned their pleadings more closely on tobacco litigation cases, as well as those against opioid and asbestos manufacturers.
Even if these corporate climate litigation cases are ultimately unsuccessful, they have implications for directors’ fiduciary duties.
Why these cases matter for directors
Fiduciary duties, as interpreted under Delaware law, where many of these carbon-majors are headquartered, require directors to pay attention to the risks faced by the corporation and to make informed decisions.
U.S. federal agencies such as the Department of Defense have identified climate change as a long-range, emerging threat that could adversely impact national security. Climate change is a threat to global fiscal stability, putting at risk one-third of global manageable assets.
Corporate climate litigation highlights the bidirectional risks of climate change: corporations emit greenhouse gases that increase climate impacts, but those impacts also directly affect corporations. Courts want to know that directors have considered all material information reasonably available to them, and the increasing impacts and risks of climate change to businesses mean climate risks and opportunities are now material.
Failing to monitor and manage climate risk and disclose these risks to shareholders could put directors in breach of their legal duties. Climate change poses tremendous risks to carbon major corporations whose assets and infrastructure are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
The impacts of wildfires, for example, have led PG&E to seek bankruptcy protection, and a recent case in the Supreme Court in Canada determined that a bankrupt oil company was still responsible for the costs of remediating its abandoned wells.
As the impacts of climate change escalate, bankruptcies and other corporate financial woes are likely to only increase.
Climate change, misrepresented
Corporate law and securities law are also being used by plaintiffs in this second wave of climate litigation, raising the stakes even further for directors of these carbon majors. New York claims ExxonMobil defrauded shareholders and a separate civil suit alleges ExxonMobil and its executives misrepresented the impacts of climate change on its business.
Directors must now consider and assess the risks of climate change to their businesses in order to comply with their fiduciary duties, particularly in corporations highly exposed to the risks of climate change. Investors will continue to be concerned about climate litigation as well as climate risks, and the issue will continue to raised by them at annual general meetings. It is likely that these are issues that RWE’s directors are now carefully considering.
Links
- What does the Dutch court ruling on climate targets mean for Australia?
- The fossil fuel era is coming to an end, but the lawsuits are just beginning
- Climate Change Could Destroy His Home In Peru
- Four Climate Change Lawsuits To Watch In 2018
- Kids Suing Governments About Climate: It's A Global Trend
- The Climate Change Lawsuit That Could Stop The U.S. Government From Supporting Fossil Fuels
- In Courtrooms, Climate Change Is No Longer Up For Debate
- A Scientist Took Climate Change Deniers To Court And Wrested An Apology From Them
- Cutting-Edge CO2 Tracking Technology Could Boost Climate Liability Claims
- Kids Suing The US Over Climate Change Are Getting Global Support
- Brace For Impact - Climate Change Litigation Is Fast Approaching
- Torres Strait Islanders Ask UN To Hold Australia To Account On Climate ‘Human Rights Abuses’
- Torres Strait Islanders Accuse Government Of Human Rights Breach Over Climate Inaction
- Climate Change Activists Worldwide Look To Courts As A Powerful New Ally
- Climate Change - The Gathering Legal And Policy Storm In Australia And Its Impact On The Energy And Resources Sector
- Climate Change Could Destroy His Home In Peru. So He Sued An Energy Company In Germany.
- Legal Protections Urged As Science Gears Up To Aid Great Barrier Reef
- Environmental Groups To Sue Shell Over Climate Change
- Climate Change: Top Lawyer Says Councils May Soon Be Liable For Climate Damage
- Environmental Groups Take France To Court Over Climate Change Inaction
- Trump’s Climate Policies Face 6 Big Legal Battles This Year
- Support Is Surging For Teens’ Climate Change Lawsuit
- Climate Change In Court
- Climate Change-Related Litigation Was Once Seen As A Joke, But It Could Soon Become Business Reality
- These Residents Stopped A Coal Mine, Made History And Sent Ripples Through Boardrooms Around The World
Categories: External websites
Australia's Emissions Reach The Highest On Record, Driven By Electricity Sector
The Guardian - Lisa Cox
Fugitive emissions from LNG are also fuelling rising national emissions, Ndever Environmental figures show
Australia’s emissions for the year to March 2019 increased to 561 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, Ndever Environmental figures show. Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP Australia’s emissions are again the highest on record, driven this time by an increase in emissions from the electricity sector, which rose to their highest levels in two years, according to new figures.
Fugitive emissions from Australia’s LNG industry also continue to fuel rising national emissions.
Ndevr Environmental, an emissions-tracking organisation that publishes quarterly greenhouse gas emissions data months ahead of the federal government, says its latest research shows emissions for the year to March 2019 increased to 561 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
That was up from 554.5 million tonnes the previous year and 551.2 million tonnes in 2017.
Ndevr’s figures exclude unreliable data from the land-use sector, but the organisation said that even when it was included emissions had still increased for four consecutive years over the same period.
The trend line for the Government's Paris emissions reduction targets assumes a linear rate of reduction to reach the final target. | Source: NGGI, NDEVR Environmental
According to Ndevr’s research, there was an 8.2% increase in emissions from the electricity sector between the December and March quarters.
It follows three consecutive quarters of declines in electricity emissions and is the highest increase in emissions from that sector since March 2017.
However, rising emissions from electricity generation between the December and March quarters is not unusual due to higher energy use in the warmer months.
LULUCF emissions are negative from September 2011 onwards, and not represented here. Guardian graphic | Source: NGGI, NDEVR Environmental.
Ndevr’s managing director, Matt Drum, said there was less renewable generation in March 2019 than there was in the March quarter the previous year, with Ndevr’s data showing falls in both wind and hydro power.
Drum said the continued rise in fugitive emissions as a result of Australia’s LNG industry showed there was “a lot of work to be done around offsetting and reducing emissions from the LNG sector”.
“That’s offsetting particularly through land-use projects, but also energy efficiency,” he said. “And whether the carbon capture and storage nut can be cracked for that sector is going to be really important.”
Drum dismissed recent comments by Australia’s energy and emissions reduction minister, Angus Taylor, that LNG exports were contributing to emissions reductions overseas.
“I don’t think you can prosecute that argument unless you also take into account our coal exports, which have a counter effect,” Drum said.
There is no evidence to support Taylor’s claim and the biggest consumer of Australia’s LNG – Japan – is using it in place of emissions-free nuclear power.
“There’s still work to be done on policy. I sound like a broken record,” Drum said. “At the end of the day, participation in the emissions reduction fund is decreasing. Fewer projects, fewer contracts, less abatement.
“Unless something happens, something significant, this government will just be presiding over quarter after quarter, year after year, of increasing emissions. It’s as simple as that.”
Links
Fugitive emissions from LNG are also fuelling rising national emissions, Ndever Environmental figures show
Australia’s emissions for the year to March 2019 increased to 561 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, Ndever Environmental figures show. Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP Australia’s emissions are again the highest on record, driven this time by an increase in emissions from the electricity sector, which rose to their highest levels in two years, according to new figures.
Fugitive emissions from Australia’s LNG industry also continue to fuel rising national emissions.
Ndevr Environmental, an emissions-tracking organisation that publishes quarterly greenhouse gas emissions data months ahead of the federal government, says its latest research shows emissions for the year to March 2019 increased to 561 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
That was up from 554.5 million tonnes the previous year and 551.2 million tonnes in 2017.
Ndevr’s figures exclude unreliable data from the land-use sector, but the organisation said that even when it was included emissions had still increased for four consecutive years over the same period.
The trend line for the Government's Paris emissions reduction targets assumes a linear rate of reduction to reach the final target. | Source: NGGI, NDEVR Environmental
According to Ndevr’s research, there was an 8.2% increase in emissions from the electricity sector between the December and March quarters.
It follows three consecutive quarters of declines in electricity emissions and is the highest increase in emissions from that sector since March 2017.
However, rising emissions from electricity generation between the December and March quarters is not unusual due to higher energy use in the warmer months.
LULUCF emissions are negative from September 2011 onwards, and not represented here. Guardian graphic | Source: NGGI, NDEVR Environmental.
Ndevr’s managing director, Matt Drum, said there was less renewable generation in March 2019 than there was in the March quarter the previous year, with Ndevr’s data showing falls in both wind and hydro power.
Drum said the continued rise in fugitive emissions as a result of Australia’s LNG industry showed there was “a lot of work to be done around offsetting and reducing emissions from the LNG sector”.
“That’s offsetting particularly through land-use projects, but also energy efficiency,” he said. “And whether the carbon capture and storage nut can be cracked for that sector is going to be really important.”
Drum dismissed recent comments by Australia’s energy and emissions reduction minister, Angus Taylor, that LNG exports were contributing to emissions reductions overseas.
“I don’t think you can prosecute that argument unless you also take into account our coal exports, which have a counter effect,” Drum said.
There is no evidence to support Taylor’s claim and the biggest consumer of Australia’s LNG – Japan – is using it in place of emissions-free nuclear power.
“There’s still work to be done on policy. I sound like a broken record,” Drum said. “At the end of the day, participation in the emissions reduction fund is decreasing. Fewer projects, fewer contracts, less abatement.
“Unless something happens, something significant, this government will just be presiding over quarter after quarter, year after year, of increasing emissions. It’s as simple as that.”
Links
- Fossil fuel exports make Australia one of the worst contributors to climate crisis
- Ndevr Environmental
- ''Disgrace': Angus Taylor under pressure after failing to release emissions data
- Labor to tighten emissions regime as it draws climate battle-lines
- Australia's annual carbon emissions reach record high
- Australia's annual emissions continue to rise, driven by LNG production
- Australia’s carbon emissions highest on record, data shows
- 'Investors are mostly concerned about political risks': energy minister Angus Taylor – full interview
- Electricity retailers could defer emissions reductions under Coalition plan
- Australia's greenhouse gas emissions highest on record
Categories: External websites
A ‘Climate Emergency’ Was Declared In New York City. Will That Change Anything?
New York Times - Anne Barnard
The city is now the largest on earth to pass such a measure.
Extinction Rebellion held a protest in New York City on April 17. Credit Stephanie Keith/Getty ImagesNew York City, the world capital of ambition, has never been shy about grandiose declarations. The City Council has passed or proposed resolutions demanding world peace, banning a racist slur and condemning all manner of federal policies where city government has no actual say.
But for a growing global network of activists seeking to change the way the world talks about climate, the city’s sweeping resolution in late June declaring a “climate emergency” is a major victory.
Saying that the heating climate is a crisis of imminent danger, they argue that getting people and governments to describe it in far more urgent language is the only way to produce the level of global mobilization required to stop it.
New York is now the largest city on earth to pass such a measure, calling last week for “an immediate emergency mobilization to restore a safe climate.” It joined London, Sydney and a total of 722 localities in 15 countries, according to the Climate Mobilization, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit group pushing the declarations.
And on Wednesday, Los Angeles’s City Council went further. It passed a measure that will formalize its own emergency declaration, calling climate change one of the most important issues facing the city. It also established a Climate Emergency Mobilization Department and laid out steps to make city agencies and the public take newly vigorous and coordinated action against planet-warming emissions.
Margaret Klein Salamon, a founder of the Climate Mobilization, an environmental advocacy group, said emergency declarations build political pressure to take stronger actions, like New York’s recent sweeping state and city laws to curb emissions.
“Because what are elected leaders supposed to do if not protect us from emergencies?” she said.
Do these words even mean anything?
By themselves, emergency declarations have no more force than other political proclamations. And just as no individual country can stop climate change within its borders, cities and states’ toolboxes are limited without the support of federal law and international agreements.
That hasn’t stopped states and smaller jurisdictions. New York City recently mandated that the owners of its largest buildings slash their emissions impact, and new legislation requires New York State to eliminate nearly all greenhouse gas output by 2050.
But questions remain about whether even these measures — with far more teeth than a council declaration — will achieve their goals.
Government agencies need to “start making things happen — and fast,” including acting against the interests of real estate, energy and other lobbies that traditionally wield political clout, said Pete Sikora, climate justice director for New York Communities for Change. His group supported the state and city laws but contends they do not go far enough.
Groups like Extinction Rebellion are calling for nonviolent civil disobedience to spur climate action. Credit Stephanie Keith/Getty ImagesDeclarations have increased as public alarm has grown
The first local climate emergency was declared in Darebin, Australia, in 2016. The following year, Hoboken, N.J., became the first American city to follow suit. Groups like the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, which calls for nonviolent civil disobedience to spur climate action, have made the declarations a centerpiece of their campaigns.
The movement has grown with extreme climate events that have been impossible to ignore: wildfires, storms and droughts, plus heat waves that set record temperatures in Europe last week and made June the world’s hottest month on record.
Last fall, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that keeping global warming at the minimum level to avert catastrophe would, as New York’s resolution put it, “require an unprecedented transformation of every sector of the global economy over the next 12 years.”
Six in ten Americans are either “alarmed” or “concerned” about global warming, according to a recent study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and the share of those choosing “alarmed” more than doubled from 2013 to 2018.
Young advocates drive the push to use words like ‘crisis’
“Climate change sounds gradual,” said Olivia Sommers, 19, one of dozens of climate activists in an overflow crowd at a City Council hearing on the measure, part of the public pressure that swayed the body to approve the resolution sooner than planned. “But to me it doesn’t feel like ‘change’. It feels like a crisis.”
NY City Council environment hearing is so packed some waited hrs outside to testify. Advocates galvanized to propose solutions, push NYC & NYS to meet climate goals set by new laws. pic.twitter.com/uOHQSuKH2X
— Anne Barnard (@ABarnardNYT) June 24, 2019Jilly Edgar, 20, a New York University student and member of the Sunrise Movement, which advocates for Green New Deal policies, said she struggled to think of the future. That should be a time, she said, when “the world is becoming my own, and moving forward in it” toward “marriage, graduate degrees, children.”
“But actually,” she said, “the world is dying. There’s just, like, a cutoff point. That does a lot to destroy the idealism of young people that usually pushes them to act.”
The ‘fear of fear' is an obstacle to action, activists say
“The idea that ‘you can’t scare people, fear paralyzes people,’ has been a guiding principle of the gradualist climate movement for decades, and it’s horribly wrong and misguided,” said Ms. Klein Salamon, 33, who trained as a clinical psychologist.
“The basic tenet of therapy is that facing hard truths is how you create transformative change,” she said. “You cannot skip the step of facing reality. It’s only when we have a national consensus that we are all personally in danger, when we feel enough fear, that we are willing to make drastic changes. Fear is literally how we translate perception of danger into action.”
The mobilization to fight World War II, she said, is the closest parallel in recent history to the scale and urgency of effort needed, she said: “Pull every lever, have all hands on deck, spend without limit to save as much life as possible.”
The young activists at City Hall said they had all been through a phase of “climate despair,” but that what gave them hope was, as Ms. Edgar put it, “deciding to push for change, and urge people with power to make that same decision.”
News media, too, are being pushed to use urgent language
Ms. Sommers, a Middlebury College student, was one of 70 people arrested outside The New York Times last month in a protest calling for the newspaper to use the phrases “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” rather than “climate change.”
The Guardian recently announced that it would adopt those terms. A Times spokeswoman said the paper devotes more resources to covering climate than any national publication.
“We should call it an emergency because that’s what it is,” Ms. Sommers said. “Tell the truth.”
Links
The city is now the largest on earth to pass such a measure.
Extinction Rebellion held a protest in New York City on April 17. Credit Stephanie Keith/Getty ImagesNew York City, the world capital of ambition, has never been shy about grandiose declarations. The City Council has passed or proposed resolutions demanding world peace, banning a racist slur and condemning all manner of federal policies where city government has no actual say.
But for a growing global network of activists seeking to change the way the world talks about climate, the city’s sweeping resolution in late June declaring a “climate emergency” is a major victory.
Saying that the heating climate is a crisis of imminent danger, they argue that getting people and governments to describe it in far more urgent language is the only way to produce the level of global mobilization required to stop it.
New York is now the largest city on earth to pass such a measure, calling last week for “an immediate emergency mobilization to restore a safe climate.” It joined London, Sydney and a total of 722 localities in 15 countries, according to the Climate Mobilization, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit group pushing the declarations.
And on Wednesday, Los Angeles’s City Council went further. It passed a measure that will formalize its own emergency declaration, calling climate change one of the most important issues facing the city. It also established a Climate Emergency Mobilization Department and laid out steps to make city agencies and the public take newly vigorous and coordinated action against planet-warming emissions.
Margaret Klein Salamon, a founder of the Climate Mobilization, an environmental advocacy group, said emergency declarations build political pressure to take stronger actions, like New York’s recent sweeping state and city laws to curb emissions.
“Because what are elected leaders supposed to do if not protect us from emergencies?” she said.
Do these words even mean anything?
By themselves, emergency declarations have no more force than other political proclamations. And just as no individual country can stop climate change within its borders, cities and states’ toolboxes are limited without the support of federal law and international agreements.
That hasn’t stopped states and smaller jurisdictions. New York City recently mandated that the owners of its largest buildings slash their emissions impact, and new legislation requires New York State to eliminate nearly all greenhouse gas output by 2050.
But questions remain about whether even these measures — with far more teeth than a council declaration — will achieve their goals.
Government agencies need to “start making things happen — and fast,” including acting against the interests of real estate, energy and other lobbies that traditionally wield political clout, said Pete Sikora, climate justice director for New York Communities for Change. His group supported the state and city laws but contends they do not go far enough.
Groups like Extinction Rebellion are calling for nonviolent civil disobedience to spur climate action. Credit Stephanie Keith/Getty ImagesDeclarations have increased as public alarm has grown
The first local climate emergency was declared in Darebin, Australia, in 2016. The following year, Hoboken, N.J., became the first American city to follow suit. Groups like the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, which calls for nonviolent civil disobedience to spur climate action, have made the declarations a centerpiece of their campaigns.
The movement has grown with extreme climate events that have been impossible to ignore: wildfires, storms and droughts, plus heat waves that set record temperatures in Europe last week and made June the world’s hottest month on record.
Last fall, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that keeping global warming at the minimum level to avert catastrophe would, as New York’s resolution put it, “require an unprecedented transformation of every sector of the global economy over the next 12 years.”
Six in ten Americans are either “alarmed” or “concerned” about global warming, according to a recent study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and the share of those choosing “alarmed” more than doubled from 2013 to 2018.
