At the talks in Sofia, Bulgaria, most countries supported a faster process that would see three flagship reports assessing the state of climate science delivered by mid-2028, in time for the next global stocktake – the UN’s scorecard of collective climate action.

But a group of high-emitting developing countries made up of China, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia and South Africa – backed by Kenya – opposed an accelerated timeline, citing concerns that it would be harder to include scientists from the Global South, three sources present at the talks told Climate Home.

Governments were unable to reach a decision for the second time this year after “fraught talks” in January ended with the same outcome. The issue will be debated again at the next gathering in February 2025, while a separate expert meeting is tasked with drafting the outline of those reports by the end of 2024.

Fight over climate science

Adão Soares Barbosa, IPCC representative for Timor-Leste within the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) group, expressed his disappointment over the lack of agreement in Sofia resulting from “strong polarisation in the room”.

“If the assessment reports are not able to feed information into the global stocktake process, what are they good for?” he said, speaking to Climate Home.

Joyce Kimutai, who represented Kenya at the Sofia talks, said her country’s opposition to the proposed shortened timeline was “absolutely not intended to frustrate the process” but to highlight the challenges countries with more limited resources would be facing.

“With such a tight timeline, it is likely that we will produce a report that is not comprehensive, not robust. We found that very problematic,” she told Climate Home on Monday.

IPCC delegates exchange views in an informal huddle in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photo: IISD/ENB | Anastasia Rodopoulou

The primary purpose of the IPCC is to provide credible scientific assessments to the UN’s climate body (UNFCCC) and national decision-makers. The findings of its reports – which are usually compiled over several years by scientists working on a voluntary basis around the world – have been highly influential. They synthesise the latest research on climate change, as well as efforts to curb planet-heating emissions and adapt to the impacts of global warming.

The sixth series, whose final report was issued in March 2023, played a prominent role in informing the first UNFCCC global stocktake which resulted in governments agreeing for the first time to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels” at COP28 in Dubai last December.

But some fossil fuel-rich countries like Saudi Arabia – which have pushed back against clear language on the need to cut production – have previously opposed strong recognition of IPCC reports in UNFCCC negotiations.

The UN climate body has officially requested that its scientific counterpart align its activities with the timeline of the next global stocktake. The IPCC’s input will be “invaluable” for the international review of climate action, Simon Stiell, chief of the UN climate body, told the IPCC meeting in January.

Reputation ‘at risk’

As he opened the session in Sofia, the IPCC chair Jim Skea warned of a “complex and testing” agenda.

The discussion over the report production schedule would have “far-reaching implications in terms of the timeliness of our products, and the inclusivity of both our own processes and the science that is being assessed”, he added. 

Scientists and government officials were presented with a proposal drafted by the IPCC secretariat – its administrative arm – which would see the assessment reports completed between May and August 2028. That would be a few months before the global stocktake process is scheduled to end in November 2028.

The IPCC must produce its flagship report in time for the next UN global stocktake

A majority of countries, including EU member states, the UK, the US and most vulnerable developing nations, supported the proposal, stressing the importance of the scientific reports feeding into the global stocktake, according to sources and a summary of discussions by the IISD’s Earth Negotiations Bulletin. Many supporters added that the IPCC’s reputation would otherwise be at risk.

Small island states and least-developed countries argued that IPCC input is crucial for those that lack capacity to produce their own research and are most vulnerable to the immediate impacts of climate change, according to the IISD summary.

But a dozen developing countries – with India, Saudi Arabia and China being the most vocal – opposed speeding up the process, arguing that more time is needed to ensure greater inclusion of experts and research from the Global South, which would result in “robust and rigorous” scientific output.

South Africa, Russia, Kenya, Algeria, Burundi, Congo, Jordan, Libya and Venezuela expressed similar views, according to IISD.

More time for more voices

India said that “producing the best science needs time, haste leads to shoddy work”, while Saudi Arabia claimed that the shortened timeline would “lead to incomplete science and would be a disservice to the world”, according to the IISD summary of the discussions.

Kenya’s Kimutai told Climate Home that producing scientific literature and reviewing submissions takes a lot of time and, unlike their counterparts in richer countries, scientists in the Global South can rarely count on the help of junior researchers at well-funded institutions.

“We love this process – we find it important,” she added, “but we’re trying to say that, while it may be an easy process in other regions, it is not for us”.

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The IPCC has long struggled with ensuring adequate representation of expert voices from the Global South. Only 35% of the authors working on its sixth and latest assessment report hailed from developing countries, according to a study published in the journal Climate, up from 31% in the previous cycle.

In Sofia, several delegates pointed out that the IPCC is working to improve inclusivity and that a slight extension of the schedule would not be the solution. Similar views were aired by forty IPCC authors from developing countries in a letter circulated ahead of last week’s talks, urging countries to ensure that the reports are ready in time for the global stocktake.

While recognising concerns over the inclusion of under-represented communities, they argued that it would not be achieved by allowing more time but through “deliberate efforts to counterbalance long-standing inequalities” in the research world.

Writing for Climate Home, Malian scientist Youba Sokona, one of the letter’s authors, warned that the IPCC risks losing its relevance and influence over global climate policy-making if its output cannot be used in the global stocktake.

IPCC Chair Jim Skea gavels the session to a close. Photo: Photo by IISD/ENB | Anastasia Rodopoulou

Despite lengthy exchanges, scientists in Sofia could not find a solution and decided to postpone a decision on the timeline until the next IPCC session in February 2025, when countries will also need to agree on the outline of the reports’ content.

Kenya’s Kimutai has proposed a compromise that would see reports on adaptation and mitigation completed in time for the global stocktake, with a third on the physical science of climate change coming in later.

Richard Klein, a senior researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and a lead author of previous IPCC reports, told Climate Home the ongoing row was “problematic”. “With these delays, a shorter [report] cycle in time for the global stocktake may not be feasible anymore, which in turn makes it less likely we will see ambitious nationally-determined contributions (NDCs) after that process,” he warned.

Expert scientists from the IPCC will meet again this December at a “scoping” session to sketch out a framework for what the assessment reports should include.

Barbosa of Timor-Leste is worried that those discussions will also become “heavily politicised”.

“We are concerned that high-emitting developing countries will try water down the work on emission-cutting measures and keep out strong messages on things like the need to phase out fossil fuels,” he told Climate Home.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Megan Rowling)

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seventh Assessment Report can and must be ready in time for the second Global Stocktake (GST).

The IPCC report plays a pivotal role in assessing climate change science and informing government decisions, especially in the context of multilateral negotiations. 

The GST is a key element of the Paris Agreement, designed to evaluate the world’s progress towards long-term climate goals. It must be conducted “in the light of equity and the best available science,” underscoring the importance of IPCC assessments as a primary input for the GST.

As an IPCC author from the Global South, I believe that ensuring the IPCC cycle aligns with GST timelines is crucial for maintaining the integrity of international climate cooperation. 

Efforts to enhance the inclusion of developing country voices should be prioritized over inordinate delays, which could risk the irrelevance of the IPCC report for the second Global Stocktake – taking place in 2028.

Concerns over accelerating process

A delayed production at the three IPCC working groups—which craft three reports covering the physical science of climate change, impacts and adaptation, and mitigation— is being justified under three main arguments.

First, those in favour of delaying the report claim that expediting the process could risk a lack of representation of underrepresented communities. A delay may impact the inclusion of voices from the Global South and non-English speakers, reducing the diversity of perspectives essential for a comprehensive assessment.

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Another argument is that the topics covered in the report could also be reduced in range. Ensuring a broad array of topics is vital for addressing the multifaceted nature of climate change and providing a holistic understanding.

Finally, delays would risk spreading out key messages from the different IPCC working groups. Timely integration of insights from the different working groups is crucial for a cohesive and comprehensive assessment.

Measures for inclusion 

The IPCC’s role is to provide credible scientific assessments to the UNFCCC process and national decision-makers. Time constraints may lead to some compromises, but it is better to minimize these than to forego IPCC input entirely. The IPCC must ensure its assessments are available in time for the second GST to maintain its relevance and impact on global climate policy-making.

On the inclusion of underrepresented communities, ensuring representation is more about deliberate efforts than merely the time available. Creating networks for southern scholars, facilitating special issues in academic journals, and convening regional meetings can enhance representation.

Delegates convene in a huddle on the fourth day of IPCC-61 in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photo: IISD/ENB | Anastasia Rodopoulou

Focused attention on these efforts in the next IPCC cycle is more effective than strictly adhering to traditional timelines. My experience as an IPCC author from the Global South indicates that inclusion results from proactive initiatives rather than extended timelines.

Successive IPCC cycles have increasingly included literature from developing regions and better represented perspectives from the Global South. For instance, AR6 highlighted issues of equity, impacts on vulnerable communities, and development pathways relevant to developing countries.

Without IPCC input, the GST may lack essential Southern perspectives. The direction of travel within the IPCC has been towards greater concern for under-represented regions, countries, and research communities. Removing IPCC input risks losing an important source of southern perspectives.

No risk of losing quality

Accelerating the cycle by a few months does not significantly compromise the report’s robustness. Past assessments have been completed within five to six years, and with urgency, drafting and expert reviews can be slightly expedited.

Reviews by governments remain crucial to the science-policy interface. The effective time required for a single working group report is approximately four years from the call for experts for the scoping meeting. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, it is feasible to shorten the drafting and review process by a few months without compromising the quality.

Concerns about topic range and integration can be mitigated through proper planning of publications and coordinated efforts across working groups. Modifying the assessment report process to be more flexible is preferable to rendering the IPCC policy irrelevant. Appropriate planning can achieve a significant degree of integration, even if not perfect.

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Designing the IPCC cycle in ways that prevent input to the GST risks undercutting an essential element of international cooperation—providing scientific assessment to political decision-makers.

Concerns about the under-representation of developing country voices are legitimate but can be better addressed by redoubling efforts to enhance these voices in the IPCC, rather than through delay. Ensuring timely IPCC input to the second GST is essential for effective global action on climate change and for the voices of developing countries to be adequately represented.

This opinion piece is adapted from a letter written by Dr Sokona and 39 other IPCC authors from developing countries ahead of the IPCC’s plenary session in Sofia, Bulgaria

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As governments met in Switzerland to approve the report, a group led by Saudi Arabia pushed for an emphasis on sucking carbon out of the atmosphere through carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

But a group of mainly European nations pushed for the report to emphasise the role of wind and solar power in fighting climate change and note how much cheaper it has got recently.

Government influence

The IPCC synthesis report summarises the latest scientific knowledge on climate change.

Alongside the full report, the IPCC publishes a shorter document called the “summary for policy-makers” which is approved by governments at a week-long session in the Swiss city of Interlaken.

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Although the scientists who wrote the report are in the room to push back, government negotiators regularly try to lobby for the inclusion of their priorities in the text. The report needs to be approved line-by-line.

Cost-effectiveness

A think tank called IISD is the only organisation allowed to report on the talks.

According to their summary, a group of European nations wanted the report to say that solar and wind electricity “is now cheaper than energy from fossil fuels in many regions”.

Germany said this sentence was of “paramount” importance but, according to IISD, Saudi Arabia “strongly opposed inclusion of the sentence”.

IPCC highlights rich nations’ failure to help developing world adapt to climate change

The Bahamas’ representative called for the report to say specifically that CCS technology, unlike wind and solar, is not getting cheaper.

But Saudi Arabia pushed back, saying that CCS and CDR are “in fact unavoidable”.

The paragraph they were debating ended up referring to “sustained decreases” in the cost of solar, wind and batteries without mentioning CCS or CDR.

Carbon capture

While CDR sucks carbon out of the general atmosphere, CCS sucks it out of a polluting source like a power plant’s smoke-stack.

Lili Fuhr, from the Center for International Environmental Law, told Climate Home that CCS was the “first line of defence” for the fossil fuel economy.

Saudi Arabia has a history of promoting CCS in IPCC reports and in UN climate talks.

In April 2022, it successfully lobbied for a stronger emphasis on CCS in the IPCC’s report on solutions to climate change.

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When Germany tried to reduce the emphasis on CCS in one paragraph and called for the inclusion of more information on the limits of the technology, Saudi Arabia pushed back.

According to IISD, the oil-reliant nation said “any additional context on CCS should include benefits”.

In an extensive footnote, the final report notes that implementation of CCS currently faces “technological, economic, institutional, ecological-environmental and socio-cultural barriers”.

It describes CCS as a “mature technology” for gas processing and enhanced oil recovery, but less so in the power, cement and chemicals sectors “where it is a critical mitigation option”.

The report says CCS deployment should be sped up to help the world limit global warming to 1.5-2C.

Carbon removal role

CDR, which is less linked to high-carbon industry and fossil fuels than CCS, was supported by a broader range of countries.

IISD reports that France and Germany “cautioned that CDR deployment at scale is unproven and risky” and “asked for more detail on their limits and risks”. Mexico, Kenya and Bolivia also raised concerns about CDR’s role.

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But Saudi Arabia and China fought to have the document describe the technology as necessary to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than humans are emitting.

Switzerland, which hosts CDR company Climeworks, argued that CDR may be required “for hard to reduce emissions”.

Japan, New Zealand and the Netherlands also defended the report’s emphasis on the role of CDR technology.

The final report says “CDR will be necessary to achieve net-negative Co2 emissions”.

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Duncan Mclaren is a climate intervention fellow at University College Los Angeles who has criticised previous reports for skirting over the limitations of CDR.

He said this report treats it better. But he said it still gives too great a sense of possibility of the future role of CDR, “even as it very clearly calls for accelerated, immediate emissions cuts”.

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Representatives of countries from an array of different regions, including Africa, Asia, Latin America and small island states, pushed to be singled out as particularly vulnerable.

Tanzania and Timor-Leste asked that the world’s poorest countries, known as least developed countries (LDCs), be added to a list of impacted communities, according to a report of the meeting by think-tank IISD.

Africa and small island developing states (Sids) were nearly cut out of one section on vulnerabilities, the IISD report says, and replaced by a reference to “developing and least developed countries”.

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But there was a strong push from many delegates to retain them, particularly as most of those regions’ representatives had already left the talks to approve the report, as they had to catch flights home from Switzerland.

Mexico and Chile wanted to add Latin America to the list of regions that are particularly vulnerable while India wanted Asia included, according to IISD’s report.

The final document lists Africa, Sids, LDCs, Central and South America, Asia and the Arctic as particularly vulnerable.

The benefits of vulnerability

What makes some communities more vulnerable than others is not just physical factors like sea level rise but also social factors like poverty, governance, building standards and infrastructure.

This makes naming specific parts of the world as vulnerable a politically sensitive topic.

The inclusion of the Arctic as one of the most climate vulnerable places in the world, for example, was significant because it came just days after the US approved the hugely controversial Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s north slope.

There are various reasons for wanting to be named as vulnerable, including global recognition and better access to climate finance.

Last year’s Cop27 climate talks agreed that a new fund for climate victims should be targeted at countries who are “particularly vulnerable” to climate change.

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Samoan ambassador Fatumanava-o-Upolu III Dr. Pa’olelei Luteru, who chairs the alliance of small island states (Aosis), said making specific note of the risks to these islands was “imperative in the context of climate justice”.

“The fact is that we are already facing devastating losses and damages of great magnitude, and funds we should be investing into sustainable development initiatives must be diverted to help us cope with climate change impacts,” he said.

IPCC highlights rich nations’ failure to help developing world adapt to climate change

But recognising growing impacts also gives states the responsibility of acting on them.

Jörn Birkmann researches climate vulnerability at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and was coordinating lead author of one of the underlying IPCC reports.

He told Climate Home: “It seems like governments fear that if their country is not mentioned, they could receive less support (e.g. global adaptation funds),”

He added: “Or vice versa; if they are mentioned it might lead to a stigmatisation or might raise questions about the role of governance.”

Measuring vulnerability

Birkmann said studies on human vulnerability all point to the same global hotspots, particularly Africa.

But even though many governments acknowledge this, there are significant tensions when measuring and mapping human vulnerability.

“It is still difficult in [a summary for policymakers report] to name specific global regions that are more vulnerable than others,” he said.

“The synthesis report is mentioning some regions, but it seems to be much easier for governments to agree on general sentences, rather than pointing to areas or countries where such deficits are evident.”

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Although it misses a lot of nuance about who is vulnerable, Birkmann welcomes the fact that the report recognises global hotspots, “since the success of adaptation and resilience building also depends on the starting point communities and countries have”.

He believes adaptation strategies should not just focus on physical phenomena and climatic hazards such as storms, but also on structures and interventions that reduce human vulnerability, such as poverty reduction, education or fighting corruption – the latter being “a very controversial topic in the political arena”.

Furthermore, when new financial mechanisms for loss and damage agreed at Cop27 are being put into practice, he said it would be helpful to define adaptation goals, not just those on emission reduction.

“These goals should also take into account the very different starting points of regions/countries/communities to build resilience,” he said.” The level of human vulnerability might be such a benchmark of the different starting points.”

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The report states that “attention to equity and broad and meaningful participation” can build “social trust” and so “deepen and widen support for transformative changes.”

To put that in non-IPCC language; in climate policy, people matter. The kind of radical social changes supported – demanded – by this report simply won’t happen without the consent and participation of citizens around the world.

But reports, however brilliant, however terrifying, don’t inspire action. That falls to us, as citizens, led by our governments around the world.

For many years, this critical part of the climate change response has been strangely ignored. Socially marginalised and economically vulnerable citizens, and those who are more impacted by changing temperatures, remain excluded from the conversation.

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Rebellions against climate policies emerge as a result. Governments pay lip-service to the idea of communicating with and engaging citizens. But as the Committee on Climate Change has recognised in the UK, there’s rarely a plan for how to do it.

Governments around the world actually have a formal duty – embedded in article 6 of the UNFCCC – to educate their citizens on climate change, involve them in policymaking and ensure they have all the necessary information.

The UNFCCC’s Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) is made up of six elements: education, training, public awareness, public participation, public access to information and international cooperation. These six principles are all core to public engagement, and most importantly to holding governments accountable.

States are legally obliged to implement many of elements of ACE, but many are not aware of it yet. It is vital that we continue to make the case to them about the importance of public engagement if we are to avert climate breakdown.

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Governments are important not just as policymakers, but educators. Today’s report specifically flags the importance of “education including capacity building, climate literacy, and information provided through climate services and community approaches” to “heighten risk perception and accelerate behavioural changes and planning”.

What does that mean in practice? Providing more and more frightening information about the coming impacts of climate change can just as easily be overwhelming and despair-inducing as helpful.

So what we need instead are bold, positive campaigns that support feelings of ‘efficacy’ – giving people that feeling that it’s possible to do something on climate change, and that that something has the potential to make a difference. This applies, for example, to campaigns around getting football fans talking about and pledging action on climate change, changing travel behaviours, or getting involved with Fridays for Future.

Climate change communications shows that people take action when they see their values, identities and concerns reflected in the story being told, and are able to observe and hear about their peers taking action.

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Citizens who are going to change their lives need to be supported to do so in communities of collective action, whether that’s with communities in big cities boosting access to green spaces or social housing tenants leading the conversation on housing retrofit.

Achieving this isn’t easy. At the government level, doing this right means bringing together social science, communication and policy experts alongside businesses and citizens involved in tackling climate change in their lives and communities. It means making public engagement a core function of government, and funding it properly. It means introducing climate policy that treats everyone as they should be treated.

It’s a big challenge. But attitudes towards – and concern about – climate change is changing rapidly. Climate Outreach’s research shows that people are hungry for change and aware of the need for profound social transformation, but in many cases desperately seeking support and information about how they can be involved. Turbo-charging public engagement means pushing at an open door.

I’ll end with some more words from IPCC: “Climate resilient development is advanced when actors work in equitable, just and inclusive ways to reconcile divergent interests, values and worldviews, toward equitable and just outcomes.”

Pulling people together to take action on climate change requires a true bottom up, listening, participatory approach to working with different people across societies. Achieving this isn’t the job of the scientists. They’ve done their job. Now governments and all of us need to do ours.

Robin Webster leads on advocacy communications for UK-based NGO Climate Outreach, a team of social scientists and communications specialists which aims to build a social mandate for climate action

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“Current global financial flows for adaptation are insufficient for, and constrain implementation of, adaptation options, especially in developing countries”, the scientists report says.

Wealthy governments have failed to provide $100 billion of climate finance a year they promised to developing countries by 2020, with the US responsible for the vast majority of the shortfall.

Finance for adapting to climate change – rather than cutting emissions – has been particularly low.

At Cop26 in 2021, all countries agreed that developed nations would double their adaptation finance by 2025 on 2019 levels and a group of self-proclaimed “champions” has been set up to try to implement this.

