Patricia Espinosa told Climate Home News she expected about 80 out of 197 signatories of the 2015 Paris Agreement to submit updated or more ambitious climate plans in 2020.

To meet the Paris goal of holding global temperature rise “well below 2C”, governments need to deliver deeper carbon cuts in their plans, known as “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs).

“It is a source of concern for me that we are not yet in a situation where I could confidently say ‘oh yes we will have a lot, or a majority, of NDCs on the table’,” by the end of the year, said Espinosa, executive secretary of UN Climate Change.

This year had been billed by the UN as “pivotal” for climate action. But the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 850,000 people globally, has wrought havoc on climate diplomacy.

A summit due in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2020 has been delayed by a year.

Espinosa said China, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases ahead of the US, was not among the 80 nations she expected to submit NDCs in 2020. She declined to list the 80.

Extra UN climate talks mooted for 2021 to help negotiators catch up

“China has indicated that yes, they are doing their work preparing for increasing ambition but, because of the way their process goes, they have said it would be difficult to come forward this year,” she said, confirming widespread expectations of a delay.

China’s new five-year economic plan starts in 2021. Before the pandemic, however, Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed with French President Emmanuel Macron in November 2019 to publish an updated NDC by 2020.

Espinosa, a former Mexican foreign minister, wrote to all nations on 13 August urging NDC submissions by the 2020 deadline laid out in the Paris texts.

She said the fight against what she called the “climate emergency” was also an opportunity for clean economic growth after the pandemic.

”Addressing climate change and Covid-19 are not mutually exclusive. They are perfectly compatible. If we want to talk about a recovery there is no choice: we have to address both,” she said.

UK risks missing UN climate deadline, in headache for hosts of key summit

The UK government, hosting the delayed UN summit known as Cop26, declined to say if it would submit an NDC this year.

“The UK has committed to coming forward with an increased NDC well ahead of Cop26,” a Cop26 spokesperson said. “We recognise the capacity constraints presented by coronavirus but the climate crisis will not wait, so we encourage all countries to submit enhanced NDCs and long-term strategies as soon as possible.”

Most nations submitted their first NDCs before the 2015 Paris summit but only 11 nations have issued new or updated NDCs to the UN, with Jamaica the last two months ago. The Paris Agreement seeks new NDCs every five years to ratchet up action.

Among industrialised nations – historically most responsible for carbon emissions – just Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland and Norway have submitted plans. Norway’s was the only one to commit to deeper emissions cuts by 2030, with the others reaffirming previous targets.

Kamala Harris might help ‘night and day’ shift for US on global climate diplomacy

Much hinges on who wins the US presidential election on 3 November.

The United States is due to quit the Paris Agreement on 4 November under a decision by President Donald Trump, who has no plans to issue an NDC. He has called climate change a hoax and promotes US “energy dominance” in fossil fuel production.

In contrast, Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic rival, says he would rejoin the Paris accord if elected and set a target of net zero emissions by 2050.

The US-based World Resources Institute think-tank says 104 nations have stated their intention step up climate ambition or action in an NDC by 2020. Another 33, including the European Union, plan to update their existing NDCs by 2020, it says.

Many of the early movers are developing nations under threat from heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising sea levels.

“We are likely to see a lot of smaller, and vulnerable countries, showing the way forward,” David Waskow, Director of WRI’s International Climate Initiative, told CHN.

He said that it was important for nations to build momentum with NDCs in 2020, but that the level of ambition was ultimately the most important factor.

‘Solidarity economy’: Indigenous women run WhatsApp food swap in Rica

UN chief António Guterres has urged nations to cut emission by 7.6% a year over the coming decade to limit the rise in average surface temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial times, the toughest target of the Paris Agreement.

Temperatures are already up 1.1C and set to rise more than 3C by 2100 with current plans. The steep economic downturn caused by Covid-19 will cut emissions this year.

Espinosa said she had to respect the Paris texts in urging NDCs this year.

“I have been very reluctant to give a plan B deadline… I do not want to give the impression that there can be another deadline,” she said. “I don’t think it’s helpful to say ‘OK, if you can’t make it by December, maybe March’.”

In her 13 August letter, Espinosa said her secretariat would publish a report at the end of February, giving an overview of NDCs submitted by the end of 2020.

It left the door ajar to delayed submissions by saying it would update the report “closer to Cop26 to ensure that it contains the latest available information”.

The Paris Agreement also invites nations to submit, by the end of 2020, long-term plans to decarbonise their economies in coming decades.

Espinosa said her main focus was on NDCs as the core of the Paris Agreement. The UN has received 17 long-term strategies so far, with Singapore the most recent in March.

Espinosa also said that she was working with Guterres’ office and the UK government to organise a virtual celebration to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, adopted on 12 December, 2015.

Guterres tells India coal business ‘going up in smoke’ as investors back clean tech

Guterres has recently been outspoken in urging a shift from coal.

Last week he told India that the coal business was ‘going up in smoke’ and tweeted that coal should “have no place in any rational #COVID19 recovery plan.”

“I think that he (Guterres) is really putting his finger on the spot when he says ‘if you want to be making a recovery package, don’t put coal into that’,” Espinosa said.

Espinosa added that the UN had to mobilise climate finance to enable developing nations to leave coal reserves in the ground and shift to cleaner energies such as wind or solar power.

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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.

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The study, by the New Climate Economy and World Resources Institute think-tanks in partnership with former finance ministers and World Bank executives, proposed measures including reduced deforestation, more sustainable agriculture, less-polluting energies and wider electrification of the vehicle fleet.

It estimated that a shift to greener growth could could create two million jobs and boost gross domestic product by $535 billion over the next decade compared to business as usual plans — a gain equivalent to the gross domestic product of Belgium.

Low-carbon growth would help cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 42% below 2005 levels by 2025, it estimated. That would exceed Brazil’s climate pledge under the 2015 Paris Agreement of a 37% reduction.

Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist, has scaled back protection for the Amazon rainforest where deforestation rates have risen since he was elected in 2018. In turn, that has led to strong criticism from foreign governments and investors.

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

“Brazil’s economy was in trouble before Covid-19 hit. Now, it is expected to contract between 8% and 9.1%,” the report said.

“The transition to low‐carbon energy technologies is a strong 21st century trend. It is no longer a matter of if, but of when it will happen,” it said, noting that both China and the European Union have made greener growth pillars of post Covid-19 economic plans.

Rogério Studart, an author of the study and a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute in Washington, expressed hopes that the report would stir debate in Brazil and abroad despite Bolsonaro’s reluctance to embrace tougher action on climate change.

“The crisis makes it very very hard not to think outside the box,” he told Climate Home News. “Opting for a low-carbon inclusive development has so many benefits.”

Kamala Harris might help ‘night and day’ shift for US on global climate diplomacy

“A green recovery is best for Brazil and Brazilians and can also make the country much more attractive to foreign investment,” echoed Caio Koch-Weser, former vice chairman of Deutsche Bank Group and a former German Deputy Minister of Finance.

Among recommendations, the report said that Brazil should do more to safeguard nature.

Brazil’s “advantage lies in the ample existing supply of natural infrastructure (e.g., forests, mangroves, and rivers), which has been proven to reduce overall costs of investments in infrastructure and logistics, if natural resources are used in a smart way,” it said.

More sustainable agriculture, including restoring degraded lands, could increase “crop yields between 30% and 300% and can increase incomes up to 3.5 times,” it said.

For transport, the report encouraged a shift to greater use of Brazil’s natural gas for the shipping industry, a less polluting option than bunker fuel. And it said that Brazil could build more electric buses, perhaps opening export markets.

Among examples of greener innovation, it said that a switch to burning farm and industrial waste, rather than illegal firewood, had brought wide-ranging benefits to five ceramic factories in Ceará state.

Their shift generated $4.5 million in revenues for local communities, improved working conditions, increased water availability and avoided the deforestation of 1,750 hectares in ten years, in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the report said.

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Iran and Libya – both among the 14-member Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) – as well as Yemen and Eritrea have not ratified the agreement.

The deal has been formally endorsed by 193 of 197 nations, including all G20 countries. Turkey and Iraq signed up in late 2021.

The US withdrew from the agreement under president Donald Trump, with effect from November 2020. His successor Joe Biden rejoined the pact on his first day in office, 20 January 2021, and formally re-entered the global treaty 30 days later.

South Sudan, the world’s newest country which is torn by conflict, ratified the deal on 23 February 2021.

Before that, Angola ratified on 12 August 2020, Kyrgyzstan on 18 February and Lebanon on 5 February.

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The four countries yet to ratify the accord account for around 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the European Commission’s emissions database.

Iran (1.85%) is currently the top emitter among the nations that have not yet ratified. The others represent a far smaller share of global emissions: Eritrea (0.01%), Libya (0.14%), and Yemen (0.03%).

International agreements are initially signed to signal intent to comply, but only become binding through ratification. That can take an act of parliament or some other formal acceptance. Different countries have different processes. Former US President Barack Obama used disputed executive powers to ratify the Paris accord in 2016.

Once ratified, the agreement commits governments to submit their plans to cut emissions. Ultimately they will have to do their bit to keep global temperatures well below 2C above pre-industrial times and to “pursue efforts” to limit them further to 1.5C.

“Oil has been an important factor for economic security for several of these countries,” David Waskow, of the World Resources Institute think-tank in Washington, told CHN, noting common interests of both Opec nations and the US, the world’s top oil producer.

Big emitter yet to ratify:

Iran

As a major producer of oil and natural gas exporter, Iran’s energy sector accounts for around 77% of its total emissions. Despite its fossil fuel empire, the country has developed a renewable energy industry thanks to a number of national plans and funds.