Young advocates drive the push to use words like ‘crisis’
“Climate change sounds gradual,” said Olivia Sommers, 19, one of dozens of climate activists in an overflow crowd at a City Council hearing on the measure, part of the public pressure that swayed the body to approve the resolution sooner than planned. “But to me it doesn’t feel like ‘change’. It feels like a crisis.”
NY City Council environment hearing is so packed some waited hrs outside to testify. Advocates galvanized to propose solutions, push NYC & NYS to meet climate goals set by new laws. pic.twitter.com/uOHQSuKH2X
— Anne Barnard (@ABarnardNYT) June 24, 2019Jilly Edgar, 20, a New York University student and member of the Sunrise Movement, which advocates for Green New Deal policies, said she struggled to think of the future. That should be a time, she said, when “the world is becoming my own, and moving forward in it” toward “marriage, graduate degrees, children.”
“But actually,” she said, “the world is dying. There’s just, like, a cutoff point. That does a lot to destroy the idealism of young people that usually pushes them to act.”
The ‘fear of fear' is an obstacle to action, activists say
“The idea that ‘you can’t scare people, fear paralyzes people,’ has been a guiding principle of the gradualist climate movement for decades, and it’s horribly wrong and misguided,” said Ms. Klein Salamon, 33, who trained as a clinical psychologist.
“The basic tenet of therapy is that facing hard truths is how you create transformative change,” she said. “You cannot skip the step of facing reality. It’s only when we have a national consensus that we are all personally in danger, when we feel enough fear, that we are willing to make drastic changes. Fear is literally how we translate perception of danger into action.”
The mobilization to fight World War II, she said, is the closest parallel in recent history to the scale and urgency of effort needed, she said: “Pull every lever, have all hands on deck, spend without limit to save as much life as possible.”
The young activists at City Hall said they had all been through a phase of “climate despair,” but that what gave them hope was, as Ms. Edgar put it, “deciding to push for change, and urge people with power to make that same decision.”
News media, too, are being pushed to use urgent language
Ms. Sommers, a Middlebury College student, was one of 70 people arrested outside The New York Times last month in a protest calling for the newspaper to use the phrases “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” rather than “climate change.”
The Guardian recently announced that it would adopt those terms. A Times spokeswoman said the paper devotes more resources to covering climate than any national publication.
“We should call it an emergency because that’s what it is,” Ms. Sommers said. “Tell the truth.”
Links
- New York to Approve One of the World’s Most Ambitious Climate Plans
- A Heat Wave Tests Europe’s Defenses. Expect More.
- Demise of Gasoline Cars? What We Know About N.Y.’s Ambitious Climate Goals
- Sydney Declares A Climate Emergency – What Does That Mean In Practice?
- The City Of Sydney Has Officially Declared A Climate Emergency
- Blockchain and carbon offsetting can help cities reduce emissions – but sometimes simpler is better
- UK becomes first country to declare a 'climate emergency'
- Cutting cities' emissions does have economic benefits – and these ultimately outweigh the costs
- The Climate Crisis Is Our Third World War. It Needs A Bold Response
- Climate Change Doomsday Report Predicts End Of Human Civilisation
- Time To Flick Climate Emergency Switch: A Plea To Our New Parliament
- The Heat Is On Over The Climate Crisis. Only Radical Measures Will Work
- Come Senators, MPs, There's A Climate Emergency Raging
- The Guardian View On Extinction: Time To Rebel
- Biodiversity Crisis Is About To Put Humanity At Risk, UN Scientists To Warn
- Our Carbon Budget Is All But Spent, But Who In Canberra Is Counting?
Categories: External websites
Greta Thunberg Thanks OPEC Chief For Complaining About ‘Threat’ Of Climate Activists
The Independent - Emma Snaith
Fossil fuel industry leader worries about ‘mass mobilisation of world opinion against oil’
Greta Thunberg thanks OPEC chief for complaining about ‘threat’ of climate activists
Climate change activist Greta Thunberg has welcomed criticism from a fossil fuel industry chief that environment campaigners pose “perhaps the greatest threat” to the oil sector.
The 16-year-old founder of the “School Strike 4 Climate’ movement described the comments made by the leader the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as their “biggest compliment yet”.
It comes after energy ministers from 13 of the world’s most powerful oil-producing nations met in Austria to thrash out a deal restricting the amount of oil flowing into the global market to boost demand.
Speaking after the meeting earlier this week, general secretary Mohammed Barkindo said that “there is a growing mass mobilisation of world opinion… against oil”.
He said: “Civil society is being misled to believe oil is the cause of climate change.”
In the protest that started a movement, Greta skips school to sit outside of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm in order to raise awareness of climate change on 28 August 2018 Getty
Additional Images:
He said the children of some colleagues at OPEC’s headquarters ”are asking us about their future because … they see their peers on the streets campaigning against this industry”.
His comments appeared to be in reference to Ms Thunberg’s school strike movement, which began after the teenage activist started skipping classes to protest outside the Swedish parliament.
Her protest inspired millions of other children around the world to walk out school on Fridays to demand greater action on climate change.
“There is a growing mass mobilisation of world opinion... against oil" and this is "perhaps the greatest threat to our industry".
OPEC calls the school strike movement and climate campaigners their “greatest threat”.
Thank you! Our biggest compliment yet!https://t.co/f3anMLo4XX— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) July 4, 2019 Mr Barkindo added that the changing attitudes towards fossil fuels were ”beginning to ... dictate policies and corporate decisions, including investment in the industry”.
In response to Mr Barkindo’s comments, Ms Thunberg tweeted: “OPEC calls the school strike movement and climate campaigners their ‘greatest threat’.
“Thank you! Our biggest compliment yet!”
Bill McKibben, the founder of the climate group 350.org which calls for 100 per cent renewable energy, also welcomed Mr Barkindo’s comments.
He tweeted: “Wow! Wow! Wow! ...Thanks everyone for your good work!”
The OPEC chief’s comments come nearly a year after the UN released its landmark IPCC report that found we have 11 years to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5C to limit the worst effects of climate change.
Since then, the Extinction Rebellion movement brought parts of London to a standstill in April to demand action on climate change. And MPs voted to declare a climate emergency in May.
In the US, Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez submitted her Green New Deal proposal to the US House of Representatives in February. The deal, which calls for the achievement of “net-zero” greenhouse gases within a decade and “a full transition off fossil fuels, has received the backing of Democratic presidential candidates including Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.
OPEC is an intergovernmental organisation made up of 13 nations which seeks to coordinate oil prices to stabilise the market. Among its member nations are Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Nigeria.
Links
Fossil fuel industry leader worries about ‘mass mobilisation of world opinion against oil’
Greta Thunberg thanks OPEC chief for complaining about ‘threat’ of climate activists
Climate change activist Greta Thunberg has welcomed criticism from a fossil fuel industry chief that environment campaigners pose “perhaps the greatest threat” to the oil sector.
The 16-year-old founder of the “School Strike 4 Climate’ movement described the comments made by the leader the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as their “biggest compliment yet”.
It comes after energy ministers from 13 of the world’s most powerful oil-producing nations met in Austria to thrash out a deal restricting the amount of oil flowing into the global market to boost demand.
Speaking after the meeting earlier this week, general secretary Mohammed Barkindo said that “there is a growing mass mobilisation of world opinion… against oil”.
He said: “Civil society is being misled to believe oil is the cause of climate change.”
In the protest that started a movement, Greta skips school to sit outside of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm in order to raise awareness of climate change on 28 August 2018 Getty
Additional Images:
- Greta stages a protest at the World Economic Forum in Davos on 25 January Reuters
- Greta speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos on 25 January AFP/Getty
- Greta attends a meeting for the Civil Society For rEUnaissance at the EU Charlemagne Building in Brussels on 21 February AFP/Getty
- Greta addresses a children's climate protest on 1 March in Hamburg Getty
- Greta attends a children's climate protest in Berlin on 29 March AFP/Getty
- Greta receives the Special Climate Protection Award at the German Film and Television awards in Berlin on 30 March AFP/Getty
- Greta addresses a debate of the EU Environment, Public Health and Food Safety committee at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on 16 April AFP/Getty
- Greta addresses to the occupation at Marble Arch in London on 21 April AFP/Getty
- Greta speaks at the House of Commons in London on 23 April PA
- Greta speaks at the senate in Rome on 18 April Reuters
- Greta meets the Pope on a visit to Rome Reuters
He said the children of some colleagues at OPEC’s headquarters ”are asking us about their future because … they see their peers on the streets campaigning against this industry”.
His comments appeared to be in reference to Ms Thunberg’s school strike movement, which began after the teenage activist started skipping classes to protest outside the Swedish parliament.
Her protest inspired millions of other children around the world to walk out school on Fridays to demand greater action on climate change.
“There is a growing mass mobilisation of world opinion... against oil" and this is "perhaps the greatest threat to our industry".
OPEC calls the school strike movement and climate campaigners their “greatest threat”.
Thank you! Our biggest compliment yet!https://t.co/f3anMLo4XX— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) July 4, 2019 Mr Barkindo added that the changing attitudes towards fossil fuels were ”beginning to ... dictate policies and corporate decisions, including investment in the industry”.
In response to Mr Barkindo’s comments, Ms Thunberg tweeted: “OPEC calls the school strike movement and climate campaigners their ‘greatest threat’.
“Thank you! Our biggest compliment yet!”
Bill McKibben, the founder of the climate group 350.org which calls for 100 per cent renewable energy, also welcomed Mr Barkindo’s comments.
He tweeted: “Wow! Wow! Wow! ...Thanks everyone for your good work!”
The OPEC chief’s comments come nearly a year after the UN released its landmark IPCC report that found we have 11 years to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5C to limit the worst effects of climate change.
Since then, the Extinction Rebellion movement brought parts of London to a standstill in April to demand action on climate change. And MPs voted to declare a climate emergency in May.
In the US, Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez submitted her Green New Deal proposal to the US House of Representatives in February. The deal, which calls for the achievement of “net-zero” greenhouse gases within a decade and “a full transition off fossil fuels, has received the backing of Democratic presidential candidates including Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.
OPEC is an intergovernmental organisation made up of 13 nations which seeks to coordinate oil prices to stabilise the market. Among its member nations are Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Nigeria.
Links
- When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Met Greta Thunberg: 'Hope Is Contagious'
- Students From 1,600 Cities Just Walked Out Of School To Protest Climate Change. It Could Be Greta Thunberg's Biggest Strike Yet
- ‘Now I Am Speaking To The Whole World.’ How Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Got Everyone To Listen
- The Uncanny Power Of Greta Thunberg’s Climate-Change Rhetoric
- The Guardian View On Greta Thunberg: Seizing The Future
- Greta Thunberg Backs Climate General Strike To Force Leaders To Act
- Humanity Is At A Crossroads, Greta Thunberg Tells Extinction Rebellion
Categories: External websites
Climate Change Is Scaring Kids. Here’s How To Talk To Them.
New York Times - Laura M. Holson
Children held signs as they stood onstage with Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who signed bills addressing climate change last month. Credit Elaine Thompson/Associated PressHollywood has produced quite a few fictionalized depictions of dramatic climate change. Scores of people die after Manhattan freezes in 2004’s “The Day After Tomorrow.” In “Geostorm,” released in 2017, the weather goes haywire after satellites malfunction.
Realistic scenarios, though, have been less frequent. Yet Sunday’s episode of “Big Little Lies,” the HBO show about five women living in Monterey, Calif., included a second grader who had an anxiety attack after discussing climate change with a teacher. The girl worried the world was going to end.
Psychologists say the way parents and teachers talk about climate change with children has an effect on their young psyches.
“A lot of people, when they talk to kids, are processing their own anxiety and fears,” said John Fraser, a psychologist and chief executive of NewKnowledge, a social science think tank that studies health and the environment. “Do you think kids won’t be scared, too? As a culture, we haven’t developed good tools to talk about these things.”
Janet K. Swim, a professor of psychology at Penn State University, said she emphasized several steps for parents (and teachers, for that matter) to take when talking about climate change with youngsters.
“You should start off with something positive, like, ‘We like the planet,’” she said. This should be followed with taking children outside to appreciate nature. For city dwellers, this is as simple as going to a park. Families in more rural areas can hike.
“The goal is for them to appreciate the beauty of nature,” Dr. Swim said. “They should be thinking about what is good in the environment.”
This serves a purpose: connecting children to a world larger than their own.
“There is this thinking that young kids will understand what we are talking about,” Dr. Fraser said. “But summer and fall are new. They are only beginning to understand the seasons. Nature, to them, is a tree.”
Laura Dern and Jeffrey Nordling in “Big Little Lies,” a show created by David E. Kelley on HBO. In a recent episode, a second grader has an anxiety attack after discussing climate change with a teacher. Credit Jennifer Clasen/HBODr. Swim and Dr. Fraser agree that the next step is discussing the process of climate change and its effect on the planet. This is essential to demystifying the concept of global warming. But it requires parents to do some homework, too. Many parents, educators say, have as much to learn as their children.
“They have to understand the cycle,” Dr. Swim said. “If you want to talk without scaring your kids, you have to understand what is going on.”
At the New England Aquarium in Boston, William Spitzer, the vice president in learning and community, said educators there often engage families by using animals as a starting point. Myrtle, an 80-year-old green sea turtle that weighs 500 pounds, is quite popular among visitors.
One way to explain climate change, he said, is to use the analogy of the Earth being covered by a blanket of heat caused by, among other things, burning fossil fuels. That action creates more carbon dioxide, he said, which “causes the temperature of the ocean to rise.”
For sea turtles like Myrtle, temperature affects gender. “Changes to the environment affect the male-to-female ratio,” he said.
If children can understand how climate change affects an animal like Myrtle, they are more apt to expand their attitudes about the environment, Mr. Spitzer said. “We always try to connect the story back to something people already care about.”
In some situations, though, parents deny that climate change exists. In those cases, Dr. Fraser said, conversations are tricky. “The kids will have two conflicting views of what is going on in the world,” he said.
Educators at the aquarium do not try to change the minds of visitors who resist the concept, Mr. Spitzer said. “But there are not as many deniers as you might think given the noise they make,” he said. “People who go to zoos and museums and aquariums are more open.”
So what can a parent or teacher do to assuage fears? Dr. Fraser suggested that engaging children in social activities, like community gardens or a school recycling program, can give them agency over their future.
“It’s not just what an individual can do,” he said. “We have to look at what we can do as a community.”
Added Dr. Swim: “You don’t just sit down once and talk about it. It is an ongoing conversation.”
Advocates and other environmental professionals are already seeing a shift in attitudes. Community is key to addressing fear, said Meghan Kallman, a sociologist and co-founder of Conceivable Future, an organization that highlights how climate change is limiting reproductive choices.
“We are now only beginning to talk about climate anxiety,” she said. “It used to be fringe-y.”
Ms. Kallman said she has observed children asking parents what they plan to do about climate change.
“And parents should have an answer for that,” she said.
Links
Children held signs as they stood onstage with Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who signed bills addressing climate change last month. Credit Elaine Thompson/Associated PressHollywood has produced quite a few fictionalized depictions of dramatic climate change. Scores of people die after Manhattan freezes in 2004’s “The Day After Tomorrow.” In “Geostorm,” released in 2017, the weather goes haywire after satellites malfunction.
Realistic scenarios, though, have been less frequent. Yet Sunday’s episode of “Big Little Lies,” the HBO show about five women living in Monterey, Calif., included a second grader who had an anxiety attack after discussing climate change with a teacher. The girl worried the world was going to end.
Psychologists say the way parents and teachers talk about climate change with children has an effect on their young psyches.
“A lot of people, when they talk to kids, are processing their own anxiety and fears,” said John Fraser, a psychologist and chief executive of NewKnowledge, a social science think tank that studies health and the environment. “Do you think kids won’t be scared, too? As a culture, we haven’t developed good tools to talk about these things.”
Janet K. Swim, a professor of psychology at Penn State University, said she emphasized several steps for parents (and teachers, for that matter) to take when talking about climate change with youngsters.
“You should start off with something positive, like, ‘We like the planet,’” she said. This should be followed with taking children outside to appreciate nature. For city dwellers, this is as simple as going to a park. Families in more rural areas can hike.
“The goal is for them to appreciate the beauty of nature,” Dr. Swim said. “They should be thinking about what is good in the environment.”
This serves a purpose: connecting children to a world larger than their own.
“There is this thinking that young kids will understand what we are talking about,” Dr. Fraser said. “But summer and fall are new. They are only beginning to understand the seasons. Nature, to them, is a tree.”
Laura Dern and Jeffrey Nordling in “Big Little Lies,” a show created by David E. Kelley on HBO. In a recent episode, a second grader has an anxiety attack after discussing climate change with a teacher. Credit Jennifer Clasen/HBODr. Swim and Dr. Fraser agree that the next step is discussing the process of climate change and its effect on the planet. This is essential to demystifying the concept of global warming. But it requires parents to do some homework, too. Many parents, educators say, have as much to learn as their children.
“They have to understand the cycle,” Dr. Swim said. “If you want to talk without scaring your kids, you have to understand what is going on.”
At the New England Aquarium in Boston, William Spitzer, the vice president in learning and community, said educators there often engage families by using animals as a starting point. Myrtle, an 80-year-old green sea turtle that weighs 500 pounds, is quite popular among visitors.
One way to explain climate change, he said, is to use the analogy of the Earth being covered by a blanket of heat caused by, among other things, burning fossil fuels. That action creates more carbon dioxide, he said, which “causes the temperature of the ocean to rise.”
For sea turtles like Myrtle, temperature affects gender. “Changes to the environment affect the male-to-female ratio,” he said.
If children can understand how climate change affects an animal like Myrtle, they are more apt to expand their attitudes about the environment, Mr. Spitzer said. “We always try to connect the story back to something people already care about.”
In some situations, though, parents deny that climate change exists. In those cases, Dr. Fraser said, conversations are tricky. “The kids will have two conflicting views of what is going on in the world,” he said.
Educators at the aquarium do not try to change the minds of visitors who resist the concept, Mr. Spitzer said. “But there are not as many deniers as you might think given the noise they make,” he said. “People who go to zoos and museums and aquariums are more open.”
So what can a parent or teacher do to assuage fears? Dr. Fraser suggested that engaging children in social activities, like community gardens or a school recycling program, can give them agency over their future.