Adaptation becomes harder

The IPCC’s scientists warned time for adaptation action is rapidly running out because measures will increasingly become ‘constrained and less effective’ as temperatures rise.

When countries can no longer adapt to climate change, they will suffer devastating loss and damage as a consequence of escalating climate-related hazards like heatwaves, droughts and storms.

The United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) estimates $340 billion will be needed every year for adaptation, but only about 7% of climate finance flows are currently spent in that direction.

‘A huge injustice’

Aditi Mukherji, one of the authors of the report, told Climate Home that the lack of funding forces low-income countries into further debt.

Seventy-one percent of public climate finance was provided through loans in 2020, with grants having much smaller role, according to the latest assessment by the OECD.

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“It is a huge injustice”, Mukherji said. “Least developed countries and coastal communities who have not caused the problem are now having to take loans to solve the problem. It makes hardly any sense.”

The IPCC report summarises the state of knowledge of climate change science, its impacts and risks and the progress made on mitigation and adaptation. The text was approved by all member governments after a week-long session in Switzerland.

Insufficient climate action

Scientists say the pace and scale of what has been done so far, and current plans, are insufficient to tackle climate change.

While highlighting the lack of money for adaptation, the report also says climate finance also needs to increase ‘many-fold’ for emissions-cutting measures in order to achieve climate goals.

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Despite absorbing the overwhelming majority of the money pot, funding for measures to cut emissions still falls short of the levels needed to limit warming to 1.5°C across all sectors and regions.

“Adaptation and mitigation are closely interlinked,” Mukherji said. “Unless we reduce our emissions now we are locked in a cycle of irreversible impacts”.

“We cannot think we can continue to emit, make the planet warmer and those who are affected will continue to adapt. That is not going to happen. Adaptation will always have some limits.”

Adaptation limits reached

The report says some tropical, coastal, polar and mountain ecosystems have already reached hard adaptation limits. That means any action becomes unfeasible to avoid risks. An example is when a small island becomes uninhabitable due to sea level rises and lack of freshwater.

The IPCC has also found ‘increased evidence’ of maladaption, which occurs when measures backfire and increase vulnerabilities.

Mukherji says there is a need for a less technocratic approach. “The most appropriate actions need to be decided by those who are most affected. You cannot go from outside and impose views on the communities,” she said.

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The study published in the journal Nature found that a typical 1.5C energy transition model expects nations like China, India and South Africa to get off coal faster than any country has ever got off any energy source before.

But these models ask for much slower reductions in oil and gas – fuels that tend to be produced and used more in wealthy countries.

The study’s lead author Greg Muttitt told Climate Home that these models are amplified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) scientific reports and guide decision-makers’ policies across the world.

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“The models currently are asking so much more of India and South Africa than they are of Canada and France and that’s a problem”, he said.

What are these models?

To work out how to limit global warming to 1.5C, academics make integrated assessment models (Iams). They use formulas and spreadsheets to model factors like how much forest must be saved, how quickly cars must become electric and how fast use of different fossil fuels must drop.

The IPCC takes these models and puts them in its regular reports, which are then signed-off by governments. With this stamp of approval from governments and scientists, the findings of these reports become benchmarks for decision-makers across the world.

Muttitt, who worked with University College London-based modellers on the study, said that estimates tend to be based in rich nations and to therefore have subconscious biases.

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Modellers based in the UK, he said, will be aware of the factors limiting how fast polluting vehicles can be replaced with electric ones. “You will be more sensitised to that than you will the difficulties of closing down a coal power plant in India,” he adds.

What do the models say about coal?

Last year, the IPCC published a report based on the models, concluding that to limit global warming to 1.5C coal use should fall by nearly three-quarters between 2020 and 2030 while oil and gas use goes down by around a tenth.

The modelled transition away from coal is even faster in the power system. The IPCC says coal use for electricity should fall 88% between 2020 and 2030.

Muttitt’s study compared this scenario with previous rapid energy transitions like South Korea’s move away from oil after the 1973 Opec crisis and the USA’s transition away from coal during its 2010s boom in home-grown fracked gas, but results were not realistic.

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He found that, to reach an 88% fall, coal-reliant nations like China, India and South Africa would have to move off the fossil fuel twice as fast as the previous world records, relative to the size of their energy systems.

“This raises questions about socio-political feasibility,” the study says. It adds that coal phase-out dates of 2030 for wealthy countries and 2050 for developing ones are better targets as they are “difficult but possible”.

What limits the speed of coal phase-out?

Coal tends to be dug up and burned for power in geographically concentrated areas, where the fuel happens to be abundant. The communities in these areas come to rely on coal for their local economy.

Environmentalists in South Africa’s coal heartland told Climate Home recently that coal “is the backbone of our economy” and so, despite their concern for climate change, they were wary of a rushed, unfair transition away from the fuel.

Avantika Goswami, the climate change lead at Indian think-tank the Centre for Science and Environment, said renewables must be paired with grid-scale battery storage and that “currently grid-scale battery storage can’t compete yet with coal-based power in terms of cost”.

She added that, for developing countries, borrowing money to invest in renewables is more expensive than for richer nations.

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But Pieter de Pous, head of E3G’s fossil fuel transition programme, said that emerging economies could break previous records. “Lets not rule out the [Global] South being able to go faster than anyone thinks is conceivable”, he said.

He said that Europe’s experience is there is no trade-off between a fast transition away from coal and a fair one. Spain and Portugal had phased coal out fast while looking after coal communities, he said.

IPCC author Joeri Rogelj agreed that the transition could happen faster than previous examples “because there is a fundamental difference dynamic between accidental emissions reductions in the past that happened as a side effect of societal disaster and disruption, and targeted policy driven emissions reductions that set out a positive development path over multiple decades”.

He added: “The same differences exist for the pace of technology phase-outs and therefore require careful consideration.”

What do models say about oil and gas?

If coal is phased out slower than the IPCC envisions then oil and gas will have to be phased out faster to meet the 1.5C target. Muttitt suggests oil and gas should be phased out 50% faster than the IPCC’s figures propose.

This would place more responsibility on rich nations like the US and Europe. In particular, the use of oil to power cars, trucks and ships would have to fall particularly fast.

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“The pace of oil and gas phase out is very gentle in these models,” said Muttitt, “and it’s very gentle because a lot of the work of emissions reduction is done by phasing out coal”.

Only a handful of nations have promised to stop producing oil and gas. At Cop27, a group of producers including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia blocked a commitment to phase out all fossil fuels.

Why are models important?

It’s hard to prove a link between these models and real-world decisions but climate policy, particulary in rich countries, has prioritised global reductions in coal use over oil and gas.

In climate talks, coal has been singled out. As Cop26 hosts, the UK said the summit was about “coal, cars, cash and trees”. At the summit, governments committed to phasing down coal use but did not mention oil or gas.

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Many big and wealthy nations, multilateral development banks and private banks ended finance for overseas coal before they ended it for oil and gas. China, Japan and South Korea all announced in 2021 they would end support for overseas coal but have yet to extend this to oil and gas.

Only a handful of nations have joined an initative, led by Denmark and Costa Rica, to end oil and gas production.

This article was updated on 20th February to include Joeri Rogelj’s comments.

The post Study: IPCC asks emerging countries to drop coal faster than rich nations did appeared first on Climate Home News.

Yet there has been little discussion at an international level on how to handle “overshoot” of those goals. A high-powered commission due to launch in May aims to break the silence.

Climate diplomats are finalising a 15-strong lineup of former presidents, ministers and representatives of international organisations to explore options for deep adaptation, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and geoengineering, Climate Home News can reveal.

The Climate Overshoot Commission will address sensitive questions around the ethics and feasibility of potential ways to reverse warming that are problematic or unproven at large scale.

“The primary strategy to combat climate change should remain reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it has also become necessary to explore additional strategies,” Jesse Reynolds, executive secretary of the commission, told Climate Home.

France’s Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organisation between 2005 and 2013, has been appointed as chair. He is president of the Paris Peace Forum, which will host the commission.

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The idea for a commission to assess climate engineering options was floated in 2017 by Edward Parson, professor of environmental law at the University of California.

Parson became one of 11 on a steering committee of politicians, policymakers and academics to shape what the commission should look like. Among them, five were from developing countries, including Cop27 host Egypt’s environment minister Yasmine Fouad, former Marshall Islands president Hilda Heine and Youba Sokona, vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Paris Agreement architect Laurence Tubiana and Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance (C2G) Initiative, were other members.

“How will the world manage the risk of temperature overshoot? That is the question that nobody is talking about,” Pasztor told Climate Home. “There isn’t enough attention paid to the magnitude of the risk for removing the huge amount of carbon dioxide that will keep us to 1.5C.”

With the latest science showing overshoot of 1.5C, if not 2C, is highly likely, the moment for that conversation may have arrived.

Pakistan’s tree-planting ambition in doubt after Imran Khan’s exit

A paper published in Nature last week gives a 6-10% probability of reaching without exceeding the 1.5C threshold, even assuming all climate commitments to 2030 and mid-century are met.

In theory, global temperatures can be pulled back by sucking carbon out of the atmosphere through biological solutions such as reforestation and technological ones like direct air capture. But tree planting competes with food production for land and carbon capture technology is energy-hungry and expensive.

The latest report from the IPCC concluded sucking carbon dioxide from the air is “necessary” to achieve net zero emissions and “an essential element” to limit heating below 2C by the end of the century.

While no substitute for deep and urgent emissions cuts, carbon dioxide removals are needed to counterbalance residual emissions from hard-to-abate sectors such as aviation, agriculture and some industrial processes.

Five billion tonnes of CO2 would need to be removed each year by 2050 for a 66% chance to limit warming below 2C, under one IPCC scenario, scaling up to 13bn by the end of the century. Any delay to cutting emissions will further increase reliance on removals to stabilise the climate.

A temporary overshoot of climate goals is dangerous for human societies and ecosystems. “Many human and natural systems will face additional severe risks, compared to remaining below 1.5C,” the IPCC’s impact report warned. Some impacts, such as ice sheet and glacier melt and sea level rise, “will be irreversible”.

Brazil accused of backsliding in updated climate pledge to UN

Despite the presence of CDR in all IPCC scenarios, efforts to scale up the technology are barely getting started.

An initiative co-led by the US, Canada and Saudi Arabia aims to enable a net reduction of 100 million metric tons of CO2 per year globally by 2030. And there are some efforts to support research in the US and in the UK, and develop methodologies to include removals in carbon accounting in the EU.

Silicon Valley is getting in on the act. Earlier this month, online payment processing platform Stripe launched a $925m fund to buy offsets from start-ups that permanently remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2030.

The Frontier fund is financed by Stripe together with Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey. It aims to send a signal to researchers and investors that there is a growing market for these technologies.

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, Stripe’s climate research lead, told Climate Home that understanding what removal technologies could work at scale and driving their cost down was necessary if they are to be used in decades to come.

Elsewhere, Venture capital firm Lowercarbon Capital launched a $350m fund in invest in carbon removal start-ups and Swiss carbon removal company Climeworks raised $650m from institutional investors earlier this month.

“But the private sector can only push things so far,” said Hausfather, suggesting governments help fund research and development of CDR approaches.

Sweden set to be world’s first country to target consumption-based emission cuts

The issue has been largely ignored at UN Climate Change talks.

For Oliver Geden, a lead author of the IPCC report on mitigation and senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, that’s unlikely to change “until there is an acceptance that overshooting 1.5C is unavoidable”.

While “not a magic bullet,” Geden said countries have already said yes to CDR by adopting net zero emissions targets – the “net” being achieved by balancing sources and sinks of emissions.

“I’m of that bottom-up view that countries have a net zero target should and can explore CDR,” he told Climate Home. The alternative top-down approach of sharing out between nations the delivery of removals needed to meet global climate goals brings about considerations of equity and historic responsibility that many wealthy economies are seeking to avoid.

That conversation is uncomfortable for many climate campaigners, who are concerned that a focus on removals is at best a distraction from the need to phase out fossil fuels and roll out clean energy – and at worse a fig leaf for climate inaction.

“We urgently need the weight of global financing to invest in a radical overhaul of our polluting energy, food and industrial systems. But tech bros prefer to throw good money after bad into the carbon removal pipedream, letting polluters continue business-as-usual while appearing green,” Teresa Anderson, climate justice lead at Action Aid International, told Climate Home.

Crypto bubble: The hype machine behind a $70,000 carbon credit

For MJ Mace, a climate negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, there is “a real fear that the pressure comes off emissions reductions” if the issue of removals is pushed too forcefully in the public consciousness.

And yet, if emissions cuts are still lagging behind targets at the end of this decade, “we are going to end up having to rely on CDR on such a huge scale to meet these goals that we are not going to be able to pull it off” unless investment and planning start now, she said. “It’s such a dance.”

If removing carbon from the atmosphere is a sensitive subject, solar radiation management, or geoengineering, is even more so. Still largely in the realm of science fiction, the potential to block the sun’s warming effect by pumping aerosols into the high atmosphere is part of the commission’s mandate.

Pasztor said solar geoengineering is “unbelievably controversial” but leaders have to consider what risks they are willing to take to meet the 1.5C goal.

The Carnegie Climate Governance (C2G) Initiative, which he heads, is hoping to push a resolution on addressing the risks of overshoot at the UN general assembly by 2023.

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The combination of acute shocks to global food systems and a warming climate make for a terrifying and explosive combination. We are seeing the consequences play out right now, as the war in Ukraine will almost certainly trigger a global food crisis with catastrophic consequences for the most vulnerable.

Ukraine and Russia are both agricultural powerhouses, and together account for nearly a third of global wheat and barley exports. 45 African and least developed countries import at least a third of their wheat from Ukraine or Russia, and 18 of those countries import more than half. If the war drags on, countries like Egypt could face food shortages as soon as this summer, triggering what the UN secretary general has warned could become “a hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system”.

Then there’s climate change. One of the most alarming findings in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) recent series of reports is that the climate crisis will increasingly undermine food security and nutrition around the world. The IPCC’s report on climate impacts confirmed that extreme climate events like floods, droughts, and storms have already exposed millions to acute food insecurity and malnutrition.

IPCC: Five takeaways from the UN’s 2022 climate impacts report

Perhaps most ominously, the IPCC warns that climate extremes will increase the risk of simultaneous crop losses in major food-producing regions, with potentially catastrophic consequences for food prices and availability.

This is our new reality: A gradually worsening situation for food and nutrition as temperatures relentlessly rise. It’s the frightening backdrop for the world’s geopolitical and economic developments – any crisis in a critical food-producing area could spell disaster on a global scale.

While it’s likely too late to prevent a food crisis in Ukraine, we can help those who are suffering now while working to aggressively reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and build resilience to future food shocks.

First, we must respond to the growing humanitarian emergency. The World Food Programme’s work is critical and should be fully funded, along with the full UN-wide response.

Second, governments should collectively diagnose the challenges to food security and coordinate their responses. When G7 countries gathered in Brussels in late March, they committed to acting in unison and called for an extraordinary session of the Council of the Food and Agriculture Organization to address the consequences of Russia’s invasion for global food security and agriculture. They should follow through on those commitments.

Sweden set to be world’s first country to target consumption-based emission cuts

Third, critical ecosystems should not be turned into farmland to make up for Ukrainian and Russian food exports. As part of its emergency plan, the EU is considering freeing up fallow and conservation land for increased grain production. The United States Department of Agriculture made the right call when it rejected a request to let farmers plant on land protected through its Conservation Reserve Program. Europeans should follow suit.

Fourth, we can make up for lost food production by minimizing the amount of crops used for animal feed and biofuels. The U.S. uses more than a third of the corn it produces for ethanol to blend with gasoline. The World Resources Institute found that reducing grain currently used for transportation in the US and Europe by 50% this year could make up for the shortfall of Ukrainian wheat, corn, barley, and rye. Let’s prioritize growing crops to feed people, not produce fuel.

Similarly, shifting to more sustainable diets could have a big impact. About a third of global cropland is used to feed livestock. Greenpeace estimates that reducing the use of cereals for animal feed by 8% in the EU would outweigh expected production deficits in Ukraine. And we can make more food available for human consumption by reducing food loss and waste, which accounts for a third of all food produced.

Finally, and most importantly, we need to align our global climate and food goals. A changing climate will require resilience across food systems – from agricultural production to food consumption and waste disposal. At the same time, land offers opportunities to reduce greenhouse gases – from implementing farming practices that sequester carbon in soils to reducing agricultural methane emissions from livestock, rice production and food waste, and cutting nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer overuse.

We are at a pivotal moment. Making the right choices about food – especially the difficult ones – can help minimize human suffering. But if our responses are not aligned with our long-term climate objectives, this food security crisis will not be the last.

Ryan Hobert is the managing director for climate and environment at the United Nations Foundation.

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the third installment of its sixth assessment on the causes, impacts and solutions to the climate crisis last week.

The three-part assessment paints a stark picture of human society’s “unequivocal” role in causing climate change, wreaking “increasingly irreversible losses” and putting the world on track to overshoot a 1.5C warming limit. It also sets out how, with the right policies, governments can substantially cut greenhouse gas emissions and meet global climate goals.

Science has a vital role to play to provide “evidence-based advice” and inform decisionmakers, Corinne Le Quéré, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia and a former IPCC author told a climate conference at the Royal Society in London, UK, on Monday.

Yet, these comprehensive assessments are published every six to seven years because of the time it takes to scope, assess and compile the scientific literature. The next one isn’t due until 2028 – too late for course correction in this critical decade for meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement.

“The IPCC comes and goes away for six, seven years and then comes back… that’s not helpful,” said Le Quéré.  With the scientific literature “exploding”, she said, the IPCC has a role to play to “fill that knowledge gap to 2028″.

Five takeaways from the IPCC’s report on limiting dangerous global heating

On average, 10 papers are published every day on the interaction between climate change and rainfall and two on the implications for wildfires, including weekends and bank holidays, Le Quéré told the meeting, suggesting that technologies such as machine learning will be needed to assess the literature for the next assessment round.

Established indicators such as the carbon budget, global mean temperatures, costs of solutions such as renewable technologies and batteries and assessments of climate impacts could be published without the need for a comprehensive literature review.

“I’m not suggesting there should be a full report every year but the IPCC could come back to say ‘here is where we are at’ every year,” she explained.

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Le Quéré’s research focuses on the interaction of climate change and the carbon cycle, particularly in the oceans. She was an author of the third, fourth and fifth IPCC assessment reports and she instigated the annual publication of the Global Carbon Budget, which assesses emissions every year and what is left of the carbon budget for global temperature benchmarks.

While some established climate indicators, such as the carbon budget, are already updated annually by scientists, the process for doing so is “chaotic” and receives less media attention than the IPCC, she told Climate Home News.

As an advisor to the French and UK governments, Le Quéré hopes that annual updates to some of the key indicators for assessing climate change and society’s response to it will better inform policymakers of the trajectory the planet is headed. She is chair of France’s High Council on Climate and a member of the UK’s Climate Change Committee.

New technologies and digital platforms could also be used to share knowledge and help make the latest science more readily accessible. “I would love for the IPCC to move in that direction,” she said.

As an intergovernmental body, the IPCC would need a mandate from member states to produce annual reports.

Le Quéré and like-minded scientists are scoping out whether a country might sponsor the proposal at the Cop27 climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November or at the UN general assembly. “This is very early days,” she told Climate Home.

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Set up with $340 million of philanthropic funding, the Global Methane Hub will offer grants and technical support to implement the Global Methane Pledge.

Launched by the US and EU at Cop26 climate talks in November, 110 countries have signed up to the pledge to date, committing to collectively reduce their methane emissions by 30% between 2020 and 2030. That is roughly in line with what is needed to keep a 1.5C warming limit within reach, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report on Monday.

Marcelo Mena, the former environment minister of Chile and director of the Climate Action Center at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, will lead the hub.

The first $10 million of funds is earmarked for the UN’s Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), which will work with 30 developed and developing countries to establish plans over the next three years to achieve the 2030 target.

“We’ll be helping all countries who’d like to develop national methane reduction plans, sharing the scientific, technical and regulatory expertise,” Drew Shindell, CCAC’s special advisor for action on methane, told Climate Home News. 

Five takeaways from the IPCC’s report on limiting dangerous global heating 

Methane contributes significantly to global warming. Although it only stays in the atmosphere for around nine years, methane has a warming impact 84 times that of CO2 over a 20-year period. 

A paper in Environmental Research Letters last year found an all-out, rapid effort to slash methane emissions could slow the rate of current warming by 30% and avoid 0.5C of warming by the end of the century. 

Tackling methane provides a “short-term climate win,” Shindell said. “Actions to reduce it can rapidly slow warming whereas decarbonisation provides needed long-term, but not near-term, climate relief.”