In November 2015, it pledged to reduce its emissions by 4% by 2030, compared to a business as usual scenario. Its national plan said cutting greenhouse gas emissions “will be facilitated and speeded up, only in the absence of any forms of restrictions and sanctions.”

Iran’s reluctance to ratify stems largely from its dependence on oil, complicated by the collapse of the July 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and other major powers led by Washington.

Windmills in Manjeel, Iran (Photo: Ali Madjfar)

This article was updated on 07 October 2021 after Turkey ratified the agreement and on 3 November 2021 after Iraq ratified the agreement. 

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California Senator Harris, 55 and the first black woman chosen to run for vice-president, is an original sponsor of the US Green New Deal and has fought for climate justice, including holding oil and gas companies to account for their carbon emissions.

If Biden and Harris win the US election on 3 November, the Democrats would rejoin the 2015 Paris climate Agreement, abandoned by Trump. That could spur the deal and help rebuild frayed US ties with other nations, perhaps even China, the top greenhouse gas emitter ahead of the US.

“It’s definitely a good forward move for climate diplomacy,” Niklas Höhne, head of the New Climate Institute scientific think-tank, told Climate Home News of Biden’s pick of Harris.

A Biden-Harris administration would be “like day and night in relation to climate policy and the Paris Agreement,” he said.

A revived US commitment to climate action would also undermine laggards such as Brazil, Saudi Arabia or Australia whose voices have become more strident in international negotiations in the shadow of Trump’s scepticism. The coronavirus pandemic has further slowed climate action in recent months.

Biden is leading Trump in the polls, but the next few weeks will be a massive test.

India’s solar boom is threatened by anti-China trade tariffs

Bill Hare, CEO and senior scientist at Climate Analytics, hailed Harris as “a well-known advocate of serious action on climate change.”

“It does mean that we can look forward to renewed US leadership on climate change,” he said. A Biden-Harris victory could revive a former “high ambition coalition” of nations pushing to limit a rise in global temperatures to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial times, the most ambitious goal under the Paris Agreement.

And Claire Healy, the Washington-based director of think-tank E3G’s climate diplomacy programme, said Harris would add “fire-power” behind Biden’s climate plan if he wins in November.

“She is a woman, she’s young and ethnically diverse,” she said, adding her background could be influential on the world stage.

Environmental group Greenpeace said it gave Harris a B+ (77/100) on its climate 2020 scorecard, marginally better than Biden. “She’s an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal as well as co-author of the Climate Equity Act and Environmental Justice for All Act,” it said. Trump rated 0/100 on the scorecard.

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Peter Betts, a former EU and UK lead climate negotiator, told CHN a Biden-Harris administration would have to show it can cut emissions at home to have any credibility on the international stage, particularly with China and developing countries.

“If a Biden administration makes climate change a top priority and all the signs show that he will, it will get the attention of traditional US allies such as Japan, Canada, Australia,” he said.

Biden’s plan is to ensure the US achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050. Trump, who doubts scientific findings that climate change is man-made, announced in 2017 that the US would pull out of the Paris Agreement to focus instead on bolstering the coal industry.

The US will formally quit the Paris Agreement on 4 November, 2020 – a day after Americans are due to the polls.

Yvo de Boer, former head of UN Climate Change from 2006-10, said the Democrats were “a powerful force for good” on climate action but faulted the party for negotiating ambitious UN deals without ensuring they would be implemented.

Former President Barack Obama, for instance, used an executive order to endorse the 2015 Paris Agreement after failing to win support from Republicans in the Senate. It was undone by Trump at the stroke of a pen. And the administration of former President Bill Clinton signed the UN’s 1997 Kyoto climate deal but failed to put it to a hostile Senate for ratification.

“When I think of the Democrats and climate action I’m always reminded of the couple in the Swiss cuckoo clock: now you see them, now you don’t,” de Boer told CHN, urging a more bipartisan US approach to climate change.

South Africa tightens restrictions for new coal power in ‘landmark’ ruling

As vice president to Obama, Biden has often taken credit for shaping the 2015 Paris Agreement, especially a joint approach with China.

Obama’s climate plan, ditched by Trump, foresaw a cut in US greenhouse gas emissions of between 26 and 28% below 2005 levels by 2025. China promised to peak its carbon emissions by 2030, while striving for an earlier date.

But it may be hard to revive that Beijing-Washington axis amid tensions over issues such as trade, intellectual property rights and human rights in Hong Kong.

“The big uncertainty now is how the election is going to play out with China. The bilateral agreement between the US and China was the biggest reason for the Paris Agreement,” said Steinar Andresen, a research professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo and an expert in international agreements.

And there were uncertainties about how far Biden would want to reach out to China. “It’s more of a bipartisan agreement that the US should be tougher on China,” Andresen added.

Whether the US and China can cooperate is also a key question for Betts, the former EU and UK negotiator. “It is not naïve to think that it is possible to come to some form of understanding between bigger players even if they relationship is not as good as it was,” he said.

The threat of a carbon adjustment mechanism being considered by both the European Union and the Biden campaign could be a factor in “bringing China to the table,” he added.

Bangladesh considers scrapping 90% of its coal power pipeline

Biden has said the US must work with its allies to take a hard line and “confront China’s abusive behaviours and human rights violations, even as we seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge, such as climate change, nonproliferation, and global health security.”

If elected, Biden and Harris will have to navigate a complex relationship with China and one that is very different compared with five years ago, said Li Shuo, a senior climate and energy policy officer at Greenpeace East Asia.

“No one should take for granted that an Obama-Xi honeymoon can be easily replicated in 2021.  If Biden is elected, a reset is needed for the most important bilateral relationship in the world,” he said.

Past climate cooperation between the world’s two largest economies shows their rivalry can be overcome, Shuo added. “Through the Paris climate accord, Washington and Beijing have managed to find a balance point. By doing so, they also led the rest of the world in landing on a solid starting point for tackling climate change.”

The coronavirus has forced a delay until November 2021 for a UN climate summit in Glasgow, which was meant to give new impetus for climate action with nations signing up for tougher ambition at the first five-year milestone of the Paris Agreement.

So far, however, only 11 nations representing 2.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions have issued new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), that are meant to be upgraded by the end of 2020.

The post Kamala Harris might help ‘night and day’ shift for US on global climate diplomacy appeared first on Climate Home News.

Global warming is projected to lead to increased droughts and stress on water supplies in South Africa, which generates about 90% of its electricity from coal, one of the highest rates in the world.

The nation’s Water Tribunal in Pretoria upheld an appeal by environmental campaigners to scrap two water use licences granted in 2017 by the Department of Water Affairs and Sanitation to Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power for the development of the 600MW capacity Khanyisa coal-fired power station.

groundWork, the environmental justice group which made the successful appeal, this week hailed the little-noticed 21 July ruling as a landmark in the fight against coal and global warming.

“The landmark aspect is that for the first time climate change is specifically confirmed to be a ‘relevant factor’ to be taken into account when considering a water use licence application,” Michelle Koyama, attorney at the Centre for Environmental Rights (CER), which acted on behalf of groundWork, told Climate Home News on Thursday.

India’s solar boom is threatened by anti-China trade tariffs

“Any company that intends to start any sort of project which requires a water use licence and which will implicate climate change – such as a coal-fired power station – should bear this judgment in mind when applying for a water use licence,” Koyama said.

She said the water use licences for Khanyisa, in the east of the nation, underestimated climate risks including disruptions to rainfall, and that polluted water and coal ash could spill into nearby wetlands. Coal-fired power plants use vast amounts of water for everything from cleaning coal to cooling generators.

The tribunal’s ruling means ACWA will have to re-submit applications for water use, requiring new rounds of public and expert consultation, likely to take months, in a new blow to the project. ACWA and the South African government did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

Environmental activists in South Africa have taken legal action to try to stop Khanyisa and another coal-fired project, Thabametsi. They are also lobbying banks, investors and developers to shun coal projects, saying they are at odds with South Africa’s commitments under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

“Khanyisa proposes using technology that is particularly greenhouse gas emission-intensive,” Robby Mokgalaka, coal campaign manager at environmental justice group groundWork, said in a statement.

The Water Tribunal’s final decision focused on procedural lapses by ACWA and the government in granting licenses, but its 54-page document stressed the need to consider climate change.

Bangladesh considers scrapping 90% of its coal power pipeline

“One of the key impacts of climate change in Southern Africa will be water scarcity,” it said. Cape Town, for instance, imposed drastic water restrictions in 2018 after the worst regional drought in a century.

“It is not in dispute that, regardless of mitigating measures, building a coal-fired power station will increase South Africa’s total emissions of greenhouse gases and thereby contribute to climate change which will impact water security,” the tribunal said.

Most crucially from a legal standpoint, the tribunal said that “the effects of climate change are a relevant factor to be considered” under the 1998 National Water Act (NWA), which governs how licences are issued. The text of the NWA does not mention climate change.

Tracy-Lynn Field, a professor of environmental law at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said it was a pity that the tribunal did not expand on its reasoning for including climate change.

“Climate change jurisprudence would have benefitted from an extended and more thoroughgoing justification,” she wrote in an email.

The ruling adds to climate demands already in place in South Africa for coal-fired plants.

Ireland forced to strengthen climate plan, in supreme court win for campaigners

In 2017, a court ruled that the government can only issue an “environmental authorisation” for a coal-fired power plant after considering factors such as “how climate change will impact on its operation, through factors such as rising temperatures, diminishing water supply, and extreme weather patterns.”

Koyama at CER said that an environmental authorisation is among the early conditions on a power plant. The water use licence is separate and applied for later.

South Africa says it is working to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, partly by shifting away from coal.

Its emissions rose by 20% to the equivalent of 512 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2015 from 426 million in 2000, the government said in a 2019 report to UN Climate Change.

