7 December 2016, Climate Home, UN to extend freeze on climate change geoengineering. Draft documents suggest countries will agree to further ban on large-scale climate techno-fixes, warning risks of damage to biodiversity outweigh potential benefits. Countries should resist the urge to experiment with large scale planetary geoengineering until it’s clear what the consequences of meddling with the oceans or atmosphere may be. That’s the nub of a decision expected to be taken at the UN’s biannual biodiversity summit taking place in Cancun, Mexico this week, emphasising a “precautionary approach” to such projects. With greenhouse gas emissions closing in on levels that could guarantee warming of 1.5C above pre industrial levels and an El Nino-boosted 2016 likely to be the hottest year on record, some scientists are looking to emergency measures. But the UN is sticking to a familiar line: pumping the atmosphere with tiny mirrors to deflect sunlight, boosting the uptake of CO2 in oceans by stimulating plankton growth, or burning wood and pumping the emissions underground could be a bad idea. “We’re concerned that with any initiative regarding the use of geoengineering there needs to be an assessment,” UN biodiversity chief Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias told Climate Home. “These can have unforeseen results and spin-offs. If you capture carbon in the oceans, this is effective through all the food chains.” Even national risk assessments on individual geoengineering projects would still form an “incomplete basis for global regulation” says the latest iteration of the UN draft decision, echoing previous Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) decisions in 2010, 2012 and 2014. “More trans-disciplinary research and sharing of knowledge among appropriate institutions is needed,” it says, citing potential impacts on ecosystems and potential ethical issues. Read More here
Category Archives: Ecosystem Stress
7 December 2016, Climate Home, There’s a secret UN climate summit taking place in Mexico. UN biodiversity chief tells Climate Home protecting and restoring ecosystems is the best way to protect the world from dangerous levels of global warming. There’s a UN climate change meeting involving nearly 200 governments taking place right now in the Mexican holiday resort of Cancun. It’s not making many headlines, but then the biannual UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) conference rarely does. Especially not in a year like 2016. And that’s a pity, because at stake is the air you breathe, the trees that surround you and the fate of the earth’s 8.7 million species of flora and fauna. Also at stake is the ability of communities across the world to cope with erratic weather patterns linked to climate change like flash flooding, acidifying oceans, drought and storms. “Everything is inter-linked,” says Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, a former Brazilian government official who has been executive secretary of the CBD since 2012. “If countries want to meet the Paris climate agreement and the sustainable development goals in 2030 they also need to make progress in biodiversity.” That means slowing and then reversing deforestation so there are more trees to suck up carbon emissions from fossil fuels, and managing wetlands that can act as a buffer against storm surges. It means working out how countries can better manage livestock and look after fish stocks so species can be supported if their habitats are damaged or waters become too acidic. “Unless we can do a better job we won’t make it,” says Dias, who argues that countries and businesses are – eventually – starting to understand why biodiversity matters. The Brazilian leaves his role after this meeting, but he wants governments to understand that building walls as protection – no Trump pun intended – is not going to crack it. Read More here
6 December 2016, The Conversation. At first glance, the progress reports on the Great Barrier Reef released last week by the Australian and Queensland governments might seem impressive. The update on the Reef 2050 Plan suggests that 135 of the plan’s 151 actions are either complete or on track. The Australian government’s apparent intention in releasing five recent reports is to reassure UNESCO that the Great Barrier Reef should not be listed as “World Heritage in Danger” (as the World Heritage Committee has previously threatened). Sadly, behind the verbosity and colour of these reports, there is disappointingly little evidence of progress in the key areas needed to make a significant difference to a World Heritage Area that is in crisis. Poor baseline The government framework for protecting and managing the Reef from 2015 to 2050, the Reef 2050 Plan, has been widely criticised as failing to provide a sound basis for the necessary long-term protection of the Reef. As well as providing a shaky basis to build effective actions, the Reef 2050 Plan has few measurable or realistic targets. It is therefore not easy to report on the actual progress. Several of the actions that will have the greatest impacts on the overall health of the Reef are shown in the progress reports as “not yet due”. In some cases, such as climate change, the Reef 2050 Plan is silent, instead simply referencing Australia’s national efforts on climate change. Read More here
6 December 2016, Climate Home, Fire bombs: British Columbia prepares for infernos. The second part of our series on vulnerable communities finds BC taking radical action in the face of a pile up of fire threats. Can it move fast enough? Tasmania and British Columbia are kindred lands; wild outposts of Britain’s empire, never fully tamed by settlers, with cool capital cities and a laid-back reputation that attracts nature lovers and marijuana connoisseurs. But the two share a less merry distinction – they are both sitting ducks for catastrophic fire. The first article in this series found Tasmania’s capital Hobart facing the twin threats of climate change and a landscape over brimming with fuel because traditional fire management by Aborigines had ceased with colonialism. There are strong parallels in BC. As the climate warms, fires are predicted to become more severe, larger and occur more frequently in unusual times of the year. The times call for bold ideas. Here, authorities are attempting to avert danger with a scheme so radical that one fire scientist in Tasmania calls it “crazy”, although not as crazy as living in a tinderbox. “Almost every year for the last five years we’ve said: wow, this is the earliest start to a fire season in a long time or ever,” says Lori Daniels, a forest scientist at the University of British Columbia’s tree ring lab. The coastal region in BC gets more rain than the interior. Even so, the capital Vancouver’s northern slopes, where Daniels lives, are desperately exposed once the perennial summer drought arrives. Here the city has made trouble for itself. The hills around the harbour were once lined by old wet forests. But those have been logged and replaced by more flammable woods. “The forests that have grown back are very productive and are a really different structure and now we have more than a million people who live in the vicinity of those forests and are very active ignition sources,” said Daniels. In other words, Vancouverites have laid their bed and manage to set fire to it every chance they get. Read More here