7 December 2015, Huffington Post, Will Climate Change Break the Global Food System? Extreme weather events scuttling harvests. Skyrocketing food prices causing famine for millions and driving multitudes into poverty. Governments toppling – again – in Pakistan and Ukraine. Massive floods driving millions of refugees from their homes in Bangladesh and putting pressure on neighboring India. Droughts devastating harvests in traditional bread baskets like the U.S. and Brazil. The E.U., in a panicked move, suspending its environmental rules for agriculture and instituting a tax on meat. The world’s top greenhouse gas emitters ultimately banding together to raise a global carbon tax.The events described above are not the real world, but they could be. They were part of what transpired at Food Chain Reaction a few weeks ago, a high-level crisis simulation in Washington, DC that brought together 65 international leaders to explore how climate change may strain the world’s food system from 2020 to 2030. What the simulation taught us, is that policymakers attending this week’s U.N. climate summit in Paris cannot afford to neglect food security. The world’s population is on a path to 9.5 billion by mid-century. That means we will have to grow up to 70 percent more food. To make matters more complicated, we’ll have to do so in a changing climate that alters the very way we grow our crops. We must figure out how we can make that happen within the limits of the Earth’s natural resources. We’ve talked long enough. It is time to decide on a course of action that will actually improve the situation. Read more here
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7 December 2015, Washington Post, Economists: Climate change is going to cost a lot more than previously thought. When it comes to climate change, there’s broad consensus among economists that the potential economic impacts will be serious, widespread and more severe than previous estimates have indicated. At least, this is the conclusion of a new survey, published Monday by the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity — and experts say we should be listening to their warnings. The report, which was authored by the Institute’s Derek Sylvan and Peter Howard, compiled answers from more than 300 experts on the economics of climate change in response to a set of 15 questions regarding climate change risks, policies and potential damages. “We figured if you want to understand how climate change will affect our daily lives, it makes sense to ask the economists who study issues like food production, climate adaptation, energy economics,” said Sylvan, strategy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity. “And so essentially our survey helps clarify the wisdom of the crowd among this group of experts.” Sylvan and Howard compiled their pool of experts by creating a list of all the people who had published a climate change-related article in a leading economics or environmental economics journal since 1994. The survey questioned the economists on how serious a problem they felt climate change will be in the future, what economic sectors are likely to be negatively affected, how soon they expect the effects to begin manifesting and how seriously these impacts will affect global output. Read more here
7 December 2015, The Conversation, Australia’s climate diplomacy is like a doughnut: empty in the middle. There is a profound disconnect between Australia’s international climate diplomacy and its national climate and energy policies. The diplomacy could be cast in positive terms, on the surface at least. During the first week of the climate negotiations in Paris, Australia displayed a preparedness to be flexible and serve as a broker of compromises in the negotiations over the draft Paris Agreement. Australia has also agreed to support the inclusion of a temperature goal to limit global warming to 1.5℃, which is a matter very dear to the hearts of Pacific Island nations for whom climate change is a fundamental existential threat. Australia will serve as co-chair (with South Africa) of the Green Climate Fund in 2016, which will be channelling money to the most vulnerable countries in the Pacific and elsewhere to enhance their preparedness for the harmful impacts arising from a much warmer world. …. Yet appearances can be deceiving. The A$200 million in annual climate finance comes from the aid budget and is not new or additional. Nor does it represent an enhanced commitment relative to previous contributions. And it is widely acknowledged that an enhanced commitment to climate finance by rich countries to assist poor countries to develop clean energy and adapt to climate change will be central to garnering the support of developing countries to a Paris agreement. Australia had every reason to ratify Kyoto II, since it had one of the lowest emissions targets in the developed world for 2020 (5% below 2000 levels). Australia has also been able to benefit from greenhouse gas accounting rules (including a carry over of surplus emissions allowances from the first commitment period) that will enable achievement of this target at the same time as greenhouse emissions outside the land sector are set to increase by around 11% by 2020. Read More here
7 December 2015, The Conversation. Draft deal emerges midway through Paris climate talks, but leaves plenty to do. A huge piece of street art with the words “Fluctuat nec mergitur” – Paris’ official motto since 1853 – has just appeared on a building near the city’s Canal Saint Martin. It refers to a ship at sea and translates as “tossed but not sunk”. The slogan is cropping up around the city as a sign of resistance to the recent terror attacks. But it is perhaps also a comment on the Paris climate negotiations. The Paris Conference of the Parties (COP) aims to land a deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2020. Progress during this first week has been grindingly slow. Nevertheless, the initial 54-page document has been whittled down to a slightly more focused 48-page text, now handed to the COP president Laurent Fabius. The new draft, released on Saturday, is still dense with contested phrases and bracketed options and landmines of coded language, both substantive and tactical. These will be the focus of this week’s high-level negotiations as ministers arrive for the second half of the summit. Mind the gaps The cluster of issues being considered include collective ambition on climate mitigation and adaptation, the level and nature of climate finance, technology transfer and capacity building, and processes for measuring and reviewing progress. It is hard to predict where the final deal might land, but at this stage negotiators are struggling to bridge two critical gaps – a mitigation gap and a climate finance gap. Deeply entrenched positions over which countries should do what, how much, and when, have dominated these negotiations. Longstanding disputes between developed and developing countries over the equitable sharing of responsibility and effort for mitigation, and who should bear the costs of mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, stand in the way of bridging either gap. The mitigation gap lies between the current level of global fossil fuel use and the much lesser amount required to keep global warming below 1.5℃ or 2℃ – the two goals being considered here in Paris. Read More here