“It’s not just what an individual can do,” he said. “We have to look at what we can do as a community.”
Added Dr. Swim: “You don’t just sit down once and talk about it. It is an ongoing conversation.”
Advocates and other environmental professionals are already seeing a shift in attitudes. Community is key to addressing fear, said Meghan Kallman, a sociologist and co-founder of Conceivable Future, an organization that highlights how climate change is limiting reproductive choices.
“We are now only beginning to talk about climate anxiety,” she said. “It used to be fringe-y.”
Ms. Kallman said she has observed children asking parents what they plan to do about climate change.
“And parents should have an answer for that,” she said.
Links
- Unless we act now- The impact of climate change on children
- Climate Change Mainly Impacting Vulnerable Children
- Future under threat: climate change and children's health
- Children, Young People and Climate Change
- Climate change: The effects on children
- Children and Climate Change: Introducing the Issue
Categories: External websites
Planting A Trillion Trees May Be The Best Way To Fight Climate Change, Study Says
TIME - Seth Borenstein / AP
The Debates Showed America Still Doesn't Know How to Talk About Climate Change
(WASHINGTON) — The most effective way to fight global warming is to plant lots of trees, a study says. A trillion of them, maybe more.
And there’s enough room, Swiss scientists say. Even with existing cities and farmland, there’s enough space for new trees to cover 3.5 million square miles (9 million square kilometers), they reported in Thursday’s journal Science. That area is roughly the size of the United States.
The study calculated that over the decades, those new trees could suck up nearly 830 billion tons (750 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s about as much carbon pollution as humans have spewed in the past 25 years. Much of that benefit will come quickly because trees remove more carbon from the air when they are younger, the study authors said. The potential for removing the most carbon is in the tropics.
“This is by far — by thousands of times — the cheapest climate change solution” and the most effective, said study co-author Thomas Crowther, a climate change ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Six nations with the most room for new trees are Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil and China.
Before his research, Crowther figured that there were other more effective ways to fight climate change besides cutting emissions, such as people switching from meat-eating to vegetarianism. But, he said, tree planting is far more effective because trees take so much carbon dioxide out of the air.
Thomas Lovejoy, a George Mason University conservation biologist who wasn’t part of the study, called it “a good news story” because planting trees would also help stem the loss of biodiversity. Planting trees is not a substitute for weaning the world off burning oil, coal and gas, the chief cause of global warming, Crowther emphasized. “None of this works without emissions cuts,” he said.
Nor is it easy or realistic to think the world will suddenly go on a tree-planting binge, although many groups have started, Crowther said. “It’s certainly a monumental challenge, which is exactly the scale of the problem of climate change,” he said. And as the Earth warms, and especially as the tropics dry, tree cover is being lost, he noted.
The researchers used Google Earth to see what areas could support more trees, while leaving room for people and crops. Lead author Jean-Francois Bastin estimated there’s space for at least 1 trillion more trees, but it could be 1.5 trillion.
That’s on top of the 3 trillion trees that now are on Earth, according to earlier Crowther research.
The study’s calculations make sense, said Stanford University environmental scientist Chris Field, who wasn’t part of the study. “But the question of whether it is actually feasible to restore this much forest is much more difficult,” Field said in an email.
Links
The Debates Showed America Still Doesn't Know How to Talk About Climate Change
(WASHINGTON) — The most effective way to fight global warming is to plant lots of trees, a study says. A trillion of them, maybe more.
And there’s enough room, Swiss scientists say. Even with existing cities and farmland, there’s enough space for new trees to cover 3.5 million square miles (9 million square kilometers), they reported in Thursday’s journal Science. That area is roughly the size of the United States.
The study calculated that over the decades, those new trees could suck up nearly 830 billion tons (750 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s about as much carbon pollution as humans have spewed in the past 25 years. Much of that benefit will come quickly because trees remove more carbon from the air when they are younger, the study authors said. The potential for removing the most carbon is in the tropics.
“This is by far — by thousands of times — the cheapest climate change solution” and the most effective, said study co-author Thomas Crowther, a climate change ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Six nations with the most room for new trees are Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil and China.
Before his research, Crowther figured that there were other more effective ways to fight climate change besides cutting emissions, such as people switching from meat-eating to vegetarianism. But, he said, tree planting is far more effective because trees take so much carbon dioxide out of the air.
Thomas Lovejoy, a George Mason University conservation biologist who wasn’t part of the study, called it “a good news story” because planting trees would also help stem the loss of biodiversity. Planting trees is not a substitute for weaning the world off burning oil, coal and gas, the chief cause of global warming, Crowther emphasized. “None of this works without emissions cuts,” he said.
Nor is it easy or realistic to think the world will suddenly go on a tree-planting binge, although many groups have started, Crowther said. “It’s certainly a monumental challenge, which is exactly the scale of the problem of climate change,” he said. And as the Earth warms, and especially as the tropics dry, tree cover is being lost, he noted.
The researchers used Google Earth to see what areas could support more trees, while leaving room for people and crops. Lead author Jean-Francois Bastin estimated there’s space for at least 1 trillion more trees, but it could be 1.5 trillion.
That’s on top of the 3 trillion trees that now are on Earth, according to earlier Crowther research.
The study’s calculations make sense, said Stanford University environmental scientist Chris Field, who wasn’t part of the study. “But the question of whether it is actually feasible to restore this much forest is much more difficult,” Field said in an email.
Links
- Can planting billions of trees save the planet?
- Let nature heal climate and biodiversity crises, say campaigners
- Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
- The global tree restoration potential
- Crowther Lab
- Global Carbon Budget
- Global Carbon Budget 2018
- 'Football pitch' of Amazon forest lost every minute
- Tropical tree loss persists at high levels
- Climate change made heat five times more likely
- 'Brutal news': global carbon emissions jump to all-time high in 2018
- We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN
- Paris climate deal: nearly 200 nations sign in end of fossil fuel era
- Climate Change: Trees 'Most Effective Solution' For Warming
- Climate Change Could Be Paused By Planting Trees, Researchers Say, As They Map Out Available Land
- Restoring forests as a means to many ends
- Australia - 20 Million Trees Program
- Fact check: Is Queensland clearing land as fast as Brazil?
- One million species at risk of extinction, UN report warns, and we are mostly to blame
- Threatened blue carbon ecosystems store carbon 40 times faster than forests
Categories: External websites
Stop Building A Spaceship To Mars And Just Plant Some Damn Trees
Mother Jones - Jackie Flynn Mogensen
Researchers found that there’s room for an extra 900 million hectares of canopy cover.
borchee/GettyWhen it comes to climate change research, most studies bear bad news regarding the looming, very real threat of a warming planet and the resulting devastation that it will bring upon the Earth. But a new study, out Thursday in the journal Science, offers a sliver of hope for the world: A group of researchers based in Switzerland, Italy, and France found that expanding forests, which sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, could seriously make up for humans’ toxic carbon emissions.
In 2018, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s foremost authority on climate, estimated that we’d need to plant 1 billion hectares of forest by 2050 to keep the globe from warming a full 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. (One hectare is about twice the size of a football field.) Not only is that “undoubtedly achievable,” according to the study’s authors, but global tree restoration is “our most effective climate change solution to date.”
In fact, there’s space on the planet for an extra 900 million hectares of canopy cover, the researchers found, which translates to storage for a whopping 205 gigatonnes of carbon. To put that in perspective, humans emit about 10 gigatonnes of carbon from burning fossil fuels every year, according to Richard Houghton, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, who was not involved with the study. And overall, there are now about 850 gigatonnes of carbon in the atmosphere; a tree-planting effort on that scale could, in theory, cut carbon by about 25 percent, according to the authors.
In addition to that, Houghton says, trees are relatively cheap carbon consumers. As he put it, “There are technologies people are working on to take carbon dioxide out of the air. And trees do it—for nothing.”
To make this bold prediction, the researchers identified what tree cover looks like in nearly 80,000 half-hectare plots in existing forests. They then used that data to map how much canopy cover would be possible in other regions—excluding urban or agricultural land—depending on the area’s topography, climate, precipitation levels, and other environmental variables. The result revealed where trees might grow outside of existing forests.
“We know a single tree can capture a lot of carbon. What we don’t know is how many trees the planet can support,” says Jean-François Bastin, an ecologist and postdoc at ETH-Zürich, a university in Zürich, Switzerland, and the study’s lead author, adding, “This gives us an idea.”
The global potential tree cover available for restoration. ScienceThey found that all that tree-planting potential isn’t spaced evenly across the globe. Six countries, in fact, hold more than half of the world’s area for potential tree restoration (in this order): Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and China. The United States alone has room for more than 100 million hectares of additional tree cover—greater than the size of Texas.
The study, however, has its limitations. For one, a global tree-planting effort is somewhat impractical. As the authors write, “it remains unclear what proportion of this land is public or privately owned, and so we cannot identify how much land is truly available for restoration.” Rob Jackson, who chairs the Earth System Science Department and Global Carbon Project at Stanford University and was not involved with the study, agrees that forest management plays an important role in the fight against climate change, but says the paper’s finding that humans could reduce atmospheric carbon by 25 percent by planting trees seemed “unrealistic,” and wondered what kinds of trees would be most effective or how forest restoration may disrupt agriculture.
“Forests and soils are the cheapest and fastest way to remove carbon from the atmosphere—lots of really good opportunities there,” he said. “I get uneasy when we start talking about managing billions of extra acres of land, with one goal in mind: to store carbon.” Bastin, though, says the study is “about respecting the natural ecosystem,” and not simply planting “100 percent tree cover.” He also clarified that planting trees alone cannot fix climate change. The problem is “related to the way we are living on the planet,” he says.
Caveats aside, Houghton sees the study as a useful exercise in what’s possible. “[The study] is setting the limits,” says Houghton. “It’s not telling us at all how to implement it. That’s what our leaders have to think about.”
Links
Researchers found that there’s room for an extra 900 million hectares of canopy cover.
borchee/GettyWhen it comes to climate change research, most studies bear bad news regarding the looming, very real threat of a warming planet and the resulting devastation that it will bring upon the Earth. But a new study, out Thursday in the journal Science, offers a sliver of hope for the world: A group of researchers based in Switzerland, Italy, and France found that expanding forests, which sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, could seriously make up for humans’ toxic carbon emissions.
In 2018, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s foremost authority on climate, estimated that we’d need to plant 1 billion hectares of forest by 2050 to keep the globe from warming a full 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. (One hectare is about twice the size of a football field.) Not only is that “undoubtedly achievable,” according to the study’s authors, but global tree restoration is “our most effective climate change solution to date.”
In fact, there’s space on the planet for an extra 900 million hectares of canopy cover, the researchers found, which translates to storage for a whopping 205 gigatonnes of carbon. To put that in perspective, humans emit about 10 gigatonnes of carbon from burning fossil fuels every year, according to Richard Houghton, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, who was not involved with the study. And overall, there are now about 850 gigatonnes of carbon in the atmosphere; a tree-planting effort on that scale could, in theory, cut carbon by about 25 percent, according to the authors.
In addition to that, Houghton says, trees are relatively cheap carbon consumers. As he put it, “There are technologies people are working on to take carbon dioxide out of the air. And trees do it—for nothing.”
To make this bold prediction, the researchers identified what tree cover looks like in nearly 80,000 half-hectare plots in existing forests. They then used that data to map how much canopy cover would be possible in other regions—excluding urban or agricultural land—depending on the area’s topography, climate, precipitation levels, and other environmental variables. The result revealed where trees might grow outside of existing forests.
“We know a single tree can capture a lot of carbon. What we don’t know is how many trees the planet can support,” says Jean-François Bastin, an ecologist and postdoc at ETH-Zürich, a university in Zürich, Switzerland, and the study’s lead author, adding, “This gives us an idea.”
The global potential tree cover available for restoration. ScienceThey found that all that tree-planting potential isn’t spaced evenly across the globe. Six countries, in fact, hold more than half of the world’s area for potential tree restoration (in this order): Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and China. The United States alone has room for more than 100 million hectares of additional tree cover—greater than the size of Texas.
The study, however, has its limitations. For one, a global tree-planting effort is somewhat impractical. As the authors write, “it remains unclear what proportion of this land is public or privately owned, and so we cannot identify how much land is truly available for restoration.” Rob Jackson, who chairs the Earth System Science Department and Global Carbon Project at Stanford University and was not involved with the study, agrees that forest management plays an important role in the fight against climate change, but says the paper’s finding that humans could reduce atmospheric carbon by 25 percent by planting trees seemed “unrealistic,” and wondered what kinds of trees would be most effective or how forest restoration may disrupt agriculture.
“Forests and soils are the cheapest and fastest way to remove carbon from the atmosphere—lots of really good opportunities there,” he said. “I get uneasy when we start talking about managing billions of extra acres of land, with one goal in mind: to store carbon.” Bastin, though, says the study is “about respecting the natural ecosystem,” and not simply planting “100 percent tree cover.” He also clarified that planting trees alone cannot fix climate change. The problem is “related to the way we are living on the planet,” he says.
Caveats aside, Houghton sees the study as a useful exercise in what’s possible. “[The study] is setting the limits,” says Houghton. “It’s not telling us at all how to implement it. That’s what our leaders have to think about.”
Links
- Climate Change Could Be Paused By Planting Trees, Researchers Say, As They Map Out Available Land
- Climate Change: Trees 'Most Effective Solution' For Warming
- Tree Planting 'Has Mind-Blowing Potential' To Tackle Climate Crisis
- Australia Will Plant 1 Billion Trees To Combat Climate Change
- Massive Restoration Of World’s Forests Would Cancel Out A Decade Of CO2 Emissions, Analysis Suggests
- Planting 1.2 Trillion Trees Could Cancel Out A Decade of CO2 Emissions, Scientists Find
- Scientists Champion Forests As 'Unsung Hero' Of Climate Action
- Land Conservation Steps Into Limelight As Key Climate Change Fix
- When Trees Make Rain: Could Restoring Forests Help Ease Drought In Australia?
Categories: External websites
A New Team Is Working To Predict The Danger Zones Of Australia's Deadliest Heatwaves
ABC News - Helen Frost
Recognition of the impact of extreme heat is prompting stronger responses. (ABC News: Mary Lloyd) Key points:
While the fires made headlines, the associated heatwave claimed another 374 lives in Victoria and another 50 in South Australia.
Now, a working group under the guidance of the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) is developing a strategy to better predict that natural phenomenon.
Nine of the past 14 years have been among the hottest on record and 2018 was the third warmest in Australia's history.
In response to the danger posed by extreme heat, the Federal Government has formed the Emergency Management Australia-led National Heatwave Framework Working Group, with input from a range of departments.
John Nairn, the state manager of the BOM in South Australia, said the heat trend was set to continue.
"We are seeing heatwaves becoming much more intense," he said.
"One of the signals that we have to be mindful of though is that the minimum temperature is probably even more important than the maximum temperature."If we can't get recovery temperatures to actually discharge the heat, those very high temperatures, day-on-day, continue to build heat in the environment and the heatwaves become much more intense as a consequence.
"That is where we see the impacts unfold."
Right now, Europe is experiencing a heatwave which, according to the World Meteorological Organisation, is exceptionally intense.
A girl cools off in a Paris fountain during the recent heatwave. (AP: Alessandra Tarantino)France set a new national record of 45.9 degrees Celsius and records have also been broken in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria.
Closer to home, Adelaide hit a sweltering 46.6C on January 24 this year, surpassing the previous record set in Melbourne a decade ago to officially become the hottest capital in the country.
It's not just the elderly who are at risk
The national working group will use data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Geoscience Australia, the Department of Health and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
"We'll have a lot of the ingredients for how people can become exposed and the evidence of their exposure vulnerabilities," Mr Nairn said."We can hopefully identify the locations and the types of people who may well be exposed to those heatwaves."
The bureau currently issues heatwave charts, but is working on a predictability map. (Supplied: BOM)According to Mr Nairn, the evidence that extreme heatwaves were increasing — and appearing very early and late in the season — was reflected in BOM's data.
"The BOM is leading a project that will build a heatwave predictability map for Australia," he said.
"That will enable us to combine that with our heatwave intensity measure that we do with our forecasting to determine where we think the community will be exposed and possible impacts."
The map should be able to predict how long and severe the heatwaves will be, allowing emergency, health and community services to put measures in place and deploy staff to cope with the heat.
What you need to know about cyclones
Cyclones are part and parcel of an Australian summer. Here's how they form and what they do.
The information would also go out to government departments, so they can plan for the excess power consumption during prolonged periods of heat, to help avoid blackouts.
But the planning side of things is only part of the battle — another problem with heatwaves is that people can underestimate the risks.
Research undertaken by University of Adelaide public health expert Peng Bi showed that most people believed a heatwave was something that would not impact them.
"A lot of people think 'OK a heatwave, hot days in summer are not unusual, that is a normal phenomenon' — but in fact it is not. I think that is a very dangerous perception," Professor Bi said.
"From our study we found that the elderly, outdoor workers and migrant communities are the most vulnerable populations in our community, so we need to do something for them."The elderly make up a large number of the deaths during extreme heat, but the figures also took into consideration ambulance call-outs, hospital presentations, drownings and the consequences for people with chronic health issues such as cardiovascular disease.
In addition to that, they also include festival and alcohol-related deaths.
A large crowd at Groovin' the Moo festival. (ABC Central Victoria: Corey Hague)"[On] hot days, a lot of people drink alcohol, they are wandering around the streets and alcohol-driven street violence sometimes happens," Professor Bi said."At a large event, that's why we see an increased police presence on really hot days."
State borders determine heatwave responses
Each state and territory has its own heatwave response approach, with different triggers and thresholds for their local communities.
They also have different government agencies responsible for warning systems and plans.
In South Australia for example, the State Emergency Service (SES) takes the lead.
"South Australia has a whole-of-government heatwave planning framework," SES chief officer Chris Beattie said.
"Once we are aware some extreme heat conditions are forecast, we will activate cross-government heatwave warning protocols and arrangements.
"Within each department there are a range of specific triggers which will be activated."The SES take the lead in South Australia. (ABC News: Gordon Taylor) There are different state and federal projects looking at how to better respond to heatwaves, and fix holes in the current system.
For instance, South Australian heatwaves are currently mapped using Adelaide temperatures for the whole state.
The SES is also working with other agencies and academics to develop a new modelling technique that will allow it to adapt its response.