The aim is for all these countries to set specific methane targets in their national climate plans, in updates ahead of Cop27 in Egypt this year, Mena told Climate Home News. 

“The quick wins are in the oil and gas sector,” Mena said, while emissions from farming and waste also need attention.

The oil and gas industry could achieve a 75% reduction in methane emissions by 2030 using existing technology, according to the International Energy Agency. And it need not be expensive: the IPCC estimates 50-80% of methane emissions from fossil fuel operations could be slashed at a cost of less than $50 per tonne of CO2 equivalent.

“Inaction on methane is not a technology or science problem, it is very much a political and organisational problem,” said energy analyst Poppy Kalesi. 

Saudi Arabia dilutes fossil fuel phase out language with techno fixes in IPCC report

Rubbish tips are an enormous problem and must be addressed, Mena said. Satellite images show that landfill sites in the US have been leaking methane at rates as much as six times higher than estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency. 

The other major source of methane emissions, responsible for almost 40%, is farming. A cow produces an average of 250-500 litres of methane a day from digesting grass.

The IPCC report said that behaviour and lifestyle changes, such as reducing meat consumption and shifting to plant-based diets, are an important part of the solution. 

“We have a food system that is not healthy for people or the planet,” said Mena. “We need to build the groundwork for transformational change in our food system.” 

Better livestock manure management and changing the diet of livestock could help curb methane emissions from agriculture. There are a host of methane-busting products being trialed, ranging from laboratory-made probiotics to natural additives such as seaweed and charcoal.

Research from the University of California, Davis, for example, has found that feeding seaweed to cows significantly reduced the amount of methane from their burps and farts.

“We need to tackle the neglected sectors of waste management and the food system to reduce methane emissions,” said Mena. 

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s latest report focuses on how to halt global heating below 2C and to 1.5C in line with the Paris Agreement. While it deals with solutions, this is the most politically sensitive part of the IPCC’s three-part assessment.

Publication was delayed by six hours on Monday following a marathon 40-hour session over the weekend for scientists and government representatives to finalise its summary for policymakers – the longest approval plenary in the IPCC’s 34-year history.

The document concludes “a substantial reduction in overall fossil fuel use” is needed to tackle the climate crisis. But compared to earlier drafts, there is a much stronger emphasis on technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide underground (CCS) as a potential solution that extends the lifespan of coal, oil and gas infrastructure.

Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s largest oil producers and exporters, successfully argued for the repeated inclusion of references to CCS, which remains unproven at commercial scale. Opposition from European nations wasn’t enough to prevent a weakening of language on the need to phase out coal, oil and gas.

CCS and other carbon dioxide removal practices have become “the escape hatch for the fossil fuel industry,” one source told Climate Home. The negotiations are closed to media.

Five takeaways from the IPCC’s report on limiting dangerous global heating

Wrangling over this and other issues made the summary longer. In total, 22 pages were added compared to a draft dated 16 March seen by Climate Home News – taking it from 41 to 63 pages.

Language on risks and feasibility concerns about carbon dioxide removal techniques was toned down. References to shifting away from coal, oil and gas were qualified with the word “unabated” and “fossil fuels with CCS” was identified as a way to cut emissions in line with global climate goals.

A whole section was introduced on CCS, describing the technology as “an option” to cut emissions from fossil fuel use and in the industry sector. It notes that CCS has the capacity to store more carbon under ground that what is needed by 2100 to limit warming to 1.5C, albeit with some regional limitations.

And the report makes clear that CCS technology is the way to keep the oil and gas industry alive: “Depending on its availability, CCS could allow fossil fuels to be used longer, reducing stranded assets,” it states.

Saudi Arabia gets more than half its government revenue from the oil and gas sector. In recent years, the Kingdom has promoted the concept of a “circular carbon economy”, advocating for technological solutions that would cut emissions while allowing it to continue to extract and sell its oil for decades to come.

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In the negotiations, Saudi Arabia was isolated on the issue. But its vocal position may have provided cover for others with similar views.

“The US was silent on CCS,” Teresa Anderson, climate justice lead at ActionAid International, told Climate Home. “It really seemed like they were happy to let Saudi Arabia be the bad guys.”

Anderson added: “The IPCC report delivers a clear warning that reliance on technofixes and tree plantations to solve the problem not only amount to wishful thinking, but would drive land conflicts and harm the food, ecosystems and communities  already hardest hit by the climate crisis.”

The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) denounced the outcome of the negotiations as “de-emphasising” the risks and uncertainty of carbon dioxide removal techniques while “overwhelmingly rely[ing] on technologies that pose grave threats to people and the environment”.

“States may water down the text but they cannot mask this clear scientific reality: only a rapid and equitable phaseout of fossil fuels, and the transformation of our energy system, can avoid overshooting 1.5C and the irreparable damage that would follow,” said Nikki Reisch, climate and energy programme director at CIEL.

Breakdown of recent average (downstream) mitigation investment flows and modelled investment needs until 2030 in scenarios likely to limit warming to below 2°. The figure was deleted from the summary for policymakers after a dispute between the US and China (Source: draft IPCC WGIII report)

Another point of contention between the US and China was the scale of the funding gap for developing countries to cut emissions compared to wealthier ones.

The issue flared over a figure detailing the finance gap by sector and for developed and developing countries. It showed that developing countries need on average four to seven times more mitigation finance per year to 2030 to align with pathways that limit warming to below 2C – an upper range of approximately $2.8 trillion.

The US opposed the distinction between developed and developing countries in the graph – a red line for China. The figure was eventually deleted from the summary but remains in the underlying report.

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This is the last of three instalments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sixth assessment report. Together, they provide a complete picture of the causes, consequences and solutions to human-induced climate change. The previous two reports focused on the physical science of climate change and societies and ecosystems’ capacities to adapt and their limits.

This latest report provides a roadmap for how to rapidly reduce emissions in the next three decades under scenarios that put the world on track to limit global heating to below 2C and 1.5C – the Paris Agreement goals.

Here are the key takeaways.

1. We are set to overshoot 1.5C

Global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise in the last decade, albeit at a slower rate than the previous one. That means that the likelihood of limiting warming to 1.5C has declined on average compared to scenarios previously identified by the IPCC.

The world has used more than four fifths of the total carbon budget for a 50/50 chance of limiting global heating to 1.5C.

Without immediate action to cut emissions, that chance is slipping away. Global greenhouse gas emissions would need to peak before 2025 and that is not happening. Based on national climate plans announced prior to the Cop26 summit in November 2021, emission projections for 2030 “make it likely that warming will exceed 1.5C during the 21st century”.

Global temperatures could be reined back by sucking carbon out of the atmosphere through biological solutions such as reforestation and technological ones like direct air capture. But many of these techniques are unproven or problematic at large scale.

Limiting warming below 2C would then rely on “a rapid acceleration of mitigation efforts after 2030”.

Since Cop26, a number of countries have come up with 2030 carbon-cutting plans, but these haven’t significantly changed the global picture. Commitments made by China, Japan and South Korea, announced prior to Cop26, are included in the tally.

“The conclusion remains clear that all [2030 climate plans] together by no means are sufficient for 1.5C and also not for 2C,” Niklas Höhne, of the New Climate Institute, told Climate Home. “ This is why Cop26’s call for countries to update their climate plans in 2022 is so important.”

2. Coal, oil and gas infrastructure has to go

The Afsin-Elbistan lignite-fired power station in Turkey (Photo: Umut Vedat / Greenpeace)

Leaving coal, oil and gas in the ground is necessary to meet the Paris Agreement goals.

By 2019, carbon emissions from fossil fuels and the industry sector were responsible for the largest growth in emissions and 64% of all anthropogenic emissions.

Cutting emissions from the energy sector requires “major transitions” away from the current system, including “a substantial reduction in overall fossil fuel use”.

Existing and planned fossil fuel infrastructure will emit enough over its lifetime to blow past 1.5C warming and push temperature rise to 2C. Replacing fossil fuels with very low or zero-carbon energy sources such as wind and solar power is one of the biggest ways to prevent further warming.

For 1.5C, the use of coal must be virtually eliminated by 2050. Unabated oil consumption falls 60% and gas by 70% compared with 2019. Even with carbon capture and storage, oil and gas consumption is projected to decline 60% and 45% respectively by 2050.

Meanwhile, the expansion of unabated coal, oil and gas must stop. “The continued installation of unabated fossil fuel infrastructure will ‘lock-in’ greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states, making it more difficult to reach global climate goals.

Conversely, in a scenario where warming is held to 2C, $1-4 trillion will be wiped off the value of fossil fuel reserves and associated assets by 2050. Depending on its availability, carbon capture and storage “could allow fossil fuels to be used longer” and reduce stranded assets.

Options to wind down the world’s fossil fuel infrastructure and align the power sector with limiting warming below 2C include decommissioning, retrofitting plants with carbon capture and storage and cancelling new unabated coal installations. Scrapping fossil fuel subsidies could reduce emissions by up to 10% by 2030.

3. Solutions are getting cheaper

Carbon-cutting and low-emissions technologies are becoming cheaper. The cost of solar, wind power and lithium battery technologies have fallen significantly since 2010.

In fact, the economic benefit of limiting warming to below 2C is higher than the cost of action.

Mitigation options costing $100 or less for a tonne of CO2 could reduce emissions by at least half between 2019-2030. These include rolling out solar and wind energy, energy efficiency improvements, reducing deforestation, sequestering carbon in soil and cutting methane emissions.

Half of that potential could be achieved with measures costing less than $20 for every tonne of CO2 cut. These include fitting buildings with efficient appliances, improving energy efficiency in shipping and aviation, shifting to electric vehicles and promoting public transport and cycling.

Some of these measures have economic benefits that outweigh their costs, such as promoting wellbeing and improving living standards.

Options like carbon carbon capture and storage and some forms of ecosystem restoration remain expensive.

The take-up of low emissions technologies is uneven across the world and lags in most developing countries, particularly the poorest.

4. Carbon dioxide removal is ‘unavoidable’

CO2 captured from an incineration plant in Switzerland is being used to boost the production of vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers (Photo: Matjaz Krivic / Climate Visuals Countdown)

To achieve net zero emissions, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is “unavoidable”. Removals are needed to counterbalance residual emissions from hard-to-abate sectors such as aviation, agriculture and some industrial processes.

Carbon capture and storage technology is needed for the industrial sector to reach net zero CO2 emissions. If done right, this could store carbon dioxide permanently in geological formation. But the technology remains underdeveloped and is facing technological, economic and environmental barriers.

And there are risks and uncertainty associated with deploying carbon dioxide removal (CDR) at large scale. A rapid and deep decline of emissions over the next two decades will help reduce the likelihood of overshooting warming limits and the need for removals.

Reforestation, improving forest management and soil carbon sequestration are the only widely deployed CDR methods. But carbon stored that way is vulnerable to being released by human interventions, such as trees being cut down, and natural disturbances such as fires, which can be exacerbated by climate change.

If sustainably managed, forestry and the restoration and protection of ecosystems can deliver large-scale emission reductions as well as co-benefits for biodiversity, food and water security and livelihoods. But competition for land also creates trade-offs which increase with the scale and pace of deployment. These can be avoided through national policies.

To be consistent with limiting warming to below 2C, forest-related mitigation requires annual investments of $400bn a year by 2050.

Carbon dioxide stored underground or removed from the oceans by geochemical processes to reduce acidity is less likely to be released back into the atmosphere, but comes with other risks. The impacts of ocean-based CDR on ecosystems and biodiversity are not well understood.

5. Lifestyle change is part of the solution 

An e-waste recycling and dismantling facility in Rwanda (Photo: Rwands Green Fund/Flickr)

One cost-effective way of reducing emissions is to reduce energy demand. Strategies to do so across all sectors by 2050 could cut emissions 40-70% compared with projections based on current policies.

For policymakers, that means finding new ways to provide citizens with basic services like transport, homes and jobs. These measures can help improve wellbeing and living standards.

For example, investments in public transport, changes in pricing and spatial planning that provide services closer to people’s homes could reduce travel demand in developed countries and slow growth in developing ones.

In the industrial sector that means adopting processes that use low or zero-emission electricity and fuels, preventing waste and establishing systems for recycling, repurposing and reusing materials such as metal, plastic and glass.

Behaviour and lifestyle changes can reduce global emissions of end-use sectors by at least 5% “rapidly” with policy support and enable deeper cuts if supported by improved infrastructure design, particularly in wealthy nations. These include shifting to healthy diets based on plants, reducing food waste and overconsumption, supporting longer-lived and repairable products, turning the heating down, teleworking and car sharing.

The post Five takeaways from the IPCC’s report on limiting dangerous global heating appeared first on Climate Home News.

The figure in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate impacts and adaptation paints a stark picture of the threat facing humanity. It also ventures into sensitive territory.

A map showing how scientists arrived at that number was deemed too misleading and problematic by many national representatives to include in the summary for policymakers. A version of it remains in the underlying report.

It painted much of the African continent red, for “very high” vulnerability, while Caribbean islands threatened by intense hurricanes and sea level rise – but with more money and infrastructure to cope – were depicted as less vulnerable. Australia, where 20 people died recently in extreme flooding, is ranked as one of the safest places to live.

This depiction matters both as a matter of pride – no country wants to be seen as a basket case – and access to resources. Under the UN climate convention, wealthy countries have agreed to provide financing to developing countries, “especially those that are particularly vulnerable”. But there is no agreed method for measuring vulnerability.

While IPCC reports do not prescribe policy, they may influence decisions on which countries merit special treatment.

A map on observed human vulnerability from the draft summary for policymakers of the IPCC sixth assessment report Working Group II, which did not make it into the final version. A similar map was published in the full report

The classification provides “a simplified bird view” of global vulnerability, said Jörn Birkmann, a coordinating lead author of the report, who researches climate vulnerability at the University of Stuttgart in Germany.

It helps show that Micronesia is more vulnerable than Australia, “even though there is a lot of flooding and suffering in Australia. And that’s an important message,” he told Climate Home.

Defining vulnerability is “a political question,” said Richard Klein, a senior researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute. “There is no [single] truth when it comes to vulnerability because there are many different possible interpretations. Indices can tell you whatever you want them to tell you.”

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The IPCC defines vulnerability in its report as “the propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected” and “lack of capacity to cope and adapt”.

The 3.3-3.6 billion figure corresponds to the estimated number of people that live in countries ranked in the two most vulnerable tiers of a five-tier classification system.

Mozambique, Somalia, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Haiti are labelled “very high” vulnerability, while India, Pakistan and the Philippines are in the “high” bracket.

On the flipside, 1.8-2 billion people are estimated to live in countries with low or very low vulnerability. The last category includes the UK, Australia, Canada and Sweden.

“We are not assigning a specific vulnerability label to a specific person. We are not saying that all people in Chad or Afghanistan are vulnerable,” explained Birkmann.

Rather, the authors looked at each country’s resilience as a whole, judged more by development criteria than climatic conditions.

China plans huge wind and solar power rollout in Gobi desert

The classification is based on indicators from the INFORM Risk Index and the World Risk Index, which cover factors such as access to basic infrastructure and health care, nutrition, extreme poverty levels, literacy rates, inequality, governance and perception of corruption.

It does not take into account exposure to sea level rise, storms, heat stress or floods. Nor does it include projected risks. That reflects a lack of consensus on how to compare the severity of various climate hazards.

Some countries expressed concerns the national averaging couldn’t account for differences within countries. Others considered criteria on governance and corruption as policy prescriptive and biased towards wealthy nations.

Debra Roberts, who co-chaired the IPCC’s work on climate impacts and adaptation, defended the approach. As head of the sustainable and resilient city initiatives unit at eThekwini municipality, the local government body for Durban, in South Africa, she understands the policy implications.

The vulnerability assessment was useful “in that it gives us a sense of the scale of the problem,” she told Climate Home. And while the map relies on a small set of indices, it talks to “a much broader narrative that some of our foundations are simply at risk”.

Swap Russian gas for renewables, EU tells member states

The IPCC acknowledges the limits of this national level assessment of vulnerability, noting that there are highly vulnerable groups in low vulnerability countries.

For example, in Northern America, urban ethnic minorities, immigrants and indigenous peoples are more likely to live in climate danger zones. Poor households and elderly people in Europe are more vulnerable to flooding and heat stress.

While important, these vulnerable demographics do not make a fundamental difference to the global picture, Birkmann said.

Countries like the US, Germany and the UK have the funding and institutional capacity to reduce these groups’ vulnerability, he added. “That’s not the case in Somalia.”

For Klein, having resources and capacity to respond to climate disaster doesn’t necessarily mean a government will put them to best use.

“I think it would be helpful to be much more differentiated about what it is that actually makes people vulnerable, not countries. And to help design adaptation strategies that lift people out of vulnerability. And that’s a different story,” he said.

The post Mapping vulnerability: why the IPCC’s geography of climate risk is contentious appeared first on Climate Home News.

In its first report on climate impacts since 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says some impacts are already “irreversible” and that 3.3-3.6 billion people live in “contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change” – a total that is projected to rise.

The report notes there is “very high confidence” that climate change has adversely affected the mental health of people in assessed regions. 

Mental health challenges, including anxiety, stress and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), are predicted to increase as temperatures continue to rise and people experience more extreme weather events, the IPCC scientists said. Children, adolescents, elderly people and those with underlying health conditions are particularly vulnerable to mental health risks associated with climate change. 

“It is a huge step that we see mental health mentioned for the first time in the most influential report on climate change,” Gesche Huebner, lecturer in sustainable and healthy built environments at University College London, told Climate Home News. “Climate change is the biggest mental health threat in the decades to come,” she said. 

UN report shows us human costs of climate failure 

Scientists expressed “high confidence” that there is an association between high temperatures and worsening mental health. Mental health outcomes associated with high temperatures include suicide, psychiatric hospital admissions, and experiences of anxiety, depression and acute stress. 

“There is a lot of research linking higher temperatures to psychiatric admissions, but we need more evidence for the causal mechanisms,” Susan Clayton, one of the lead authors of the health chapter in the IPCC report and professor of psychology at the College of Wooster in Ohio, told Climate Home News. “We don’t yet have good data to say what the exact link is.”

According to a report by Imperial College’s Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, people with a pre-existing mental illness, particularly psychosis, have a two to three times higher risk of death during heatwaves than people without.

Hotter temperatures can impact blood flow, affect how well medication works, worsen sleep and increase conflict in society. These factors all increase mental health risks, Emma Lawrance, co-author of the report and a mental health innovations fellow at Imperial College London, told Climate Home News. 

Exposure to extreme weather events, such as floods and hurricanes, can lead to a wide range of mental health problems, including depression and PTSD, according to the IPCC report. “[These events] are often very stressful and traumatic, [resulting] in ongoing changes to communities and forcing people to move from their homes,” said Lawrance. 

For every one person affected physically during a disaster, 40 people are affected psychologically, according to the Grantham Institute report. 

Invasion tears Ukraine’s climate community away from life’s work

To help people cope in the aftermath of an extreme event, countries should invest in providing “psychological first aid” and bolstering emotional resilience within vulnerable communities, said Clayton. “People who are not mental health professionals can be trained to provide that.” Investing in physical infrastructure, such as emergency shelters, can also help people feel safer and “better mentally” ahead of an event hitting, she said. 

According to the IPCC report, there is less scientific evidence that anxiety about the climate crisis, also known as solastalgia, leads to an increase in mental health problems. 

“There is lots of evidence that people are concerned, worried and fearful about climate change, but does it affect their mental health? Just being anxious about climate does not mean you have a mental illness,” said Clayton. 

While the research focus on the topic has increased in the western world, there are major data gaps across Africa, Asia and South America – regions where many communities are highly vulnerable to extreme weather. In many countries, mental illness is stigmatised and suicides may not be logged, said Huebner. “That is a huge issue… It will take quite some time to overcome this. It is really important to work with the countries in question on this.” 

The post IPCC report spotlights mental health impacts of climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

Exceeding 1.5C of warming would cause further irreversible harm – from which full recovery is impossible.

The devastating impacts over shooting 1.5C include species extinction, loss of entire ecosystems on land and in the oceans, and ever more extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, heatwaves and fires that endanger water resources, ecosystems, and livelihoods.

It also poses the risk of triggering tipping points and feedbacks in the climate system that would accelerate the climate crisis.

Some in the scientific community are grasping for technological fixes in the field of climate geoengineering – unproven, high-risk technologies: carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM).

Interest in such high-risk technologies has grown in some government circles and, even more notably, in polluting industries such as the fossil fuel industry, mining, aviation – as well as in Silicon Valley.

However, the latest IPCC report finds they could trigger catastrophic events, particularly in vulnerable parts of the world and would introduce a range of new, egregious hazards to people and ecosystems.

