19 January 2018, World Resource Institute. Global Environmental Risks Are Keeping Davos Leaders Awake at Night. As movers and shakers — reportedly including President Trump – fire up their private jets to travel to Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, the Forum issued its annual Global Risks Report. For more than a decade, the report has been surveying the WEF’s network of business, government and civil society leaders, asking them to rank global risks based on both their impact and likelihood. In short, the report asks what keeps the global elite awake at night. The answer? Mounting environmental threats. 2 Takeaways from the Global Risks Report First, a majority (five of eight) of the risks respondents said were both most impactful and most likely to happen were environmental risks. These were extreme weather events, failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation, man-made environmental disasters, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and natural disasters. A sixth, water crises, is labeled by the WEF as a societal risk, but it can also be considered an environmental risk. In other words, even while geopolitical and cyber risks are increasing and domestic politics in many countries are in turmoil, the leading decision-makers in business and government remain most concerned about the cluster of risks connected to the environment—many of them related to climate change. Read More here
Category Archives: Global Action Inaction
12 January 2018, Reuters, Warming set to breach Paris accord’s toughest limit by mid century: draft. Global warming is on track to breach the toughest limit set in the Paris climate agreement by the middle of this century unless governments make unprecedented economic shifts from fossil fuels, a draft U.N. report said. The draft, of a report due for publication in October, said governments will also have to start sucking carbon dioxide from the air to achieve the ambition of limiting temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. “There is very high risk that … global warming will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” the U.N. panel of experts wrote, based on the current pace of warming and current national plans to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. There were no historic precedents for the scale of changes required in energy use, to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energies, and in reforms ranging from agriculture to industry to stay below the 1.5C limit, it said. The draft, by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of leading scientists and obtained by Reuters, says average surface temperatures are about 1C above pre-industrial times and that average temperatures are on track to reach 1.5C by the 2040s. Curbing warming to 1.5C would help limit heat extremes, droughts and floods, more migration of people and even risks of conflict compared to higher rates of warming, according to the draft summary for policymakers. But a 1.5C rise might not be enough to protect many coral reefs, already suffering from higher ocean temperatures, and ice stored in Greenland and West Antarctica whose melt is raising sea levels. Read More here. For expert response read more here
11 January 2018, ABC News – Science: Forget Paris: Australia needs to stop pretending we’re tackling climate change. As the Bureau of Meteorology confirms another record-breaking year for temperatures in Australia, we should expect a sense of urgency to be creeping into Australia’s climate policy. Instead, we’re seeing the opposite. While 2015-17 were all within the hottest six years on record, our carbon emissions also continued to increase during the same period, including an all-time peak in 2017, when unreliable land-use data was excluded from the analysis. This is despite signing up to the Paris Agreement in 2015, which outlined a plan to reduce our carbon emissions by 26-28 per cent by 2030. Government data pushed out under the cloak of Christmas indicates that we will be about 140 million tonnes — or about 30 per cent — above that target based on current growth Government optimism at odds with UN: Despite last financial year’s continued emissions growth, Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg remains upbeat about Australia’s commitment to the Paris Agreement. “If you look on a yearly basis that is true [that emissions went up]. But if you look on the last quarter, they went down. If you look at the trend, it is improving. And when you talk about the 2030 target, which is our Paris commitment, the numbers that were most recently shown, indicate that they were 30 per cent better than when Labor were last in office,” the Minister told RN Breakfast. But his optimism is at odds with a number of experts, and is contrary to what was reported in the United Nations Emissions Gap Report (see below), 2017. “Government projections indicate that emissions are expected to reach 592 [million tonnes] in 2030, in contrast to the targeted range of 429-440 [million tonnes],” the report states.. Read More here
27 November 2017, Climate Home News. Cleaner coolants fund gets $540m – and US backing. Rich countries will pay $540 million over three years into a fund to support a shift to cleaner coolants, under a deal agreed in Montreal on Saturday. Notably, the US is set to contribute $37m, despite the Trump administration’s hostility to multilateral environmental agreements. It comes as the 1987 Montreal Protocol pivots from its initial focus on the ozone layer to addressing the climate impact of chemicals used in fridges and air conditioners. State department official Judith Garber said the US was starting the process to ratify the Kigali Amendment to the protocol, which sets a phasedown path for HFCs, a group of potent warming gases produced by these appliances. In a speech on Thursday that did not mention climate change, she hailed the Kigali Amendment’s “pragmatic and balanced approach” to reducing HFCs’ “environmental impact”. US chemical companies like Honeywell and Dow support the deal, seeing an opportunity to sell climate-friendly alternatives. The Kigali Amendment will enter into force on 1 January 2019, after Sweden became the twentieth country to ratify it on 17 November. Developing countries like India made clear their backing for an HFC phasedown depended on finance to help their chemical manufacturers switch to substitutes. Gaby Drinkwater of Christian Aid said in a statement: “Developing nations are where the demand growth in air conditioning systems will come from as the planet gets hotter. No one wants to see this demand creating a vicious cycle of rising greenhouse gas emissions.” David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote in a blog that developing countries appeared “optimistic” the funds were adequate. Read More here