What do we really know about climate change in the world? A critical comparison of Australia, Britain, Brazil and the United States (and the UN Environment Programme)

Consider the consequences of the federal election in Australia, as well as the Conservative Party leadership contest in Britain, and of a presidential election this month in Brazil, and of the US elections in November.

All these countries matter hugely in climate terms. Australia, Britain and the United States are among history’s biggest emitters. The biggest share of the Amazon rainforest is in Brazil, and it stores lots of carbon dioxide for other countries.

In May, voters ousted the conservative coalition that had championed coal and gas and made Australia one of the climate laggards of the world. A new Labor Party led government updated the country’s international climate targets in less than a month.

At the end of last year’s UN climate conference, developed countries were urged to at least double their funding for adaptation from 2019 levels by 2025. The UN says that the amount of money isn’t enough to meet the needs of developing nations to prepare for climate risk.

Climate scientist Dr Vikki Thompson from the University of Bristol, UK said that the analysis has managed to really quantify the consequences of global warming. It also includes parts of the world that are often excluded from studies on heatwaves owing to a lack of data, she says.

The executive director of the UN Environment Programme said in a foreword to the report that political will is needed to increase adaptation investments and outcomes.

She said “If we don’t want to spend the coming decades in emergency response mode, dealing with disaster after disaster, we need to get ahead of the game.”

Climate Investment Funds: How Developing Countries Can Benefit from Climate Change Conferences, and Why It Is Not Necessary. Report: John D. Sutter

The 27th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties will start on 6 November. Sameh Shoukry, Egypt’s foreign minister, wrote a letter to world leaders this week expressing his concerns that the extra climate finance promised in Glasgow has not materialized. From the year 2025, industrialized countries plan to double funding for climate-adaptation projects.

The UN climate negotiations scheduled to begin over the weekend in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh are the 27th Conference of the Parties. They are expected to focus on raising money to deal with climate change in developing countries.

“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.

Extreme weather worldwide is being super-charged by the climate crisis. Look no farther than the deadly floods in Pakistan this summer or Hurricane Ian in Florida this September. Disasters are getting more expensive because they’re becoming more intense as humans continue to burn fossil fuels and swamp the atmosphere with heat-trapping gasses.

The whole world can be at risk if the money is not spent to limit and prepare for climate change. Analysts say that the risks could include armed conflicts, refugee crises and disruptions in financial markets.

“We have to change our mindset and think differently because, when it comes to climate, an investment across borders in another place is a domestic investment,” she says.

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 in this commentary are his own. There is more opinion at CNN.

The fate of climate change: a wake-up call for U.S. and Europe to stop talking about “loss and damage” at COP26

Last year’s COP26 in Scotland resulted in promises to continue discussing the issue of “loss and damage” but there was no real action. Vanuatu and other vulnerable nations shouldn’t be put on hold for further years or decades. It’s clear that this bill is substantially overdue.

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.

“There have been many promises,” says Mahmoud Mohieldin, the UN’s climate change high-level champion for Egypt, but “without finance, money and investment, nothing will progress”.

It is time for the United States and other countries in highpolluting zones to take this question seriously. It’s clear that polluters should be held accountable for these losses to territory, culture, life and property.

The fair and proactive thing is to have rich countries impose taxes on fossil fuel profits. That can be done as part of UN climate negotiations.

The climate system is affected by the amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere, and by how much risk we put into it.

Arguments against action have taken many forms over the decades. The most laughable, in retrospect, is that this was a problem for the future rather than the present.

Climate Change and International Law in Small Island States: A Call to Reformulate the Climate in the Light of Recent Climate Change Events and Climate Storms

It’s been a long time since that seemed to feel like a new phenomenon. The 2003 heat wave that killed two people in Europe was linked to human-caused warming. That heat wave killed an estimated 20,000 people.

The onslaught of heat waves, fires and storms feels 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.

“The fossil fuel industry is feasting on hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and windfall profits while household budgets shrink and our planet burns,” António Guterres said.

