Category Archives: Impacts Observed & Projected

PLEA Network

4 November 2015, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Tipping points: A new landscape of global crises. Recent crises are increasingly global and follow new kinds of patterns in the past crises were often local and isolated. They left surrounding ecosystems and societies largely unaffected. This made aid and governance work easier.Today, crises are becoming more global in reach affecting more people and systems at the same time. In a recent study lead by Thomas Homer-Dixon and Brian Walker published in Ecology and Society with Centre researchers Oonsie Biggs, Anne-Sophie Crépin, Carl Folke, Garry Peterson, Johan Rockström, Will Steffen and Max Troell a framework to identify the causes, processes and outcomes of multiple interconnected crises which they term “synchronous failure” is proposed. A guide for understanding globally interconnected crises The framework shows how several stressors together can cause a crisis which can rapidly spread to become global in reach. “We have developed a framework for understanding how global crises may emerge,” says Biggs. “Our framework could be used as an initial guide for systematic analyses and identifying early-warning signals and measures for building social-ecological resilience. It can also support establishment of appropriate governance structures that can navigate the danger of synchronous failure,” she says. Causes of crises The authors argue that future crises will increasingly result from three long-term global trends: the dramatic increase in human economic activity in relation to Earth’s environment, the rapidly increasing connections across the globe, and the decreasing diversity of human cultures, institutions, practices and technologies. These three trends create several stresses and reduce the capacity of systems to deal with disturbances. Case studies from the 2008 financial-energy and food-energy crises illustrate this. In the food-energy crises four stresses seemed to have affected the systems simultaneously, sometimes enhancing the impacts on one another:

1. diminishing supply of new agricultural land of good quality
2. declining returns on intensifying agriculture through more extensive inputs
3. climate change related extreme weather such as droughts
4. consistent high demand for food in a world with a growing population. Read More here

PLEA Network

3 November 2015, The Conversation, As drought looms, the Murray-Darling is in much healthier shape – just don’t get complacent. Melbourne Cup Day is a significant day in the history of water policy in Australia. The first Tuesday in November 2006 saw the then Prime Minister John Howard intervene decisively in the growing drought crisis in the southern Murray-Darling Basin (MDB). Nine years on, the spectre of drought is back. The Murray Darling Basin Authority’s weekly reports show inflows into the River Murray (which can be seen as a proxy for the southern MDB) during the year to end September 2015 were the among the lowest on record. And the Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate and Water Briefing last week suggests a warm and dry summer in prospect in the southern MDB, amid a still strengthening El Niño. Yet there are reasons to believe that these past nine years of stronger Commonwealth involvement have left the MDB much better placed to withstand an escalating drought. That said, there is no room for complacency, and continuing Commonwealth commitment is still needed if those hard-won gains are to be retained. Read More here

PLEA Network

30 October 2015, Daily Science, Mass gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet greater than losses. A new study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice. According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008. “We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica — there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.” Read More here

PLEA Network

30 October 2015, Renew Economy, With latest fires crisis, Indonesia surpasses Russia as world’s fourth-largest emitter. New analysis reveals even more troubling news about Indonesia’s fires crisis. Emissions from this year’s fires have reached 1.62 billion metric tons of CO2—bumping Indonesia from the sixth-largest emitter in the world up to the fourth-largest in just six weeks. The analysis from Guido van der Werf with the Global Fire Emissions Database also reveals that:

  • Emissions from Indonesia’s fires alone are approaching the total annual emissions of Brazil.
  • Indonesia’s current total emissions hover around 760 Mt CO2 (excluding land-use change), meaning the fires alone have tripled Indonesia’s entire annual emissions.
  • Indonesian fires during 38 of the past 56 days (as of October 26) have released more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire U.S. economy on those days.

While the country may finally be getting some relief as heavy rainfall interruptsmonths of record-breaking fires and toxic smog in South Sumatra and Kalimantan, the damage to human health, the economy and the global climate has already been done. Read More here