The team hopes to have it set up in time for the hot and dry weather already predicted this summer.
"We are now working with the University of Adelaide and the BOM to provide a gridded data set that can provide a data-rich source of information at the township level," Mr Beattie said.
"So, in terms of providing information and warnings to the broader community, we can move beyond a whole-of-state heatwave warning threshold to individual tailored thresholds for communities."
Working out the death toll is not easy
One of the main issues in addressing heat problems in Australia is the inconsistent way death tolls have been calculated and reported.
Different agencies cite different figures, and it is often unclear which is the most accurate.
For example, following South Australia's two-week heatwave in 2009, there were three different figures.
SA Health stated there were 33 deaths, the coroner's office said there had been 58 and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) put the figure at 96.
An ice delivery man cools off in SA's far north, the day Adelaide's temperature hit 46.6C. (ABC News)Mr Beattie explained that those different approaches were one of the biggest challenges facing authorities as they tried to prepare and plan for heatwaves across the country.
"Actually capturing that data and cleaning it and understanding it is a complex process," he said.
"Depending on which methodology you use, you'll get a different result as to how many fatalities there have been for any given event."It's not just the direct heat deaths that we need to be worried about, it's the coincidental deaths that occur — from illnesses that are exacerbated, from increased accident rates in the workplace and our roads and through other events such as drownings."
The BOM has already issued its outlook for spring which has forecast more hot and dry weather.
The weather pattern is indicating below-average rainfall through central and eastern Australia, which covers around two thirds of the continent.
Be prepared for the heat
Heatwaves kill far more people than other natural disasters. ABC Emergency has a checklist of things you can do to be ready.
John Nairn said the BOM was getting better at providing heatwave advice to communities.
"Last year we were preparing the community for a hotter summer and an earlier start and I suppose those chickens came home to roost when Queensland's epic fires started in October, and the heatwave hit the wet tropical coast in early November," he said.
"Those messages were accurate, so we're building confidence that the bureau can provide good advice."Certainly the dialogue that we have with the emergency services agencies and the departments of health and the like are becoming more meaningful over time, so we are helping the community prepare."
The new working group has one year to develop the predictability map and understand the data types required.
"It would be nice to think we will have something in place by the end of the year," Mr Nairn said.
"But there are many agencies coming together for this, for the first time, to look at each other's data.
"It's not a trivial exercise."
Links
Recognition of the impact of extreme heat is prompting stronger responses. (ABC News: Mary Lloyd) Key points:
- A new team will take a national approach and aims to predict heatwaves across Australia
- It comes as nine of the past 14 years have been among the hottest on record
- The Bureau of Meteorology is warning the record temperature trend is set to continue
While the fires made headlines, the associated heatwave claimed another 374 lives in Victoria and another 50 in South Australia.
Now, a working group under the guidance of the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) is developing a strategy to better predict that natural phenomenon.
Nine of the past 14 years have been among the hottest on record and 2018 was the third warmest in Australia's history.
In response to the danger posed by extreme heat, the Federal Government has formed the Emergency Management Australia-led National Heatwave Framework Working Group, with input from a range of departments.
John Nairn, the state manager of the BOM in South Australia, said the heat trend was set to continue.
"We are seeing heatwaves becoming much more intense," he said.
"One of the signals that we have to be mindful of though is that the minimum temperature is probably even more important than the maximum temperature."If we can't get recovery temperatures to actually discharge the heat, those very high temperatures, day-on-day, continue to build heat in the environment and the heatwaves become much more intense as a consequence.
"That is where we see the impacts unfold."
Right now, Europe is experiencing a heatwave which, according to the World Meteorological Organisation, is exceptionally intense.
A girl cools off in a Paris fountain during the recent heatwave. (AP: Alessandra Tarantino)France set a new national record of 45.9 degrees Celsius and records have also been broken in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria.
Closer to home, Adelaide hit a sweltering 46.6C on January 24 this year, surpassing the previous record set in Melbourne a decade ago to officially become the hottest capital in the country.
It's not just the elderly who are at risk
The national working group will use data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Geoscience Australia, the Department of Health and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
"We'll have a lot of the ingredients for how people can become exposed and the evidence of their exposure vulnerabilities," Mr Nairn said."We can hopefully identify the locations and the types of people who may well be exposed to those heatwaves."
The bureau currently issues heatwave charts, but is working on a predictability map. (Supplied: BOM)According to Mr Nairn, the evidence that extreme heatwaves were increasing — and appearing very early and late in the season — was reflected in BOM's data.
"The BOM is leading a project that will build a heatwave predictability map for Australia," he said.
"That will enable us to combine that with our heatwave intensity measure that we do with our forecasting to determine where we think the community will be exposed and possible impacts."
The map should be able to predict how long and severe the heatwaves will be, allowing emergency, health and community services to put measures in place and deploy staff to cope with the heat.
What you need to know about cyclones
Cyclones are part and parcel of an Australian summer. Here's how they form and what they do.
The information would also go out to government departments, so they can plan for the excess power consumption during prolonged periods of heat, to help avoid blackouts.
But the planning side of things is only part of the battle — another problem with heatwaves is that people can underestimate the risks.
Research undertaken by University of Adelaide public health expert Peng Bi showed that most people believed a heatwave was something that would not impact them.
"A lot of people think 'OK a heatwave, hot days in summer are not unusual, that is a normal phenomenon' — but in fact it is not. I think that is a very dangerous perception," Professor Bi said.
"From our study we found that the elderly, outdoor workers and migrant communities are the most vulnerable populations in our community, so we need to do something for them."The elderly make up a large number of the deaths during extreme heat, but the figures also took into consideration ambulance call-outs, hospital presentations, drownings and the consequences for people with chronic health issues such as cardiovascular disease.
In addition to that, they also include festival and alcohol-related deaths.
A large crowd at Groovin' the Moo festival. (ABC Central Victoria: Corey Hague)"[On] hot days, a lot of people drink alcohol, they are wandering around the streets and alcohol-driven street violence sometimes happens," Professor Bi said."At a large event, that's why we see an increased police presence on really hot days."
State borders determine heatwave responses
Each state and territory has its own heatwave response approach, with different triggers and thresholds for their local communities.
They also have different government agencies responsible for warning systems and plans.
In South Australia for example, the State Emergency Service (SES) takes the lead.
"South Australia has a whole-of-government heatwave planning framework," SES chief officer Chris Beattie said.
"Once we are aware some extreme heat conditions are forecast, we will activate cross-government heatwave warning protocols and arrangements.
"Within each department there are a range of specific triggers which will be activated."The SES take the lead in South Australia. (ABC News: Gordon Taylor) There are different state and federal projects looking at how to better respond to heatwaves, and fix holes in the current system.
For instance, South Australian heatwaves are currently mapped using Adelaide temperatures for the whole state.
The SES is also working with other agencies and academics to develop a new modelling technique that will allow it to adapt its response.
The team hopes to have it set up in time for the hot and dry weather already predicted this summer.
"We are now working with the University of Adelaide and the BOM to provide a gridded data set that can provide a data-rich source of information at the township level," Mr Beattie said.
"So, in terms of providing information and warnings to the broader community, we can move beyond a whole-of-state heatwave warning threshold to individual tailored thresholds for communities."
Working out the death toll is not easy
One of the main issues in addressing heat problems in Australia is the inconsistent way death tolls have been calculated and reported.
Different agencies cite different figures, and it is often unclear which is the most accurate.
For example, following South Australia's two-week heatwave in 2009, there were three different figures.
SA Health stated there were 33 deaths, the coroner's office said there had been 58 and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) put the figure at 96.
An ice delivery man cools off in SA's far north, the day Adelaide's temperature hit 46.6C. (ABC News)Mr Beattie explained that those different approaches were one of the biggest challenges facing authorities as they tried to prepare and plan for heatwaves across the country.
"Actually capturing that data and cleaning it and understanding it is a complex process," he said.
"Depending on which methodology you use, you'll get a different result as to how many fatalities there have been for any given event."It's not just the direct heat deaths that we need to be worried about, it's the coincidental deaths that occur — from illnesses that are exacerbated, from increased accident rates in the workplace and our roads and through other events such as drownings."
The BOM has already issued its outlook for spring which has forecast more hot and dry weather.
The weather pattern is indicating below-average rainfall through central and eastern Australia, which covers around two thirds of the continent.
Be prepared for the heat
Heatwaves kill far more people than other natural disasters. ABC Emergency has a checklist of things you can do to be ready.
John Nairn said the BOM was getting better at providing heatwave advice to communities.
"Last year we were preparing the community for a hotter summer and an earlier start and I suppose those chickens came home to roost when Queensland's epic fires started in October, and the heatwave hit the wet tropical coast in early November," he said.
"Those messages were accurate, so we're building confidence that the bureau can provide good advice."Certainly the dialogue that we have with the emergency services agencies and the departments of health and the like are becoming more meaningful over time, so we are helping the community prepare."
The new working group has one year to develop the predictability map and understand the data types required.
"It would be nice to think we will have something in place by the end of the year," Mr Nairn said.
"But there are many agencies coming together for this, for the first time, to look at each other's data.
"It's not a trivial exercise."
Links
- Heatwaves are Australia's deadliest natural hazard and many are unprepared
- BOM declares 2018 Australia's third-hottest year on record
- Adelaide now Australia's hottest capital city on record as temperatures soar
- Qld To Cop Dramatic Rise In Extreme Heat
- Australia Breaks Weather Records With Hottest Ever Summer
- 'The Darling Will Die': Scientists Say Mass Fish Kill Due To Over-Extraction And Drought
- Floods, Fire And Drought: Australia, A Country In The Grip Of Extreme Weather Bingo
- Australia Swelters Through Hottest Month On Record, With January Mean Temperature Exceeding 30c
- Fish Kill In The Murrumbidgee River Leaves 'Thousands' More Dead
- Thousands Of Australian Animals Die In Unprecedented Heatwave
Categories: External websites
Coal And Gas On Notice, As US Big Solar And Battery Deal Stuns Market
RenewEconomy - Sophie Vorrath
Downtown Los Angeles at night. Source: FlickrA Californian solar and battery storage power purchase agreement is plumbing new lows for the cost of electricity from solar – a US-dollar price of 1.99c/kWh for 400MW of PV and 1.3c/kWh for stored solar power from a co-located 400MW/800MWh battery storage system.
The record setting deal, struck by a team at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) with renewables developer 8minute, seeks to lock-in a two-stage, 25-year contract to serve 7 per cent of L.A.’s electricity demand from the massive solar and battery project.
The project, called the Eland Solar and Storage Center, would be built in two 200MW stages in Kern County north of Los Angeles, with an option to add a further 50MW/200 MWh of energy storage for 0.665 cents per kWh more.
The project aims not only to help power L.A. during the day with dirt-cheap solar power but to use the stored battery power in the evening peak period to ease the effect of fossil fuel “ramping” as the solar leaves the system.
And while the project’s size is impressive – particularly the size of the battery system, which would be twice the size of the world’s current biggest big battery, Australia’s own Hornsdale Power Reserve – it has been the prices quoted for the PPA that have really caught the market’s attention.
Goodnight #naturalgas, goodnight #coal, goodnight #nuclear#LosAngeles seeks record setting solar PV price under 2¢/kWh and battery storage at 1.3¢/kWh under a 25-year contract https://t.co/KkwOqGyfWK¢-kwh/ @pvmagazine @howarth_cornell @ProfStrachan @ProfRayWills @NickCowern— Mark Z. Jacobson (@mzjacobson) June 28, 2019
As PV Magazine’s John Weaver noted, the current world record solar power price was set in Mexico at 1.97¢/kWh as part of a batch of projects averaging just over 2¢/kWh. A lower bid submitted in Saudi Arabia at 1.79¢/kWh was not ultimately signed.
“This is the lowest solar-photovoltaic price in the United States, and it is the largest and lowest-cost solar and high-capacity battery-storage project in the U.S., and we believe in the world today,” said the LADWP’s manager for strategic initiatives, said James Barner. “So this is, I believe, truly revolutionary in the industry.”
Barner has also noted that the project has been able to make “full use” of a “substantial” federal solar investment tax credit, which amounted to around 30 per cent “basically knocked off the capital cost of the project.”
According to reports, Barner told a June briefing on the project that net peak load in the evening would be offset by the Eland facility, to keep gas powered generation “not running at the full amount.”
“The battery can be dispatched differently, depending on the system need,” he said. “So you could run that four-hour battery over 16 hours at one-fourth of the output so that you can vary it over time. It’s not just fixed over four hours.
“The battery is able to take a portion of (the) solar from that facility …and then store it into the battery so that the facility can provide a constant output to the grid. It can turn this solar facility, which is not typically dispatchable, into a dispatchable type of facility.”
According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency, and quoted in Forbes, a natural-gas plant opening at the same time as the Eland facility would produce power at more than twice the price, or 4-4.3¢/kWh.
Presuming the power off-take contract is approved, the Eland project is expected start construction in 2022, with the first production expected in the first half of 2023, and a guaranteed commercial operation date of the last day of that year, PV Magazine reported.
Links
Downtown Los Angeles at night. Source: FlickrA Californian solar and battery storage power purchase agreement is plumbing new lows for the cost of electricity from solar – a US-dollar price of 1.99c/kWh for 400MW of PV and 1.3c/kWh for stored solar power from a co-located 400MW/800MWh battery storage system.
The record setting deal, struck by a team at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) with renewables developer 8minute, seeks to lock-in a two-stage, 25-year contract to serve 7 per cent of L.A.’s electricity demand from the massive solar and battery project.
The project, called the Eland Solar and Storage Center, would be built in two 200MW stages in Kern County north of Los Angeles, with an option to add a further 50MW/200 MWh of energy storage for 0.665 cents per kWh more.
The project aims not only to help power L.A. during the day with dirt-cheap solar power but to use the stored battery power in the evening peak period to ease the effect of fossil fuel “ramping” as the solar leaves the system.
And while the project’s size is impressive – particularly the size of the battery system, which would be twice the size of the world’s current biggest big battery, Australia’s own Hornsdale Power Reserve – it has been the prices quoted for the PPA that have really caught the market’s attention.
Goodnight #naturalgas, goodnight #coal, goodnight #nuclear#LosAngeles seeks record setting solar PV price under 2¢/kWh and battery storage at 1.3¢/kWh under a 25-year contract https://t.co/KkwOqGyfWK¢-kwh/ @pvmagazine @howarth_cornell @ProfStrachan @ProfRayWills @NickCowern— Mark Z. Jacobson (@mzjacobson) June 28, 2019
As PV Magazine’s John Weaver noted, the current world record solar power price was set in Mexico at 1.97¢/kWh as part of a batch of projects averaging just over 2¢/kWh. A lower bid submitted in Saudi Arabia at 1.79¢/kWh was not ultimately signed.
“This is the lowest solar-photovoltaic price in the United States, and it is the largest and lowest-cost solar and high-capacity battery-storage project in the U.S., and we believe in the world today,” said the LADWP’s manager for strategic initiatives, said James Barner. “So this is, I believe, truly revolutionary in the industry.”
Barner has also noted that the project has been able to make “full use” of a “substantial” federal solar investment tax credit, which amounted to around 30 per cent “basically knocked off the capital cost of the project.”
According to reports, Barner told a June briefing on the project that net peak load in the evening would be offset by the Eland facility, to keep gas powered generation “not running at the full amount.”
“The battery can be dispatched differently, depending on the system need,” he said. “So you could run that four-hour battery over 16 hours at one-fourth of the output so that you can vary it over time. It’s not just fixed over four hours.
“The battery is able to take a portion of (the) solar from that facility …and then store it into the battery so that the facility can provide a constant output to the grid. It can turn this solar facility, which is not typically dispatchable, into a dispatchable type of facility.”
According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency, and quoted in Forbes, a natural-gas plant opening at the same time as the Eland facility would produce power at more than twice the price, or 4-4.3¢/kWh.
Presuming the power off-take contract is approved, the Eland project is expected start construction in 2022, with the first production expected in the first half of 2023, and a guaranteed commercial operation date of the last day of that year, PV Magazine reported.
Links
- Los Angeles seeks record setting solar power price under 2¢/kWh
- Sydney Opera House Turns To Wind And Solar, May Add Battery For Perfect Match
- Australian Musicians Band Together To Invest In Solar Farms
- Australia To Achieve 50% Renewables By 2030 Without Government Intervention, Analysis Finds
- Life After Solving Climate Change: Not Mud Huts And Gruel But Clean Air And Warm Homes
- Jump In Renewable Energy Jobs As Solar Farms Overtake Hydro Power
- Four Corners Report Shows Climate Change Concerns Heating Up Ahead Of Federal Election
- Australia Has Enough Solar, Wind Storage In Pipeline To Go 100% Renewables
- 'Everyone Loves Solar': Climate Action Heats Up As NSW Election Issue
- Poorer Households Switching To Solar Faster Than The Rich
Categories: External websites
Moody’s Analytics Says Climate Change Could Cost US$69 Trillion By 2100
Washington Post - Steven Mufson
Environmental activists demonstrate during a Extinction Rebellion protest April 17 in London. (Henry Nicholls/Reuters) The consulting firm Moody’s Analytics says climate change could inflict $69 trillion in damage on the global economy by the year 2100, assuming that warming hits the two-degree Celsius threshold widely seen as the limit to stem its most dire effects.
Moody’s says in a new climate change report that warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, increasingly seen by scientists as a climate-stabilizing limit, would still cause $54 trillion in damages by the end of the century.
The firm warns that passing the two-degree threshold “could hit tipping points for even larger and irreversible warming feedback loops such as permanent summer ice melt in the Arctic Ocean.”
The new report predicts that rising temperatures will “universally hurt worker health and productivity” and that more frequent extreme weather events “will increasingly disrupt and damage critical infrastructure and property.”
Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi said that the report was “the first stab at trying to quantify what the macroeconomic consequences might be” of climate change, written in response to European commercial banks and central banks.
Climate change, Zandi said, is “not a cliff event. It’s not a shock to the economy. It’s more like a corrosive.” But, he added, it’s one that is “getting weightier with each passing year.”
Moody’s Investors Service, a major credit ratings agency, has already said that it wants to take climate into account when weighing the financial health of companies and municipalities.
The new report highlights the harm done to human health, labor productivity, crop yields and tourism.
It says that “water- and vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will likely be the largest direct effect of changes in human health and the associated productivity loss.”