It said that emission would have been 631 million without efforts to rein in emissions. In its climate plan dubbed “peak, plateau and decline”, South Africa foresees emissions between 396 and 614 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from 2025-2030.

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The scenario of rising fossil fuel use, used by the UN panel of climate scientists in reports over the past decade, had accurately tracked cumulative carbon dioxide emissions to within 1% in the years 2005-2020, it said. That was more precise than the other three main pathways for emissions until 2100.

Known as representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5, the scenario foresees a rise in temperatures of up to 5C above pre-industrial times by 2100, sharply at odds with the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit warming “well below 2C”, agreed by almost 200 nations.

It remains consistent with announced government policies until 2050 and has “highly plausible” levels of CO2 emissions in 2100, according to the study.

“RCP8.5 is very, very relevant,” lead author Christopher Schwalm of the Woods Hole Research Center, Massachusetts, told Climate Home News. “If it didn’t exist, we’d have to create it.”

He said the study could be a wake-up call for greater action to curb climate change.

RCP8.5 is often portrayed by governments, scientists and the media as a “business as usual” of increasing emissions. Yet it has become increasingly controversial, with many scientists arguing it is unlikely to materialise and could make people feel hopeless about the future.

“RCP8.5 is characterised as extreme, alarmist, and ‘misleading’, with some commentators going so far as to dismiss any study using RCP8.5. This line of argumentation is not only regrettable, it is skewed,” Schwalm and colleagues wrote.

“Looking at mid-century and sooner, RCP8.5 is clearly the most useful choice” for planners, they wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ireland forced to strengthen climate plan, in supreme court win for campaigners

Among attacks on RCP8.5, two scientists in January called RCP8.5 “dystopian” and said it “becomes increasingly implausible with every passing year”. The scenario assumes a fivefold rise in coal use in the long term, whereas global coal consumption may have already peaked.

“Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome — more-realistic baselines make for better policy,” urged Zeke Hausfather of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, California and Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate Research, Oslo, Norway.

Exaggerating the risks by referring to RCP8.5 as the default for the future world economy could lead to defeatism and undermine government planning “because the problem is perceived as being out of control and unsolvable,” they wrote in the journal Nature.

Schwalm acknowledged that RCP8.5 was far from perfect. It has overestimated coal use and underestimated the fall in the price of renewable energies relative to fossil fuels. But he said that these flaws were not significant enough to undermine the scenario as a whole. Other huge risks, such as a thaw of permafrost that could release vast amounts of methane, are typically omitted from such models.

And he said too much of the criticism of RCP8.5 focused on 2100, such as growth of coal or a doubling of the global population to 12 billion people, both of which now look unlikely. On a more human time scale of 30 years to mid-century – the typical length of a home mortgage loan – he said RCP8.5 was still the best guide.

Bangladesh considers scrapping 90% of its coal power pipeline

Detlef van Vuuren, a senior researcher at PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency who helped design the RCPs, told CHN that RCP8.5 was never intended to represent “business as usual” as it covered the most extreme 5% of scenarios for emissions growth.

And he wrote in an email that RCP8.5 had become less likely overall with changing economic trends.

“Since 2011, on the one hand no stringent climate policy was implemented … But at the same time, renewables became much cheaper – and it has become more likely that future cars will be electric instead of petrol cars,” he wrote.

“All-in-all, I think that RCP8.5 is still useful as low probability, high impact case,” he wrote.

Nico Bauer, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, also said that RCP8.5 was still relevant for scientific and political debate.

“First, it cannot be excluded, because fossil fuels are abundant and the last decades have shown that countries like China and the US can increase their production within short time periods by substantial amounts,” he wrote in an email.

Also, it is useful to study the likely impact of climate change with high emissions – even if it never happened – to understand the impacts of policies and new technologies, he said.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, governments agreed to limit the rise in average world surface temperatures to “well below” 2C while pursuing efforts for 1.5C. The UN says that reaching the 1.5C goal would require unprecedented cuts in carbon dioxide emissions of 7.6% a year this decade.

Emissions are expected to dip in 2020 because of the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus, but rebound in the absence of structural change.

The authors of Monday’s report said that the pandemic did not affect their findings.

“Assuming pandemic restrictions remain in place until the end of 2020 would entail a reduction in emissions of 4.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide,” they wrote. “This represents less than 1% of total cumulative CO2 emissions since 2005 for all RCPs and observations.”

UN reports often contrast RCP8.5 with the most stringent scenario, RCP2.6, that foresees sharp emissions cuts to get on track for the Paris Agreement.

Last year, for instance, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on melting snow and ice and the state of the ocean only used those two extreme scenarios, omitting what many scientists view as the more likely middle RCP options.

And a UN Environment report last year projected that temperatures are on track to rise by 3.2C by 2100, if all governments’ climate action plans were fully implemented, far short of the RCP8.5 scenario.

Climate scientists are updating climate modelling with new scenarios for the next round of IPCC reports, starting in 2021.

The post ‘Worst-case’ global warming scenario still best guide until 2050, study says appeared first on Climate Home News.

Air temperatures hit 38C in Russia on 20 June in the Russian town of Verkhoyansk in Siberia, claimed as a heat record in the Arctic, which is warming twice as fast as the global average.

The previous day, the land surface temperature hit an extraordinary 45C at several locations in the Arctic Circle, according to European satellite data.

Often overlooked compared to air temperature records, temperatures in the ground are trending ever higher across the Arctic, according to the UN panel of climate scientists.

Permafrost, permanently frozen ground often just below the surface which melts to mud in summer, covers about a quarter of the land in the northern hemisphere. And shrinking permafrost is causing wrenching long-term changes to nature.

“As one of our elders says: ‘Nature doesn’t trust us any more’,” said Vyacheslav Shadrin, chair of the Yukaghir Council of Elders, of the Republic of Sakha-Yakutia in the Russian far east, about 600 km from Verkhoyansk. The Yukaghir total about 1,500 people.

“We can’t predict what will happen tomorrow. This is maybe the main challenge. All our lives are based on traditional knowledge. We used to know that tomorrow we catch fish or have our reindeer. Now we can’t say,” he told Climate Home News. Rivers that were reliable roads for months in winter can now be treacherous.

A bison horn revealed by melting permafrost in Siberia (Pic: Johanna Anjar)

Until a few decades ago, he said that many Yukaghir did not dig up ancient mammoth bones or tusks, fearing that disturbing bones entombed in the frozen soil could release malevolent spirits from an underworld below.

Today, however, the thaw of permafrost means such finds are more common – and valuable to collectors – and many Yukaghir have abandoned the belief.

“Traditionally the most forbidden things are connected to the mammoth, the spirit of the underworld. Now we use mammoth bones as a profit,” he said.

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Around the Arctic, the loss of white snow and ice that reflects sunlight back to space reveals darker soil and water, that absorb ever more heat and accelerates the thaw.

At the time of publication, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean was tracking close to 2012 levels, the minimum on records dating back to 1979, NSIDC data show. On land, snow and ice cover is also among the lowest for the time of year, according to Rutgers University, and Greenland’s melt so far this year is also rapid, adding to sea level rise.

The World Meteorological Organization said it is checking last month’s heat record in Siberia. Daily records can be natural freaks – Fort Yukon on the Arctic circle in Alaska hit 37.7C as long ago as 1915, before climate change was a worry.

The temperature spike in Siberia was “an iconic threshold that indicates the warming we’re seeing over the long term” both in the air and the soil, said Walt Meier, senior research scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.

“The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the globe and the Siberian region, even in the Arctic, is warming rapidly,” he told CHN. “We’re seeing buildings cracking, roads buckling around the Arctic.”

Greenpeace takes Arctic oil lawsuit to Norway’s supreme court

The thaw of permafrost may have caused the collapse of a fuel tank that spilled 21,000 tonnes of diesel into rivers and subsoil near the city of Norilsk on May 29. Elsewhere, loss of permafrost has been blamed for causing more frequent avalanches.

It may also be releasing diseases frozen in the ice – such as outbreaks of anthrax in remote parts of Russia in 2015 and 2016, perhaps from reindeer carcasses in long-frozen soils.

Indigenous peoples want more action by major emitters to limit greenhouse gas emissions, and to get more say in international UN negotiations such as such as the Paris climate agreement, or UN conventions to restrict mercury and poisonous chemicals that can build up in the Arctic.

“We have these international treaties… but nobody really seems to be taking it seriously enough,” Dalee Sambo Dorough, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, said in an interview from Alaska.

“We have relied on the sea ice for centuries,” she said, adding that Indigenous peoples’ oral histories were too often wrongly dismissed as unreliable, anecdotal evidence. Some communities will have to move inland because of coastal erosion, aggravated by sea level rise.

And the thaw of permafrost can add to global warming by releasing greenhouse gases from the frozen soils.

UN climate science report to consider lessons from coronavirus

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote in a report last year that “permafrost temperatures have increased to record high levels”.

“Widespread disappearance of Arctic near-surface permafrost is projected to occur this century as a result of warming, it said, adding that could release tens to hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon by 2100, further stoking climate change.

Rising temperatures pose huge engineering problems for building on permafrost in the region, which is opening to more economic activity, from shipping to mining or oil and gas exploration, as ice recedes. About four million people live in the Arctic region.

Arne Instanes, an engineer in Norway and an expert on permafrost construction, said global warming was one of many complications of building in the Arctic.

“Whenever you do construction with permafrost you start a climate change experiment,” he said. “Experience from Siberia to Alaska for the last 200 years is that when you start construction work on the tundra you change the heat exchange between the atmosphere and the ground.”

