What should we do now to protect our planet? Climate activist Colette Pichon Battle’s Call for Action at the United Nations Climate Summit in Egypt
As the Re:WIRED GREEN event on addressing climate change drew to a close yesterday, the weather underlined the urgency in the most horrific way possible.
While climate activist and lawyer Colette Pichon Battle spoke from a stage in blue-skied San Francisco, Hurricane Ian continued its destructive path across southwest Florida, underscoring her already-urgent call to action. “I just want to make sure that you’re paying attention to what’s happening in the Gulf of Mexico right now,” Pichon Battle said. She encouraged the audience to take notice of climate events around the world, from rain events in Baton Rouge and Houston to deadly floods ravaging Pakistan and Cape Verde.
With tears in her eyes, Pichon Battle challenged the audience in San Francisco to be honest with themselves about the actions they should take to fight for a hospitable planet for all—actions that must go far beyond throwing a plastic cup into a recycling bin or buying an electric car. She said that her job today was to bring the truth. Even if it isn’t what you want to hear.
The chairperson of an influential negotiating bloc in the United Nations Climate Summit in Egypt wants to give compensation to poorer countries that are suffering from climate change.
The landmark United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, UK has been a year since global leaders renewed their climate pledges. On Monday, global leaders will convene in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, during COP27 to carry on negotiations aimed at reining in global warming. It’s frightening that global energy prices are going up, making it hard to invest in harmful fossil fuels. Many countries have made new climate commitments this year, and so the good news is that renewable-energy installations continue to rise. What to look out for.
“We would like to see an agreement to create a dedicated financial facility that would be used to pay countries that are facing the impacts of climate change at the summit,” he said.
According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, Africa gets 2% of the total clean energy investment in the last 20 years. According to the U. N. weather agency, the world needs to double its clean energy supplies in the future to limit global warming.
Over a decade ago, the world promised to give $100 billion a year for poorer countries to cope with the effects of climate change.
We cannot afford a COP that is all talk. The climate crisis has pushed our adaptation limits, resulted in inevitable loss and damage, and delayed our much-needed development,” added Sarr.
For many activists, it seems as if glaciers are melting faster than countries can come to an agreement on policies to limit climate change. The most significant decision yet to come out of one of these conferences is the landmark Paris Agreement adopted in 2015. That agreement is a foundation for many efforts today to take action on climate change. It set a research-backed limit on how much global warming countries are willing to tolerate, making countries accountable for “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”
Developing countries are going to need a lot more money to deal with the risks they face from climate change, according to a new United Nations report released on Thursday.
The impacts from global warming have hit poor countries harder than richer ones, even though they are responsible for a very small share of the greenhouse gasses that are causing temperatures to rise. The UN says that the floods in Pakistan that killed 1500 people and the years of dry weather in East Africa are evidence of rising climate risks.
“The message of this report is clear: strong political will is needed to increase adaptation investments and outcomes,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, wrote in a foreword to the report.
She said we need to get ahead of the game and not spend the coming decades in emergency response mode.
Climate Investment Funds: Impact of a Global Investment in Climate Change and the Report of UN General Conference on Climate Change in Egypt and Middle East
The UN published the report before Egypt hosted its annual climate conference. The UN stated in a report published last week that the world isn’t cutting greenhouse gas emissions nearly enough to avoid sea level rise and other global dangers.
“The discourse needs to be raised significantly, the level of ambition, so that you can actually continue to do what you’re doing on mitigation even more, but you at the same time meet the adaptation needs,” says Mafalda Duarte, CEO of Climate Investment Funds, which works with development banks like the World Bank to provide funding to developing countries on favorable terms.
To prepare for more extreme weather, the world needs to invest more money in projects to reduce the hazards, vulnerability and exposure that people face, the UN says. Ensuring infrastructure is constructed so that it can stand up to a hotter climate and helping people evacuate in emergencies are some of the things that could be done.
Failure to spend the money that’s needed to limit and prepare for climate change will put the entire world at risk. Those risks could include armed conflicts, refugee crises and disruptions in financial markets, analysts say.