The report also says that rising temperatures will allow mosquitoes, ticks and fleas to move to new areas, resulting in more sick days. It would also raise public and private spending on health care.
Labor productivity will take a hit, especially among outdoor workers, including those working in agriculture.
The hardest-hit economies will be some of the fastest-growing ones — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the report says.
The Moody’s Analytics report also forecasts lower oil and natural gas demand, dealing a blow to oil-exporting countries, especially in the Middle East. It forecasts that Saudi GDP will drop more than 10 percent by 2048; the kingdom would be the country harmed the most by climate change, hurting government revenue, Moody’s says.
Although Saudi Arabia has suffered drops in GDP when highly cyclical oil prices sink, Moody’s says that the kingdom would suffer more lasting harm as a result of climate change.
Of the 12 largest economies, India will be the worst hit, the report says, with GDP growing 2.5 percentage points more slowly than it would without the effects of climate change. The country’s service industry will be hit by heat stress, agricultural productivity will fall, and health-care costs will climb.
The firm carried out different scenarios using an international study by the World Bank, taking different locations into account and weighing different economic sectors. It said that rising sea levels would damage coastal real estate, wiping out rental incomes in some areas and thus cutting consumer spending.
But the scenarios only go through 2048. The Moody’s report says “the distress compounds over time and is far more severe in the second half of the century.”
“That’s why it is so hard to get people focused on this issue and get a comprehensive policy response,” Zandi said. “Business is focused on the next year, or five years out.”
He added: “Most of the models go out 30 years, but, really, the damage to the economy is in the next half-century, and we haven’t developed the tools to look out that far.”
Other businesses are peering ahead on climate change, too.
Chubb, one of the biggest insurance firms in the United States, on Monday said it would no longer sell insurance to new coal-fired power plants or sell new policies to companies that derive more than 30 percent of their revenue from the mining of coal used in power plants.
Although more than a dozen leading insurance companies in Europe have already cut off insurance for coal companies, U.S. firms have resisting pressure to take climate change into account.
Chubb’s step was just an initial one. “A major U.S. insurer like Chubb restricting insurance for coal projects and companies is a game-changer,” said Ross Hammond, a senior strategist for the Insure Our Future campaign, which has tried to pressure insurance companies to pull out of the coal market. But Hammond said that the company still needs to stop insuring new coal mines and the oil sands, or tar sands, in northern Alberta.
Lindsey Allen, executive director of Rainforest Action Network, said that “new coal projects cannot be built without insurance, and Chubb just dealt a blow to the dozens of companies that are still betting on the expansion of coal globally.”
Separately, the chief economist of Equinor, the Norwegian oil company previously known as Statoil, has written a report that looks at three scenarios for climate change and its impact on global economies, especially on energy.
Only one of those, the report said, would lead to a sustainable path, but that path comes with enormous challenges. To reach that set of targets by 2050, “almost all use of coal must be eradicated,” oil demand would need to be halved, and natural gas demand trimmed by more than 10 percent. Renewables as well as carbon capture and storage or utilization would have to increase sharply, helped by continuing advances in technology.
“In order to hit 1.5 degrees Celsius, the model to get there is enormously challenging,” said Eirik Waerness, senior vice president and chief economist of Equinor. He said more than half of new cars would have to be electric vehicles by 2030. Electricity demand will double, yet wind and solar would equal the entire current electricity output, a leap from current levels.
The threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius is the target set by most climate scientists for avoiding dire climate change.
Waerness also said that the company currently assumes a carbon price of $55 a ton when considering whether to finance new energy projects. As a result, Equinor has been investing more in projects such as offshore wind, where it can also tap into its experience with offshore platforms and technology.
Links
Environmental activists demonstrate during a Extinction Rebellion protest April 17 in London. (Henry Nicholls/Reuters) The consulting firm Moody’s Analytics says climate change could inflict $69 trillion in damage on the global economy by the year 2100, assuming that warming hits the two-degree Celsius threshold widely seen as the limit to stem its most dire effects.
Moody’s says in a new climate change report that warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, increasingly seen by scientists as a climate-stabilizing limit, would still cause $54 trillion in damages by the end of the century.
The firm warns that passing the two-degree threshold “could hit tipping points for even larger and irreversible warming feedback loops such as permanent summer ice melt in the Arctic Ocean.”
The new report predicts that rising temperatures will “universally hurt worker health and productivity” and that more frequent extreme weather events “will increasingly disrupt and damage critical infrastructure and property.”
Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi said that the report was “the first stab at trying to quantify what the macroeconomic consequences might be” of climate change, written in response to European commercial banks and central banks.
Climate change, Zandi said, is “not a cliff event. It’s not a shock to the economy. It’s more like a corrosive.” But, he added, it’s one that is “getting weightier with each passing year.”
Moody’s Investors Service, a major credit ratings agency, has already said that it wants to take climate into account when weighing the financial health of companies and municipalities.
The new report highlights the harm done to human health, labor productivity, crop yields and tourism.
It says that “water- and vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will likely be the largest direct effect of changes in human health and the associated productivity loss.”
The report also says that rising temperatures will allow mosquitoes, ticks and fleas to move to new areas, resulting in more sick days. It would also raise public and private spending on health care.
Labor productivity will take a hit, especially among outdoor workers, including those working in agriculture.
The hardest-hit economies will be some of the fastest-growing ones — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the report says.
The Moody’s Analytics report also forecasts lower oil and natural gas demand, dealing a blow to oil-exporting countries, especially in the Middle East. It forecasts that Saudi GDP will drop more than 10 percent by 2048; the kingdom would be the country harmed the most by climate change, hurting government revenue, Moody’s says.
Although Saudi Arabia has suffered drops in GDP when highly cyclical oil prices sink, Moody’s says that the kingdom would suffer more lasting harm as a result of climate change.
Of the 12 largest economies, India will be the worst hit, the report says, with GDP growing 2.5 percentage points more slowly than it would without the effects of climate change. The country’s service industry will be hit by heat stress, agricultural productivity will fall, and health-care costs will climb.
The firm carried out different scenarios using an international study by the World Bank, taking different locations into account and weighing different economic sectors. It said that rising sea levels would damage coastal real estate, wiping out rental incomes in some areas and thus cutting consumer spending.
But the scenarios only go through 2048. The Moody’s report says “the distress compounds over time and is far more severe in the second half of the century.”
“That’s why it is so hard to get people focused on this issue and get a comprehensive policy response,” Zandi said. “Business is focused on the next year, or five years out.”
He added: “Most of the models go out 30 years, but, really, the damage to the economy is in the next half-century, and we haven’t developed the tools to look out that far.”
Other businesses are peering ahead on climate change, too.
Chubb, one of the biggest insurance firms in the United States, on Monday said it would no longer sell insurance to new coal-fired power plants or sell new policies to companies that derive more than 30 percent of their revenue from the mining of coal used in power plants.
Although more than a dozen leading insurance companies in Europe have already cut off insurance for coal companies, U.S. firms have resisting pressure to take climate change into account.
Chubb’s step was just an initial one. “A major U.S. insurer like Chubb restricting insurance for coal projects and companies is a game-changer,” said Ross Hammond, a senior strategist for the Insure Our Future campaign, which has tried to pressure insurance companies to pull out of the coal market. But Hammond said that the company still needs to stop insuring new coal mines and the oil sands, or tar sands, in northern Alberta.
Lindsey Allen, executive director of Rainforest Action Network, said that “new coal projects cannot be built without insurance, and Chubb just dealt a blow to the dozens of companies that are still betting on the expansion of coal globally.”
Separately, the chief economist of Equinor, the Norwegian oil company previously known as Statoil, has written a report that looks at three scenarios for climate change and its impact on global economies, especially on energy.
Only one of those, the report said, would lead to a sustainable path, but that path comes with enormous challenges. To reach that set of targets by 2050, “almost all use of coal must be eradicated,” oil demand would need to be halved, and natural gas demand trimmed by more than 10 percent. Renewables as well as carbon capture and storage or utilization would have to increase sharply, helped by continuing advances in technology.
“In order to hit 1.5 degrees Celsius, the model to get there is enormously challenging,” said Eirik Waerness, senior vice president and chief economist of Equinor. He said more than half of new cars would have to be electric vehicles by 2030. Electricity demand will double, yet wind and solar would equal the entire current electricity output, a leap from current levels.
The threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius is the target set by most climate scientists for avoiding dire climate change.
Waerness also said that the company currently assumes a carbon price of $55 a ton when considering whether to finance new energy projects. As a result, Equinor has been investing more in projects such as offshore wind, where it can also tap into its experience with offshore platforms and technology.
Links
- The Economic Implications of Climate Change (pdf)
- More U.S. businesses making changes in response to climate concerns
- A climate change solution slowly gains ground
- In small towns across the nation, the death of a coal plant leaves an unmistakable void
- Norway's $US1 Trillion Sovereign Wealth Fund To Dump Billions In Coal Investments
- Australia's Clean Economy Future: Costs and Benefits
- Analysis: $130 Billion Per Year Benefit To Australia's GDP By Avoiding Climate Change
- The Next Reckoning: Capitalism And Climate Change
- Fed Official: Climate Change Is An ‘International Market Failure’
- Heavyweights Now Speaking With One Voice On Climate Change Risks
- Why Climate Change Risks Are 'Material' For Big Finance
- APRA Demands Banks, Insurers Act On Climate Risk
- The RBA Has Sounded The Climate Change Alarm. Time To Sit Up And Take Notice
- 'Change Now Or Pay Later': RBA's Stark Warning On Climate Change
- Climate And Economic Risks 'Threaten 2008-Style Systemic Collapse'
- The Economics Of Climate Change
Categories: External websites
Journey To Antarctica: What Scientists Think Of Trump’s Latest Climate Tweet
Rolling Stone - Jeff Goodell*
Photos: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images; Derek Oyen/UnsplashTo scientists in Antarctica, President Trump is weirder than a sea pig.
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted a quote from Patrick Moore, a well-known climate denier who claims to have been a co-founder of Greenpeace. (He wasn’t, and Greenpeace has disavowed him as a “paid lobbyist.”)
“The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science,” Trump quoted Moore as saying on an episode of Fox & Friends.
A day later, I asked Rob Larter, the chief scientist aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, where we have spent the past six weeks in Antarctica doing Real Science, what he thought of Trump’s tweet. Larter can talk about the movement of the Earth’s continents 500 million years ago as breezily as other men talk about off-season baseball trades. And of course out here in Antarctica, Larter had been far too busy during the past 24 hours actually contributing to the sum of human knowledge to pay attention to tweets from the conspiracy theorist in the Oval Office.
I showed Trump’s tweet to Larter on my iPhone. As he read it, he smiled slightly and shook his head. “It’s crazy talk,” said Larter, who is British. “Do any Americans really believe that stuff?”
Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” @foxandfriends Wow!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2019
The 55 scientists and crew members from around the world who are aboard the Palmer with me have been living in a Trump-free paradise for weeks. We get very little news, as we are bandwidth-starved and have only intermittent connection to the outside world via internet and satellite phone.
But I’ll admit Trump’s tweet woke me up to a curious point: During this entire six-week cruise, I have lived in close quarters with my shipmates. I know what kind of cake was served at their kid’s birthday party and their views about the afterlife and why they believe that physicists who research the existence of other dimensions are likely to be crackpots. But there has been very little talk of climate politics or climate policy. The subject of Trump’s re-election comes up, and the Brits talk a lot about the disaster known as Brexit. There is much debate about internal politics at various universities, and within the National Science Foundation and the UK’s National Environment Research Council, both of which are funding this trip, which is part of a five-year-long collaboration to better understand the risks of collapse of Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica.
But as far as I can tell, the words “Green New Deal” have not been uttered on the ship by a scientist, nor have the words “carbon footprint” or “Paris climate accords.” I overheard one scientist engaged in a not-particularly-well-informed debate with the captain about the pros and cons of wind power, but that has been about it.
It’s not entirely surprising. “You don’t bring up climate politics because you have to live with people on the ship in very close quarters for seven weeks,” says Lars Boehme, an oceanographer from University of St. Andrews who has successfully tagged 11 seals on the trip. “It’s divisive.” Bastien Queste, a researcher from the University of East Anglia in the UK, has a different view: “Why talk about climate politics? We all have similar views on the ship. We all are big supporters of clean energy. We all know we have to get off fossil fuels. What is there to discuss?”
But even off the ship, the reluctance to get involved in politics persists. So far as I can tell, none of the scientists on this trip are engaged in climate-related political activism in their daily lives. Few are even comfortable talking about it. Several started squirming as soon as I brought it up. Two of the youngest researchers on the trip, one from the U.S. and one from Sweden, told me they have actually quit climate activism in recent years simply because they have no time.
Building a career in science is a brutally competitive endeavor, sucking up all your time and energy. But for many, the real problem with climate activism is that it requires dealing with the media. And if there is one thing that spooks climate scientists more than collapsing glaciers, it’s a person with a microphone. It’s not hard to see why. Scientists deal with facts, not characters or emotions.
They often see journalists as ignorant about science and all too eager to transform scientific debates into a new front in the culture wars. And they are not always wrong about that. “To be good at communicating about science, you have to spend a lot of time at it,” explains Queste. “If you try to analyze data and communicate with the public, it’s nearly impossible to find the time to do both very well.”
There is also the fear that if they are outspoken, they might be seen as too “political” and not do as well with research grants or other funding. That’s not a trivial question these days, when science budgets are slashed and tenured positions at universities are increasingly difficult to secure. It’s much easier just to keep your head down and do the work. “I am paid to do science,” one U.S. scientist on the trip told me. “So I do science.”
Others worry about offending family and friends by speaking out too bluntly. One scientist talked about a friend who published a paper on climate change in Nature, a top scientific journal, then received threats online. “This is a dangerous time to be a climate scientist,” the scientist said. And if the reaction of researchers on the Palmer is any indication, American scientists feel that danger more viscerally than most (and, not surprisingly, were more reluctant to talk on the record for this dispatch).
But to some U.S. scientists, it’s also a dangerous time to keep silent. From the Palmer, I emailed Andrea Dutton, a highly-regarded geologist at the University of Florida, about her reaction to Trump’s tweet. “This is no longer a matter of simple misrepresentation,” she wrote. “It is dangerous and reckless for our leaders to mislead the American people about the impacts of global warming. As a scientist, and perhaps more importantly, as a citizen of the U.S., I do feel that I have a moral obligation to speak out against misinformation. The American people deserve the truth about their future.”
One thing that has become very clear on this journey to Antarctica is that climate science is risky in all kinds of ways — including risks to life and limb. On the ship, instruments are dropped into the sea in the middle of the night while the deck of the ship pitches wildly in rough seas; winches spin with cables attached to 700-pound coring devices; marine technicians launch Zodiac boats in rough seas. On the Palmer, science goes on 24/7, no matter how bad the weather, no matter how exhausted you are.
Queste has been in the middle of most of it. When I sat down with him in the mess hall yesterday, he looked more tired than most. I asked him if he had seen Trump’s tweet. He hadn’t. So I showed it to him. “I can’t handle this much crap,” he moaned, his face drained from long hours in the lab. “It depresses me. Such blatant pandering and shit-stirring.”
A few minutes later, I showed Trump’s tweet to Lars Boehme, who seized onto a line in the tweet about carbon dioxide being “one of the main building blocks of life.” It’s a well-worn talking point for climate deniers. “You like carbon dioxide so much?” Boehme mused. “Try putting a plastic bag over your head and see how that works out.”
But perhaps the best response to Trump’s tweet came from Anna Wåhlin, a professor of physical oceanography at the University of Gothenburg and leader of the team that sent the Hugin, a semi-intelligent underwater research device, 1,500 feet beneath Thwaites glacier.
It was one of the most remarkable scientific achievements of the trip, and the data the Hugin collected has already helped scientists understand how ocean currents circulate in West Antarctica, pushing warm water beneath Thwaites and melting it from below. This is what science is supposed to do — go underneath our everyday world and make the unknown known.
Late Wednesday night, the lab on the Palmer boomed with the sound of the ship’s hull busting through thick sea ice. I asked Wåhlin if she’d seen Trump’s tweet. “No, I have not,” she replied.
She read it on my iPhone, then looked at me with something beyond anger or disgust. “I’m sorry,” she said.
* This is the latest dispatch in a series from Jeff Goodell, who is aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer in Antarctica, investigating the effect of climate change on Thwaites glacier.
Links
Photos: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images; Derek Oyen/UnsplashTo scientists in Antarctica, President Trump is weirder than a sea pig.
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted a quote from Patrick Moore, a well-known climate denier who claims to have been a co-founder of Greenpeace. (He wasn’t, and Greenpeace has disavowed him as a “paid lobbyist.”)
“The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science,” Trump quoted Moore as saying on an episode of Fox & Friends.
A day later, I asked Rob Larter, the chief scientist aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, where we have spent the past six weeks in Antarctica doing Real Science, what he thought of Trump’s tweet. Larter can talk about the movement of the Earth’s continents 500 million years ago as breezily as other men talk about off-season baseball trades. And of course out here in Antarctica, Larter had been far too busy during the past 24 hours actually contributing to the sum of human knowledge to pay attention to tweets from the conspiracy theorist in the Oval Office.
I showed Trump’s tweet to Larter on my iPhone. As he read it, he smiled slightly and shook his head. “It’s crazy talk,” said Larter, who is British. “Do any Americans really believe that stuff?”
Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” @foxandfriends Wow!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2019
The 55 scientists and crew members from around the world who are aboard the Palmer with me have been living in a Trump-free paradise for weeks. We get very little news, as we are bandwidth-starved and have only intermittent connection to the outside world via internet and satellite phone.
But I’ll admit Trump’s tweet woke me up to a curious point: During this entire six-week cruise, I have lived in close quarters with my shipmates. I know what kind of cake was served at their kid’s birthday party and their views about the afterlife and why they believe that physicists who research the existence of other dimensions are likely to be crackpots. But there has been very little talk of climate politics or climate policy. The subject of Trump’s re-election comes up, and the Brits talk a lot about the disaster known as Brexit. There is much debate about internal politics at various universities, and within the National Science Foundation and the UK’s National Environment Research Council, both of which are funding this trip, which is part of a five-year-long collaboration to better understand the risks of collapse of Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica.