Too often, he said, climate change was blamed when buildings collapsed or runways cracked, for instance, when the underlying reason was simply poor planning that let heat seep into the frozen ground below.

Newer techniques mean buildings get built on stilts, ideally with steel piles driven into bedrock below a layer of permafrost. Instanes said it also helps to have artificial refrigeration of the steel piles in summer to prevent heat from reaching the permafrost.

“Clients don’t like it – it costs a lot more and it’s complicated,” he said.

While the Siberian heat has attracted most headlines, a study this week showed that the pace of warming at an Arctic airport on the Svalbard archipelago north of Norway averaged 1.7 degrees Celsius a decade since 1991, seven times the global average and double the Arctic average.

“That was astonishing,” Ketil Isaksen,  a co-author of the study at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, said of the pace of  Arctic warming.

By contrast, the toughest goal of the Paris Agreement is to limit the rise in average world surface temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial times by 2100.

The post ‘Nature doesn’t trust us any more’: Arctic heatwave stokes permafrost thaw appeared first on Climate Home News.

Preliminary findings, shared exclusively with Climate Home News, showed that only China, India and four other nations in the Group of 20 leading economies were committing more public money to clean energy than to polluting sectors.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity… to use government funding, government subsidies, loans, to reshape our future,” said Ivetta Gerasimchuk, Sustainable Energy Supplies lead at the International Institute for Sustainable Development think-tank, one of the groups involved.

G20 nations are committing trillions of dollars to combat the economic slump induced by Covid-19.

But “the overall trend is that… there is more money going into fossil fuels than into clean energy,” she told a webcast organised by the Stockholm Environment Institute, another of the 14 research organisations.

“What we see is pretty much what countries did before the Covid crisis they keep doing. In this sense the crisis… has just exacerbated the trends we had before, unfortunately.”

Jamaica becomes first Caribbean nation to submit tougher climate plan to UN

The findings are due for publication on 15 July, at a new website, energypolicytracker.org.

Preliminary data shared with CHN showed that, as of 1 July, national and subnational-level public money commitments to fossil fuels dominated over cleaner energies in the United States, Russia, Australia, Canada, France, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and South Korea and Turkey.

The G20 countries where commitments to clean energy exceeded those to fossil fuels were China, India, Japan, Germany, the UK and Brazil.

In the five remaining G20 members – the European Union, Italy, Mexico, Argentina and South Africa – there was so far a lack of data or it was hard to disentangle support levels.

Gerasimchuk also said there were very many “shades of green”. Supporting battery-powered cars in a shift from petrol and diesel engines would be good for the climate, for instance, but not if the electricity used to recharge them came from coal rather than solar or wind power.

China was a borderline case, with a big rail bailout package tipping the balance towards green investment.

Michael Lazarus, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute’s US Center, said that “while much is on hold because of Covid, there is yet to be a sign of a reset in most countries” to help achieve goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Lazarus was lead author of a Production Gap report last year that found the world was set to produce about 50% more fossil fuels out to 2030 than would be consistent with the Paris goal of limiting warming to 2C, and 120% more than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5C.

Airlines’ climate obligations postponed as UN body endorses industry proposal

“We expect to find a similar disconnect” between climate and energy policies in an update of that report later in 2020, he said. He said global carbon emissions may fall 8% this year from 2019 because of the economic slowdown but that they “could easily rebound strongly” in coming years unless governments shift to more sustainable policies.

Adam Matthews, Co-Chair of the Transitions Pathway Initiative representing major institutional investors, said that major European oil companies, such as Royal Dutch Shell or Total, had started to engage with the idea of net zero emissions in what he called a “very significant shift” from past reluctance.

But he said companies also needed governments to act. “You can’t expect companies to act in the absence of regulation,” he said.

Among the most radical steps by a government, Costa Rica has imposed a moratorium on oil exploration. But it is now facing calls to reassess the policy to raise money to recover from the Covid-19 crisis, said Andrea Meza Murillo, director of the climate change directorate at the Ministry of Environment and Energy.

“It’s risky times right now for all of these policies,” she said. “We need to show we can generate green jobs”.

The 14 expert organizations behind the upcoming study are International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), Oil Change International (OCI), Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), the Columbia University in the City of New York, Forum Ökologisch-Soziale Marktwirtschaft (FÖS), Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (FARN), Instituto de Estudos Socioeconômicos (INESC), Institute for Climate Economics (I4CE), Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), Legambiente, REN21 and The Australia Institute (TAI).

The post Big nations aid fossil fuels more than clean energies amid pandemic, researchers find appeared first on Climate Home News.

The UK, which will host the next UN climate summit in November 2021, delayed from 2020 because of Covid-19, praised the move and urged other nations to follow suit as quickly as possible.

Worldwide, Jamaica is the 11^th nation to submit an updated plan, or nationally determined contribution (NDC), at the five-year milestone of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“Jamaica’s new NDC is more ambitious than its previous one,” the Jamaican government said in a submission to the United Nations, outlining the new goals worked out despite the coronavirus pandemic.

The nation was at risk from more intense hurricanes, sea level rise and a drying trend across much of the island, it said.

Norway sets electric car record as battery autos least dented by Covid-19 crisis

The new goal marked an upgrade by addressing land use change and forestry emissions, and committing to deeper emission reductions in the energy sector, it said.

By 2030, it promised to reduce emissions in the two sectors by 25.4% below “business as usual” (BAU) levels, and by a deeper 28.5% if the country gets international support.

By 2030, emissions covered by the plan would fall by between 1.8 and 2.0 million tonnes of carbon dioxide relative to the projected BAU levels of 7.2 million tonnes, it said. That was more ambitious than a decline of 1.1 to 1.5 million tonnes under the original plan.

The NDC did not project Jamaica’s total emissions in 2030. The first NDC in 2015 projected that the nation’s emissions would rise to 14.5 million tonnes by 2030 under business as usual, from 13.4 million in 2025.

The NDC said Jamaica would work in future to widen the NDC to include all sectors in the economy. Forests cover more than half of the island.

Airlines’ climate obligations postponed as UN body endorses industry proposal

“Fantastic to see Jamaica’s NDC showing greater climate ambition and scope during these difficult times,” Alok Sharma, the president of the Cop26 talks and UK Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, wrote in a tweet.

“We ask all countries to publish their own ambitious NDCs as soon as possible.”

Fantastic to see Jamaica’s NDC showing greater climate ambition and scope during these difficult times. It’s vital we redouble efforts towards a green recovery.

We ask all countries to publish their own ambitious NDCs as soon as possible.@CcdJamaica https://t.co/ym0ICsJ5HU pic.twitter.com/ys5sItecok

— Alok Sharma (@AlokSharma_RDG) July 1, 2020

However the UK itself risks missing the 2020 deadline in the Paris Agreement for submitting an updated NDC. A spokesperson said the government was committed to bringing forward a plan “well ahead of Cop26”.

The World Resources Institute think-tank says the 11 NDCs submitted so far account for just 2.9% of global emissions.

Jamaica’s NDC said Covid-19 had hit the nation hard, especially in its big tourism sector.

The pandemic “has also had a ripple effect on rural livelihoods which rely predominantly on the climate sensitive fisheries and agriculture sectors,” it said.

The post Jamaica becomes first Caribbean nation to submit tougher climate plan to UN appeared first on Climate Home News.

Worldwide, car sales have plunged in 2020 but government measures to promote a greening of the auto industry in nations from China to France have made electric cars a relative bright spot in the market.

Shares in US electric car marker Tesla shares hit a record high on Wednesday at $1,333 and it overtook Toyota as the world’s most valuable carmaker.

In Norway, the global electric car leader thanks to huge tax breaks, low road tolls and free parking, sales of battery electric cars edged up to 48% of all new car registrations from January to the end of June, from 45% in the same period of 2019 and 42% in all of 2019.

Data from the independent Norwegian Road Federation showed it was the best percentage share for battery electric vehicles in a half-year even though total sales were hit by lockdowns to slow the spread of Covid-19.

Airlines’ climate obligations postponed as UN body endorses industry proposal

Overall car sales in Norway crashed 24.3% compared to the same period of 2019 to 59,224, while sales of electric battery electric cars fell by a less steep 19%. The electric Audi e-tron was the most sold car.

Norway is by far the world’s biggest market by percentage for electric car sales, ahead of Iceland and the Netherlands and Sweden. Worldwide, electric cars make up about 3% of new cars, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). That figure includes plug-in hybrids, which are omitted from the Norwegian numbers.

The Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association, which represents electric car owners, said that sales were lagging a parliamentary goal that all new cars sold should be zero emissions by 2025.

“To be on track for the 2025 goal the share of electric cars should be well above 50 percent by the end of the year. That is still possible but more and more difficult,” deputy leader Petter Haugneland told Climate Home News.

“It’s been a setback, hopefully it will be short term.” Amid big economic uncertainties, he  said it was hard to tell how factors such as lower oil prices affected sales.

Analysis: This oil crash is not like the others

Norway’s goal is earlier than targets set in other countries such as Britain in 2035 or France in 2040 as part of efforts to step up action to slow climate change under the Paris Agreement.

The IEA, in a report last month based on data to the end of April, estimated that the global passenger car market would contract by 15% this year compared to 2019, while sales of electric vehicles (EVs) would be roughly stable at 2019 levels.

“The EV market has been less impacted than the overall car market… and there have been additional measures to stimulate EVs, for instance in France and Germany,” Marine Gorner, an energy and transport analyst at the IEA who was one of the authors of the report, told CHN.

She said global car sales trends since April broadly confirmed the report’s findings. But the outlook was still highly uncertain – second waves of the virus and lockdowns would hit sales, as could new policy measures.

In 2019, the IEA said the share of electric cars rose in all nations except Japan, South Korea and the United States. US President Donald Trump, who favours the fossil fuel industry, is relaxing auto emission standards.