IPCC: UN report shows us human costs of climate failure

Large-scale technological CDR jeopardises ecosystems, biodiversity, food and water security, livelihoods and land rights, in particular for indigenous people and local communities. The 2018 special report on 1.5C cautioned against heavy reliance on CDR, strongly questioning its social and environmental feasibility.

CDR also faces limitations to its effectiveness: the last IPCC report, published in August, found that CO2 removals will partially be counteracted by CO2 release from oceans and land reservoirs, and only a smaller fraction actually remains out of the atmosphere. Uncertainties around permanent storage further undercuts CDR’s effectiveness in reversing temperature overshoot.

Risks of triggering tipping points and feedbacks, such as permafrost thawing and forest ecosystem degradation, drastically increase at warming levels beyond 1.5C, further reducing the ability to return from an overshoot.

Finally, other dramatic changes in the global climate system would not be reversed, but continue for centuries to millennia, such as rising sea levels that threaten the existence of small island states and low-lying coastal areas, and the millions of people in those areas.

IPCC: Five takeaways from the UN’s 2022 climate impacts report

Some are proposing to deploy solar geoengineering (SRM) to reduce temperature overshoot.

The IPCC has consistently warned about the severe risks and potentially catastrophic impacts of a large-scale manipulation of the climate system. The most recent IPCC report warns in its summary for policymakers that SRM approaches “introduce a widespread range of new risks to people and ecosystems, which are not well understood”.

SRM comes with severe risks of disrupting regional and seasonal rainfall patterns, ozone depletion, ocean acidification, and other known and unknown adverse side-effects.

Because SRM would only “mask” temperature rise and not address the root cause of the problem, a sudden termination would induce a rapid acceleration of climate change – a so-called “termination shock.” Adaptation would be impossible for many species and ecosystems.

Opposition to SRM continues to grow outside of the IPCC: over 240 leading international scientists have called for a solar geoengineering non-use agreement that would effectively prevent SRM from being further developed.

Opposition is also building on the ground: a recent SRM equipment test over indigenous territory in Kiruna, Sweden, was cancelled after vocal opposition by the Saami Council and environmental groups, who deem climate manipulation to be fundamentally incompatible with indigenous cosmology.

Revealed: How rich and at-risk nations fought over science of climate impacts

The only sensible conclusion to be drawn is that we must, by all means possible, urgently embark on trajectories that avoid an overshoot of 1.5C and climate breakdown.

No doubt, time is running out: IPCC working group I stated that the 1.5C limit is going to be breached in the early 2030s under most emissions scenarios. Yet, the 1.5C limit is imperative, and bold, resolute, swift measures to embark on climate-just pathways can limit the climate crisis and its deleterious impacts.

This means a rapid and comprehensive phase-out all fossil fuels – oil, gas, and coal – led by rich producing countries in the global north, and needs to happen much earlier than projected in many mitigation scenarios.

Further pathways to social and climate justice will include democratic energy systems running 100% on solar and wind, public transportation, agroecological transformations of our food systems, reductions in energy and resource consumption in the affluent global north, and a restoration and regeneration of the world’s vitally important ecosystems, protecting communal land rights, in particular by indigenous peoples and local communities.

Dangerous fantasies for hacking the climate is the epitome of climate injustice: They distract from the urgency to act on safe, proven, and viable strategies now. It’s a diversionary tactic for the fossil fuel industry to continue polluting, and it risks exacerbating climate chaos.

Linda Schneider is a senior programme officer on international climate policy at the Heinrich Böll Foundation. 

The post High-risk geoengineering technologies won’t reverse climate breakdown appeared first on Climate Home News.

As Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine and explosions of military artillery resonated across the capital Kyiv on Thursday, “we woke up in a different world,” she told Climate Home News from her flat in the south of the city.

A senior scientist of applied climatology who introduced climate models to Ukraine, Krakovska was leading an 11-strong delegation in the negotiations to approve the “summary for policymakers” that accompanies the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate impacts.

This was the first time Ukraine was represented by such a large delegation, allowing experts to bring their regional perspective from Europe’s largest country (aside from Asia-straddling Russia). “Before, I was alone,” Krakovska said.

As Russian troops advanced towards the capital, the survival of Ukraine as a sovereign state and the completion of the IPCC report both became critical for Krakovska.

“As long as we have internet and no bombs over our head, we will continue to work,” she recalled telling the plenary of the IPCC meeting on Thursday. But the fighting intensified, and when rockets hit the city, the delegation was forced to withdraw from the discussions.

“It is not possible to make science when you are under attack,” she said. “I’m sad that instead of presenting key findings of this report in Ukraine, we need to fight for the existence of our country.”

IPCC: Five takeaways from the UN’s 2022 climate impacts report

A mother of four, Krakovska was born in Kyiv and has decided to stay in the city with her family.

A war in Europe in 2022 “is not acceptable” but “we don’t panic, we stay strong,” she said, visibly moved during a Zoom interview.

Krakovska says there is “a very direct connection” between climate change and the war. “Russia has a lot of money from fossil fuels and these fossil fuels make this war possible.”

Issues of water scarcity in eastern and southern Ukraine are also likely to have played a role, she said. Access to water supplies in the Russian-occupied Crimea became a major issue and led to increased concerns of Russian military threats following widespread drought in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Krakovska said that 10 of the last 12 years had seen below normal precipitation levels. In 2020, water levels in Ukraine’s rivers and reservoirs hit their lowest levels since record began in 1885.

In the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, where Russian-backed separatist forces have been in conflict with the Ukrainian military since 2014, water woes were exacerbated by shelling and damage to infrastructure.

The IPCC report published Monday states that droughts induced by higher levels of global warming, “by increasing vulnerability, will increasingly affect violent intrastate conflict”.

For Krakovska, Russia’s war on Ukraine shows this can become a cross-border issue.

Revealed: How rich and at-risk nations fought over science of climate impacts

Krakovska knows Russia well. She was born under the Soviet Union, studied meteorology in Saint Petersburg and went on several expeditions to study cloud modelling across Russia.

She joined the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute, where she now heads the applied climatology laboratory, in September 1991, days after Ukraine’s declared its independence from the Soviet Union.

Krakovska first experienced signs of climate change on a trip to the Arctic in October 1991, when mild temperatures meant that the sea still hadn’t frozen as was usual for the time of year.

In the late 1990s, she was one of the first Ukrainian women to travel to Antarctica on a scientific expedition.

A visit to the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, took her research in a new direction. There, she met with a group of scientists working on regional climate modelling.

She soon started to work on projections for Ukraine, which have since been used to plan adaptation measures across the country.

Svitlana Krakovska at the Ukrainian Akademik Vernadsky station on Galindez Island in 1997 (Photo: Svitlana Krakovska )

Since the invasion started, Krakovska has received dozens of messages of support from the scientific community across the world.

Russian delegate Oleg Anisimov apologised for his country’s invasion of Ukraine during the IPCC approval session’s closing plenary on Sunday – at risk of incurring the wrath of his government.

“The courage of the delegation of Ukraine, which continued to contribute to our deliberations [on Thursday] is remarkable. Science has no borders,” tweeted Climatologist Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, of the Belgian delegation.

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But the future of Ukraine and its scientific community are uncertain. Last month, on the anniversary of the 2014 revolution that severed Ukraine’s ties to Russia, Ukrainian scientists wrote in Nature that national science spending remained low, government funding was used inefficiently and low salaries discouraged students from embarking on research careers.

Even that small budget is likely to be redirected to defence – and Krakovska is not complaining.

“We are the poorest country in Europe and we’re really poor scientists if I’m honest,” said Krakovska. “But now I’m really happy that they use this finance to make our army stronger.”

The war is a direct threat to Ukrainian research institutions. In Crimea, those that were previously run by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine were transferred to Russian control. Since 2014, the conflict in the east has led 18 universities to relocate to other parts of the country, with many researchers losing their homes and laboratories.

“I hope that we survive and continue to do science as Ukrainian scientists in an independent Ukraine,” Krakovska said.

As our conversation came to a close, she realised she hadn’t checked her phone for warnings to get to a shelter. “I hope that my voice will make a difference,” she added.

The post Under attack: the Ukrainian climate scientist fighting for survival appeared first on Climate Home News.

Adaptation finance, nature-based solutions and solar geoengineering were among the most contentious topics as online talks at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ran into overtime on Saturday.

Sources monitoring the two-week discussions, which are closed to media, said that a group of developed nations including the US, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Norway pushed for key phrases and figures to be removed from the summary for policymakers (SPM).

These include the US seeking to replace the mention of adaptation finance with “investment” and pushing for greater emphasis on the role of the private funds. The government representative objected to putting a percentage range on the amount of global tracked climate finance that had gone to adaptation. Scientists had expressed “high confidence” in the proposed 4-8% range, which came from analysis by the Climate Policy Initiative.

IPCC: Five takeaways from the UN’s 2022 climate impacts report

Developing countries, led by India, reportedly stood their ground and the term “finance for adaptation” appears in the final SPM, albeit without concrete figures.

The US also led efforts to replace the term “losses and damages” with “adverse impacts” – but ultimately only succeeded in adding words. A draft SPM obtained by Climate Home two weeks ago said climate change had caused “widespread losses and damages to nature and people”. Monday’s final version instead references “widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages”.

“The Biden administration is not only shutting their eyes to the reality of the climate crisis – they’re trying to blindfold the rest of the world too,” said Teresa Anderson, climate policy coordinator at ActionAid International.

“They appear to wear a badge of climate leadership, while doing all they can to block those most in need from getting help. It’s dishonest and utterly shameful.”

IPCC: UN report shows us human costs of climate failure

Observers said that developed nations lobbied hard for references to the benefits of “nature-based solutions” (NbS) – projects such as conservation and tree-planting – to be included in the summary. This prompted pushback from several countries, led by South Africa.

The term is seen by some as deflecting responsibility away from burners of fossil fuels. It appeared in a main paragraph of the draft SPM, but in the final version it has been relegated to a footnote, stating: “The term is the subject of ongoing debate, with concerns that it may lead to the misunderstanding that NbS on its own can provide a global solution to climate change.”

The concept of “overshoot” – temporarily exceeding temperature caps before cooling off later this century – also provoked intense debate. An attempt by vulnerable nations to include reference to the Paris Agreement temperature goal of 1.5C in the heading of the overshoot section failed.

And, at China’s insistence, a footnote appears in the final SPM qualifying that there is limited evidence on the impacts of temporary 1.5C overshoot. 

According to sources monitoring the talks, the US stood alone in seeking to keep a draft paragraph referencing solar radiation modification (SRM), carbon dioxide removals (CDR) and carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a single block.

Other countries pushed to separate SRM, which could cool the planet but does not address the underlying cause of heating – that is, levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

‘Nature-based solutions’ prove divisive at Glasgow climate talks

Sources said the US “aggressively fought” for a “balanced” statement that took five hours of side huddles at the virtual talks to resolve. When it became clear that SRM would be separated from emission reduction and carbon sequestration options, the US sought to drop the mention of SRM altogether due to the focus on its risks. 

The final SPM states that SRM would “introduce a widespread range of new risks to people and ecosystems, which are not well understood”.

Several developing countries rejected draft phrasing which portrayed migration as an option for adapting to climate impacts, and the link was dropped in the final summary. They also pushed successfully for a mention of “past emissions”.

While they wanted language acknowledging specifically that past emissions had constrained their development options, the final phrasing is more nuanced: “Past and current development trends (past emissions, development and climate change) have not advanced global climate resilient development.”

This article was amended after publication to clarify that the 4-8% adaptation finance share was of global tracked climate finance from public and private sources, not exclusively flows to developing countries.

The post Revealed: How rich and at-risk nations fought over science of climate impacts appeared first on Climate Home News.

It is at once a withering indictment and an industrious guide, admonishing our reckless treatment of nature while offering practical solutions to avoid the worst consequences of our actions.

At its heart is a plea, unprecedented in urgency and scale, from the world’s leading climate scientists to the governments of Earth: transform how we live now or face an unliveable future.

Scientists, perhaps particularly climate scientists, are cautious by nature, bound by research norms to “err on the side of least drama”. While previous IPCC assessment reports did not shy away from the risks posed by climate change, many of their predictions were couched in the realm of the hypothetical. Given the variability of models and less-than-complete observational datasets, this circumspect approach was, at the time, the correct one.

Assessment Report Six (AR6) dispenses with hypotheticals, offering the most sure-footed evaluation yet of how we have already changed our climate beyond many ecosystems’ ability to cope.

IPCC: Five takeaways from the UN’s 2022 climate impacts report

While the introduction to 2014’s Fifth Assessment (AR5) warns “climate change poses risks for human and natural systems”, a summary of Monday’s report upgrades that to “has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people”.

Where AR5 was vague – “some impacts on human systems have also been attributed to climate change” – AR6 is direct: “Climate change has caused impacts on human health, livelihoods and key infrastructure”. 

The possible perils raised by the IPCC in 2014 are coming to pass. AR5’s summary contains 54 references to “potential” or “potentially”. In Monday’s WGII summary, it’s down to 21. In many cases, what was “projected” less than a decade ago has now become “unavoidable”.

As data proliferates and as observation techniques and modeling become ever more sophisticated, scientists have more information than ever to draw upon and state, with unrivaled authority, that a climate emergency is unfolding all around us. And more data points from the past and present mean more solid foundations upon which to build future scenarios. 

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The data simply reflects the reality that in the eight years since IPCC scientists issued their last equivalent warning, one Paris Agreement and the seven hottest years on record later, greenhouse gas emissions have continued their relentless rise.

Freiderike Otto, a physicist at Imperial College’s Grantham Institute and lead AR6 author, said that WGII’s urgent tone was “probably due to the fact that we still have not managed globally to even change the rate of increase of emissions”. 

“What this report does very differently to AR5 – which is why it feels so much more urgent and real – is that it shows climate change is not a future threat. It is here now. It is affecting those who are the most vulnerable in every society around the world,” Otto told Climate Home.

A major advance since AR5 is attribution science, which explores to what extent individual extreme weather events such as flooding and drought can be directly blamed on human-caused climate change. 

Michael Oppenheimer, a geosciences professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and former IPCC author, said that there had been a growing “note of urgency” in recent IPCC reports.

IPCC report a ‘call to arms’ for climate science in courts, legal experts say

He said that attribution, coupled with the findings of the IPCC’s 2018 special report on 1.5C, had “changed the public discourse in the media and grabbed the attention of the public and policymakers”.  

“This has had a liberating effect on the ability of scientists in these reports and elsewhere to report what they actually think rather than diluting the public message to avoid a sense of alarm,” he told Climate Home. 

“Alarm – assuming it comes hand-in-hand with greater action to reduce emissions – now seems entirely appropriate to the reality.”

For despite the damage global heating has already wrought for millions – from food and water insecurity to heightened vulnerability to disease and extreme weather events – it is the damage yet to come that ought to keep heads of state awake at night.

Many impacts are inevitable. No matter what happens to greenhouse gas emissions, the Paris Agreement temperature rise cap of 1.5C will be breached within decades, leading to “unavoidable increases in multiple climate hazards”, according to the 4,000-page report.

Beyond 2040, climate change is projected to lead to no fewer than 127 key risks, with impacts “up to multiple times higher” than at present. Thirst, hunger and disease are coming.

That’s the bad news. Or part of it.

AR6’s WGII also assesses in unrivaled detail how we as a species may adapt to these seemingly endless climate threats. 

Invasion tears Ukraine’s climate community away from life’s work

Large chunks of the report are dedicated to real-world solutions to help with water (more efficient irrigation, increased retention, early warning systems) and food (agroforestry, pest control, urban agriculture) security, as well as preserving and restoring nature.

Working Group II co-chair Debra Roberts said the report “shifts the dial from creating a narrative of risk to looking at where there is agency and possibility for responses in human and natural systems.”

So should the main takeaway from Monday’s report be: “We can change?”

“There have been losses and damages from human-induced climate change for decades that we have not avoided,” said Otto.

“But where we should focus our attention is that a lot of these losses and damages are so large because of high vulnerability and high exposure of populations. This is not god-given, we have the agency to address and change this. 

“We know what is coming. We know how to deal with this. We have adaptation strategies, we just haven’t implemented them.”

Timeline: How the science linking climate change to extreme weather took off

The direction of travel leaves much to be desired. There is not enough money going into adaptation. The poor, who need it most, get least. Many initiatives are shortsighted, reducing risk today while storing up more problems for the future.

Monday’s report also confronts the limits to adaptation. In some areas, these limits are already being tested, in ecosystems such as coral reefs and in the households of families who face constant flood risk but lack the means to move to safer ground. Other limits loom ahead, such as irretrievable water loss from vanishing glacier networks, or diminishing staple crop-growing areas.

One thing is plain. Without sweeping reductions of the greenhouse emissions driving temperature rises, no amount of adaptation can save many ecosystems and sectors from collapse.

“No matter what other critical issues are begging for your attention, like Covid or Ukraine… please keep enough of your government’s focus on climate change so that progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions can accelerate and catch up with the rate at which the climate is changing,” said Oppenheimer.

The post UN report shows us human costs of climate failure appeared first on Climate Home News.

It is the first such assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2014 and reflects large advances in scientific understanding of the effect global heating is having on us all.  

Monday’s Working Group II (WGII) is the second installment of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6), following the release last August of WGI, which reviewed the underlying physical science of climate change. Next month will see WGIII release its assessment of how to avoid the worst case warming scenarios.

Here are five key messages from the landmark report.

1. Climate change is hurting our health  

Climate change is already damaging the physical and mental health of everyone on Earth, with half of humanity already vulnerable to water insecurity and billions more at risk of extreme heat events, vector-borne diseases and hunger linked to global heating.  

Extreme heat in particular has resulted in increased human mortality and morbidity, and it is projected to worsen as the century progresses.  

Flooding has led to increased displacement in Asia, Africa and Central America and is predicted to increase. Extreme weather has already pushed millions more people into food insecurity as climactic changes increases the likelihood of simultaneous crop failures even as staple foodstuffs are losing nutritional value. 

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Heightened risk of cardiovascular illness due to exposure to smoke from wildfires has been observed, and an additional 2.25 billion people will be at risk of Dengue fever by 2080 under a middle-of-the-road emissions scenario.  

Mental health challenges, including anxiety and stress, are predicted to increase alongside humans’ exposure to extreme weather, and climate change is already “contributing to humanitarian crises”. 

Climate impacts will “significantly increase ill health and premature deaths” in both the near and long term, the report predicts. 

“People around the world are already suffering from the impacts of climate change at 1.1C of warming,” said Emily Shuckburgh, director of Cambridge Zero at the University of Cambridge. “Beyond 1.5C would put peace, security, economic stability and nature in peril across our planet and be an existential threat for far too many.” 

2. Some things will be lost forever

The report is built around the options that exist for adaptation, but its message is unequivocal: some climate impacts are already irreversible, and several losses due to human activity are approaching the point of no return.  

Human-caused climate change is wreaking “increasingly irreversible losses, in terrestrial, freshwater and coastal and open ocean marine ecosystems”. Many species have already hit the limit of their ability to adapt to temperature rises. There will be more extinctions.

Impacts that are “approaching irreversibility” include glacier retreat and changes to Arctic and mountain ecosystems from thawing permafrost.

Timeline: How science linking climate change to extreme weather took off

This will see at least one billion people by 2050 at risk of losing their homes to storms supercharged by rising seas, the report shows.

With the Paris Agreement temperature goal of 1.5C of warming to be breached within decades under all emissions scenarios, the report warns of “unavoidable increases in multiple climate hazards (that) present multiple risks to ecosystems and humans”.

Care International said the report showed how “even a marginal and or temporary overshoot of the 1.5C threshold will have dire consequences for millions of people”.

3. We can adapt… up to a point

The 4,000-page report identifies myriad ways to adapt to climate change, including innovative and practical solutions to improve food and water security and preserve ecosystems.

However, it finds that adaptation projects are not equally distributed geographically and are chronically underfunded. Many are too shortsighted and miss an opportunity for “transformational” change to how we feed, shelter and power societies.

Even with adequate finance and management, we “cannot eliminate” all losses and damages. Holding temperature rise close to 1.5C would “substantially reduce” the scale of harm.

AR6 WG1: Five takeaways from the IPCC’s 2021 climate science report

The report warns against measures that make things worse. For example, sea walls or levees can protect people and property in the short term, but require expensive upgrades to sustain and could encourage building in places that are hard to protect.

Ultimately, unless the emissions that are driving climate change decline “rapidly” then the options for societies to adapt will become “increasingly limited”, the assessment shows.

Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at University College London, said that the assessment showed the need for adaptation in tandem with sweeping emissions cuts. 

“Now it becomes clear that we not only need both, but that if we fail to act rapidly, then we risk reaching the point beyond which we can no longer adapt to climate impacts.”