But as far as I can tell, the words “Green New Deal” have not been uttered on the ship by a scientist, nor have the words “carbon footprint” or “Paris climate accords.” I overheard one scientist engaged in a not-particularly-well-informed debate with the captain about the pros and cons of wind power, but that has been about it.
It’s not entirely surprising. “You don’t bring up climate politics because you have to live with people on the ship in very close quarters for seven weeks,” says Lars Boehme, an oceanographer from University of St. Andrews who has successfully tagged 11 seals on the trip. “It’s divisive.” Bastien Queste, a researcher from the University of East Anglia in the UK, has a different view: “Why talk about climate politics? We all have similar views on the ship. We all are big supporters of clean energy. We all know we have to get off fossil fuels. What is there to discuss?”
But even off the ship, the reluctance to get involved in politics persists. So far as I can tell, none of the scientists on this trip are engaged in climate-related political activism in their daily lives. Few are even comfortable talking about it. Several started squirming as soon as I brought it up. Two of the youngest researchers on the trip, one from the U.S. and one from Sweden, told me they have actually quit climate activism in recent years simply because they have no time.
Building a career in science is a brutally competitive endeavor, sucking up all your time and energy. But for many, the real problem with climate activism is that it requires dealing with the media. And if there is one thing that spooks climate scientists more than collapsing glaciers, it’s a person with a microphone. It’s not hard to see why. Scientists deal with facts, not characters or emotions.
They often see journalists as ignorant about science and all too eager to transform scientific debates into a new front in the culture wars. And they are not always wrong about that. “To be good at communicating about science, you have to spend a lot of time at it,” explains Queste. “If you try to analyze data and communicate with the public, it’s nearly impossible to find the time to do both very well.”
There is also the fear that if they are outspoken, they might be seen as too “political” and not do as well with research grants or other funding. That’s not a trivial question these days, when science budgets are slashed and tenured positions at universities are increasingly difficult to secure. It’s much easier just to keep your head down and do the work. “I am paid to do science,” one U.S. scientist on the trip told me. “So I do science.”
Others worry about offending family and friends by speaking out too bluntly. One scientist talked about a friend who published a paper on climate change in Nature, a top scientific journal, then received threats online. “This is a dangerous time to be a climate scientist,” the scientist said. And if the reaction of researchers on the Palmer is any indication, American scientists feel that danger more viscerally than most (and, not surprisingly, were more reluctant to talk on the record for this dispatch).
But to some U.S. scientists, it’s also a dangerous time to keep silent. From the Palmer, I emailed Andrea Dutton, a highly-regarded geologist at the University of Florida, about her reaction to Trump’s tweet. “This is no longer a matter of simple misrepresentation,” she wrote. “It is dangerous and reckless for our leaders to mislead the American people about the impacts of global warming. As a scientist, and perhaps more importantly, as a citizen of the U.S., I do feel that I have a moral obligation to speak out against misinformation. The American people deserve the truth about their future.”
One thing that has become very clear on this journey to Antarctica is that climate science is risky in all kinds of ways — including risks to life and limb. On the ship, instruments are dropped into the sea in the middle of the night while the deck of the ship pitches wildly in rough seas; winches spin with cables attached to 700-pound coring devices; marine technicians launch Zodiac boats in rough seas. On the Palmer, science goes on 24/7, no matter how bad the weather, no matter how exhausted you are.
Queste has been in the middle of most of it. When I sat down with him in the mess hall yesterday, he looked more tired than most. I asked him if he had seen Trump’s tweet. He hadn’t. So I showed it to him. “I can’t handle this much crap,” he moaned, his face drained from long hours in the lab. “It depresses me. Such blatant pandering and shit-stirring.”
A few minutes later, I showed Trump’s tweet to Lars Boehme, who seized onto a line in the tweet about carbon dioxide being “one of the main building blocks of life.” It’s a well-worn talking point for climate deniers. “You like carbon dioxide so much?” Boehme mused. “Try putting a plastic bag over your head and see how that works out.”
But perhaps the best response to Trump’s tweet came from Anna Wåhlin, a professor of physical oceanography at the University of Gothenburg and leader of the team that sent the Hugin, a semi-intelligent underwater research device, 1,500 feet beneath Thwaites glacier.
It was one of the most remarkable scientific achievements of the trip, and the data the Hugin collected has already helped scientists understand how ocean currents circulate in West Antarctica, pushing warm water beneath Thwaites and melting it from below. This is what science is supposed to do — go underneath our everyday world and make the unknown known.
Late Wednesday night, the lab on the Palmer boomed with the sound of the ship’s hull busting through thick sea ice. I asked Wåhlin if she’d seen Trump’s tweet. “No, I have not,” she replied.
She read it on my iPhone, then looked at me with something beyond anger or disgust. “I’m sorry,” she said.
* This is the latest dispatch in a series from Jeff Goodell, who is aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer in Antarctica, investigating the effect of climate change on Thwaites glacier.
Links
- Journey to Antarctica: What We Learned in the Ice
- Journey to Antarctica: Is This What a Climate Catastrophe Looks Like in Real Time?
- Journey to Antarctica: The Dark Art of Coring
- Journey to Antarctica: Icy Subterranean Homesick Blues
- Journey to Antarctica: Mapping Thwaites
- Journey to Antarctica: Face-to-Face With the Doomsday Glacier
- Journey to Antarctica: Reckoning With Uncertainty
- Journey to Antarctica: When the Best Laid Plans Go Awry
- Journey to Antarctica: An Emergency at Sea
Categories: External websites
Climate Change Could Be Paused By Planting Trees, Researchers Say, As They Map Out Available Land
ABC Science - Nick Kilvert
Australia is one of six countries that together hold around 50 per cent of the world's tree planting potential. (ABC Newcastle: Robert Virtue) Key points:
But until recently it's not been clear how much land we'd need to make a tangible difference to warming, and whether we'd need to reclaim farm and residential land to do it.
Now new research published today in Science estimates there's enough suitable unused land on the globe for reforestation to store around 205 gigatonnes of carbon.
That's enough to buy us about 20 years in the fight against climate change, according to researcher Jean-Francois Bastin from the Institute of Integrative Biology in Zurich.
"This would definitely help to keep us at that maximum of 1.5 degrees by 2050," Dr Bastin said.
The researchers started by modelling the amount of tree cover the earth could sustain under current environmental conditions, if there were no humans on the planet.
They considered local climate factors like rainfall and temperature in their modelling.
Then they worked backwards, subtracting existing tree cover, urban environments and agricultural land.
They were left with 0.9 billion hectares of degraded land, which could be returned to canopy cover ranging from open savannah to dense forest.
The land they identified had been affected by things like logging, slash-and-burn fire regimes, intensive ongoing burning and clearing for grazing.
Other technological methods for combatting climate change, such as injecting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere, have been proposed but most carry significant risks or are yet to be proven at scale.
The beauty of reforestation, according to Dr Bastin, is that it's win-win.
"When you think about tree restoration, it's not only about fighting climate change it's also about maintaining ecosystems," he said.
"The forests of the world protect 80 per cent of the biodiversity that exists on land."
Reforestation needs to happen before 'tipping point'
Deforestation in Australia is undermining efforts to rejuvenate habitat. (Supplied)The researchers also modelled the effect that climate change will have on how much of the earth's surface will be able to support trees in future.
Their findings suggest that reforestation needs to happen soon if it is to be effective.
Under current forecasts, they project that global tree canopy cover will shrink by up to 223 million hectares by 2050.
The impacts will be most significant at the tropics, according to Dr Bastin.
"The tropics will be under a lot more climatic stress. There will be more severe droughts," he said.
"Forests are a little bit resilient. But at some point we are afraid that it might shift, hit a tipping point and we are going to lose a lot."
An argument often espoused by climate-change sceptics is that more carbon in the atmosphere will equal more plant growth.
But David Ellsworth, an expert in the response of forests to climate change from the University of Western Sydney, said that wasn't the case.
Instead, tree growth is limited by a range of factors, including water availability and how nutrient-rich the soil is.
"What we know is that phosphorous is very limiting [in places like Australia]," Professor Ellsworth said.
He has conducted experiments where plants are exposed to the levels of CO2 predicted in the future, and observed no significant changes in growth rate.
While today's research points to exciting possibilities, he warned that the amount of CO2 that could be absorbed should be treated with some caution.
He said that by not factoring in soil nutrients or the full range of carbon densities of different vegetation types, there was room for error.
Most potential reforestation land in Australia and five other countries
Brush-tailed bettongs or woylie's are one species that could benefit from increased forest habitat. (Supplied: Zoos Australia)More than half of the land available for what the researchers call "tree restoration potential" was identified in just six countries.
Australia ranked fourth on the list, behind Russia, the United States and Canada, and was followed by Brazil and China.
Twenty million trees are expected to be planted in Australia by 2020 under a federal government program.
But critics say any reforestation efforts in Australia are being undermined by land clearing.
Deforestation in Australia in recent years has spiked, drawing comparisons with tree-clearing hotspots like the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.
In 2017 around 1,000 football fields were being cleared each day in Queensland, and more than a million hectares were cleared in that state between 2012 and 2016.
The Nature Conservation Council (NCC) claims around one football field of bushland was cleared in New South Wales every 10 minutes, in 2017-18.
"We are in an extinction and climate emergency. We must stop destroying wildlife habitat if we are going to stop more species disappearing," NCC CEO Kate Smolski said in a statement last week.
A million species worldwide are now under threat of extinction, according to a UN-backed report published in May this year.
In Australia, 121 species are listed as critically endangered by the IUCN, with 41 species having gone extinct.
A further 239 are endangered.
Numerous critically endangered and endangered species, including Leadbeater's possum, swift parrots and bettong could benefit from forest restoration in Australia.
'Armpits of the ocean' can store carbon 40 times faster
Blue carbon habitat has an image problem, according to Dr Macreadie. (ABC News: Nick Hose)But forests aren't the only ecosystems that can help fight climate change.
While trees are able to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it for the duration of their lives, blue carbon ecosystems can do it up to 40 times faster, and can potentially lock away carbon for 1,000 years or more.
Blue carbon is the term referring to stored carbon in coastal ecosystems like mangroves, seagrass and salt marshes.
But according to Peter Macreadie from the Blue Carbon Lab at Deakin University, these systems which he calls the "armpits of the ocean" have an image problem.
"That's a big, big problem," Dr Macreadie said.
"I'm working on a program in the Maldives where they're ripping out seagrass because people don't like the look of the dark patches in the water."
Getting public support to conserve and restore habitats that might be muddy and smelly and home to mosquitoes and sand flies is a difficult ask.
But in terms of a carbon sequestration investment, blue carbon is better value for money than tree planting, according to Dr Macreadie.
"If you're a carbon offset provider you're going to think, 'I can store the same amount of carbon in a fortieth of the land area'," he said.
Like planting trees, restoring coastal ecosystems has other benefits as well like boosting fish stocks and buffering coastlines from storm surges and sea-level rise.
While we focus on decarbonising our economies, restoring natural ecosystems may buy us precious time, according to Dr Bastin.
"We cannot be too picky. We need to use every good idea we can develop to fight climate change."
Links
Australia is one of six countries that together hold around 50 per cent of the world's tree planting potential. (ABC Newcastle: Robert Virtue) Key points:
- Researchers identified 0.9 billion hectares of land that is available to be reforested
- That could buy us a 20 year pause in climate warming
- Coastal ecosystems are capable of storing carbon up to 40 times faster than forests and should also be considered, expert says
But until recently it's not been clear how much land we'd need to make a tangible difference to warming, and whether we'd need to reclaim farm and residential land to do it.
Now new research published today in Science estimates there's enough suitable unused land on the globe for reforestation to store around 205 gigatonnes of carbon.
That's enough to buy us about 20 years in the fight against climate change, according to researcher Jean-Francois Bastin from the Institute of Integrative Biology in Zurich.
"This would definitely help to keep us at that maximum of 1.5 degrees by 2050," Dr Bastin said.
The researchers started by modelling the amount of tree cover the earth could sustain under current environmental conditions, if there were no humans on the planet.
They considered local climate factors like rainfall and temperature in their modelling.
Then they worked backwards, subtracting existing tree cover, urban environments and agricultural land.
They were left with 0.9 billion hectares of degraded land, which could be returned to canopy cover ranging from open savannah to dense forest.
The land they identified had been affected by things like logging, slash-and-burn fire regimes, intensive ongoing burning and clearing for grazing.
Other technological methods for combatting climate change, such as injecting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere, have been proposed but most carry significant risks or are yet to be proven at scale.
The beauty of reforestation, according to Dr Bastin, is that it's win-win.
"When you think about tree restoration, it's not only about fighting climate change it's also about maintaining ecosystems," he said.
"The forests of the world protect 80 per cent of the biodiversity that exists on land."
Reforestation needs to happen before 'tipping point'
Deforestation in Australia is undermining efforts to rejuvenate habitat. (Supplied)The researchers also modelled the effect that climate change will have on how much of the earth's surface will be able to support trees in future.
Their findings suggest that reforestation needs to happen soon if it is to be effective.
Under current forecasts, they project that global tree canopy cover will shrink by up to 223 million hectares by 2050.
The impacts will be most significant at the tropics, according to Dr Bastin.
"The tropics will be under a lot more climatic stress. There will be more severe droughts," he said.
"Forests are a little bit resilient. But at some point we are afraid that it might shift, hit a tipping point and we are going to lose a lot."
An argument often espoused by climate-change sceptics is that more carbon in the atmosphere will equal more plant growth.
But David Ellsworth, an expert in the response of forests to climate change from the University of Western Sydney, said that wasn't the case.
Instead, tree growth is limited by a range of factors, including water availability and how nutrient-rich the soil is.
"What we know is that phosphorous is very limiting [in places like Australia]," Professor Ellsworth said.
He has conducted experiments where plants are exposed to the levels of CO2 predicted in the future, and observed no significant changes in growth rate.
While today's research points to exciting possibilities, he warned that the amount of CO2 that could be absorbed should be treated with some caution.
He said that by not factoring in soil nutrients or the full range of carbon densities of different vegetation types, there was room for error.
Most potential reforestation land in Australia and five other countries
Brush-tailed bettongs or woylie's are one species that could benefit from increased forest habitat. (Supplied: Zoos Australia)More than half of the land available for what the researchers call "tree restoration potential" was identified in just six countries.
Australia ranked fourth on the list, behind Russia, the United States and Canada, and was followed by Brazil and China.
Twenty million trees are expected to be planted in Australia by 2020 under a federal government program.
But critics say any reforestation efforts in Australia are being undermined by land clearing.
Deforestation in Australia in recent years has spiked, drawing comparisons with tree-clearing hotspots like the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.
In 2017 around 1,000 football fields were being cleared each day in Queensland, and more than a million hectares were cleared in that state between 2012 and 2016.
The Nature Conservation Council (NCC) claims around one football field of bushland was cleared in New South Wales every 10 minutes, in 2017-18.
"We are in an extinction and climate emergency. We must stop destroying wildlife habitat if we are going to stop more species disappearing," NCC CEO Kate Smolski said in a statement last week.
A million species worldwide are now under threat of extinction, according to a UN-backed report published in May this year.
In Australia, 121 species are listed as critically endangered by the IUCN, with 41 species having gone extinct.
A further 239 are endangered.
Numerous critically endangered and endangered species, including Leadbeater's possum, swift parrots and bettong could benefit from forest restoration in Australia.
'Armpits of the ocean' can store carbon 40 times faster
Blue carbon habitat has an image problem, according to Dr Macreadie. (ABC News: Nick Hose)But forests aren't the only ecosystems that can help fight climate change.
While trees are able to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it for the duration of their lives, blue carbon ecosystems can do it up to 40 times faster, and can potentially lock away carbon for 1,000 years or more.
Blue carbon is the term referring to stored carbon in coastal ecosystems like mangroves, seagrass and salt marshes.
But according to Peter Macreadie from the Blue Carbon Lab at Deakin University, these systems which he calls the "armpits of the ocean" have an image problem.
"That's a big, big problem," Dr Macreadie said.
"I'm working on a program in the Maldives where they're ripping out seagrass because people don't like the look of the dark patches in the water."
Getting public support to conserve and restore habitats that might be muddy and smelly and home to mosquitoes and sand flies is a difficult ask.
But in terms of a carbon sequestration investment, blue carbon is better value for money than tree planting, according to Dr Macreadie.
"If you're a carbon offset provider you're going to think, 'I can store the same amount of carbon in a fortieth of the land area'," he said.
Like planting trees, restoring coastal ecosystems has other benefits as well like boosting fish stocks and buffering coastlines from storm surges and sea-level rise.
While we focus on decarbonising our economies, restoring natural ecosystems may buy us precious time, according to Dr Bastin.
"We cannot be too picky. We need to use every good idea we can develop to fight climate change."
Links
- Can planting billions of trees save the planet?
- Let nature heal climate and biodiversity crises, say campaigners
- Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
- The global tree restoration potential
- Crowther Lab
- Global Carbon Budget
- Global Carbon Budget 2018
- 'Football pitch' of Amazon forest lost every minute
- Tropical tree loss persists at high levels
- Climate change made heat five times more likely
- 'Brutal news': global carbon emissions jump to all-time high in 2018
- We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN
- Paris climate deal: nearly 200 nations sign in end of fossil fuel era
- Climate Change: Trees 'Most Effective Solution' For Warming
- Climate Change Could Be Paused By Planting Trees, Researchers Say, As They Map Out Available Land
- Restoring forests as a means to many ends
- Australia - 20 Million Trees Program
- Fact check: Is Queensland clearing land as fast as Brazil?
- One million species at risk of extinction, UN report warns, and we are mostly to blame
- Threatened blue carbon ecosystems store carbon 40 times faster than forests
- Tree Planting 'Has Mind-Blowing Potential' To Tackle Climate Crisis
Categories: External websites
Climate Change: Trees 'Most Effective Solution' For Warming
BBC - Matt McGrath
Sutthipong4222 Researchers say an area the size of the US is available for planting trees around the world, and this could have a dramatic impact on climate change. The study shows that the space available for trees is far greater than previously thought, and would reduce CO2 in the atmosphere by 25%.
The authors say that this is the most effective climate change solution available to the world right now.
But other researchers say the new study is "too good to be true".