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So far, many governments were backing electric vehicles, Gorner said.

China, for instance, the biggest overall market with 47% of 7.2 million electric cars on the roads, extended an exemption of new electric vehicles from a 10% purchase tax until 2022.

France, from June, introduced huge subsidies under which a buyer could get up to €12,000 discount for buying a new Renault Zoe while scrapping an old petrol car, reducing the purchase cost to €20,000 from €32,000.

Electric car sales in Europe this year were also boosted by the entry into force of new carbon emission standards for each manufacturer’s fleet, forcing a shift away from selling big, more profitable  and higher polluting petrol SUVs.

In early 2020, more than 7% of cars sold in the European Union had a plug, double rates in 2019, said Julia Poliscanova, Senior Director, Vehicles and Emobility, at Brussels-based NGO Transport & Environment.

The outlook was unclear but the experience of lockdowns might even help sales of less polluting cars.

“People saw during the lockdowns how great it is to live in cities with clean air,” she told CHN. “That’s also driving awareness.”

The post Norway sets electric car record as battery autos least dented by Covid-19 crisis appeared first on Climate Home News.

Achim Steiner, head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) said the pandemic would transform societies. It would be impossible simply to reactivate the pre-Covid-19 global economy in the way that billion-dollar bailouts helped revive growth after the 2008 financial crisis.

“It’s a kind of a fork in the road for every country,” he told Climate Home News in a video interview from New York, adding that developing nations were especially vulnerable. “You have an opportunity to either invest in returning to yesterday’s economy or to invest into tomorrow’s economy.”

The coronavirus has killed more than 190,000 people worldwide.

Steiner said that the plunge in benchmark US oil prices to lows of around minus $40 a barrel on Monday – meaning producers and traders paying to get rid of it – highlighted a need to break dependence on fossil fuels and move to greener energies such as solar and wind power.

Crude began the year trading above $60.

“The fact that the lifeblood of our economy for much of the last 100 years has been dependent on a substance (whose price) oscillates literally in a few months by 200%, sometimes 300% … is in itself an illustration of how irrational our energy has become,” he said.

New Zealand sticks to 2030 climate target while waiting for 1.5C advice

He said that nuclear power had also failed to live up to promises of being a cheap and safe source of energy. Nuclear power “is a 20th century technology that is on the way out. Fossil fuels are rapidly moving in that direction.”

In government planning “there are thousands of possibilities in our daily economic transactions to insert the DNA of a low-carbon transition and recovery strategy. These are the possibilities we now need to test,” he said.

He noted that the Austrian government, for instance, said this month that state aid for Austrian Airlines should support climate policy targets. Similar opportunities to shape a greener future existed in all stimulus packages.

At the same time, he said that many countries, especially developing nations dependent on oil exports, needed to safeguard jobs and would need time to reform.

“You can’t talk a terrible crisis into a rosy opportunity,” he said. “We need to now have governments and markets design their strategy of exiting from fossil fuels over a period of probably 50 years, but with increasing and accelerating pace.”

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Almost 200 governments committed in the 2015 Paris climate agreement to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions in the second half of this century. That is seen as essential to limit rising temperatures that scientists link to wildfires, heatwaves, rising seas and more powerful storms.

This week, the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) estimated a deep decarbonisation of the world economy by 2050 requires total energy investment up to $130 trillion.

It would boost cumulative global GDP gains above business-as-usual by $98 trillion between now and 2050 and have benefits such as quadrupling renewable energy jobs to 42 million, Irena said.

Steiner said a green transition would also help reduce climate change and air pollution that kills millions of people a year. There were also risks that fossil fuel reserves would become stranded assets, that were unusable and worthless for investors.

IPCC: UN climate science report to consider lessons from coronavirus

Developing nations were most at risk from coronavirus and restrictions on trade and travel, since they cannot mobilise billions of dollars to shield their citizens.

In the Indian Ocean state of the Maldives, for instance, “no tourism means no economy,” he said.

Steiner was head of the UN Environment Programme at the time of the financial crisis and urged the adoption of a Global Green New Deal in 2009 to shift economies away from fossil fuels, one of the first uses of an idea that has since caught on far more widely.

In 2009, the reaction “was still a very partial and relatively limited green stimulus” even though nations including China, the United States, the European Union and South Korea and others invested billions of dollars into green measures.

And Covid-19 “isn’t a crisis we can solve with bailouts,” he said. “This time we are not going to see a return to a pre-Covid normal. It’s not just about getting back the economy we had before.”

He governments should put more resources into planning for the future.

“This is not a black swan, this is not Rumsfeld’s unknown unknown,” he said of the pandemic, referring to former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who spoke of “unknown unknowns” when discussing uncertainties about Iraq’s weapons arsenal.

“We have just been catapulted into that domain where oil is something that we actually cannot use,” Steiner said.

The post UN development chief calls for green shift away from ‘irrational’ oil dependence 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.

Climate Home News published the original letter on 9 April, when it was signed by representatives of 10 governments. France, Germany and Greece joined in the next two days and the latest round raises the total to 17.

The ministers urge Europe to remember the challenges of climate change when designing long-term strategies for a resilient recovery from the “unprecedented crisis” of the pandemic, which has killed more than 165,000 people worldwide.

On Monday, Irish minister for communications, climate action and environment Richard Bruton, Slovak minister of environment Ján Budaj, Slovenia’s minister of the environment and spatial planning Andrej Vizjak, and Malta’s minister for the environment, climate change and planning Aaron Farrugia joined the list of signatories.

Citizens’ assemblies on climate change seek to shape the post-Covid recovery

The now 17-strong letter says: “The focus is presently on fighting the pandemic and its immediate consequences. We should, however, begin to prepare ourselves to rebuild our economy and to introduce the necessary recovery plans to bring renewed, sustainable progress and prosperity back to Europe and its citizens.

“While doing so, we must not lose sight of the persisting climate and ecological crisis. Building momentum to fight this battle has to stay high on the political agenda.”

It adds that the Green Deal, an EU blueprint to reach net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050, should be central to any resilient recovery.

“The Green Deal provides us with a roadmap to make the right choices in responding to the economic crisis while transforming Europe into a sustainable and climate neutral economy,” they write.

“We should withstand the temptations of short-term solutions in response to the present crisis that risk locking the EU in a fossil fuel economy for decades to come.”

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The original 10 signatories were Austria, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

The latest additions mean that countries outside the appeal are Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Romania.

It is unclear why some waited before endorsing the appeal, but Germany’s Environment Minister Svenja Schulze put it down to a mistake in communication.

The post Four more EU nations back a green post-coronavirus recovery appeared first on Climate Home News.

Seoul’s commitment to carrying out its “Green New Deal” plan will be a test of how far governments are willing to step up action to limit global warming as the world grapples with Covid-19. The disease has killed more than 146,000 people worldwide.

Chloé Farand wrote about the victory of Moon’s Democratic Party in Wednesday’s parliamentary election, securing a majority to push a climate manifesto to steer the country’s transformation into a low-carbon economy with net zero emissions by 2050.

But South Korea, heavily dependent on high-polluting coal, has a long way to go. Climate Action Tracker, which is compiled by European researchers, rates South Korea’s existing carbon-cutting measures to 2030 as “highly insufficient” to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement to limit rising temperatures.

Among other Asian nations, Japan and Singapore have set net zero goals that are hazier, both talking of the “earliest possible” date in the second half of the century – see Megan Darby’s updated overview of the expanding net zero club, ranging from Austria to Uruguay.

In Asia, the Himalayan mountain kingdom of Bhutan is in the lead – it says that its forests and reliance on hydropower make it carbon negative already.

Citizens’ climate assemblies go online

In France and the UK, citizens’ assemblies set up to make climate policy recommendations could help shape a post-Covid-19  recovery.

Chloé Farand describes how the meetings, launched several months ago with groups representing a cross-section of society, have moved online to continue their work amid lockdowns.

Chloé also obtained 50 of the French assembly’s draft recommendations. They include encouraging ride-sharing and cycling, better insulation for 20 million homes, and limiting urban sprawl.

Dashed hopes of a Chinese oil boom

David Njagi captures a sense of betrayal among residents of a rural region of northern Kenya where people had hoped for a Chinese oil-driven investment boom.

In 2008, the China Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) announced it had identified 15 wells which showed strong signs of holding oil and gas deposits. But by January 2011, CNOOC had left, leaving the community with damaged land and $2 million worth of shattered hopes.

The failed exploration left a legacy of pollution, roads wrecked by heavy trucks and disappointment among residents who had counted on new schools and health facilities.

China to delay?

In another side-effect of the coronavirus, China could delay submitting its climate plans at least until after the US presidential election in November as Beijing focuses on reviving the economy from an unprecedented slowdown, Chloé Farand writes.

China’s economic woes have since deepened – China’s economy shrank for the first time in decades in the first quarter of 2020.

Countries are due to submit climate policies running to 2030 by the end of this year, and many governments have hoped that China will set an early example of higher ambition.

But delays now look likely, partly because the climate summit due to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, has been postponed to 2021.

Renewables falter

This year was meant to be a record year for renewable energies such as solar and wind power as the world shifts away from fossil fuels. But the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus and a plunge in oil prices may undermine a transition to cleaner energies.

The International Energy Agency is revising projections of historic shifts to renewables. An historic deal between Opec and other oil producers has done little to offset a slump in oil prices – low prices make it less attractive to invest in clean energies.