4. The poorest will be hit hardest

Although everyone is affected by climate change, not everyone is affected equally, with poorer communities, women, children, indigenous people all projected to be the most vulnerable as the century progresses.  

As well as vanishing ecosystems – and losing the services that they provide – leading to “cascading and long-term impacts” on indigenous and local communities, the assessment shows how growing urbanisation means growing stress on water, health and sanitation services.

Grave injustice: Ivory Coast villagers save their ancestors from rising waves

Some impacts such already take a disproportionately high toll in some areas, with mortality from floods, drought and storms some 15 times higher in highly vulnerable countries compared with low-vulnerability nations over the last decade.

Sudden crop losses and depleting nutritional value of staple foodstuffs, has already increased malnutrition in many communities, especially among indigenous peoples, smallholders and low-income households, with children and pregnant women particularly impacted”. 

Today, 3.3-3.6 billion people live in “contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change”, a figure, again, that is projected to rise. 

Camilla Toulmin, senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment & Development, said the report showed that the people least responsible for climate change “are hit hardest by the devastating impacts of extreme events”. 

“As richer nations go on emitting more and more greenhouse gases, so the devastation and costs grow.” 

5. Each 0.1C matters 

Although it is too late to do much about some climate impacts, writ large throughout Monday’s assessment is the message that every degree of warming matters.

Both the magnitude and rate of climate risks depend on near-term emissions and “escalate with every increment of warming,” it warns.

Echoing its special report on 1.5C from 2018, the IPCC says that limiting warming to that threshold would “substantially reduce projected losses and damages related to climate change”; virtually every projected risk becomes more dangerous the higher the temperature rises.

The report warns of the pitfalls of temperature “overshoot” – temporarily exceeding 1.5C, a feature of several climate modelling scenarios. It warns that many impacts “will persist even if temperatures return to 1.5C” and that feedbacks such as permafrost emissions or the loss of forested carbon sinks “will make returning to 1.5C by 2100 more difficult”.

As such, solutions that are not based on rapid emissions reductions, such as solar radiation modification, are given short shrift. Proposed approaches to reflect sunlight back into space “introduce a wide range of new risks to people and ecosystems” and do not stop CO2 from building up in the air and oceans, the report warns.

The post Five takeaways from the UN’s 2022 climate impacts report appeared first on Climate Home News.

Eating meat, air conditioning, flying and driving SUVs are among high carbon lifestyle choices on the rise, linked to disposable incomes. Those trends make consumer behaviour relevant to tackling climate change – particularly among the rich, who have the largest carbon footprints.

The draft IPCC report found that “individual behavioral change in isolation cannot reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions significantly” but “individuals can contribute to overcoming barriers and enable climate change mitigation”.

“If 10-30% of the population were to demonstrate commitment to low-carbon technologies, behaviors, and lifestyles, new social norms would be established,” the draft report says.

For decades, climate campaigners have hotly debated the relative importance of what individuals buy in creating change. Some argue it lets governments and big business off the hook, while others argue it is empowering and pressures governments and companies to act.

The future of humanitarian aid? Pilot scheme stops drought leading to hunger

For the first time, the IPCC is to include a major section on demand-side measures in the section of assessment report 6 on how to stop global heating, due out in March 2022. A first draft of the summary for policymakers and opening chapter has been leaked by Extinction Rebellion scientists.

Summarising published scientific research, it finds that: “Lifestyle options like heating and cooling set-point adjustments, reduced appliance use, shifts to human-centred mobility and public transit, reduced air travel and improved recycling can deliver an additional 2 GtCo2eq savings in 2030 and 3 GtCo2eq savings 2050 beyond the savings achieved in conventional technology-centric mitigation scenarios.”

Total global greenhouse gas emissions were 59GtCo2 in 2018 and 2Gt is roughly twice the annual emissions of Brazil. Of this 59Gt, 38Gt was from fossil fuel and industry.

Karen Moberg is a researcher at the Western Norway Research Institute who studies the climate impact of household consumption in European countries. She told Climate Home News: “I’ve heard arguments like ‘why do you focus on individuals when it’s the fossil fuel companies that are the real bastards’ but it’s two sides of the same coin really. Saying that individual consumption matters does not mean that we should forget about how we produce our energy. We have to do both.”

The UK prime minister’s climate spokesperson Allegra Stratton recently launched a “one step greener” campaign by encouraging people to not rinse their dishes before they put them in dishwasher. This was heavily criticised as trivialising the issue.

Moberg said that not rinsing dishes was a “low-impact action”. While these small changes “do matter”, she said, “it’s really about how we transport ourselves and the volumes of us doing so and what we eat and how it’s produced and how far it’s travelled and what the total energy use is in our dwellings”.

She added: “In addition to policies scaling up the energy system transition, we need government policies that aim at reducing individual consumption in a fair and equitable way.”

Aviation grew 28.5% between 2010 and 2020, SUV use 17% and meat consumption 12%, the draft report shows. Energy demand for household cooling grew 40% from 2010 to 2018.

The report says “a shift to diets with a higher share of plant-based protein in regions with excess consumption of calories and animal-source food can lead to substantial reductions in GHG emissions” and “plant-based diets can reduce GHG emissions by up to 50% compared to the average emissions intensive Western diet”.

While individuals can reduce their own meat consumption, the report finds that government action like a tax on red meat or an advertising campaign can help significantly. But these policies can be unpopular. In April, US Republicans falsely claimed President Joe Biden was planning to reduce the nation’s red meat eating as part of his climate plan.

The IPCC report is under review by government officials and scientists, and subject to change before its planned publication in February 2022. The IPCC does not comment on the contents of leaked drafts.

In a statement, Scientist Rebellion said they had leaked the document “because [we] expect the final version will be watered down”.

The final text of the summary for policymakers will be negotiated line by line between government representatives. Some, notably Saudi Arabia, have a record of seeking to weaken the language – but lead scientists are there to defend the evidence.

This article was amended on September 1, 2021, to correct the month in which the report is scheduled to be released and to clarify that the report is a draft.

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The report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Monday is expected to become a critical piece of evidence in climate litigation cases.

It found that it is “unequivocal” that human activity is causing climate change and there is “high confidence” that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are the main drivers of more frequent or intense heatwaves, glaciers melting, ocean warming and acidification.

Past versions of the IPCC assessments have been extensively used in climate lawsuits and relied on by judges to establish a link between anthropogenic emissions and climate impacts.

The starker language and findings of this latest report have the potential to strengthen climate lawsuits against both governments and companies, Kate Higham, who coordinates the Climate Change Laws of the World project at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, told Climate Home.

This is important, she said, because researchers have found that the evidence used by lawyers in climate cases often lagged behind the most up-to-date science that could help establish causal links between emitters and climate impacts.

IPCC report prompts calls to tackle methane emissions at Cop26

A study published in Nature Climate Change in June, which analysed evidence from 73 lawsuits, concluded that in most cases, there was no attempt to quantify the extent to which climate change was responsible for the climate-related events affecting the plaintiffs.

Now, legal experts are expecting the latest IPCC report to strengthen the evidence and the claims made by plaintiffs. The report recognises the progress of attribution science in linking individual extreme weather events such as heatwaves, heavy rain, droughts and tropical cyclones to greenhouse gas emissions with more certainty.

Rupert Stuart-Smith, a founding member of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme who researches climate change litigation and attribution science, told Climate Home the report “provides, implicitly, a call to arms for the use of evidence of this type”.

“By and large, attribution science hasn’t had its day in court,” he said, adding that “many of the cases are still unsuccessful for legal, rather than scientific reasons.”

Five takeaways from the IPCC’s 2021 climate science report

Attribution science can help establish the causal relationship between emissions from a company and the losses experienced by a plaintiff in cases seeking compensation from major emitters for example.

It can also be used in lawsuits which have asked a court to instruct a government or company to deepen their emission reductions by setting out the consequence of failing to cut those emissions.

Stuart-Smith said attribution studies could help ensure that cases that are filed in courts actually do relate to impacts and extreme events that can be linked to climate change. Last month, a rapid attribution study found that temperature extremes that had engulfed North America were “virtually impossible” without climate change.

“With the right channels of communication between the legal and scientific communities,” scientists could be made aware of legal interests and provide evidence for specific cases, he said.

“Of course there’ll still be legal issues which need to be ironed out. But if we are able to get past those initial legal obstacles, it doesn’t seem far-fetched anymore to suggest that future cases will in fact force companies to pay compensation to communities affected by climate change,” he said.

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Cases that have already been filed but haven’t passed some of those legal hurdles could benefit from the latest scientific assessment to strengthen their evidence to the courts, Higham said.

“There is an argument that this report will be useful in cases similar to the Milieudefensie vs Shell case in showing that emitters have a responsibility to reduce emissions going forward because we know that these emissions will contribute to climate harm,” she said.

That case, which resulted in a Dutch court ordering Royal Dutch Shell to cut its emissions 45% by 2030 compared with 2019, was the first time a company was held legally responsible for its role in causing the climate crisis.

The IPCC’s assessments of the remaining carbon budgets to meet the Paris Agreement temperature goals could further help start a conversation in the courts over who needs to reduce emissions and by how much, Higham added.

For Kate McKenzie, of the Strathclyde Centre for Environmental Law and Governance the report will, above all, strengthen claims calling on governments to do more to cut emissions.

The report’s stronger language on the need to reach “at least net zero CO2 emissions” to stabilise the climate could lead to “potential tougher judgements” in asking governments to go beyond net zero emissions, McKenzie told Climate Home.

Ukraine aims to grow economy without increasing carbon emissions

Greater understanding of long-term climate impacts set out in the report could reinforce the cases of youth claimants, who have increasingly argued that poor climate action is violating their rights to a humane future, she said.

And the report’s emphasis on regional differences in climate projections offers stronger evidence for countries to sue each other over climate impacts, McKenzie added.

“I do think that this provides stronger evidence if a small island state or an African nation starts bringing a case against a larger emitting country in the international legal arena,” she said. Although no such case has yet been filed, McKenzie said the prospect could not be ruled out.

Campaigners are ready to take on this call to action.

“We’re not going to let this report be shelved by further inaction. Instead, we’ll be taking it with us to the courts,” said Kaisa Kosonen, senior political advisor at Greenpeace Nordic.

“By strengthening the scientific evidence between human emissions and extreme weather the IPCC has provided new, powerful means for everyone everywhere to hold the fossil fuel industry and governments directly responsible for the climate emergency.”

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The IPCC found methane levels in the air are now higher than at any point in the past 800,000 years and are tracking close to the high emission scenarios outlined in its previous assessment in 2013.

Although the gas only stays in the atmosphere for around nine years, methane, which is mainly released from abandoned coal mines, farming and oil and gas operations, has a warming impact 84 times that of CO2 over a 20-year period. It is responsible for almost a quarter of global warming.

“Strong, rapid and sustained reductions” in methane emissions are needed in addition to slashing CO2 in the next two decades, scientists concluded, to keep a 1.5C warming limit within reach – the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement.

“The new IPCC report is a call for action on methane,” Daniel Zavala-Araiza, senior scientist with Environmental Defense Fund, told Climate Home News. “Hopefully Cop26 will show that methane is becoming a key priority at both national and sub-national level,” referring to the climate summit in Glasgow, UK this November.

Cop26 president Alok Sharma has methane on his list of issues to address at the summit. But more recently UK prime minister Boris Johnson boiled down the priorities to “coal, cars, cash and trees,” suggesting it may not be top of the agenda.

Five takeaways from the IPCC’s 2021 climate science report

A lack of effective policy to tackle methane stems from patchy monitoring and reporting. “Measuring methane is still a work in progress and far from global practice,” energy analyst Poppy Kalesi told Climate Home News.

Many governments and companies see methane gas as a “transition fuel” away from coal, as it emits less CO2 when burned for power generation or heating. Yet methane leaks in the process risk undermining that carbon saving.

Recent studies have shown that methane emissions from oil and gas production are often much higher than previously assumed. An investigation by the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) earlier this year found that methane leakage from oil and gas infrastructure across Europe was endemic.

Proper maintenance and plumbing of oil and gas pipelines to prevent leaks is needed to curb methane emissions, Sarah Smith, programme director of super pollutants at CATF, told Climate Home News.

“Since methane is the only clear strategy to substantially cut warming over the next 20 years, world leaders must come together and pledge swift and sizeable reductions. This is an opportunity that can’t be missed,” said Smith.

Ukraine aims to grow economy without increasing carbon emissions

A paper in Environmental Research Letters earlier this year found an all-out, rapid effort to slash methane emissions could slow the rate of current warming by 30% and avoid 0.5C of warming by the end of the century. 

The oil and gas industry could achieve a 75% reduction in methane emissions by 2030 using existing technology, according to the International Energy Agency. 

The other major source of methane emissions, responsible for almost 40%, is farming. 

Preventing the burning of crop residues, better livestock manure management and changing the diet of livestock could help curb methane emissions from agriculture, according to Smith.

Cows produce an average of 250-500 litres of methane a day from digesting grass. Research from the University of California, Davis, found that feeding seaweed to cows significantly reduced the amount of methane from their burps and farts. A more contentious solution is for meat eaters to adopt plant-based diets.

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According to analysis by CATF, most countries refer to methane in their climate plans, but just 13 countries have included methane reduction targets in their latest pledges to the Paris Agreement.

Nigeria has committed to ending emissions from gas flaring, which outstrip all emissions from transport and electricity, by 2030 in its updated climate plan. 

The European Commission has developed a methane strategy, proposing laws to require companies to monitor methane emissions and report and repair leaks.

In March, the EU and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) set up the International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) to monitor companies’ emissions using company data, satellite technology and scientific studies.

“Oil and gas methane is the cheapest and easiest to abate and European states are major purchasers globally. The EU could set a standard for the rest of the world to follow while cheaply addressing a major source of warming now,” Jill Duggan, executive director of EDF Europe, told Climate Home News.

Kalesi said that meaningful EU action on methane is unlikely to kick in before 2027 due to the legislation timeline and a lack of satellite data. “If legislation is adopted in 2023, it will take a couple of years before member states’ authorities are able to implement and enforce [regulations],” she said.

‘Hottest games ever’: At the Tokyo Olympics, elite sport met the climate crisis

In the US, political swings have delayed progress. Former president Barack Obama introduced methane regulations, only for Donald Trump to roll them back. President Joe Biden has directed the Environmental Protection Agency to reinstate the rules by September. 

Some campaigners and politicians have called for a global agreement on methane, similar to the Montreal Protocol which was drawn up in 1987 to phase out ozone-depleting substances.

But Kalesi said that it is more difficult to build support for methane reduction. The ozone issue was “emotional, [but] methane remains a very technical, scientific issue,” she said. “The human dynamic element is completely missing. Science in and of itself hardly ever brings change.”

The post IPCC report prompts calls to tackle methane emissions at Cop26 appeared first on Climate Home News.

It is the first scientific review since 2013 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) started its last round of assessment reports, AR5.

Assessment reports come in groups of three. This first one outlines the projected impacts of five emissions scenarios, which range from global net negative and net zero to emissions doubling by 2050 and 2100, compared to current levels.

The second and third reports, due to land in early 2022, will look at how to adapt to these impacts and how to prevent the worst case scenarios.

Here we round up five key messages from this landmark report.

1. We are set to pass 1.5C warming by 2040

The warming of recent decades has not been seen for millennia, is happening rapidly and almost everywhere on earth and has reversed a long-term global cooling trend. We need to go back around 125,000 years to find evidence of warmer global surface temperatures, spanning multiple centuries.

That leaves an increasingly narrow pathway to stabilising temperatures at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement.

Under all emissions scenarios outlined in the IPCC report, the earth’s surface warming is projected to reach 1.5C or 1.6C in the next two decades.

The threshold has come closer partly because scientists have incorporated new datasets in their estimate of historic temperature rise, including from the fast-warming Arctic. That adds 0.1C to the estimate of historic warming. High global emissions since the last assessment reports are continuing that trend.

For any chance of meeting the goal seen as essential to the survival of some vulnerable communities and ecosystems, drastic reductions in CO2 would be needed this decade and net zero emissions by 2050.

2. Human activity is driving extreme weather

While AR5 concluded that human influence on the climate system is “clear”,  AR6 said there is “high confidence” that human activities are the main drivers of more frequent or intense heatwaves, glaciers melting, ocean warming and acidification. 

“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land,” the report concludes. 

There have been enormous developments in attribution science since the last IPCC report. With enhanced models, scientists are now able to quantify how much more likely or intense extreme weather events were because of climate change.

Recent studies have shown that the Siberian heat wave in 2020 and extreme heat across Asia in 2016 would never have happened without humans burning fossil fuels. 

“There has been a real push linking extreme events to societal impacts,” said Dann Mitchell, professor of climate change at Bristol University, citing a 2016 study which found that 506 of the 753 fatalities during the Paris heatwave in 2003 could be blamed on climate change.

Timeline: How the science linking climate change to extreme weather took off

3. We know more about regional climate impacts

Climate models have improved since the last IPCC report, enabling scientists to analyse current and projected temperature and hydrological extremes at a regional level and understand what global climate impacts will look like in different parts of the world. 

Modelling shows that the Arctic is warming faster than other regions and that high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere are projected to warm by two to four times the level of global warming. While warming in the tropics is slower, it is noticeable because temperatures over land near the equator do not vary much year on year in the absence of human influence.

The Gulf Stream is very likely to weaken over the century, according to the report. A complete collapse of the Atlantic Ocean current would disrupt regional weather patterns, weakening African and Asian monsoons and strengthening dry spells in Europe, scientists warn.

“The climate models have improved since the last report, they have higher spatial resolution which allows you to see more regional impacts and they are better at simulating what will happen in the future in specific regions,” Stephen Cornelius, the IPCC lead for WWF, told Climate Home News.

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4. We are closer to irreversible tipping points 

An aerial view of Greenland’s melting ice sheets. (Photo: NASA/Goddard/Maria-José Viñas/Flickr)

The report sounds the alarm about the possibility of irreversible changes to the climate, often called tipping points.

For example, forests could start to die as temperatures rise, becoming less able to absorb carbon dioxide, leading to further warming. Or Antarctic ice sheets could become destabilised, leading to rapid sea level rise.

“The probability of low-likelihood, high impact outcomes increases with higher global warming levels,” the report notes. “Abrupt responses and tipping points of the climate system, such as strongly increased Antarctic ice sheet melt and forest dieback, cannot be ruled out.” 

The melting of Antarctic ice sheets could cause sea levels to rise more than a metre by 2100 and 15 metres by 2500.

“We are now observing climate change with our own eyes in ways we did not do so before. Many temperature extremes are outside the bounds of natural variability and triggering extreme events, such as wildfires,” said Corinne Le Quere, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, at a briefing last month.

The “substantial increase in risks” was highlighted in recent analysis which showed that parts of the Amazon are now emitting more carbon than they absorb, Emily Shuckburgh, a University of Cambridge climate scientist, said at the briefing.

5. Methane emissions are an important lever

For the first time, the IPCC has dedicated an entire chapter to “short-lived climate forcers” such as aerosols, particulate matter and methane. 

Methane levels are now higher than at any point in the past 800,000 years and are well above the safe limits outlined in AR5. Methane, which is released into the atmosphere from abandoned coal mines, farming and oil and gas operations, has a global warming impact 84 times higher than CO2 over a 20-year period. It is responsible for almost a quarter of global warming. 

Ecosystem responses to global warming, such as thawing permafrost and wildfires, are highly likely to further increase concentrations of methane in the atmosphere. 

The authors state that a strong and rapid reduction in methane emissions would not only curb global warming but also improve air quality.

Despite its global warming impact, methane has received far less attention than CO2 and is not included in most countries’ climate pledges.

“A sharp reduction in methane would give you a short-term win, but it has largely been ignored by governments to date, all the focus has been on CO2 net zero targets,” said Richard Black, senior associate at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

The post Five takeaways from the IPCC’s 2021 climate science report appeared first on Climate Home News.

It will be the first comprehensive review of the scientific literature since 2013, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) started its last round of assessment reports, AR5.

Attribution science, which looks at how much human activities lead to climate change, is likely to feature heavily in the report. Here we give an overview of the scientific developments of the past eight years.

AR5 concluded that human influence on the climate system is “clear.” Today scientists say climate change is, without doubt, caused by us. A 2021 study concluded that humans have caused all of the warming observed since the preindustrial period.

Since the last IPCC report, there has been an explosion of attribution studies finding that specific heatwaves, droughts, tropical cyclones and other extreme events were more likely or intense because of climate change. Recent studies have shown that extreme events such as the Siberian heat wave in 2020 would never have happened without humans pumping greenhouse gases into the air.