The ability of trees to soak up carbon dioxide has long made them a valuable weapon in the fight against rising temperatures.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that if the world wanted to limit the rise to 1.5C by 2050, an extra 1bn hectares (2.4bn acres) of trees would be needed.
The problem has been that accurate estimates of just how many trees the world can support have been hard to come by.
This new report aims to show not just how many trees can be grown, but where they could be planted and how much of an impact they would have on carbon emissions.
A map showing only the potential for restoring forests and excluding desert, agricultural and urban areas. Crowther The scientists from ETH-Zurich in Switzerland used a method called photo-interpretation to examine a global dataset of observations covering 78,000 forests.
Using the mapping software of the Google Earth engine they were able to develop a predictive model to map the global potential for tree cover.
They found that excluding existing trees, farmland and urban areas, the world could support an extra 0.9bn hectares (2.22bn acres) of tree cover.
Once these trees matured they could pull down around 200 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, some two-thirds of extra carbon from human activities put into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution.
This is a quarter of the overall amount of CO2 in the air.
"Our study shows clearly that forest restoration is the best climate change solution available today and it provides hard evidence to justify investment," said Prof Tom Crowther, the senior author on the study.
"If we act now, this could cut carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by up to 25%, to levels last seen almost a century ago."
The researchers identify six countries where the bulk of the forest restoration could occur: Russia (151m hectares), US (103m), Canada (78m), Australia (58m), Brazil (50m) and China (40m).
Crowther LabBut they say speed is of the essence because as the world continues to warm then the potential area for planting trees in the tropics would be reduced.
"It will take decades for new forests to mature and achieve this potential," said Prof Crowther.
"It is vitally important that we protect the forests that exist today, pursue other climate solutions, and continue to phase out fossil fuels from our economies."
The new study has been welcomed by Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief, who was instrumental in delivering the Paris climate agreement in 2015.
"Finally an authoritative assessment of how much land we can and should cover with trees without impinging on food production or living areas," she said in a statement.
"A hugely important blueprint for governments and private sector."
What do the critics say?
However not everyone was as effusive about the new study.
Several researchers expressed reservations, taking issue with the idea that planting trees was the best climate solution available to the world right now.
"Restoration of trees may be 'among the most effective strategies', but it is very far indeed from 'the best climate change solution available,' and a long way behind reducing fossil fuel emissions to net zero," said Prof Myles Allen from the University of Oxford.
Planting trees is important say some scientists but cutting emissions is paramount. Getty ImagesOthers are critical of the estimates of carbon that could be stored if these trees were planted.
"The estimate that 900 million hectares restoration can store an addition 205 billion tonnes of carbon is too high and not supported by either previous studies or climate models," said Prof Simon Lewis from University College London.
"Planting trees to soak up two-thirds of the entire anthropogenic carbon burden to date sounds too good to be true. Probably because it is," said Prof Martin Lukac from the University of Reading.
"This far, humans have enhanced forest cover on a large scale only by shrinking their population size (Russia), increasing productivity of industrial agriculture (the West) or by direct order of an autocratic government (China). None of these activities look remotely feasible or sustainable at global scale."
The study has been published in the journal Science.
Links
Sutthipong4222 Researchers say an area the size of the US is available for planting trees around the world, and this could have a dramatic impact on climate change. The study shows that the space available for trees is far greater than previously thought, and would reduce CO2 in the atmosphere by 25%.
The authors say that this is the most effective climate change solution available to the world right now.
But other researchers say the new study is "too good to be true".
The ability of trees to soak up carbon dioxide has long made them a valuable weapon in the fight against rising temperatures.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that if the world wanted to limit the rise to 1.5C by 2050, an extra 1bn hectares (2.4bn acres) of trees would be needed.
The problem has been that accurate estimates of just how many trees the world can support have been hard to come by.
This new report aims to show not just how many trees can be grown, but where they could be planted and how much of an impact they would have on carbon emissions.
A map showing only the potential for restoring forests and excluding desert, agricultural and urban areas. Crowther The scientists from ETH-Zurich in Switzerland used a method called photo-interpretation to examine a global dataset of observations covering 78,000 forests.
Using the mapping software of the Google Earth engine they were able to develop a predictive model to map the global potential for tree cover.
They found that excluding existing trees, farmland and urban areas, the world could support an extra 0.9bn hectares (2.22bn acres) of tree cover.
Once these trees matured they could pull down around 200 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, some two-thirds of extra carbon from human activities put into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution.
This is a quarter of the overall amount of CO2 in the air.
"Our study shows clearly that forest restoration is the best climate change solution available today and it provides hard evidence to justify investment," said Prof Tom Crowther, the senior author on the study.
"If we act now, this could cut carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by up to 25%, to levels last seen almost a century ago."
The researchers identify six countries where the bulk of the forest restoration could occur: Russia (151m hectares), US (103m), Canada (78m), Australia (58m), Brazil (50m) and China (40m).
Crowther LabBut they say speed is of the essence because as the world continues to warm then the potential area for planting trees in the tropics would be reduced.
"It will take decades for new forests to mature and achieve this potential," said Prof Crowther.
"It is vitally important that we protect the forests that exist today, pursue other climate solutions, and continue to phase out fossil fuels from our economies."
The new study has been welcomed by Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief, who was instrumental in delivering the Paris climate agreement in 2015.
"Finally an authoritative assessment of how much land we can and should cover with trees without impinging on food production or living areas," she said in a statement.
"A hugely important blueprint for governments and private sector."
What do the critics say?
However not everyone was as effusive about the new study.
Several researchers expressed reservations, taking issue with the idea that planting trees was the best climate solution available to the world right now.
"Restoration of trees may be 'among the most effective strategies', but it is very far indeed from 'the best climate change solution available,' and a long way behind reducing fossil fuel emissions to net zero," said Prof Myles Allen from the University of Oxford.
Planting trees is important say some scientists but cutting emissions is paramount. Getty ImagesOthers are critical of the estimates of carbon that could be stored if these trees were planted.
"The estimate that 900 million hectares restoration can store an addition 205 billion tonnes of carbon is too high and not supported by either previous studies or climate models," said Prof Simon Lewis from University College London.
"Planting trees to soak up two-thirds of the entire anthropogenic carbon burden to date sounds too good to be true. Probably because it is," said Prof Martin Lukac from the University of Reading.
"This far, humans have enhanced forest cover on a large scale only by shrinking their population size (Russia), increasing productivity of industrial agriculture (the West) or by direct order of an autocratic government (China). None of these activities look remotely feasible or sustainable at global scale."
The study has been published in the journal Science.
Links
- Can planting billions of trees save the planet?
- Let nature heal climate and biodiversity crises, say campaigners
- Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
- The global tree restoration potential
- Crowther Lab
- Global Carbon Budget
- Global Carbon Budget 2018
- 'Football pitch' of Amazon forest lost every minute
- Tropical tree loss persists at high levels
- Climate change made heat five times more likely
- 'Brutal news': global carbon emissions jump to all-time high in 2018
- We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN
- Paris climate deal: nearly 200 nations sign in end of fossil fuel era
- Climate Change Could Be Paused By Planting Trees, Researchers Say, As They Map Out Available Land
- Restoring forests as a means to many ends
- Australia - 20 Million Trees Program
- Fact check: Is Queensland clearing land as fast as Brazil?
- One million species at risk of extinction, UN report warns, and we are mostly to blame
- Threatened blue carbon ecosystems store carbon 40 times faster than forests
Categories: External websites
Tree Planting 'Has Mind-Blowing Potential' To Tackle Climate Crisis
The Guardian - Damian Carrington
Research shows a trillion trees could be planted to capture huge amount of carbon dioxide
Redwood trees in Guerneville, California. Photograph: Gabrielle Lurie/The Guardian Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas.
As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities, a figure the scientists describe as “mind-blowing”.
The analysis found there are 1.7bn hectares of treeless land on which 1.2tn native tree saplings would naturally grow. That area is about 11% of all land and equivalent to the size of the US and China combined. Tropical areas could have 100% tree cover, while others would be more sparsely covered, meaning that on average about half the area would be under tree canopy.
The scientists specifically excluded all fields used to grow crops and urban areas from their analysis. But they did include grazing land, on which the researchers say a few trees can also benefit sheep and cattle.
“This new quantitative evaluation shows [forest] restoration isn’t just one of our climate change solutions, it is overwhelmingly the top one,” said Prof Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, who led the research. “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.”
Crowther emphasised that it remains vital to reverse the current trends of rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and forest destruction, and bring them down to zero. He said this is needed to stop the climate crisis becoming even worse and because the forest restoration envisaged would take 50-100 years to have its full effect of removing 200bn tonnes of carbon.
Guardian graphic. Source: Bastin et al, Science, 2019But tree planting is “a climate change solution that doesn’t require President Trump to immediately start believing in climate change, or scientists to come up with technological solutions to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere”, Crowther said. “It is available now, it is the cheapest one possible and every one of us can get involved.” Individuals could make a tangible impact by growing trees themselves, donating to forest restoration organisations and avoiding irresponsible companies, he added.
Other scientists agree that carbon will need to be removed from the atmosphere to avoid catastrophic climate impacts and have warned that technological solutions will not work on the vast scale needed.
Jean-François Bastin, also at ETH Zürich, said action was urgently required: “Governments must now factor [tree restoration] into their national strategies.”
Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief and founder of the Global Optimism group, said: “Finally we have an authoritative assessment of how much land we can and should cover with trees without impinging on food production or living areas. This is hugely important blueprint for governments and private sector.”
René Castro, assistant-director general at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, said: “We now have definitive evidence of the potential land area for re-growing forests, where they could exist and how much carbon they could store.”
The study, published in the journal Science, determines the potential for tree planting but does not address how a global tree planting programme would be paid for and delivered.
Crowther said: “The most effective projects are doing restoration for 30 US cents a tree. That means we could restore the 1tn trees for $300bn [£240bn], though obviously that means immense efficiency and effectiveness. But it is by far the cheapest solution that has ever been proposed.” He said financial incentives to land owners for tree planting are the only way he sees it happening, but he thinks $300bn would be within reach of a coalition of billionaire philanthropists and the public.
Effective tree-planting could take place across the world, Crowther said: “The potential is literally everywhere – the entire globe. In terms of carbon capture, you get by far your biggest bang for your buck in the tropics [where canopy cover is 100%] but every one of us can get involved.” The world’s six biggest nations, Russia, Canada, China, the US, Brazil and Australia, contain half the potential restoration sites.
Tree planting initiatives already exist, including the Bonn Challenge, backed by 48 nations, aimed at restoring 350m hectares of forest by 2030. But the study shows that many of these countries have committed to restore less than half the area that could support new forests. “This is a new opportunity for those countries to get it right,” said Crowther. “Personally, Brazil would be my dream hotspot to get it right – that would be spectacular.”
The research is based on the measurement of the tree cover by hundreds of people in 80,000 high-resolution satellite images from Google Earth. Artificial intelligence computing then combined this data with 10 key soil, topography and climate factors to create a global map of where trees could grow.
This showed that about two-thirds of all land – 8.7bn ha – could support forest, and that 5.5bn ha already has trees. Of the 3.2bn ha of treeless land, 1.5bn ha is used for growing food, leaving 1.7bn of potential forest land in areas that were previously degraded or sparsely vegetated.
“This research is excellent,” said Joseph Poore, an environmental researcher at the Queen’s College, University of Oxford. “It presents an ambitious but essential vision for climate and biodiversity.” But he said many of the reforestation areas identified are currently grazed by livestock including, for example, large parts of Ireland.
“Without freeing up the billions of hectares we use to produce meat and milk, this ambition is not realisable,” he said. Crowther said his work predicted just two to three trees per field for most pasture: “Restoring trees at [low] density is not mutually exclusive with grazing. In fact many studies suggest sheep and cattle do better if there are a few trees in the field.”
Crowther also said the potential to grow trees alongside crops such as coffee, cocoa and berries – called agro-forestry – had not been included in the calculation of tree restoration potential, and neither had hedgerows: “Our estimate of 0.9bn hectares [of canopy cover] is reasonably conservative.”
However, some scientists said the estimated amount of carbon that mass tree planting could suck from the air was too high. Prof Simon Lewis, at University College London, said the carbon already in the land before tree planting was not accounted for and that it takes hundreds of years to achieve maximum storage. He pointed to a scenario from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 1.5C report of 57bn tonnes of carbon sequestered by new forests this century.
Other scientists said avoiding monoculture plantation forests and respecting local and indigenous people were crucial to ensuring reforestation succeeds in cutting carbon and boosting wildlife.
Earlier research by Crowther’s team calculated that there are currently about 3tn trees in the world, which is about half the number that existed before the rise of human civilisation. “We still have a net loss of about 10bn trees a year,” Crowther said.
Links
Research shows a trillion trees could be planted to capture huge amount of carbon dioxide
Redwood trees in Guerneville, California. Photograph: Gabrielle Lurie/The Guardian Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas.
As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities, a figure the scientists describe as “mind-blowing”.
The analysis found there are 1.7bn hectares of treeless land on which 1.2tn native tree saplings would naturally grow. That area is about 11% of all land and equivalent to the size of the US and China combined. Tropical areas could have 100% tree cover, while others would be more sparsely covered, meaning that on average about half the area would be under tree canopy.
The scientists specifically excluded all fields used to grow crops and urban areas from their analysis. But they did include grazing land, on which the researchers say a few trees can also benefit sheep and cattle.
“This new quantitative evaluation shows [forest] restoration isn’t just one of our climate change solutions, it is overwhelmingly the top one,” said Prof Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, who led the research. “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.”
Crowther emphasised that it remains vital to reverse the current trends of rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and forest destruction, and bring them down to zero. He said this is needed to stop the climate crisis becoming even worse and because the forest restoration envisaged would take 50-100 years to have its full effect of removing 200bn tonnes of carbon.
Guardian graphic. Source: Bastin et al, Science, 2019But tree planting is “a climate change solution that doesn’t require President Trump to immediately start believing in climate change, or scientists to come up with technological solutions to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere”, Crowther said. “It is available now, it is the cheapest one possible and every one of us can get involved.” Individuals could make a tangible impact by growing trees themselves, donating to forest restoration organisations and avoiding irresponsible companies, he added.
Other scientists agree that carbon will need to be removed from the atmosphere to avoid catastrophic climate impacts and have warned that technological solutions will not work on the vast scale needed.
Jean-François Bastin, also at ETH Zürich, said action was urgently required: “Governments must now factor [tree restoration] into their national strategies.”
Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief and founder of the Global Optimism group, said: “Finally we have an authoritative assessment of how much land we can and should cover with trees without impinging on food production or living areas. This is hugely important blueprint for governments and private sector.”
René Castro, assistant-director general at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, said: “We now have definitive evidence of the potential land area for re-growing forests, where they could exist and how much carbon they could store.”
The study, published in the journal Science, determines the potential for tree planting but does not address how a global tree planting programme would be paid for and delivered.
Crowther said: “The most effective projects are doing restoration for 30 US cents a tree. That means we could restore the 1tn trees for $300bn [£240bn], though obviously that means immense efficiency and effectiveness. But it is by far the cheapest solution that has ever been proposed.” He said financial incentives to land owners for tree planting are the only way he sees it happening, but he thinks $300bn would be within reach of a coalition of billionaire philanthropists and the public.
Effective tree-planting could take place across the world, Crowther said: “The potential is literally everywhere – the entire globe. In terms of carbon capture, you get by far your biggest bang for your buck in the tropics [where canopy cover is 100%] but every one of us can get involved.” The world’s six biggest nations, Russia, Canada, China, the US, Brazil and Australia, contain half the potential restoration sites.
Tree planting initiatives already exist, including the Bonn Challenge, backed by 48 nations, aimed at restoring 350m hectares of forest by 2030. But the study shows that many of these countries have committed to restore less than half the area that could support new forests. “This is a new opportunity for those countries to get it right,” said Crowther. “Personally, Brazil would be my dream hotspot to get it right – that would be spectacular.”
The research is based on the measurement of the tree cover by hundreds of people in 80,000 high-resolution satellite images from Google Earth. Artificial intelligence computing then combined this data with 10 key soil, topography and climate factors to create a global map of where trees could grow.
This showed that about two-thirds of all land – 8.7bn ha – could support forest, and that 5.5bn ha already has trees. Of the 3.2bn ha of treeless land, 1.5bn ha is used for growing food, leaving 1.7bn of potential forest land in areas that were previously degraded or sparsely vegetated.
“This research is excellent,” said Joseph Poore, an environmental researcher at the Queen’s College, University of Oxford. “It presents an ambitious but essential vision for climate and biodiversity.” But he said many of the reforestation areas identified are currently grazed by livestock including, for example, large parts of Ireland.
“Without freeing up the billions of hectares we use to produce meat and milk, this ambition is not realisable,” he said. Crowther said his work predicted just two to three trees per field for most pasture: “Restoring trees at [low] density is not mutually exclusive with grazing. In fact many studies suggest sheep and cattle do better if there are a few trees in the field.”
Crowther also said the potential to grow trees alongside crops such as coffee, cocoa and berries – called agro-forestry – had not been included in the calculation of tree restoration potential, and neither had hedgerows: “Our estimate of 0.9bn hectares [of canopy cover] is reasonably conservative.”
However, some scientists said the estimated amount of carbon that mass tree planting could suck from the air was too high. Prof Simon Lewis, at University College London, said the carbon already in the land before tree planting was not accounted for and that it takes hundreds of years to achieve maximum storage. He pointed to a scenario from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 1.5C report of 57bn tonnes of carbon sequestered by new forests this century.
Other scientists said avoiding monoculture plantation forests and respecting local and indigenous people were crucial to ensuring reforestation succeeds in cutting carbon and boosting wildlife.
Earlier research by Crowther’s team calculated that there are currently about 3tn trees in the world, which is about half the number that existed before the rise of human civilisation. “We still have a net loss of about 10bn trees a year,” Crowther said.
Links
- Can planting billions of trees save the planet?
- Let nature heal climate and biodiversity crises, say campaigners
- Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
- The global tree restoration potential
- Crowther Lab
- Global Carbon Budget
- Global Carbon Budget 2018
- 'Football pitch' of Amazon forest lost every minute
- Tropical tree loss persists at high levels
- Climate change made heat five times more likely
- 'Brutal news': global carbon emissions jump to all-time high in 2018
- We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN
- Paris climate deal: nearly 200 nations sign in end of fossil fuel era
- Climate Change: Trees 'Most Effective Solution' For Warming
- Climate Change Could Be Paused By Planting Trees, Researchers Say, As They Map Out Available Land
- Restoring forests as a means to many ends
- Australia - 20 Million Trees Program
- Fact check: Is Queensland clearing land as fast as Brazil?