It’s important to change our mindset and think in a different way when it comes to climate issues, because an investment across borders is a domestic investment.
Editor’s Note: John D. Sutter is a CNN contributor, climate journalist and independent filmmaker whose work has won the Livingston Award, the IRE Award and others. He recently was appointed the Ted Turner Professor of Environmental Media at The George Washington University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
What is the responsibility of the United Nations of preventing climate change in developing countries? The case of Vanuatu and Van Lierop
There should be an “insurance pool … used to compensate the most vulnerable small island and low-lying coastal developing countries for loss and damage resulting from sea level rise,” Vanuatu’s ambassador, Robert Van Lierop, proposed to United Nations climate negotiators, according to a 2019 article in the journal “Climate Policy.”
At the time, Vanuatu – on behalf of an alliance of small-island states – argued quite reasonably that polluters should pay for the costs of their pollution.
The world has known for a long time what it has to do to stave off the worst effects of warming: hold the line at 1.5 degrees. To make cuts to carbon emissions fast, we need to cut them by at least 42% from current levels by the year 2030. That’s been the aim since 2015, when world leaders came together to sign the Paris Agreement. So around this time last year, when global climate negotiators arrived at the United Nations’ annual Conference of Parties meeting, known as COP26, they came with a clear mandate. Yet by the end of the marathon negotiations, they left Glasgow with the carbon arithmetic far from solved.
After decades of deflection, it’s overdue for high-polluting countries like the United States to take this question seriously. It is clear that polluters should be held accountable for the losses they cause.
Those efforts should be supported, but the fair and proactive thing is for rich countries to impose taxes on fossil fuel profits. That can be done as part of UN climate negotiations.
The less carbon we put into the atmosphere, the less risk we put into the climate system — with important consequences for sea levels, storms, drought, biodiversity and so-on.
Against Fossil Fuel Pollution: A Peruvian Farmer Sues a German Factory over a Melting Glacial Glacier
Over the decades, there have been many arguments against action. The most laughable, in retrospect, is that this was a problem for the future rather than the present.
That may feel like a new phenomenon, but it’s been decades in the making. Scientists linked a 2003 heat wave in Europe to global warming. That heat wave killed an estimated 20,000 people.
The onslaught of ever-worsening heat waves, droughts, wildfires and storms can feel both urgent and numbing. The truth is that as long as humans have been burning fossil fuels, we’ve been making the planet more dangerous.
A report shows that there were 60 times as many profits as had to be made to compensate for economic losses from climate disasters over that same period. We know that burning fossil fuels harms people all over the world so we should see those profits as immoral.
Short of international efforts to fund a loss-and-damage process, countries and individuals are turning to the courts. A Peruvian farmer, for example, is suing a German fossil fuel company over a melting glacier that threatens his home and farm. The suit, filed in 2015, according to news reports, claims the German company, RWE, should be liable for its proportion of the damages, in line with the proportion of global fossil fuel pollution it has created. RWE is contesting the lawsuit and says it isn’t responsible for the damage.
The Commission of Small Island States on Climate change and International Law was formed by Tuvalu and other countries. The aim is to find out if there are claims in international courts.
“Litigation is the only way we will be taken seriously while the leaders of big countries are dillydallying,” Gaston Browne, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, said last year, according to The New York Times. “We want to force them to respond in a court of law.”
What’s going on at the COP27 climate conference? Environmental activists, climate policy analyst, and the elephant in the room of Egypt’s actions on climate protests
This is a raging debate, even within the conference. The activist who became a celebrity at last year’s conference said that the conference is not really working, after she decided not to attend this year. The COPs are mostly used as a way for leaders and people in power to get attention, using different kinds of greenwashing.
Of course, there’s still a lot of pressure on countries at COP27 to do more to prevent planet-heating pollution in the first place. Since countries agreed to strengthen their targets for the future, environmental groups want to see more updated national commitments come out of COP 27.