The concept of reimbursement for such loss and damage is not aid, but based on the “polluter pays” principle, the basis of environmental laws around the world, says Sunita Narain, editor of science magazine Down to Earth, based in New Delhi. This financing “must be on the table — not to be pushed away with another puny promise of a fund that never materializes”, Narain writes in the 1–15 November issue.

The small island states formed the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law. The goal is to explore claims in international courts.

The Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda said last year that litigation is the only way that he will be taken seriously. They want to be forced to respond in court.

Why there is no silver bullet for anopheles stephensi, a malaria-resistant mosquito species in Africa and how to protect the public

It is suggested that more than a million lives might have been saved by distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines more fairly. How to decarbonize the military is one of the topics we will be talking about atCOP 27.

It will be about evaluation, assessment and accountability. David Waskow, climate-policy analyst, says that we must get a grip on whether the current commitments are being carried out.

Insecticide-resistant mosquitoes have made their way from Asia to Africa, threatening progress there towards eradicating malaria. Anopheles stephensi accounted for almost all adult mosquitos found at the homes of participants with the disease in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia. The notorious species can breed in urban environments and persist through dry seasons. If control measures aren’t put in place, it could potentially cause more than 100 million infections in Africa. But “there is no silver bullet” for this fast-spreading vector, says molecular biologist Fitsum Tadesse.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03572-0

How can militaries protect themselves from net zero emissions? The Egyptians need more research in their climate studies, says Egypt’s Environment Minister

The US armed forces have the highest per capita CO2 emissions in the world. But militaries are largely spared from emissions reporting. The researchers outline how militaries can be held to account.

It’s hard to imagine making a plan that leaves out more than one billion people in Africa. There is a troubling truth behind net-zero emissions proposals. She argued that we can’t engage meaningfully with the concept of net zero without African data, models and expertise.

Oliver Mller is an astronomer at a university and he has learned some valuable lessons, after a stint at GOOGLE. Don’t be a hero. “If a task can be finished only through putting your mental health and even physical health at risk, you are effectively hiding flaws in the system.”

The Egyptian hosts of the COP27 climate conference are warning the leaders of wealthy nations that there can be no “backsliding” on commitments made at COP26 in Glasgow, UK, last year.

According to the president of the Egyptian Academy of Scientific Research and Technology in Cairo, scientists from Climate-Vulnerable countries will be asking for more research funding. Countries, he says, need to conduct more of their own climate studies — especially in the Middle East and North Africa, which already experience low rainfall and arid conditions. The Arab world accounts for just 1.2% of published climate studies, according to an analysis1 published at the end of 2019.

In 2015, Egypt estimated that it needs to set aside $73 billion for projects to help the country mitigate climate change and adapt its infrastructure. This number has tripled, says the environment minister. “Most climate actions we have implemented have been from the national budget, which adds more burden and competes with our basic needs that have to be fulfilled.”

The impact of loss-and-damage financing on developing countries: How Africans can make the most of the global climate crisis and how to support them

Ian Mitchell, a researcher with think tank the Center for Global Development in London, warned of possible unintended consequences if agreement on loss and damage becomes a deal-breaker at the meeting. High-income countries could agree to the principle and then absorb loss-and-damage finance as part of their humanitarian-aid spending — meaning it would not be new money.

Adil Najam, who studies international climate diplomacy at Boston University in Massachusetts, thinks it is unlikely that these issues will be resolved in Egypt, and says that the politics will probably get messy. He says that loss and damage finance can no longer be avoided by the high-income countries because of climate impacts in vulnerable countries.

Fouad says that organizing this year’s COP in Africa has been transformative. “We are expecting more attention towards issues that are crucial and meaningful to us Africans and relevant to most developing countries, such as food security, desertification, natural disasters and water scarcity. This COP is a chance for more African youth, non-governmental and civil-society organizations to be heard.”

The findings could inform the way in which strategies that help countries to adapt to extreme heat or heavy rainfall are implemented. The effect of the five hottest days of the year on the whole year is what makes it so, because of the small effects on the economy. Major economic returns could be achieved if investments are focused on keeping the heat out in the hottest parts of the year.

The study also emphasizes the need for rich countries to pay their share, says Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. “Given the unequal burden and the share of historical emissions … the global north needs to support the global south in terms of coping with these adverse effects.”