Since AR5, attribution science has become more “impact-oriented”, Sjoukje Philip, a climate scientist from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group, told Climate Home News.

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That means more studies focusing on the societal impacts of extreme weather events, such as the 2016 study which found that 506 of the 753 fatalities during the Paris heatwave in 2003 were a result of climate change. 

“We wanted to see how much human-induced climate change contributed to mortality,” Dann Mitchell, one of the study’s authors and professor of climate change at Bristol University, told Climate Home News. “Since the last IPCC report models have become more advanced and we have better ways of collecting climate and health data,” he said. 

The increase in attribution studies is due to more precise climate models and peer-reviewed methods which allow scientists to rapidly and accurately analyse extreme events, according to Philip. This also helps with communication. “If you can do the attribution one week after the event, it’s still news,” she said.

Scientists are now able to carry out attribution studies within a few days of an event occurring. In some cases they can do the analysis while the event is still going on. Scientists from the WWA group published a study in 2018 showing that climate change made Europe’s heatwave twice as likely, while it was ongoing.

Half of all attribution studies focus on heatwaves, according to Mitchell. Heatwaves are relatively easy to attribute because they are “very certain and the first response to climate change” and cover a large area, which makes it easier for climate models to pick up, said Mitchell. Most of the rest look at extremes of rainfall leading to drought or floods.

Only a handful have looked at hurricanes, which are hard to model due to their complexity and limited historical data. They reached relatively weak conclusions about the scale of human influence.

That could change as new high-resolution models are being developed, said Sarah Teuling-Kew, a climate scientist at WWA. “Methods for large-scale precipitation and temperature extremes are more robust – they have been put through the tests,” she said.

The majority of attribution studies focus on events in Europe and North America. This is because these regions have the most reliable climate data available, according to Philip. “I don’t think we’ve ever done a heatwave attribution study over Africa because we never hear about it,” she said, adding that WWA scientists are collaborating with African scientists and sharing knowledge to improve modelling of the continent.

The post Timeline: How the science linking climate change to extreme weather took off appeared first on Climate Home News.

The three parts of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the main guide to policymakers around the world had originally been due in 2021 in an update of the last global assessment completed in 2014.

The expected publication in 2021 of the reports by the IPCC, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, had been one of few benefits when the UN and host Britain postponed the climate summit in Glasgow to November 2021 from the original date of November 2020 because of the pandemic.

On current plans, however, only the first section of the IPCC report about the science of global warming, including scenarios for temperatures and sea level rise, is now expected to be issued before the summit in Glasgow as timetables slip, IPCC sources said.

Wind, solar generate 10% of world electricity, doubling share since 2015

The other two main sections – about the impacts of climate change and ways to curb greenhouse gas emissions – will not be published before the summit because of a series of delays to author meetings and scientific research caused by the pandemic. That will also delay a final synthesis report, tying up work by the three working groups due in 2022.

“The postponement (of key meetings) now means that the report will not be approved before the Glasgow Climate Change Conference, known as Cop26, which has itself been postponed to November 2021,” the IPCC said in a statement about the section dealing with solutions to climate change and known as Working Group III.

It did not set a new date.

Next UN climate science report to consider lessons from coronavirus

Working Group II, about the impacts of climate change, has been due for publication in October 2021, but a revised IPCC calendar for 2021 says “extensions are expected for these dates”. IPCC sources said the report was now almost certain to be pushed into 2022.

“So far, we cannot confirm such a delay,” Sina Löschke, communications manager for Working Group II technical support unit, wrote in an email.

The last IPCC assessment report in 2014 told governments starkly that “human influence on the climate system is clear” and that man-made greenhouse gases were at their highest in history, causing “widespread impacts on human and natural systems”. That helped pave the way to the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

The Glasgow summit is meant to bolster action under the Paris accord, which seeks to limit warming and the damage of more frequent heatwaves, floods and rising sea levels. Governments are meant to submit upgraded plans for action in 2020.

In a statement, Working Group III Co-chair Priyadarshi Shukla praised authors who were pushing ahead with their work despite lockdowns. Work for the IPCC is prestigious, but unpaid.

The post Most of UN climate science report likely to be delayed beyond 2021 Glasgow summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

Covid-19, which has killed more than 180,000 people worldwide, is thought to have originated in animals, perhaps bats, before infecting people in Wuhan, China.

Global warming, a rising human population, pollution and destruction of wildlife habitats are among the factors raising the risk of such zoonotic diseases, which jump from animals to humans.

Zoonotic disease was mentioned in the last round-up of scientific knowledge by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013-14, but the pandemic potential was not a focus.

That will change in its next assessment report, due to be published in stages over 2021-22 as the main scientific guide for government action on global warming. Each section is likely to be delayed by a few months, IPCC scientists say.

“Pushing wildlife out of natural habitats, high density living and closer interactions between animals and humans… are a risky cocktail,” said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told Climate Home News.

Coronavirus: plane-free skies spur research into warming impact of aviation

In an Earth Day presentation on 22 April, he noted a study finding that 96% of the weight of all living mammals are people and domesticated animals such as chickens and cows, with just 4% made up of wild creatures.

Many researchers reckon that human activities have become the overwhelming force of change on the planet, and qualify for a new geological epoch dubbed the Anthropocene, based on the Greek word “anthropos”,  meaning “man”. It would succeed the current Holocene, which began at the end of the last Ice Age about 11,700 years ago.

“This is a manifestation of the Anthropocene,” said Rockström of the coronavirus pandemic.

IPCC scientists say it is urgent to find out how far humans can influence the planet before ecosystems collapse, such as tropical coral reefs that are bleaching and dying in warming waters.

“Humans are exploiting natural resources and the world up to its limits. Knowing those limits would be very, very important. It’s a matter of survival,” Hans-Otto Pörtner, of the Alfred Wegener Institute and co-chair of the IPCC working group on the impacts of climate change,  told Climate Home News.

Climate activists form new tactics and alliances amid coronavirus lockdown

Before the coronavirus, the IPCC had already planned to explore links between climate change and biodiversity by holding a first joint workshop, in May, with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

That event will be delayed by several months, Pörtner said. More scientists were starting to look into the links between biodiversity, climate change and coronavirus and early findings will be included in the next IPCC report.

“There are similarities between the crises [of coronavirus and climate change] in the need for science-based policies – you see the same politicians failing on this [pandemic] as they are failing on the climate side,” Pörtner told CHN. “We need policymakers who have an understanding of the risks.”

He declined to single out any governments for criticism. IPCC scientists consulted for this article gave their personal views, not those of the IPCC.

The IPCC assessment report in 2014 had a chapter on health and climate change. It outlined health threats from heat waves and deadly wildfires, malnutrition because of less food production in poor regions and diseases such as malaria and dengue spread by mosquitoes expanding their ranges.

The publication of the first part of the next IPCC report looking at the physical science of climate change, including scenarios for future warming, is likely to be delayed by about 3 months from April 2021, said co-chair Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a climatologist at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.

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She and Pörtner paid tribute to IPCC scientists who are continuing work despite lacking access to laboratories or field work as countries are put under lockdown. Particularly in developing nations, many struggle with weak internet links and face extra stresses in taking part – IPCC work is prestigious but unpaid.

Masson-Delmotte said the world needed to find ways to plan for the future even when there was “deep uncertainty”, a phrase used in past IPCC reports about how, for instance, to predict the future of Antarctic ice beyond 2100. A major collapse of the ice sheet would raise global sea levels by several metres.

“A clear lesson from the pandemic is that there is a global failure in preparedness, and planning for managing a known risk,” she said.

The response to the pandemic could also inform efforts to cut emissions.

Greenhouse gas emissions are predicted to fall around 6% in 2020, as non-essential work and travel is put on hold to slow the spread of Covid-19. The UN estimates that emissions will have to fall 7.6% a year over the coming decade to limit temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial times, the tougher target in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The post Next UN climate science report to consider lessons from coronavirus appeared first on Climate Home News.

The secretive five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Ethiopian prime minster Abiy Ahmed from among 301 nominees. Ahmed has worked to end a long-running conflict with neighbouring Eritrea.

“I have no comment on that,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said when asked about Thunberg and the possibility of future prizes linked to climate change, in line with a policy of only talking about the winners.

The committee does not even publish a list of its nominees.

There had been strong speculation Thunberg would win for her work to alert the world to the mounting risks from worsening heatwaves, floods, storms and rising sea levels. She has inspired a worldwide campaign since staging a solo school strike outside the Swedish parliament in August 2018.

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At odds with the bookmakers, peace researchers in Scandinavia who track the Nobel Prizes had generally viewed 16-year-old Thunberg as an outsider, too young to join a list that includes Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King.

And there has been controversy in Norway in recent years about whether work to protect the environment should qualify for the peace prize under the 1895 will of the founder, Sweden’s Alfred Nobel.

Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai won in 2004 for planting millions of trees across Africa and the 2007 prize was shared by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for documenting the worsening risks from global warming.

Extinction Rebellion: Paralympian climbs on top of plane as activists disrupt London airport

Alfred Nobel’s will says the prize should go to the person who has done the most for “fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”.

Over the years, the Nobel committee has often interpreted “fraternity between nations” more broadly to encompass everything from human rights to the environment.

Fredrik Heffermehl, a Norwegian jurist and peace activist who is the strongest critic of the widening scope, argues that Nobel intended fraternity between nations to be confined to “cooperation and organisation of international relations. It is often diluted into the unlimited”.

“Greta Thunberg is not at all qualified for the Nobel Peace Prize,” he told Climate Home News. There is some evidence that the committee has been stung by Heffermehl’s criticisms – in recent years the prize citation has always included a sentence about why it fits Nobel’s will.

And some committee members, who are picked by major parties in Norway’s parliament, may simply be unconvinced by Thunberg and her cause.

Earlier this year, a Norwegian newspaper quoted committee member Asle Toje, chosen by the populist right-wing Progress Party whose leaders often doubt climate science, as saying Thunberg staged a “little Joan of Arc stunt” at a meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2019.

She had travelled by train to warn world leaders that “our house is on fire.”

Norway is western Europe’s top oil and gas exporter and Thorbjoern Jagland of the Labour Party, who served as prime minister in the 1990s and strongly supported jobs in the industry, is among the members of the committee.

More broadly, there is disagreement among academics about how far war and peace are linked to climate change.

In a 2013 report, the IPCC said: “Climate change can indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts in the form of civil war and inter-group violence by amplifying well-documented drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks.”

It added: “there remains much disagreement about whether climate change directly causes violent conflicts.”

In 2018, the UN Security Council recognised climate change as a threat to stability across West Africa and the Sahel. Earlier this year, the German foreign office said climate change posed “unconscionable risks for peace and security”.

Former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, set off debate in 2007 by saying that it was wrong to view the conflict in Darfur, Sudan, as pitting Arab militias against black rebels and farmers.  “Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change,” he wrote.

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Henrik Urdal, head of the Peace Research Institute, Oslo, said blaming climate change for the conflict in the arid Darfur region was convenient for Sudan’s rulers to distract from charges they were responsible for genocide. He said that it had proved hard to establish clear links between armed conflicts and climate change.

Dan Smith, head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said such views were too narrow. “There’s never been a conflict with a single cause so why say that ‘if I can’t identify climate change as a single cause therefore it’s not a cause at all’?” he said.

Another factor that may have counted against Thunberg was her age, Smith added.

“Greta Thunberg has clearly got something that’s inspirational. But she is after all only 16. With the spotlight comes pressure and a Nobel Peace Prize would just intensify the glare.”

“There is time in the future” for her to win, he said. Thunberg berated world leaders at a UN summit in New York last month, saying “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

Despite objections about Thunberg’s youth, however, Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai was just 17 when she became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2014 for her campaign for girls’ education.

Shot in the head by the Taliban, Malala had been widely tipped to win in 2013 but the committee waited a year, apparently to give more time to assess her work, said Asle Sveen, a historian of the prize.

The post Greta Thunberg misses Nobel prize amid green vs peace dispute appeared first on Climate Home News.

Many fish, corals and other marine life are suffering in ever warmer waters, with more frequent underwater heatwaves, acidification caused by man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a decline in levels of oxygen, the world’s leading climate scientists said.

“Over the 21st century, the ocean is projected to transition to unprecedented conditions,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a special report about the oceans and the cryosphere – the world’s frozen regions. It was compiled by more than 100 authors from 36 nations.

The report is the most detailed look at the impact of climate change ranging from melting glaciers on the world’s highest mountains to the depths of the oceans that cover 71% of the Earth’s surface.

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“The open sea, the Arctic, the Antarctic and the high mountains may seem far away to many people,” said Hoesung Lee, chair of the IPCC. “But we depend on them and are influenced by them directly and indirectly in many ways.” Melting Himalayan glaciers, for instance, provide water to grow crops or generate hydropower before flowing into the oceans.

The report points to alarming signs of an accelerating melt of Antarctica that could herald an irreversible thaw from the world’s biggest store of frozen ice, ahead of Greenland.

Even so, sea level rise could be limited to 43cm by 2100, and around a metre by 2300, if the world sharply cuts greenhouse gas emissions in line with a goal set by almost 200 nations in the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit warming to 2C above pre-industrial times, it said.

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But a future with no meaningful action and rising greenhouse gas emissions could push up sea levels by 84cm by 2100, about 10cm higher than estimated in the most recent IPCC global assessment in 2014 because of Antarctica’s quickening melt.

On that track, seas could rise by anywhere between 2.3 and 5.4 metres by 2300, it said. That would redraw maps of the world, make entire low-lying nations in the Pacific Ocean uninhabitable and swamp coasts from Bangladesh to Miami.

Lee said that there were worrying signs that the world was losing the race against climate change. “We need to take immediate and drastic action to cut emissions right now,” he said.

“Humanity is exacting a terrible toll on the ocean,” Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg and Palau president Tommy Remengesau Jr. wrote in CNN on Monday. “Global warming, combined with the negative impacts of numerous other human activities, is devastating our ocean, with alarming declines in fish stocks, the death of our reefs, and sea level rise that could displace hundreds of millions of people.”

Authors said those different futures for rising seas highlighted stark choices now.

“Although many of the messages may seem depressing … there are actual, positive choices that can be made to limit the worst impacts of climate change,” said Michael Meredith, of the British Antarctic Survey.

Nerilie Abram, of Australian National University, also said: “We see changes in all of these areas, from the tops of high mountain to the depths of the oceans and the polar region …We see two very different futures ahead of us.”

The report was published two days after leaders failed to match UN secretary general Antonio Guterres’ call for nations to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 at a summit in New York.

Global CO2 output continues to rise. Guterres said such immediate action was needed to get on track to limit warming to 1.5C, the toughest goal of the Paris Agreement. Global average temperatures are already up about 1C.

The UN asked for climate plans. Major economies failed to answer

Delegates to the IPCC said Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s top oil producer, had repeatedly sought changes at the Monaco meeting, partly to weaken links to an IPCC report in 2018 that examined ways to achieve the 1.5C goal.

Largely at Saudi insistence, Wednesday’s text, for instance, merely said it “follows” the 1.5C report and another about climate change and land issued this year. Many other delegates had favoured the word “complements” to underscore that the reports are part of a family of scientific studies.

Delegates said the Saudis pushed to water down any wording that would link this report to the IPCC’s 1.5 degrees report. In Katowice, the COP only “noted” the 1.5C report, under pressure from Saudis, Americans etc, stopping short of “welcoming” it. 

Saudi Arabia seemed to worry that the Santiago COP may “welcome” this new report. If so, it could implicitly endorse the findings in the 1.5C report if they were strongly connected in the text, so they wanted to loosen any links.

Some authors said wrangling over wording ended up helping because authors tightened the scientific findings.

Martin Sommerkorn, an author with the WWF conservation group, said that “the report ended up stronger because of a defence of the science.”

Delegates said the wrangling contributed to delay the meeting, with an all-night session lasting into Tuesday, from a scheduled finish on Monday.

They also said that the US delegation did not stand in the way of the science, even though US president Donald Trump plans to pull out of the Paris Agreement.

Climate science on 1.5C erased at UN talks as US and Saudis step in

Among other findings, the report said the maximum catch of fish in the oceans, already falling because of factors including over-fishing and pollution as well as warming waters, would fall by between 20 and 24% this century unless governments take strong action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

And fish stocks would be driven polewards or to the depths as the waters warm, perhaps causing conflicts over dwindling resources.

The report said extreme high tides or storm surges that historically happened only once a century could become at least annual events by 2100, exacerbated by rising sea levels. And a melt of permafrost could release methane and undermine infrastructure in mountains or polar regions.

“The impacts of human-made carbon emissions on our oceans are on a much larger scale and happening way faster than predicted,” said Taehyun Park, global climate political advisor with Greenpeace East Asia.

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Last week’s IPCC report on land use may not have turned out to be the headline-generating machine that the 2018 report on limiting warming to 1.5C was; nor did it go unnoticed. The scope for stories was wide, with co-chair Jim Skea telling Climate Home News the paper was “the most complicated thing I’ve ever been involved with”.

While some journalists picked up on trade-offs between carbon storage and food production, the importance of indigenous land rights or sustainable farming practices, one theme dominated: meat.

Led by western media, the majority of coverage focused on the environmental impact of readers’ steak habits – even in countries where vegetarian diets are dictated by financial constraints or spiritual practice, not consumer preference.

Despite being the first IPCC report with a majority of authors from the developing world, few news outlets in poorer countries dedicated space to it. What little reporting filtered through was largely based on the IPCC press release or newswire copy, rather than highlighting the stark implications of the science for vulnerable communities.

Comment: How we manage land is critical to climate justice

AFP led with “Can we eat Big Macs and still avoid climate chaos?”, summarising that “not everyone needs to become a vegetarian, much less vegan, to keep the planet from overheating, but it would probably make things a lot easier if they did.” Reuters also attempted to capture that nuance, writing “although the report stopped short of explicitly advocating going meat free, it called for big changes to farming and eating habits to limit the impact of population growth and changing consumption patterns on stretched land and water resources.”

In the UK, The Times called on the reader to “Eat less meat to save the Earth”, while in the Guardian leftist commentator George Monbiot hit out at the IPCC for “[understating] the true carbon cost of our meat and dairy habits”. It provoked a backlash from British farming unions, who lamented “biased” and “selective” reporting of the science.

Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine had a similar focus, describing it the report as “a thorn in the flesh” (the word “fleisch” also meaning meat). Spanish online magazine Economía Digital warned the report would worsen the dire state of the national meat sector, which has suffered from declining demand in the past decade.

The focus on diet isn’t without its problems, Max Boykoff, director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research and a seasoned observer on climate coverage, told Climate Home News.

“Some of these ways in which certain outlets can choose to focus in on the individual can serve to distract and simply displace in a finite news hole those larger scale stories that need attention: the revolutionising of our agricultural practices, the way we manage our forests,” Boykoff said.

“Yes, [eating habits] are the way we come into contact with the environment most frequently. But to stay in that place is to atomise and limit the possibilities for making the kind of changes that are needed.” It also gave “corporations a free pass”, he said.

Analysis: Nine solutions to the food-forests-fuel trilemma

India initially set its own agenda, with the Business Standard first to obtain a leak of the draft report in July. Under the headline “Climate change could cause 29% spike in cereal prices,” journalist Nitin Sethi noted that increased aridity in Asia could severely impact food security, and leave up to 522 million people prey to “water stress, drought and habitat degradation…. in a significant finding for countries such as India”.

On the day of the final report’s publication, however, much of the national media toed the vegetarian line. The Times of India went with an uncannily similar headline to that of The Times in the UK (“Adopt a green diet and help save Earth: UN body report”), while India Today gave twin prominence to the report’s messages on food security and plant-based diets.

In the most vegetarian country on earth, that angle smacked of irresponsibility, said Dharini Parthasarathy, a communications officer at the umbrella group Climate Action Network (CAN).

“The report also talks about the extent of hunger and poverty that will be exacerbated by bad land use and climate change. For decision makers in India, that’s an alarm bell. We’re in an agrarian crisis, so for that not to be the big takeaway is quite something,” she said.

The big picture wasn’t lost on everyone.

IPCC: Urgent action needed to tackle hunger alongside climate crisis

The New York Times wrote of the planet’s soil as a carbon and hunger time bomb. “A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming.” It quoted one of the lead authors of the report, Cynthia Rosenzweig, who said that “the potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing… All of these things are happening at the same time.”

In France, Germany and Spain media called for a revolution in food systems. The French and German media covered the report particularly extensively, with Le Monde, Liberation and Ouest-France devoting front pages to it. Left-leaning Süddeutsche Zeitung mentioned the report in no fewer than 16 articles on Thursday and Friday.