- One million species at risk of extinction, UN report warns, and we are mostly to blame
- Threatened blue carbon ecosystems store carbon 40 times faster than forests
Categories: External websites
Koalas On The Decline — Dangerous New Threats, Emerging Solutions
The Revelator - Gloria Dickie
The Australian icon could lose its fight against climate change, disease, habitat destruction and cars — but not if dedicated conservationists get the tools they need to protect the species.
Photo: University of SydneyTen years ago the shaky video of a dehydrated, wildfire-damaged koala captured headlines and the world’s attention.
Crouched next to a charred tree trunk, a volunteer firefighter named David Tree gingerly poured bottled water into the open mouth of the burned koala. A tiny gray paw rested in his own large, calloused hand, allowing the animal to remain upright as she drank.
The young koala, later nicknamed “Sam,” quickly became the iconic emblem of the fires — the first stages of what would be known as the Black Saturday bushfires that burned through the forests of southeastern Australia in February 2009. The fires occurred during a massive heatwave. They burned more than 1.1 million acres, killed 180 people, and caused more than 1 million animal fatalities.
Sam, who was lucky to survive, received treatment at a nearby wildlife center for second-degree burns.
Unfortunately she didn’t last long. Veterinarians soon discovered she was also suffering from severe cysts caused by inoperable chlamydia, one of a few diseases plaguing wild koalas. With no other options, Sam was euthanized that August.
Today her remains reside at the Melbourne Museum, where she serves as a symbol of not only the bushfires but the multitude of threats facing Australia’s wild koalas.
Those threats have taken a terrible toll on koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus), which once numbered in the millions. This May the nonprofit Australian Koala Foundation announced that the marsupials’ wild populations have fallen below 80,000 individuals and the species may now be “functionally extinct.”
In this case “functionally extinct” means that populations have been reduced so drastically that the animals no longer play a significant role in the ecosystem.
The news made headlines, but other biologists countered that while koalas have declined tremendously, the Australian endemics have not yet reached functional extinction. Regardless, koalas are indeed facing a whammy of threats in the country, and without serious and timely intervention it might not be long before the marsupial goes the way of another famous Australian animal, the extinct Tasmanian tiger.
But even as the koala’s decline continues, many people are stepping up to help — and what they’re learning may help the species survive the newest threat from climate change.
A History of Decline, an Uncertain Future
The koala was once ubiquitous in eastern Australia, ranging from tall eucalyptus forests to low woodlands and coastal islands.
Even today “they cover a huge geographic range,” says Christine Hosking, a koala biologist at the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute. Indeed koalas can still be found in all four of the country’s six eastern states, although their remaining habitats have shrunk and become fragmented from each other, and many sites hold increasingly few animals.
“Population sizes vary from place to place,” Hosking says. “That’s why you can’t come up with a statement saying they’re all functionally extinct. However, some pockets aren’t doing so well.”
The decline was a long time coming. The fur trade was the first to decimate the koala population. Between 1890 and 1927, more than 8 million pelts were exported to England, according to research compiled by the Australian Koala Foundation.
Habitat loss followed. Eucalyptus groves were bulldozed for suburbs. People moved in. If the koalas weren’t killed by cars when crossing roads, they’d be found dangling in the jaws of pet dogs.
A koala injured by powerlines. Photo: Ausgrid (CC BY 2.0)Then came chlamydia, thought to have crossed over to koalas from imported sheep and cattle. The marsupials are keenly susceptible to the sexually transmitted disease, especially when stressed by other factors. In some areas more than 50 percent of koalas exhibit symptoms, which can often prove fatal in its late stages. Climate change and heat stress, therefore, are only the latest in a series of unfortunate events for the vulnerable koala.
Hosking conducts scientific models to understand how climate change has and will affect the koala’s range. She’s found that koalas, already facing reduced and fragmented habitats, will likely now move eastward to the coast, which has a more moderate climate compared to the inland areas increasingly experiencing extreme heat and drought.
“The farther you go inland, there’s already evidence of koala populations crashing by as much as 80 percent,” she explains.
Koalas, it turns out, can’t handle the heat. “We did some modeling on the thermoregulation of koalas and found that over 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) seems to be about their threshold.” As the climate changes, Australia frequently experiences 10 days in a row of 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit). “They’re not coping with that at all. There’s heat stress, lack of water, and their food trees are drying out,” says Hosking.
But moving east also means moving into more urbanized areas. That’s why scientists are hoping to mitigate this migration, using new tools to save the species.
Drink Up
Koalas get most of their moisture from eating juicy eucalyptus leaves, but they’re limited by how much they can eat.
“Not only are these leaves not particularly nutritious, they’re full of toxins,” explains Valentina Mella, a researcher at the University of Sydney. Koalas have developed a specialized intestinal tract to deal with the toxins, but, they have to wait until they’ve digested the toxins before eating more. “If you’re thirsty and there’s no water, it’s not as simple as, ‘I’ll just have another bunch of leaves.’ ”
Can human assistance help koalas get past that biological limitation? In 2016 Mella and her team placed 10 pairs of drinking stations across the Liverpool Plains in New South Wales, an area where koalas hadn’t been doing well. They wanted to see if the marsupials would supplement their all-leaf-diet with water found in tanks on the ground and in trees. To her surprise, when presented with the opportunity, the koalas were enthusiastic drinkers. Mella documented more than 600 visits by koalas during the course of a year. Other species such as sugar gliders, brushtail possums, kangaroos and echidnas also took advantage of the tanks. During hot and dry periods, the koalas chugged down even more.
This gives Mella hope that conservationists might be able to help the species by maintaining water stations in the wild for koalas — something that’s already done in rangeland for domestic cattle. Based on this research, the New South Wales government has already adopted water stations as a strategy to assist koalas during heatwaves and droughts
Dr. Valentina Mella with a koala joey during research fieldwork Gunnedah, NSW. Photo: University of SydneyThe next step, Mella says, will be to assess exactly how the water stations affect the overall health and survival of koalas.
“On the properties where we have these stations, we check on the ‘regular drinkers’ every six months. So far, they seem to be okay,” she says. But that’s just in terms of heat and dehydration. “When you add in the disease situation, then it’s a whole different story. Water is not a medicine. It can’t cure. But it probably helps in terms of making the animal more healthy to fight the infection.”
Medicine for Marsupials
To help koalas battling disease, dog bites, and automobile collisions, koala hospitals still play an essential role.
At the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital in New South Wales, about 200 koalas pass through the facility every year. That’s down from around 300 in previous years. “There are just fewer koalas now,” says Cheyne Flanagan, clinical director at the hospital.
Of the koalas that come in with chlamydia, about 40 percent are euthanized due to severe damage to their urogenital tracts. The other 60 percent can be treated with antibiotics or surgery. In addition to affecting internal organs, chlamydia also affects koalas’ eyes, causing infections or an overgrowth of tissue.
Recovering in a koala hospital. Photo: Tobias Spaltenberger (CC BY-SA 2.0)“We’ve made progress,” says Flanagan. “It’s definitely better than it used to be because a lot of research is going on. We’ve learned what drugs are knocking chlamydia down. You can never cure chlamydia… but you can put it in remission and sometimes, if the koalas are healthy enough, their own immune system kicks in and keeps it under control.”
Antibiotic treatment has been problematic in the past because it often kills the gut microbes that allow koalas to eat eucalyptus leaves. But scientists have recently discovered one particular protective microbe that, if kept alive, allows the koala to survive the course of antibiotics. Researchers are also working on alternative treatments, such as fecal transplants, probiotics and a chlamydia vaccine.
Yet pressure on state and federal government from the international community, Flanagan says, is still critical. “Some of the laws for biodiversity in this country are disgusting.”
Australia’s Federal Failure, a Local Opportunity
Before the federal election in May, koala conservationists had hoped to turn the tide after decades of apparent governmental neglect.
In its press release ahead of the vote, the Australian Koala Foundation wrote that it had spent 31 years working with “13 environment ministers, many of which could be described as the ‘Who’s Who’ of the political elite and nothing has happened except dead koalas in the wild… No one has written anything to protect the koala in the last six years of government.” A national recovery plan, mandated by law, has never been established. Notably, Australia’s Department of Environment and Energy web page for koalas still says, as of this writing, that the planned publication date of a recovery plan for the species “is expected to be late 2014.”
Further federal progress seems unlikely. On May 18 Australian citizens re-elected the Liberal-National Coalition, notorious for its refusal to sharply reduce carbon emissions and coal. Opposing parties had made far bolder promises on addressing climate change.
Though the federal election was a disappointment to most environmentalists, Hosking notes it’s now up to local and state governments to play the bigger roles in koala conservation.
“There’s a lot of lobbying going on with local government,” she says. “And we’re trying to engage more with state-level governments right now to come up with strategies to protect the koalas. It’s a matter of keeping populations viable, allowing them to move safely and stay healthy. It’s really difficult. It’s gloomy. But it’s certainly not over.”
Links
The Australian icon could lose its fight against climate change, disease, habitat destruction and cars — but not if dedicated conservationists get the tools they need to protect the species.
Photo: University of SydneyTen years ago the shaky video of a dehydrated, wildfire-damaged koala captured headlines and the world’s attention.
Crouched next to a charred tree trunk, a volunteer firefighter named David Tree gingerly poured bottled water into the open mouth of the burned koala. A tiny gray paw rested in his own large, calloused hand, allowing the animal to remain upright as she drank.
The young koala, later nicknamed “Sam,” quickly became the iconic emblem of the fires — the first stages of what would be known as the Black Saturday bushfires that burned through the forests of southeastern Australia in February 2009. The fires occurred during a massive heatwave. They burned more than 1.1 million acres, killed 180 people, and caused more than 1 million animal fatalities.
Sam, who was lucky to survive, received treatment at a nearby wildlife center for second-degree burns.
Unfortunately she didn’t last long. Veterinarians soon discovered she was also suffering from severe cysts caused by inoperable chlamydia, one of a few diseases plaguing wild koalas. With no other options, Sam was euthanized that August.
Today her remains reside at the Melbourne Museum, where she serves as a symbol of not only the bushfires but the multitude of threats facing Australia’s wild koalas.
Those threats have taken a terrible toll on koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus), which once numbered in the millions. This May the nonprofit Australian Koala Foundation announced that the marsupials’ wild populations have fallen below 80,000 individuals and the species may now be “functionally extinct.”
In this case “functionally extinct” means that populations have been reduced so drastically that the animals no longer play a significant role in the ecosystem.
The news made headlines, but other biologists countered that while koalas have declined tremendously, the Australian endemics have not yet reached functional extinction. Regardless, koalas are indeed facing a whammy of threats in the country, and without serious and timely intervention it might not be long before the marsupial goes the way of another famous Australian animal, the extinct Tasmanian tiger.
But even as the koala’s decline continues, many people are stepping up to help — and what they’re learning may help the species survive the newest threat from climate change.
A History of Decline, an Uncertain Future
The koala was once ubiquitous in eastern Australia, ranging from tall eucalyptus forests to low woodlands and coastal islands.
Even today “they cover a huge geographic range,” says Christine Hosking, a koala biologist at the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute. Indeed koalas can still be found in all four of the country’s six eastern states, although their remaining habitats have shrunk and become fragmented from each other, and many sites hold increasingly few animals.
“Population sizes vary from place to place,” Hosking says. “That’s why you can’t come up with a statement saying they’re all functionally extinct. However, some pockets aren’t doing so well.”
The decline was a long time coming. The fur trade was the first to decimate the koala population. Between 1890 and 1927, more than 8 million pelts were exported to England, according to research compiled by the Australian Koala Foundation.
Habitat loss followed. Eucalyptus groves were bulldozed for suburbs. People moved in. If the koalas weren’t killed by cars when crossing roads, they’d be found dangling in the jaws of pet dogs.
A koala injured by powerlines. Photo: Ausgrid (CC BY 2.0)Then came chlamydia, thought to have crossed over to koalas from imported sheep and cattle. The marsupials are keenly susceptible to the sexually transmitted disease, especially when stressed by other factors. In some areas more than 50 percent of koalas exhibit symptoms, which can often prove fatal in its late stages. Climate change and heat stress, therefore, are only the latest in a series of unfortunate events for the vulnerable koala.
Hosking conducts scientific models to understand how climate change has and will affect the koala’s range. She’s found that koalas, already facing reduced and fragmented habitats, will likely now move eastward to the coast, which has a more moderate climate compared to the inland areas increasingly experiencing extreme heat and drought.
“The farther you go inland, there’s already evidence of koala populations crashing by as much as 80 percent,” she explains.
Koalas, it turns out, can’t handle the heat. “We did some modeling on the thermoregulation of koalas and found that over 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) seems to be about their threshold.” As the climate changes, Australia frequently experiences 10 days in a row of 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit). “They’re not coping with that at all. There’s heat stress, lack of water, and their food trees are drying out,” says Hosking.
But moving east also means moving into more urbanized areas. That’s why scientists are hoping to mitigate this migration, using new tools to save the species.
Drink Up
Koalas get most of their moisture from eating juicy eucalyptus leaves, but they’re limited by how much they can eat.
“Not only are these leaves not particularly nutritious, they’re full of toxins,” explains Valentina Mella, a researcher at the University of Sydney. Koalas have developed a specialized intestinal tract to deal with the toxins, but, they have to wait until they’ve digested the toxins before eating more. “If you’re thirsty and there’s no water, it’s not as simple as, ‘I’ll just have another bunch of leaves.’ ”
Can human assistance help koalas get past that biological limitation? In 2016 Mella and her team placed 10 pairs of drinking stations across the Liverpool Plains in New South Wales, an area where koalas hadn’t been doing well. They wanted to see if the marsupials would supplement their all-leaf-diet with water found in tanks on the ground and in trees. To her surprise, when presented with the opportunity, the koalas were enthusiastic drinkers. Mella documented more than 600 visits by koalas during the course of a year. Other species such as sugar gliders, brushtail possums, kangaroos and echidnas also took advantage of the tanks. During hot and dry periods, the koalas chugged down even more.
This gives Mella hope that conservationists might be able to help the species by maintaining water stations in the wild for koalas — something that’s already done in rangeland for domestic cattle. Based on this research, the New South Wales government has already adopted water stations as a strategy to assist koalas during heatwaves and droughts
Dr. Valentina Mella with a koala joey during research fieldwork Gunnedah, NSW. Photo: University of SydneyThe next step, Mella says, will be to assess exactly how the water stations affect the overall health and survival of koalas.
“On the properties where we have these stations, we check on the ‘regular drinkers’ every six months. So far, they seem to be okay,” she says. But that’s just in terms of heat and dehydration. “When you add in the disease situation, then it’s a whole different story. Water is not a medicine. It can’t cure. But it probably helps in terms of making the animal more healthy to fight the infection.”
Medicine for Marsupials
To help koalas battling disease, dog bites, and automobile collisions, koala hospitals still play an essential role.
At the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital in New South Wales, about 200 koalas pass through the facility every year. That’s down from around 300 in previous years. “There are just fewer koalas now,” says Cheyne Flanagan, clinical director at the hospital.
Of the koalas that come in with chlamydia, about 40 percent are euthanized due to severe damage to their urogenital tracts. The other 60 percent can be treated with antibiotics or surgery. In addition to affecting internal organs, chlamydia also affects koalas’ eyes, causing infections or an overgrowth of tissue.
Recovering in a koala hospital. Photo: Tobias Spaltenberger (CC BY-SA 2.0)“We’ve made progress,” says Flanagan. “It’s definitely better than it used to be because a lot of research is going on. We’ve learned what drugs are knocking chlamydia down. You can never cure chlamydia… but you can put it in remission and sometimes, if the koalas are healthy enough, their own immune system kicks in and keeps it under control.”
Antibiotic treatment has been problematic in the past because it often kills the gut microbes that allow koalas to eat eucalyptus leaves. But scientists have recently discovered one particular protective microbe that, if kept alive, allows the koala to survive the course of antibiotics. Researchers are also working on alternative treatments, such as fecal transplants, probiotics and a chlamydia vaccine.
Yet pressure on state and federal government from the international community, Flanagan says, is still critical. “Some of the laws for biodiversity in this country are disgusting.”
Australia’s Federal Failure, a Local Opportunity
Before the federal election in May, koala conservationists had hoped to turn the tide after decades of apparent governmental neglect.
In its press release ahead of the vote, the Australian Koala Foundation wrote that it had spent 31 years working with “13 environment ministers, many of which could be described as the ‘Who’s Who’ of the political elite and nothing has happened except dead koalas in the wild… No one has written anything to protect the koala in the last six years of government.” A national recovery plan, mandated by law, has never been established. Notably, Australia’s Department of Environment and Energy web page for koalas still says, as of this writing, that the planned publication date of a recovery plan for the species “is expected to be late 2014.”
Further federal progress seems unlikely. On May 18 Australian citizens re-elected the Liberal-National Coalition, notorious for its refusal to sharply reduce carbon emissions and coal. Opposing parties had made far bolder promises on addressing climate change.
Though the federal election was a disappointment to most environmentalists, Hosking notes it’s now up to local and state governments to play the bigger roles in koala conservation.
“There’s a lot of lobbying going on with local government,” she says. “And we’re trying to engage more with state-level governments right now to come up with strategies to protect the koalas. It’s a matter of keeping populations viable, allowing them to move safely and stay healthy. It’s really difficult. It’s gloomy. But it’s certainly not over.”
Links
- 'Our Little Brown Rat': First Climate Change-Caused Mammal Extinction
- The Biggest Issues For Wildlife And Endangered Species In 2019
- Climate Change Sparks Fears For Flying Foxes After 23,000 Deaths
- Fixing Australia’s Extinction Crisis Means Thinking Bigger Than Individual Species
- Golden Bowerbirds' Building Prowess Helps Scientists Monitor Climate Change, And Alarm Bells Are Ringing
- Worst Mass Extinction Event In Earth’s History Was Caused By Global Warming Analogous To Current Climate Crisis
- Why The Polar Bear Is An Indisputable Image Of Climate Change
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