This week’s top stories…

• South Korea to implement Green New Deal after ruling party election win
• Citizens’ assemblies on climate change seek to shape the post-Covid recovery
• Kenyans live with shattered hopes of a Chinese oil boom
• China may delay submitting climate plans amid economic slowdown
• Renewable energies under threat in 2020 from coronavirus, oil price slump

…and climate conversations

• Coronavirus crisis underscores small islands’ climate vulnerability
• Why climate advocates should welcome the historic Opec++ deal

The post East Asia’s green test – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) said it is reviewing its October 2019 forecasts that 2020 will be a record year for additions of electricity generation capacity for solar, wind and other clean energies, as well as that total renewable-based power capacity will surge by 50% between 2019 and 2024.

“There’s a chance that 2020 may not be a record,” said Heymi Bahar, IEA senior analyst of renewable energy markets and policy, told Climate Home News. “Every day we see something either about a new lockdown, or a resuming of some construction activity.”

Covid-19 had killed more than 126,000 people worldwide by Wednesday.

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Installations of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels on the roofs of businesses and homes, expected to help drive future growth, were hard hit by the economic slowdown. They often require workers to be physically close together to install panels, which is difficult with rules on social distancing to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Workers on other projects, such as installing huge wind turbines or building hydropower dams, can typically be further apart.

Rooftop solar “may sound a bit marginal but represented a fifth of global renewable energy additions in 2018-19 and 40% of solar PV,” he said. Renewables made up 26% of global electricity generation in 2018 and the IEA’s October 2019 forecast of a 50% increase by 2024 would total a 1,200 GW addition to current capacity.

Disruptions for renewable energy are in the shadow of the far greater turmoil in fossil fuel markets.

At the weekend, OPEC, Russia and other producers agreed over to cut output by 9.7 million barrels per day (bpd) in May and June, under pressure from US President Donald Trump. The cuts are around 10% of supply before the pandemic, but probably only about half the slump in demand. Cuts are to last until April 2022, with a cut of 5.8 million bpd in the final 16 months.

Brent crude oil was trading at around $30 a barrel, less than half the price of around $66 at the start of 2020 but up from lows around $25 in early April.

China may delay submitting climate plans amid economic slowdown

“When you cut around 10 million barrels and the cut you need is 20 to 30 million you are not really doing anything to balance the market,” said Erik Holm Reiso, global head of consulting at Rystad Energy in Oslo. “And it’s not positive for renewables if oil prices are low.”

Low fossil fuel prices are a threat to a transition to renewables under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, because it may make it less attractive to shift, for instance, from a gasoline-powered car to an electric model, or to raise capital to build a wind farm rather than to extend the life of an existing coal plant.

Once the worst of the human crisis passes “there will be a new focus on renewables to dig countries out the economic hole after coronavirus. Governments need to incentivise industrial activity. You can direct that – renewables are an obvious way,” he said.

Andrew Grant of the Carbon Tracker think-tank in London said the unprecedented deal among oil producers was driven by self-interest and did not herald any wider cooperation to confront climate change.

“We are going to have to come up with a sustainable model [for reducing fossil fuel production] that doesn’t rely on an economic crisis,” he said.

Emergency stop-gap measures to shore up the oil price were a stark contrast to longer-term efforts to align energy demand with the Paris Agreement, which seeks to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit droughts, heatwaves, floods, and intense storms.

Grant estimated that oil demand would have to fall steadily each year by a million barrels per day to get on track for the Paris Agreement.

Comment: European Green Deal must be central to a resilient recovery after Covid-19

Covid-19 lockdowns are disrupting supplies of solar panels, Bahar at the IEA said, because China accounts for 70% of global production, and another 15% comes from Chinese firms operating in other countries in south-east Asia.

Since late March, however, China has reopened many firms as new infections fell.

“They are ramping up to meet demand. That’s good news,” he said. But while Chinese ports may be able load panels onto ships for export, foreign ports may be unable to unload them when they arrive because they are closed or operating with reduced capacity.

He also noted that demand for biofuels, often added as a blend for gasoline in many nations as part of renewable energy goals, was suffering simply because people are driving their cars less.

The IMF has forecast that the world economy will contract 3% in 2020 because of what it calls the Great Lockdown. That is also likely to depress greenhouse gas emissions this year from record highs in 2019.

One major challenge is how to spur renewables more than fossil fuels when energy demand picks up, to avoid a rebound in emissions. In the wake of the financial crisis a decade ago, carbon emissions leapt by 5.9% in 2010 after a 1.4% decrease in 2009.

Airlines urge UN body to ease climate goals for 2020s as traffic collapses

Bahar said governments could help renewables, for instance in China  and the United States, by extending incentives for connecting solar and wind projects that are due to expire at the end of the year.

And many governments say that climate change should be at the heart of any post-Covid recovery once short-term measures stabilise the economy.

Gerard Wynn, an energy finance consultant at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said it may also be time to consider measures such as wider taxes or fees on fossil fuels to help cleaner energy.

They may be less controversial now because low prices will mute their impact on consumers, if they are pitched by politicians as part of a green recovery package.

Wynn noted that former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to take on Trump in the November election, favours a “Clean Energy Revolution” including prices on carbon.

For Europe, Wynn calculated that an economy-wide fee of €25 per tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions could raise a dividend worth about €370 ($400) for every household. Such a fee could be imposed at source, such as coal mines, or oil and gas producers, he said. Household energy bills would rise but Wynn estimates that most people would still have money left over to spend.

“It sounds like a fantasy – but maybe this is a good time to do it?” he told CHN.

The post Renewable energies under threat in 2020 from coronavirus, oil price slump appeared first on Climate Home News.

Megan Darby reported on the news conference where a trio of Chilean ministers wore masks against coronavirus and promised the nation will peak its greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, two years earlier than mentioned in a draft proposal.

Chile has been among many campaigning for all governments to submit stronger plans this year to the United Nations at the first five-year milestone of the 2015 Paris Agreement, although the exact legal requirements are murky.

So far, few have complied and the coronavirus pandemic is complicating many nations’ plans to raise ambition.

Before Chile, only the Marshall Islands, Suriname, Norway, Moldova, Japan and Singapore have submitted updated 2030 plans for action, according to a World Resources Institute tracker. Dominated by Japan, which faced criticism for largely reiterating pledges from 2015 – they represent 2.8% of global emissions.

The delay of this year’s climate summit, originally due to be held in Glasgow in November, to 2021 doesn’t affect the Paris request for all countries to submit plans “by 2020” – or 31 December.

Flights and emissions

Chloé Farand wrote about how airlines are seeking relief from new carbon emissions rules due to start in the 2020s after the coronavirus pandemic caused a collapse in international flights.

The International Air Transport Association (Iata), which represents the world’s airlines, wants to change the baseline from which CO2 emissions from traffic growth will be judged in coming years to dampen a likely rise in the 2020s, when traffic recovers from current depressed levels.

The move, it said, would “avoid an inappropriate economic burden on the sector”.

Contrails 

The grounding of flights is giving scientists a rare chance to study clear skies and find out how contrails – white lines of vapour left behind jets – create high altitude clouds that stoke global warming. Cloud formation caused by air travel is one of the least understood areas of climate science.

The last time skies were as clear, at least over the United States, was after the 9/11 suicide hijacker attacks in 2001. Planes’ contrails could be contributing at least as much to climate change – by trapping heat – as carbon dioxide from the fuel they burn.

Counting penguins

People forced to stay home because of the coronavirus are contributing to citizen science in record numbers – from counting penguins to mapping solar panels.

Read Megan Darby’s intriguing and fun look at these lockdown projects. Zooniverse, which sets volunteers to work on subject matters ranging from literature to space exploration, recorded five million “classifications”, or images processed, last week – four times its usual number.

By the way, this Climate Weekly is coming to you a day early because of a long Easter break in Europe: maybe an opportunity to try some citizen science?

This week’s top stories…

• Chile to peak emissions by 2025, under strengthened climate pledge
• Coronavirus lockdown gives a boost to citizen science projects
• Airlines urge UN body to ease climate goals for 2020s as traffic collapses
• Coronavirus: plane-free skies spur research into warming impact of aviation

…and climate conversations

• European Green Deal must be central to a resilient recovery after Covid-19
• The US election is even more crucial with UN climate talks delayed to 2021
• Japan’s woeful climate plan amounts to science denial

The post Chile steps up – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, air traffic has slumped in a manner not seen since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001.

Scientists with Nasa and European research groups hope to use clear skies to narrow down massive uncertainties about the warming effect of condensation trails – the wispy white lines that criss-cross the skies in the wake of jets engines.

Understanding planes’ impact on the climate is urgent because commercial aviation generates about 2% of global carbon emissions and rising, mainly from burning jet fuel. Taking into account the impact of cloud formation in the upper atmosphere, however, could make the sector’s responsibility for human-caused global warming as high as 4% or 5%.

“It is welcome that we can have an experiment with the Earth,” said Ulrike Burkhardt, of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). “But it’s not the way we would want to design it.”

Coronavirus has killed almost 90,000 people. Global demand for air travel is down 70% compared to last year and millions of jobs are at risk, according to the International Air Transport Association (Iata), which represents airlines.

Researchers will use satellites and measurements by planes to study how clouds form naturally when thousands of flights are grounded, and contrast it with data from pre-coronavirus conditions of crowded skies. In the long term, that could help governments set better policies.

Airlines urge UN body to ease climate goals for 2020s as traffic collapses

Under social distancing guidance to prevent the spread of Covid-19, however, Burkhardt said it was difficult to assemble teams of technicians to install sensors on planes and find pilots to fly them.

“The air traffic system has not been diminished to the current levels since the days following 9/11,” said Patrick Minnis of Nasa Langley Research Center, who is joining a research effort to study high-altitude clouds.

“Flight groundings at the scales initiated in response to the coronavirus pandemic are a significant opportunity to better quantify the impact of air traffic on cloud cover via contrail formation.”