Addressing a nation of farmers, France’s press delved deeper than others into the takeaways for agriculture. Le Monde splashed with the headline “Humanity is exhausting the earth” – the word “terre” carrying the double meaning of “planet Earth” and “soils”. A caricature by Plantu shows a mapped snake biting its own tail, in a reference to a French phrase denoting self-harm.

To Olivier de Schutter, former UN chief on the right to food, the report is first and foremost an endorsement of agroecology. He told the French paper of record that humanity needed to turn away from fertilisers and pesticides and embrace organic methods.

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Like Climate Home News, Brazil’s Folha de S Paulo homed in on the competing demands on land to cut emissions through forest plantations and biofuels, and grow food.

In the highest and fourth highest emitting countries in the world, China and Russia, media stuck to neutral summaries of the report’s key messages.

China’s official state-run press agency, Xinhua News Agency, led with the headline that “UN report points out that land degradation will exacerbate climate change”.

As record wildfires tore across Siberia, unleashing plumes of smog the size of the EU, the Russian press missed an opportunity to cover feedback loops between fires and climate change. It wasn’t for want of trying on the part of Greenpeace Russia, which circulated a press release to 400 outlets titled “UN recognizes fires in natural areas as a threat to climate”. The report noted that “fire weather season has already lengthened by 18.7% globally between 1979 and 2013,” with “significant increases in forest area burnt in boreal Siberia”.

Instead, state news agency Interfax contented itself with a broadbrush overview of the report, focusing on rising food security risks and the need to slash meat consumption.

Tanzania’s The Citizen offered a rare bit of African commentary, with an editorial urging the “government… to check the habit of wanton falling [sic] of trees for the excuse of farming” and advocating “strong punitive measures against the destruction of natural forests”.

Reuter’s charitable arm, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was one of the few outlets to focus on the report’s conclusion about the critical role of indigenous people  in land and climate conservation.

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The post Meat and potatoes: international media majors on diet in IPCC coverage appeared first on Climate Home News.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on climate change and land use, is a major piece of work. It deals with such complex issues as the balance between land as a source of greenhouse gas emissions and land as a carbon sink.

While the implications of its findings for the future of rich country diets has grabbed the headlines, its warnings for climate justice are significant.

One of the report’s more startling observations is that air temperatures over land have risen nearly two times the global average. A 1.5C global rise in temperature will actually mean a 3C increase over land.

IPCC: Urgent action needed to tackle hunger alongside climate crisis

Driving inequality

Some richer countries and regions are experiencing striking impacts now, from melting permafrost in the Arctic to unprecedented wildfires in many parts of the US and Europe.

But the effects of heatwaves, droughts and heavy rainfall on people’s livelihoods will be more extreme in the tropics and subtropics than in the generally richer temperate zones.

In India, for example, there has been a threefold increase in widespread extreme rain events in India between 1950 and 2015, leading to soil erosion and land degradation. The report notes that ‘yields of some crops’ (maize and wheat for example) have declined in the lower-latitude regions, while in many higher latitude regions yields of key crops have increased.

The report reinforces the fact that poorer countries in the tropics (low latitudes) will be hit far harder than richer ones in temperate zones (higher latitudes). This will drive increasing inequality between rich and poor countries unless urgent action is taken to both turn around the climate crisis and support vulnerable countries to deal with the damage, which is already extensive.

Analysis: Nine solutions to the food-forests-fuel trilemma

Problematic solutions

Most of the pathways identified by the IPCC consistent with limiting temperature rise to 1.5C involve substantial use of costly bio-energy projects with carbon capture and storage (known as Beccs). There are two problems here.

First, this involves technology that is unproven at the scale needed to make a significant dent on global carbon emissions.

Second, operating at that kind of scale would require vast amounts of land.

At this point the trade-offs become worrying – amplified by the sense that it will be poorer countries in the Global South that will be expected to provide the land.

The concern is that this will lead to land being taken out of local ownership and put under bioenergy monocropping systems that will damage ecosystems as well as societies.

Similar concerns apply to some approaches to land conversion for afforestation. It isn’t just the climate crisis, therefore, that threatens poorer communities – it is also the wrong policy choices.

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A fair transition

Managing forests and other ecosystems is crucial to making it possible for local communities to address climate change and thrive in spite of it, while also protecting nature.

The IPCC lists the options with a wide range of social and environmental benefits including sustainable food production, soil organic carbon management, sustainable forest management, ecosystem conservation, land restoration, reduced deforestation and degradation. It is important to be aware of the limits – most land-based options for carbon sequestration do not deliver these benefits indefinitely.

It is certain that these measures, however helpful for mitigation, are no substitute for the urgent transformations of energy, industrial and infrastructure systems that are necessary. The IPCC’s emphasis on the need to secure local people’s land rights and make sure they have a voice in policy to underpin positive climate action in land management is crucial.

Land is visceral, emotional and inescapably political as a policy focus. The IPCC report on land use can help bring into focus both the risks facing poor rural communities in vulnerable countries and the potential they have to contribute to solutions. But their rights and knowledge must be respected, and they will need effective support to realise this potential.

Andrew Norton is director of the International Institute for Environment and Development

The post How we manage land is critical to climate justice appeared first on Climate Home News.

Large-scale tree-planting and bioenergy production are important tools to limit global warming but could threaten food security, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In late-running negotiations on how to summarise the latest science for policymakers, representatives of forest nations stressed that with sustainable management, these conflicts can be minimised.

“Land already in use could feed the world in a changing climate and provide biomass for renewable energy, but early, far-reaching action across several areas is required,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, one of the leading IPCC scientists coordinating the report. “Also for the conservation and restoration of ecosystems and biodiversity.”

Left unchecked, global warming itself will damage ecosystems, eroding the capacity of land to support human life, the evidence shows.

Analysis: Nine solutions to the food-forests-fuel trilemma

The special report on land use shines a light on the importance of afforestation and fuel crops to absorb carbon dioxide – and the associated risks of land degradation and increased desertification, which it said could have “potentially irreversible consequences”.

It covered controversial ways to limit global warming such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (Beccs): burning plants to generate energy and pumping the emissions underground.

“The report leaves no doubt about the devastating impacts that large-scale bioenergy, Beccs and afforestation with monocultures would have on water availability, biodiversity, food security, livelihoods, land degradation and desertification — a tsunami of threats that make large scale bioenergy and Beccs completely unacceptable and unworkable,” said Linda Schneider, senior programme officer in climate policy at the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

In one scenario, use of forestry and land to store carbon causes crop prices to soar 80% by 2050, translating into an extra 80 to 300 million people suffering from undernourishment.

This tension is however limited if trees are planted on land unsuitable for agriculture and used to prevent desertification and restore degraded soil. Small-scale planting of native species can also provide a safety net during times of food and income insecurity.

Another way to reduce competition for land is to crack down on illegal logging in protected areas and better manage existing forests.

Comment: It is high time to reboot our relationship with nature

Bioenergy, which can replace carbon-intensive fossil fuels, must be used judiciously to avoid tensions between feeding a growing population and tackling climate change, the report showed.

Extensive use of bioenergy – including with carbon capture and storage – puts an additional 150 million people at risk of hunger if used to reduce emissions by several gigatonnes of CO2 per year.

But limiting bioenergy crops to marginal lands could significantly reduce negative effects, potentially even enriching ecosystems and the soils in the process.

Those warnings come after national delegates and scientists spent a week in Geneva, Switzerland, debating what to include in the summary for policymakers (SPM), a 41-page document to guide governments.

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Among the most contentious topics were passages detailing the downsides of large-scale bioenergy and forest plantations.

Led by Brazil, a group including the US, Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom pushed back against a diagram in the draft that flagged several trade-offs in red. The final version separated out the contested elements, highlighting areas of scientific uncertainty and how best practice can bring dual benefits.

A draft of the IPCC land use report summary for policymakers raised several red flags around bioenergy

The final version emphasises areas of uncertainty and the benefits of following best practice

France and Germany, however, “stood firm in the face of attempts to water down high afforestation scenarios,” an observer told CHN.

The two delegations also championed “nature-based solutions” to restore natural landscapes such as mangroves and peatlands to soak up carbon emissions, according to three sources. The final version added several paragraphs on this theme, compared to the draft.

Bolsonaro under fire for deforestation denial, after sacking space agency chief

Jim Skea, a lead scientist on the IPCC report, told Climate Home News the final version introduced “a lot more nuance” about bioenergy.

“What was picked up from the previous draft was that the message about bioenergy was almost entirely negative because the figure assumed that it would be deployed at the scale that would remove at least 3Gt of CO2 annually… But we are not deploying bioenergy nearly at that scale at the moment,” he said.

The report is part of a series of landmark publications by the IPCC aiming to arm governments with the best climate science ahead of 2020, a critical moment for UN climate negotiations. Next month will see the release of a report focused on oceans and the cryosphere – water in its solid state such as glaciers and ice sheets.

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Due for release on 8 August, the report is set to warn that expanding bioenergy crops and forests in order to soak up greenhouse gas emissions risks displacing precious farmland and worsening hunger.

But there are ways to limit the tension between clean fuel, carbon sinks and food. Here are nine win-win-win solutions

Photo: Wikimedia commons

1. Banish food waste

One of the most common myths about food security is that it’s all about production. In fact, most of the world’s hunger takes root in problems of distribution and access. Roughly one third of all food is lost or wasted between the farm and the fork. And 1.3 billion tonnes of squandered food means millions of square kilometres of squandered land.

There are many solutions to food waste. The World Resources Institute has suggested that governments set food loss and waste reduction targets, create independent waste watchdogs and boost investment to slash post-harvest losses in developing countries. Better food date labels are another must.

Photo: Creative commons

2. Eat less meat

“When it comes to the question of how to reduce demand for land, the heart of the discussion is of course to reduce demand for animal products,” says Pierre-Marie Aubert, the leader of the European food policy initiative at the Paris-based think tank Iddri. “This for a very simple reason: animal production consumes the great majority of known green surfaces on earth.”

Animal farming, including feedstock, takes up 83% of the world’s agricultural land, but delivers only 18% of our calories. A plant-based diet cuts the use of land by 76% and halves the greenhouse gases and other pollution that are caused by food production.

While the world’s poor would benefit from more animal protein, in the rich world slashing meat consumption can go hand in hand with healthier eating.

Palm oil plantations in Indonesia (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Achmad Rabin Taim)

3. Move away from (some) cash crops in poorer countries

The past decades have seen farmers in developing countries increasingly focus on satisfying Western appetites for crops like coffee, cacao and palm oil. This has resulted in the substitution of rich patchworks of crops with monocultures.

As well as limiting the range of food crops available for local diets, intensive farming methods on homogenous plantations can kill vital pollinators.

As a result, soybean production now presents substantial risks for food security in Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. There is a similar phenomenon in Indonesia and Malaysia due to large-scale palm oil plantations.

“It’s lose-lose. We lose on production and we lose on the degradation of the ecosystem,” Aubert says. He recommends diversifying agriculture.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons/SthefanyMora

4. Sustainably intensify agriculture in the global South

“Cattle must be lonely in Brazil,” former UK climate envoy David King joked when he visited the country in March 2016, noting the vast areas they roam.

In many tropical countries, rainforests are cleared to create pastures for grazing, but because farmers do not invest in soil health, the land slowly deteriorates. Farming incomes eventually degrade alongside grasslands, prompting ranchers to deforest new tracts – a vicious cycle.

The leading source of deforestation in Brazil, ranching accounts for 450,000 square kilometres of stripped Amazon, with an average 1.3 cattle per hectare. Carlos Nobre, a scientist in Earth Systems at the University of São Paulo, says that with better ranching practices, each cow could be raised in half the space, preventing further deforestation.

A plot cultivated along the principles of permaculture in France (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Alôsnys)

5. De-intensify agriculture in the global North

In developed countries, on the other hand, intensification has in many cases gone too far. Since the second world war, a revolution in farming methods banished food scarcity – but degraded soils in the process.

The intensive use of fertilisers and pesticides, coupled with mechanical ploughing, is unsustainable over the long term. By definition, less intensive methods lead to lower yields, other things being equal.

But a 2018 report by Iddri argued a shift to greener practices in Europe was essential to future food security and carbon storage – and coupled with dietary changes (see point 2) could slash total farming emissions by 40%.

Coconut trees flirt with Mexican marigolds in Kerala, India (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Ezhuttukari)

6. Turn farmland into a carbon sponge

Regardless of where it’s located, forward-looking agriculture will need to boost soils’ capacity to absorb carbon. There are tried and tested methods to achieve this, such as growing several crops on one field, also known as intercropping, or disturbing the soil less by reducing tillage.

Dousing the soils with biochar – a charcoal produced from plant matter – could also help soils store up carbon.

The Montane peatlands in Eastern Australia (Photo: Creative Commons/Doug Beckers)

7. Care for existing carbon-rich ecosystems

When it comes to storing carbon, all landscapes are not created equal. Coastal habitats, such as mangroves, sea grass and salt marshes can soak up carbon up to 40 times faster than tropical forests. Peatlands, which cover 3% of the land surface, represent the largest terrestrial carbon store.

Caring for them is a priority if we are to keep emissions under control. They also provide an effective barrier against flooding and storms – which can threaten food crops – and create habitats for biodiversity and pollinators.

Biofuel proponents claim that algal biofuels can cut through the food vs biofuel dilemma (Photo: Creative Commons/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory – PNNL)

8. Choose the right bioenergy crops

Some biofuels are better than others. First generation biofuels, distilled from food crops like corn, sugarcane, rapeseed, soybeans and palm oil, are controversial. In the worst cases, research shows such biofuels pollute even more than petroleum-based fuels, for example where rainforest is cleared to make way for a low-yielding palm oil plantation.

Third generation biofuels like algae are promising in theory, holding over 200 times more biomass per area than terrestrial biomass. In practice, though, they are difficult to produce at scale and have yet to break through commercially.

There is scope to generate bioenergy in ways that don’t compete with tree cover or food production, however. Agricultural waste, forestry offcuts and crops grown on marginal land are safer sources.

Windmills in Galicia (Photo: Creative Commons/Makunin)

9. Rapidly reduce emissions in other sectors

Last but not least, “action on land and forestry is not an excuse for lack of action on industry and energy,” says Greenpeace campaigner Christopher Thies.

While the IPCC foresees biofuels and forestry playing a key role in limiting warming to 1.5C, the scale of the challenge depends on other polluting sectors.

The faster fossil fuels are phased out, the less pressure falls on land use choices to meet climate goals.

The post Nine solutions to the food-forests-fuel trilemma appeared first on Climate Home News.

Models suggest large areas of land are needed to draw carbon dioxide out of the air to limit global warming to 1.5C, the most ambitious target in the Paris Agreement.

This risks worsening hunger by competing with food production for space, according to the draft summary for policymakers obtained by Business Standard.

“Widespread use at the scale of several millions of km2 globally” of tree-planting and bioenergy crops could have “potentially irreversible consequences for food security and land degradation”, the report said.

Intensifying the production of bioenergy crops through the use of fertilisers, irrigation and monocultures could also erode soil and its capacity to soak up carbon in the long run.

UN report on 1.5C blocked from climate talks after Saudi Arabia disputes science

There is rising demand for fuels derived from plants as a source of renewable energy. The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), describes modern bioenergy as the “overlooked giant” of renewables, predicting it will outpace solar, wind and hydropower in the next five years.

However, converting land to bioenergy production could deprive countries of valuable agricultural soil and displace crops and livestock to less productive regions. Populations most at risk of food insecurity were sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, the IPCC draft said.

To minimise the conflict, scientists advised governments to limit the scale of bioenergy. Depending on the way countries developed, negative effects from biofuel crops could kick in starting from between 2 and 6 million km2 globally.

A safer way to reduce land emissions is to protect and restore ecosystems known for their capacity to absorb carbon, including grasslands, peatlands and coastal wetlands, which affect smaller areas.

On the food production side, measures to cut waste and a shift to lower meat diets can also help to alleviate pressure on land.

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The report dealt a blow to the system of intensive agriculture spawned after the second world war and called for a shift to sustainable farming. The current food system is responsible for over half of human-caused methane emissions and 25-30% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

Breaking monocultures by cultivating several crops at once, planting more crops to enrich and protect soil, such as legumes, and reducing tillage could help soil absorb more carbon.

The findings chime with research by French think tank IDDRI published in December, which showed that an agroecological food system in Europe could slash emissions by around 40% compared to 2010.

The report urged policymakers to consult local people, “particularly the most vulnerable”, over the use of land. This could help governments identify the most appropriate uses for land and overcome potential conflicts or trade-offs.

Responding to media reports on the leak, the IPCC said in a statement that “drafts of the report are collective works in progress that do not necessarily represent the IPCC’s final assessment of the state of knowledge”.

Government representatives are due to meet 2-6 August to consider the report and finalise the summary for policymakers ahead of publication.

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Discussions came to a deadlock at the talks in Bonn after a small group of countries refused to engage in substantive discussions over how the report’s findings could be used to inform policies on increasing the pace and scale of decarbonisation.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lays out the differences between 1.5C and 2C of warming – a matter of survival for many vulnerable countries including small island states which pushed for the findings to lead to more ambitious carbon-cutting policies.

Wealthy countries resist global tax on carbon offsets

At the closing plenary, which took place amid soaring summer temperatures in the former west German capital, a five-paragraph watered-down agreement put an end to formal discussions on the report.

The agreed text expressed “appreciation and gratitude” to the scientific community for the report, which it said “reflects the best available science” and notes “the views expressed on how to strengthen scientific knowledge on global warming of 1.5C”.

It offers no way forward for the report to be considered further in formal negotiations.

In the final meeting of the talks, diplomats came together to express their disappointment. Franz Perrez, lead negotiator for Switzerland, wore a t-shirt with the message “science is not negotiable” and urged countries to use the report to inform their policies and “make the right decisions”.

A diplomat from Costa Rica said the IPCC report on 1.5C represented “a great triumph of science” and that “the quality of the work and the robustness of the conclusions are a tremendous achievement”.

“We recognise that many messages of the special report are difficult to accept,” she said, adding: “On climate change, listening to the science is not a choice but a duty. If we are asking the world to change, we also, as representatives, need to be willing to change.”

The meeting’s chair Paul Watkinson said science remained “at the heart” of UN Climate Change’s science stream and that it is “essential for all our collective and individual activities”.

Carlos Fuller, lead negotiator for the alliance of small island states (Aosis), told Climate Home News he was disappointed there would be no other formal opportunities for countries to delve into the science.

“When anyone is trying to discredit the science it is worrying, especially in the middle of a heatwave. We are the ones suffering if others reject the science,” he said.

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Fuller said the final version of the text “encouraged everyone to use the [report’s findings]” but prevented the science from being debated.

Following pressure from a group of large oil and gas producers led by Saudi Arabia, a previous version of the text aimed to cast doubt on the report’s scientific grounding. It stressed the “risks and uncertainties” of the report’s methodology and raised concerns that “the scientific knowledge gap” would “hamper the ability to inform decision making at national, regional and international levels.”

Gebru Jember Endalew of Ethiopia, negotiator for the group of least developed countries, told Climate Home News this previous version of the text was “unacceptable” because it “questioned and revisited the science”.

“We can’t negotiate science,” he said. “This is not our mandate.”

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Endalew said that although excluding the report from formal negotiations was “a mistake” it was a better outcome to “go without anything rather than having a shopping list of issues”.

Instead, he called on Chile, which is taking on the talks’ presidency, to organise events so that discussions can continue informally.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was commissioned by the UN on behalf of all countries, including those now objecting to its methodology.

Saudi Arabia, the US, Kuwait and Russia also refused to endorse the report’s findings at the last round of talks in Katowice, Poland, last year, despite support from almost the entire community of nations.

Alden Meyer, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, described the agreed text as “very weak” and added little more than what had already been agreed.

“It shows a small group of large oil and gas producing countries have deep concerns about the implications of the report for their future revenue and are coordinating a strategy to try and block these implications to be more widely understood.

THREAD on why Saudi Arabia is so afraid of the @IPCC_CH's 1.5C report https://t.co/VX4RuRxz9W

— Climate Home News (@ClimateHome) June 27, 2019

“But no matter how hard they try, Saudi Arabia can’t put the message back into the bottle, the report is out there,” he said.

Eddy Pérez, international policy analyst at Climate Action Network Canada, warned against the “politicisation” of climate science.

In an op-ed in the Financial Times, ambassador Lois Young, of Belize and the chair of Aosis, said five years after all countries had agreed to the Paris Agreement, a few countries wished to “quietly use procedural measures to rip it up away from the public gaze” – a strategy she described as “a rejection of multilateralism”.

“The move essentially declares that small islands and low-lying coastal developing states like my home, Belize, are disposable global zones to be sacrificed amid unprecedented climate change,” she wrote. “This is a crisis that affects our security and we call on those blocking at the UN to step aside.”