The money is supposed to be spent on new and improved infrastructure that could help keep people safe in a warming world. That might look like cities designed to be better at beating the heat or communities that are less likely to be wiped out in a wildfire. Increased early warning systems that can warn people about a flood or storm are possibilities. There is a push to secure more funding this year, since adaptation costs in developing countries have been projected to reach up to $300 billion a year by end of the decade. Advocates are also pushing for more locally led solutions since what it means to live with climate change looks different from place to place and the people most affected by climate disasters haven’t always been included at planning tables.
The conference is taking place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. The climate conference this year contains one elephant in the room that is Egypt’s actions on climate protests and the dissent that goes with it. Dozens of people have reportedly been arrested in the days leading up to the climate conference in an effort to quell demonstrations, adding to tens of thousands more political prisoners believed to be detained currently in Egypt.
The focus will be evaluation, assessment and accountability. David Waskow, Climate policy analyst says, “We have to get a grip on whether the current commitments are being carried out.”
There have been some bright spots. Australia, led by a newly progressive government, doubled its planned cut to 43 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030. A handful of other countries, including Chile, which is working to enshrine the rights of nature into its constitution, have already promised more cuts or say they will soon. Most of those updates are from smaller polluters who are playing catch up after submitting goals that were woefully lacking in detail. Many of the low-hanging fruit have already been picked.
Other wins have simply put emitters on the path to making good on last year’s promises. The Inflation Reduction act in the United States represented a huge step toward meeting the 50 percent emissions reduction pledge. But the US still isn’t on track to reach that commitment. She says that further increasing its goals this year would be a bad idea because of the nation’s political stalemate.
Fransen is one of the people that keeps track of emissions plans and whether countries are sticking to them. It’s tricky to take stock. It means measuring how much carbon nations emit. It involves showing how the climate will change in 10, 20, or 100 years.
It is not easy to see how much CO2 is being created by the world. There is a lot of gas in the atmosphere and it creates a muddy origin to each signal. The release of carbon by natural processes is complicating matters. It is similar to trying to find a water leak in a swimming pool. Researchers have tried pointing satellites at the Earth to track CO2 emissions, but “if you see CO2 from space, it is not always guaranteed that it came from the nearest human emissions,” says Gavin McCormick, cofounder of Climate Trace, which tracks greenhouse gas emissions. That is why more sophisticated methods are needed. For instance, Climate Trace can train algorithms to use steam billowing from power plants as a visible proxy for the emissions they’re belching. Other scientists have been making some progress using weather stations to monitor local emissions.
The troubling truth behind net zero emissions proposals: How the military can afford to lose a billion lives in Africa, says a molecular biologist
According to the models, there could be more than one million lives saved if the COVID-19 vaccine was shared more evenly with lower income countries. The emergence of the SARS-coV-2 variant might have been slowed by a drop in infections caused by vaccine distribution.
Insecticide-resistant mosquitoes have made their way from Asia to Africa, threatening progress there towards eradicating malaria. In a study in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia — the site of a malaria outbreak — Anopheles stephensi accounted for almost all adult mosquitos found near the homes of participants with the disease. The notorious species can breed in urban environments and persist through dry seasons. It could infect more than 100 million people in Africa if they are not protected by vaccines and other control measures. But “there is no silver bullet” for this fast-spreading vector, says molecular biologist Fitsum Tadesse.
The US military puts out more carbon dioxide than any other nation in the world. But militaries are largely spared from emissions reporting. The researchers explain how to account for the carbon footprint of the military.
“Imagine making a data-driven plan for the world, but leaving out more than one billion people in Africa,” writes energy researcher Rose M. Mutiso. “That’s the troubling truth behind net-zero emissions proposals.” She says we cannot engage meaningfully with the concept of net zero without appropriate models and African expertise.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03572-0
Oliver Müller: From Astronomy to the Laws of Medicine and Psychiatry – A Tale of Two Pseudogaps
After a stint at Google, astronomer Oliver Müller is back in academia — and he has learnt some valuable lessons. One of the most important: don’t be a hero. If a task can only be completed with the use of mental health and even physical health at risk, you are deceiving the system.