The new research builds on studies after the 9/11 suicide hijackings in the US grounded flights for a few days. One study, for instance, found that the plane-free skies had an impact on temperature variations in the United States, but some researchers say the findings might have been caused by natural variations.

Minnis and colleagues are trying to determine whether contrails increase the total amount of clouds in the sky, or suck up moisture that might have allowed clouds to form elsewhere. That would help to establish whether contrails and cloudiness linked to aviation had an overall warming or cooling effect on the planet.

Most low clouds such as cumulus are made up of tiny water droplets and reflect sunlight back into space from  their white tops. That helps to keep the planet cool.

By contrast, icy, high-altitude clouds formed by contrails have an overall warming effect because they trap more heat escaping from the Earth’s surface than they reflect back into space.

Coronavirus lockdown gives a boost to citizen science projects

Contrails typically form at 8-13 kms above the Earth, depending on factors including temperature and moisture. They are less likely in tropical regions than the higher latitudes of Beijing, New York or London.

Between 2013 and 2019, aviation sector emissions grew from 733 million tonnes to 915 million tonnes of CO2, according to Iata.

Piers Forster,  professor of Physical Climate Change at the University of Leeds, said that the “total historic warming from aviation is roughly twice that from its carbon dioxide emissions alone”.

“The total warming effect of aviation is still small: maybe 5% of the warming from all human activity,” Forster said, factoring in cloud formation. “But as other emissions will hopefully decline, it is expected that aviation will be the dominant source of emissions within the next few decades…

“We are beginning to look at this. We are looking at contrails and general high level cloudiness changes” amid coronavirus, he said.

Airlines urge UN body to ease climate goals for 2020s as traffic collapses

Nations have agreed to offset the growth in carbon dioxide emissions from 2020 under the International Civil Aviation Organization (Icao). So far, there is no consensus to curb the overall warming effect, partly because the impact on cloud formation is too uncertain.

At an individual level, flying is one of the most climate polluting activities a person can undertake. Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg has famously refused to fly, sparking a debate about the morality of air travel. There are some signs “flight shame” is dampening demand in wealthy parts of the world.

But Bernd Kärcher, a colleague of Burkhardt at Germany’s DLR, said the 2020 slowdown was likely to be short-lived, in a long-term trend of more flights. He estimated that aviation contributed 4% to man-made global warming, with most of it from contrails rather than carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Understanding all impacts of aviation was vital to the policy response, Kärcher said: “To meet the Paris climate goals, every tenth of a degree of reduced increase in surface temperatures matters.”

The plane-free skies could help narrow uncertainties and so help guide longer term policies, he added. “Icao points to the need for scientific consensus, which, so it is argued, is absent in the case of non-CO2 cloud effects.”

He said that other ways to reduce non-Co2 effects could be cleaner fuels that produce fewer contrails, re-routing flights to regions or altitudes where contrails are less likely to form, or better aircraft design.

The post Coronavirus: plane-free skies spur research into warming impact of aviation appeared first on Climate Home News.

The UN talks, known as Cop26, had been due to take place in Glasgow from 9-20 November with the goal of spurring deep cuts in greenhouse gases in the coming decade to rein in rising temperatures.

Up to 30,000 delegates were expected from around the world in the biggest diplomatic event the UK has ever hosted.

“The world is currently facing an unprecedented global challenge and countries are rightly focusing their efforts on saving lives and fighting Covid-19,” Alok Sharma, UK president-designate of Cop26, said in a statement. “That is why we have decided to reschedule Cop26.”

“Covid-19 is the most urgent threat facing humanity today, but we cannot forget that climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity over the long term,” said Patricia Espinosa, head of UN Climate Change.

A UN statement seen by Climate Home News said the summit would be postponed into next year, but did not set a new date. A preparatory session of talks due at UN Climate Change’s headquarters in Bonn, Germany, in June were also put off until preliminary dates of 4-13 October, with a review in August.

The session of mid-year talks is due to lay some of the ground work ahead of the Cop, giving negotiators time to advance on technical issues. A number of topics including the reporting of countries’ climate plans and efforts to create a new global carbon market were left unresolved at the last round of talks.

The decision to postpone the talks was taken by the UN Climate Change bureau – which is comprised of top climate diplomats from various countries, including Cop25 president and Chilean environment minister Carolina Schmidt and UN Climate Change head Patricia Espinosa.

Zoom climate diplomacy: ‘Technology doesn’t help build trust’

UN Climate Change and the UK government “agreed to work closely with the COP Bureau members over the next few weeks to identify a suitable date for Cop26,” the statement added.

As of 1 April, coronavirus had killed more than 37,200 people worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation. The Cop26 venue, the Scottish Event Campus, is being turned into a temporary hospital with an initial 300 beds to increase patient capacity in Scotland during the Covid-19 crisis.

The postponement will give some clarity to governments and diplomats who have been waiting to know the impact of the pandemic on this year’s climate timetable.

It also means governments around the world will have more time to assess the likely stark impact of the US presidential election, on 3 November, on global efforts to avert more heatwaves, wildfires and rising sea levels.

The US will formally leave the Paris Agreement on 4 November, under a decision by President Donald Trump. Democratic candidates to take on Trump – Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders – have pledged to immediately rejoin the Paris Agreement if they win.

That means a Democratic victory would make the US a leading voice for climate action at the postponed Cop26, and a mere observer if Trump wins a second term.

Coronavirus pandemic threatens climate monitoring, WMO warns

“Soon, economies will restart. This is a chance for nations to recover better, to include the most vulnerable in those plans, and a chance to shape the 21st century economy in ways that are clean, green, healthy, just, safe and more resilient,” Espinosa said.

“Postponing Cop26 … is the right thing to do – public health and safety must come first now,” said Laurence Tubiana, an architect of the Paris Agreement and CEO of the European Climate Foundation.

Speaking to reporters before the announcement, Tubiana said the pandemic had made carrying out the formal international diplomacy necessary for countries to ramp up their climate plans “really difficult”.

“I think we have to be innovative on the way we keep the momentum going,” she said, adding that governments would have to move away “from a diplomacy only focused on UN Climate Change” and coordinate with others on how stimulus packages can help accelerate the green transition.

Christiana Figueres, former head of UN Climate Change, added “there can be no pushing off the urgent need for climate action in 2020”.

Earlier this year, the UK called the summit its top international priority for 2020, a year when London is also trying to sort out a new relationship with the European Union after Brexit.

In 2021, the UK is due to preside over the G7 and Italy, which submitted a joint bid with London to preside over Cop26 and is due to organise preparatory events known as the pre-Cop, the G20.

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Governments are under pressure to submit tougher climate plans to the UN this year to bridge the gap between current levels of commitments to cut emissions and levels needed to limit global temperature rise “well below 2C”, in line with the Paris Agreement goals.

So far, only four countries – the Marshall Islands, Suriname, Norway and Moldova – have submitted more ambitious climate plans to the UN. On Monday, Japan became the first G7 country to submit an updated plan, but it merely reaffirmed its existing 2030 goal, set in 2015.

If the talks are postponed well into 2021, governments will also have what is likely to be a bleak report about the mounting risks of global warming from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due to be published in mid-April.

The virus outbreak is also threatening developing countries’ plans to step up climate action this year as expert meetings are being postponed and resources are mobilised to address the public health crisis.

Speaking to Climate Home News, Tenzin Wangmo, of Bhutan and the lead negotiator for the group of Least Developed Countries (LDC), said most countries had only started to work on this climate plans when the virus spread across the world.

“It’s going to be tough to submit climate plans this year,” agreed Carlos Fuller, of Belize and the lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States.

The post Cop26 climate talks postponed to 2021 amid coronavirus pandemic appeared first on Climate Home News.

Japan, the first G7 industrialised nation to submit an updated climate action plan known as a “Nationally Determined Contribution” this year, said it would “continue to aim at resolutely achieving” its goal set in 2015 of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26% by 2030 from 2013 levels.

Its submission to the UN also said it “will pursue further efforts both in the medium and long-term to reduce greenhouse gas emissions beyond this level”. It comes at a time when governments around the world are overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Laurence Tubiana, who was an architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement as France’s climate ambassador, welcomed Japan’s submission but said it was “disappointing to see the government has not increased its ambition in response to the climate crisis”.

Britain is due to host a critical climate summit in Glasgow in November – providing the coronavirus crisis is over by then – to rally far more global action at the first five-year milestone of the Paris Agreement. Countries are under pressure to submit tougher climate plans to limit climate change that the UN calls an existential threat to humanity.

A UK government spokesperson told Climate Home News it had taken note of Japan’s “technical NDC submission” but expected Tokyo to come up with a more ambitious plan ahead of the summit.

“We are clear on the need for increased ambition from all countries, particularly from G7 partners. We hope to see a further submission that includes an increase in Japan’s headline target ahead of Cop26.”

Green bailouts? – Climate Weekly

Tubiana said that other nations such as European Union members, China, the UK and South Korea were moving towards a low-carbon economy and could leave Japan behind in “the high-tech race of this century”.

“At one of the most challenging times of recent memory, we need bolder, mutually reinforcing plans that protect our societies from the global risks we all face,” Tubiana, who is now CEO of the European Climate Foundation, said in a statement.

2019 was the second warmest year on record, behind 2016, with severe wildfires, bleachings of coral reefs and an accelerating thaw of ice in Greenland and Antarctica that is pushing up world sea levels. Last year, UN Secretary General António Guterres urged the world to cut emissions by 45% by 2030, and for developed nations to lead the way.

Christiana Figueres, who was head of the UN Climate Change secretariat at the time of the Paris Agreement, praised Japanese companies including business conglomerate Marubeni for moving away from fossil fuels. But she said the government’s NDC fell short.