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It is undoubtedly the case that species go extinct. And sometimes large numbers of species disappear together in mass events caused by the same physical stresses. It is also true that at some point in the future the human species will go extinct, or at the least evolve into a new species partly of our own making.

Yet I resist the current mood of ‘extinctionism’ which pervades the new public discourse around climate change. Talking about the future in this way is counter-productive. And it does a disservice to development, justice, peace-making and humanitarian projects being undertaken around the world today.

A denier is a person who denies something, “who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.” If I do not believe that climate change will drive the human species to extinction, does that make me an extinction denier? For I do not believe that there is good scientific or historical evidence that climate change will lead to human extinction.

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And yet you would be led to believe that there is. Last September the United Nations secretary-general António Guterres made the bald claim, “We face a direct existential threat” from climate change. Jem Bendell at the University of Cumbria warns, “there is a growing community of people who conclude we face inevitable human extinction”. Bendell goes on to state that ‘Inevitable Near Term Human Extinction’ (INTHE) has become a widely used phrase for online discussions about climate-collapse. And Greta Thunberg frequently claims that climate change “is an emergency, this is an existential crisis”.

Across the Atlantic the American commentator Tom Englehardt has placed humanity on a suicide watch for itself.  “Even for an old man like me,” he says, “it’s a terrifying thing to watch humanity make a decision, however inchoate, to essentially commit suicide.” And in David Wallace-Wells’ best-selling book, An Uninhabitable Earth, he claims that climate change is “much, much worse than you think”.

This rise in extinction rhetoric in (largely) English-speaking societies over the past 12 months is in part linked to the IPCC’s Special Report on 1.5C Warming published last October. The slogan “we have only 12 years left” has somehow been extracted from this report and feeds the rise of climate clocks such as this one from the Human Impact Lab in Montreal. But the IPCC report offers neither scientific nor historical evidence for human extinction.

From this extinction fear arises the “panic” that Greta Thunberg has called for. Panic demands a response and one response is to declare an emergency. ‘Climate emergencies’ are now being declared in jurisdictions ranging from universities, the British Parliament and several local authorities in the UK.

Climate emergency declarations spread across UK after Extinction Rebellion

But the rhetoric of extinction and emergency does not adequately describe the situation we find ourselves in. Declaring a climate emergency implies the possibility of time-limited radical and decisive action that can end the emergency. But climate change is not like this. The historical trajectory of human expansion, western imperialism and technological development has created climate change as a new condition of human existence rather than as a path to extinction.

So here are five reasons why I am an extinction denier.

The rhetoric of climate change and extinction does not do justice to what we know scientifically. Climate prediction science is fundamentally based on probabilistic forecasts which underpin the quantification of risk. There is a range of possible values for future global warming. It is as false scientifically to say that the climate future will be catastrophic as it is to say with certainty that it will be merely lukewarm.

Neither does it do justice to what we know historically. Some like the American veteran journalist Bill Moyers have called for a war-like stance in relation to climate change, using the analogy of the late 1930s: “In the second world war, the purpose of journalism was to awaken the world to the catastrophe looming ahead of it. We must approach our climate crisis the same way”. But as the historian and Liberal politician James Bryce explained in 1920, “the chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies”. We should beware of false or trite analogues.

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The rhetoric of climate and extinction does not help us psychologically. It all too easily induces feelings of terror as Ed Maibach at George Mason University bluntly remarks: “As a public health professional (and as a human), I find the prospect of 3 or 4 degree C of global warming to be nothing short of terrifying.” But inducing a state of terror generates counter-productive responses in human behaviour.

Nor does the rhetoric of climate and extinction help us politically. Simply ‘uniting behind the science’ or ‘passing on the words of science’ gets us no further forward politically. Even if climate science predicted the extinction of humanity, as Darrick Evensen explains climate change “raises a host of ethical, historical and cultural questions that are at most tangentially connected to any scientific findings”.

And finally the rhetoric of climate and extinction does not help us morally. Even if we take these claims literally, the mere fact of human extinction by no means impels us to conclude that the correct moral response must be to prevent that extinction. There may well be other moral demands upon us which take precedence, and yet which we ignore. Why the human species above other species? Why are the future unborn more morally demanding of us than the dispossessed victims of today? Why is suicide the worst sin of all?

Despite what some claim, climate change is not a black and white issue. It has many shades of grey. By this I mean that interpreting the significance of the fact that humans are altering the world’s climate is not self-evident. To believe that there is an absolute truth to be told about what climate change means, or what ‘it demands of us’, is misguided.

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What climate change means is not ‘revealed truth’ emerging from some scientific script. The political meanings and individual and collective responses to climate change have to be worked out iteratively. They have to be negotiated within the political structures and processes we inhabit, negotiations that can’t be circumvented by an appeal to the authority of science being ‘on our side’. (Of course this must also include the possibility of renegotiating some of those same political structures).

Campaigning on the grounds that the human species faces extinction because of climate change – and declaring a climate emergency – is a superficial response to complex realities. And it is talk that opens the door to one-eyed techno-solutions – such as envisaged by the putative Cambridge Centre for Climate Repair – and fuels the possible legitimation of dangerous solar climate engineering schemes.

The new condition of climate change is real. Without being deferential or uncritical, we need to be cognisant of what science can tell us about the future. We need more varied, and more active, voices in climate politics. And it requires us to think through, argue and enact political projects and ethical priorities in different ways.

But I will argue against climate politics henceforth being conducted under the restrictive conditions of emergency. And I will deny that there is warrant to collapse the possibilities of the future to human extinction.

Mike Hulme is professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge. This article originally appeared on his blog.

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Oceans mop up vast amounts (up to 80%) of the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere by humans. The ecosystems they support could provide new, albeit controversial, ways to draw carbon from the air.

But their health and management remains sidelined from the key political forum on climate change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

That could change this year. Host nation Chile, which has control over almost 18 million sq km of the world’s oceans, is calling this year’s Cop25 UN climate conference in Santiago a “Blue Cop”.

At a special preparatory meeting in Madrid earlier this month politicians, scientists, and NGOs discussed ways to use the meeting to gain political traction.

Have hope, humanity is finding ways to defeat climate change

“Time is running out,” Chile’s environment minister and the Cop25 president Carolina Schmidt told the meeting through a video. “This is why Chile has been pushing to highlight this problem. In our vision, there cannot be an effective response to climate change without a global response to ocean issues.”

The UN body of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is due to release a landmark report on the complex linkages between ocean and climate change in September. This is expected to add impetus to Chile’s programme.

What it means to host a “Blue Cop” is still up for debate. Rémi Parmentier, secretary of Because the Ocean, an initiative signed by 23 countries at COP21 in Paris to call for the IPCC report, told Climate Home News “the role of the ocean in mitigating climate change, and the ocean change that it is causing (ocean warming, acidification, deoxygenation, etc) will take centre stage, now and in the future”.

“Ocean and climate are two sides of the same coin: if we want to protect the climate, we must protect the ocean, and vice-versa,” Parmentier said.

According to observers from the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, some governments at the meeting requested that ocean health be placed on the formal agenda for the Cop. This would hoist marine issues at the top of the list of climate priorities.

From CJRF: Beekeepers and seaweed farmers bring entrepreneurial flair to climate adaptation

Other governments were more reluctant, stressing that the creation of special slots for ocean matters could delay negotiations. Instead, the UN could hold a special event in relation to the publication of the IPCC report or release a political statement, they suggested. (The meeting was closed and ENB did not attribute the statements.)

Political statements are a common device in the UN process. They can propose solutions to specific problems, form new commissions or simply commit governments to place new attention on an issue.

Several countries, including Chile, Monaco and France, are pushing for countries to include ocean health issues alongside the energy transition, forestry, agriculture and industry in the national climate plans they submit to the UN climate process. Launching the Cop25 talks this month, Chilean president Sebastian Piñera used his speech to call for this.

These voluntary plans can include anything governments wish, but their inclusion would indicate governments are considering what they can do to protect the ocean carbon sink. Spain’s minister for the ecological transition Teresa Ribera said the IPCC report would identify specific measures that countries could take that could then be addressed in their reports.

Scientists and policy-makers are currently debating what these could be, with some calling to monitor ocean acidification or increase the number of marine protected areas. Others have suggested that national jurisdictions should count and cut their shipping emissions, which account for 2.5% of global emissions, according to the latest International Maritime Organisation (IMO) study.

Participants also voiced caution that a renewed focus on the ocean could boost controversial technologies, such as ocean fertilisation and blue carbon credits.

Ocean fertilisation refers to the sprinkling of iron into the oceans to spur the growth of algae, or phytoplankton, which bloom and capture large quantities of carbon through photosynthesis.

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Scientists are still evaluating the consequences of the geotechnology, however. Sunken blooms could, for example, deplete oxygen reserves, which are vital for marine life, and produce greenhouse gases that are more perilous than CO2.

Head of the Paris-based Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) Sébastien Treyer, told CHN that it was therefore “very important that all the potential negative impacts that solutions like ocean fertilisation can have on ocean ecosystems and ecological cycles are assessed” before promoting them through climate negotiations.

An emphasis on offsetting emissions through blue carbon, or the carbon stored by coastal ecosystems such as mangrove forests, seagrass meadows and salt marshes, also comes with its own set of risks. In the past, the inclusion of such spaces into carbon markets have led to “ocean grabbing” from small-scale fishermen, civil societies such as Afrika Kontakt have argued.

Parmentier cautioned that “avoid repeating past abuse with regard to carbon credits”.

On top of the the Blue Cop and IPCC report, 2021 will also mark the start of the UN decade on Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.

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By failing to reach agreement after two and half hours of emotional negotiations, delegates in Katowice set the scene for a political fight next week over the importance of the UN’s landmark scientific report on the effects of a 1.5C rise in the global temperature.

The battle, halfway through a fortnight of Cop24 negotiations, was over two words: “note” or “welcome”.

Saudi Arabia, the US, Kuwait and Russia said it was enough for the members of the UN climate convention (the UNFCCC) to “note” the findings.

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But poor and undeveloped countries, small island states, Europeans and many others called to change the wording to “welcome” the study – noting that they had commissioned it when they reached the Paris climate agreement in 2015.

“This is not a choice between one word and another,” Rueanna Haynes, a delegate for St Kitts and Nevis, told the plenary. “This is us, as the UNFCCC, being in a position to welcome a report that we requested, that we invited [scientists] to prepare. So it seems to me that if there is anything ludicrous about the discussion that is taking place, it is that we in this body are not in a position to welcome the report.”

The four opposing countries argued the change was not necessary. Saudi Arabia threatened to block the entire discussion if others pushed to change the single word – and warned that it would disrupt the last stretch of negotiations between ministers next week.

The aim of the Cop24 climate summit is to agree a dense set of technical rules to underpin the Paris Agreement’s goals for limiting global warming to well below 2C, and ideally 1.5C, by the end of the century.

The scientific report was published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October. It found that limiting global warming to 1.5C, rather than below 2C, could help avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, and potentially save vulnerable regions such as low-lying islands and coastal villages in the Arctic. But it also made clear that the world would have to slash greenhouse gases by about 45% by 2030.

Before the plenary on Saturday, the UN’s climate chief Patricia Espinosa said she hoped to see countries “really welcoming and highlighting the importance of this report… Even if the IPCC is very clear in saying how difficult it will be to achieve that goal, it still says it is possible”.

CopCast Episode 6: The Yellow Vest Warning

Just a few months before the gilets jaunes protests threw France into turmoil, Valérie Masson-Delmotte presented science to the government, warning climate policy without public consultation was risky. Follow us on Soundcloud and all good podcast apps, and please share.

The US, which raised doubts about the science behind the report before it was finalised, said on Saturday that it would accept wording that noted the IPCC’s findings – while stressing that that “does not imply endorsement” of its contents. Russia said “it is enough just to note it”, rather than welcoming the report, while Kuwait said it was happy with the wording as it stood.

The push in the plenary to change the wording to “welcome” began with the Maldives, which chairs the alliance of small island states. It was quickly backed by a wide range of countries and groups, including the EU, the bloc of 47 least developed countries, the Independent Association of Latin America and the Caribbean, African countries, Norway (another large oil and gas producer), Argentina, Switzerland, Nepal, Bhutan, the Marshall Islands, Belize and South Korea.

Negotiators huddled with the plenary meeting’s chair, Paul Watkinson, for nearly an hour to try and work out a compromise. But Watkinson’s suggestion – welcoming the “efforts” of the IPCC experts and noting the “importance of the underlying research” – fell flat. Delegates from Latin America, small islands, Europe, New Zealand, Canada, Africa and elsewhere argued it was not enough to highlight the work that went into the report, it needed to address the findings.

Watkinson said he was disappointed that they could not agree. But a negotiator said the talks will continue: “This is a prelude to a huge fight next week,” when ministers arrive in Poland. It will be up to the Polish hosts to find a place for the report’s findings in the final outcome of the talks.

Wording that welcomes, rather than notes, the 1.5C report should be the bare minimum, Belize negotiator Carlos Fuller told Climate Home News. However, “the oil producing countries recognise that if the international community takes it on board, it means a massive change in the use of fossil fuels”, he said. “From the US point of view, this is the Trump administration saying ‘we do not believe the climate science’.”

COP 24: 12 activists denied entry to Poland for UN climate summit

Fuller added: “In my opinion we have won the fight, because the headline tomorrow will be: the UNFCCC cannot agree the IPCC report’, and people will say ‘Why, what’s in the report?’ and go and look.”

The 1.5C science wasn’t the only divisive issue after a week of Cop24 talks, with countries still mostly holding their ground on the Paris Agreement’s rulebook.

Contentious decisions related to the transparency of reporting emissions and the make up of national climate plans have all been refined, but ultimately kicked to the higher ministerial level. Several observers raised the concern that some unresolved issues may be too technical for ministers to debate with adequate expertise.

Financial aid is still contentious issue. The rules on how and what developed countries must report on their past and planned funding, and the extent to which emerging economies are urged to do the same, remains largely up for debate.

In a further moment of drama on Saturday afternoon, Africa stood firm as UN officials tried to finalise a draft of the rules that will govern the deal. Africa’s representative Mohamed Nasr said the continent could not accept the deal as it was presented, forcing the text to be redrafted on the plenary floor.

“You can’t bully Africa, it’s 54 countries,” said one negotiator, watching from the plenary floor.

The change will mean new proposals to be made to the text next week. That would allow African ministers to attempt to strengthen a major climate fund dedicated to helping countries adapt to climate change and push for less strict measures for developing countries.

“We have been voicing our concerns, maybe the co-chairs in their attempt to seek a balanced outcome they overlooked some of the stuff. So we are saying that we are not going to stop the process but we need to make sure that our views are included,” Nasr told CHN.

Mohamed Adow, a campaigner with Christian Aid, said the African intervention had “saved the process” by ensuring that dissatisfied countries could still have their issues heard.

“It’s actually much better than it’s ever been in this process at this stage,” he said. “Because this is the end of the first week and ministers have been provided with clear options. Of course nothing is closed but the options are actually narrower.”

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Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a French climate scientist and co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told Climate Home News’ podcast CopCast that members of the senate committee of sustainable development had been “surprised” by findings in a major report in October, which said green policies must be coupled with public consultation or face social resistance.

“They expressed how difficult it is for them as members of the senate to think on how to implement transitions. They also said they were powerless. They didn’t know how to change things, basically,” said Masson-Delmotte.

Listen to the full interview – CopCast Episode 6: The Yellow Vest Warning

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France has been gripped by rioting for three weeks, after Emmanuel Macron’s government announced a tax on diesel fuels designed to reduce pollution.

Despite a retraction of the policy this week, large demonstrations are expected in the French capital over the weekend. On Saturday morning, police arrested hundreds of protestors from the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement in Paris.

Masson-Delmotte, who spoke to CHN’s podcast at UN climate talks in Poland, said she had met protesters near her home in Paris.

“It was interesting to understand how much they don’t trust policy makers, how they don’t trust experts,” she said. “What is striking is the inability of the usual democratic representatives, elected people, trade unions – the usual instruments of a democracy – to deal with the situation. There is a lack of dialogue and a lack of perception of representation of a fraction of the population which believes they are trapped when the price of oil goes up and they believe they have no alternative.”

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The IPCC’s special report in October found social barriers to change could be overcome through strong, consultative leadership, “including citizens and allowing for participation for minorities, and having them provide input and endorse it”.

Masson-Delmotte called for the creation of citizens’ assemblies, borrowing a model created in Ireland, in order for the political class to better understand social anxieties and needs.

The protests in France coincide with UN climate talks in Katowice. The Polish host government has used the talks to highlight the impact on workers and other groups affected by the closure of mines or other measures necessary to avoid dangerous climate change.

“It’s … tragic to observe when I live and work in France and I see that our country failed to have a sustainable development approach that pays attention to the ones who are most vulnerable to policies,” said Masson-Delmotte. “I think our senators reflect society and maybe the older generation of society, so they have not yet fully understood the implications of climate change and how deep it goes into thinking differently the way we build a new future.”

France’s standing committee on sustainable development did not respond to a request for comment.

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I was chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis) when our group fought for the report at the Paris climate change conference back in 2015. The findings came as a shock, even for those of us who have been sounding the climate change alarm for decades.

Among the most startling revelations is that global warming may exceed 1.5C above preindustrial levels – the temperature beyond which climate change impacts could spiral out of control – in as few as 11 years. Already, with 1C of warming, climate impacts have grown more frequent and severe than previously imagined, including increasingly powerful storms and accelerating sea level rise.

In fact, along with the IPCC report, Aosis successfully advocated for setting a global temperature goal of 1.5C in Paris. As countries on the frontline of the climate crisis, we have long devoted an enormous amount of political capital to pushing for the most ambitious temperature target as possible.

Reality check: is the 1.5C warming target even possible?

Our efforts have helped remind the international community that scientific information, however difficult it may be to hear, must inform the international climate change regime.

But, in light of the report, as well my own observations as the environment minister for the one of the world’s lowest-lying countries, I fear we have entered a new phase in the climate talks, one where we must now devote at least as much energy to securing our priorities on adaptation and loss and damage as we do on mitigation ambition.  

As small island leaders, we know that the cost of adapting to climate impacts is straining our budgets.

In the Maldives, for instance, we are witnessing prolonged droughts in our outlying atolls. Such extremes have major implications for ensuring our people have enough water to drink. In emergencies, we have been forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship supplies from our desalination plant in the capital to the affected areas.

At the same time, we have been forced to build coastal protection structures around numerous islands to help manage rising seas and erosion. In the past 5 years, we have spent $85 million on such projects.

Green Climate Fund: US vetoes first Chinese project bid

We were fortunate to be among the first group of countries to receive support from the Green Climate Fund for an adaptation project on water security. When complete, it is projected to provide freshwater to over 100,000 people in a group of outer islands at a cost of about $28 million ($4 million of which came from our own budget).

This represents a significant return on investment by any measure, but like all small islands we face dramatically higher adaptation costs if we hope to build resilience against the kind of impacts the IPCC projects.

Globally, the cost of adapting to climate change in developing countries could rise to between $280 and $500 billion per year by 2050, according to a 2016 UN Environment report. The cost will be disproportionately borne by the world’s developing and least developed countries and is exponentially larger than the amount of international public finance available today.

A failure to keep global warming under 1.5C and the enormous shortfall in the support needed to help vulnerable communities adapt also forces us to confront loss and damage with renewed urgency.

Comment: It’s time to make polluters pay for climate damages

Loss and damage refers to the irreversible harm caused by climate change—slow onset events like the disappearance of an island to rising seas or extreme catastrophes like the near total destruction of property seen on Barbuda in the wake of Hurricane Irma in 2017.

The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage, established in 2013, was ostensibly supposed to address the aforementioned concerns, but while progress has been made in developing the bureaucratic structure of the mechanism, there is faint hope today that real money will materialize to let it do its work.

Since Aosis formed in 1992, it has always advocated for positions that would give all our members the best chance for survival. Decades ago, the group called for a global temperature goal of 1C. As greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise, it became clear that the target was unrealistic. Later, strong scientific evidence pointed to 1.5C as the responsible global temperature goal and the slogan “1.5 to stay alive” was born.

Now that the IPCC is saying we could overshoot 1.5C of warming in about a decade, we must adjust our political demands accordingly. Make no mistake: it would be suicide for the world to continue to emit greenhouse gases at the current pace and we should all demand a rapid transition to renewable energy. But for small island nations, it would also be suicide not to use every lever of power we have to demand what is fair and just: the support we need to manage a crisis that has been thrust upon us.

Thoriq Ibrahim is the environment and energy minister of the Maldives and has been chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States since 2015

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