“The new NDC limits the scope for Japan to meet the goals required by science, desired by humanity and committed to by its government in Paris. I hope this announcement does not hinder further leadership from the private sector in Japan,” she said in a statement.

Governments urged to attach green strings to long-term coronavirus recovery plans

“When the world is learning through the Covid-19 pandemic that we need to work together to tackle global threats like climate change, it’s disappointing to see Japan not learning this lesson,” Mohamed Adow, director of the Nairobi-based think tank Power Shift Africa, said in a statement.

Japan says its industries such as steel, cars or cement have historically been more efficient than major rivals, partly because of its dependence on energy imports. Tokyo says that limits its ability to make deep cuts compared to other, less efficient, economies.

It originally submitted its NDC climate action plan in July 2015. Since then, the document said that Japan had reduced its greenhouse gas emissions for four consecutive years, from 2014-2017.

The submission also added that revisions to Japan’s NDC “will be carried out consistently with the revision of the energy mix” rather than having to wait for the next five-year milestone of the Paris accord, when countries will be expected to ratchet-up their plans further.

According to figures included in the submission, coal makes up 26% of Japan’s energy mix on which its NDC is based. Renewable energy makes up 22-24%, nuclear power up to 22% and liquefied natural gas about 27%.

A report published by Oil Change International earlier this year, also found that Japan’s export credit agency provided more support to oil, gas and coal projects abroad than any other government – an estimated $7.8 billion annually.

Coronavirus: in Hawaii’s air, scientists seek signs of economic shock on CO2 levels

In 2019, Japan also submitted a long-term strategy to cut emissions by mid-century to the UN.

Monday’s document said that long-term plan aimed to achieve “a ‘decarbonised society’ as close as possible to 2050 with disruptive innovations” such as artificial photosynthesis – a process used by plants to make food while absorbing carbon dioxide – and hydrogen.

Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions totalled the equivalent of 1.23 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2017, up 2.04% from the UN base year of 1990. They have declined from 1.34 billion in 2013.

Only four nations have submitted more ambitious climate plans to the UN so far – the Marshall Islands, Suriname, Norway and Moldova.

The post Japan sticks to 2030 climate goals, accused of a ‘disappointing’ lack of ambition appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Mauna Loa observatory at 3,397 metres is home to the Keeling Curve, tracking increasing carbon dioxide concentrations since 1958. Named after its late founder, Charles Keeling, it is widely viewed as the most iconic measure of humanity’s impact on global climate.

“There has never been an economic shock like this in the whole history of the curve,” Ralph Keeling, professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and son of Charles Keeling, told Climate Home News of the impact of the coronavirus.

He said scientists were now studying data from the mountain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for signs that the economic slowdown linked to the coronavirus could reduce the rise in atmospheric carbon concentrations.

The coronavirus, which has killed more than 22,000 people by 26 March, is slowing the global economy and cutting the use of fossil fuels in cars, power plants and factories that emit carbon dioxide. “I can look out of my window now and the number of cars has dropped,” he said.

Russia’s plans to tighten 2030 climate goal criticised as ‘baby steps’

But there was a long way from reduced use of fossil fuels to a crisis that would affect carbon dioxide concentrations in the global atmosphere.

Keeling estimated that global fossil fuel use would have to decline by 10% for a full year to show up in carbon dioxide concentrations. Even then, it would be a difference of only about 0.5 parts per million.

Since 1958 there have been no world wars, for instance, that might abruptly depress economic activity and emissions and show up as a measurable impact on the curve, he said.

Recessions, like the 2008-09 financial crisis or even the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, did not cause a discernible drop. And other factors that have tended to drive the curve up more steeply, such as the economic rise of China this century, were not visible as sudden events.

This March 2020 data may hint at a slight slowdown in the rate of rise.

“It’s too early to say,” if it is related to coronavirus, Keeling said, adding there were big variations from year to year and that the March trend was similar to some previous years.

Two-year record of carbon dioxide (Source: Scripps Institution of Oceanography)

Current carbon concentrations  “are approaching last year’s peak right now,” he said, at about 415 parts per million on 24 March, with big daily swings. If sustained, that is already in line with the record high, judged as a monthly average, of 414.7 ppm for the May 2019.

Carbon dioxide levels have risen from about 270 ppm before the Industrial Revolution and are at the highest in at least 800,000 years, according to the UN panel of climate scientists.

Governments urged to attach green strings to long-term coronavirus recovery plans

Carbon dioxide concentrations have their annual peak at the end of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, where North America, Asia and Europe make up most of the planet’s land masses. When spring arrives, plant growth on these continents soaks up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, slightly reducing levels.

Keeling likened economic activity affecting the atmosphere to a tap pouring water into a bathtub.

If you turn down the tap in a bathtub you can see there is less water coming in “but it takes a while to be able to see that the rising water level slows,” he said. “We’re still in that phase.”

The Keeling Curve, Mauna Loa Observatory

On the other side of the world in Norway, Kim Holmen, international director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, says his team is also closely monitoring carbon dioxide levels at the Zeppelin station on a mountain on the Arctic island of Svalbard.

“The curve is not pointing upwards,” he said of carbon dioxide measurements in March, which are usually rising at this time of year. Still, he said that it would probably take months to know if it was related to coronavirus.

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And he said there were many local factors affecting carbon levels, even in parts of the world isolated from industrial centres such as Hawaii or Svalbard.

Around Svalbard, for instance, “it has been colder this winter than the past 10 years,” Holmen said. That meant there had been more ice on the surrounding seas in the winter, putting a lid on waters that can release carbon dioxide into the air.

The UN wants steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to limit rising temperatures to goals set in the Paris Agreement of “well below 2C” above pre-industrial times while pursuing efforts for a stricter ceiling of 1.5C.

Emissions rose sharply after the financial crisis but Keeling expressed hopes that policy makers would help drive cuts in coming years, after the pandemic passes.

“We can hope that emissions stay down for the right reasons afterwards. This [coronavirus] is not the right reason,” he said.

The post Coronavirus: in Hawaii’s air, scientists seek signs of economic shock on CO2 levels appeared first on Climate Home News.

Emissions by Russia, the world’s fifth biggest emitter, plunged after smokestack industries collapsed after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union and are still only around half the levels in the UN’s benchmark year of 1990.

All countries are under pressure to announce more ambitious policies on climate change in 2020, the first five-year milestone of the Paris climate agreement, with calls to link stimulus packages to combat the coronavirus to a greener economy.

In a draft plan stretching to 2050, Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development projected that emissions would rise to the equivalent of 2.08 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030, including land use and forestry, or 67% of 3.11 billion tonnes recorded in 1990.

The 2030 level would be up from 1.58 billion tonnes in 2017, or 51% of 1990 levels, according to the “basic” scenario in the plan, published in Russian on Monday.

The 2030 goal is more ambitious, however, than the existing target to limit 2030 emissions to 75% of 1990 levels, or 2.33 billion tonnes, submitted by Moscow as its contribution to the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Coronavirus slows developing nations’ plans to step up climate action in 2020

Under the new draft goal, Russia would seek to reduce demand for fossil fuels and boost renewable energy. It would also upgrade insulation for buildings and encourage energy efficiency from petrochemicals to agriculture, it said. It also noted some benefits from warming, such as greater access to shipping routes in the Arctic north.

By 2050, the basic scenario projected that emissions would dip to 1.99 billion tonnes, or 64% of 1990 levels.

“This is not an ambitious plan … it would allow emissions to rise,” Niklas Höhne, founding partner of the New Climate Institute, told Climate Home News.

“It’s not in line with the Paris Agreement. Countries need to go for the highest possible ambition”. He said that a Russian overview of its climate policies submitted to the United Nations in 2019 was more ambitious than the new plan.

“We welcome this as a start but it’s only baby steps,” Vladimir Chuprov, campaign director of Greenpeace in Moscow, told CHN. He said Moscow’s plan had some positive aspects, such as encouraging the growth of forests that soak up carbon dioxide.

But allowing a rise in overall emissions “isn’t ambitious at all. It means no real progress,” he said.

The Russian ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Russia is the fifth largest emitter after China, the US, the European Union and India.

The United Nations says that global emissions will need to fall by 7.6% a year in the decade to 2030 to get on track to limit the rise in average global temperatures to the strictest goal set in the Paris Agreement of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times to limit heatwaves, floods, droughts and a rise in sea levels.

The Russian plan, now out for review by other ministries, also included a more “intensive” scenario that would allow emissions to rise slightly and then fall to 52% of 1990 levels by 2050, or 1.62 billion tonnes – little changed from current levels.

Governments have ‘historic opportunity’ to accelerate clean energy transition, IEA says

“The transition to the trajectory of an intensive scenario of low-carbon development will allow Russia to achieve carbon neutrality in the second half of the 21st century closer to its completion,” the ministry said in a statement.

A Climate Action Tracker (CAT), run by European research groups including the New Climate Institute, last year rated Russia’s 2015 plan as “critically inadequate”.

President Vladimir Putin has sometimes argued that warming will bring benefits, such as higher farm productivity, to Russia.

CAT said Russia’s decision in October 2019 to ratify the Paris Agreement, long after most other nations, “was more symbolic than substantive, as it did not come with any improvement to its very weak emissions reduction target, nor with an announcement of any new climate policies.” CAT said it was still reviewing the new Russian plan.

The post Russia’s plans to tighten 2030 climate goal criticised as ‘baby steps’ appeared first on Climate Home News.

Plug-in vehicles emit less greenhouse gases than petrol and diesel models over a car’s lifetime – that includes the mining of metals or lithium for batteries, manufacturing, driving 150,000 kilometers and finally scrapping, a study published in the journal Nature Sustainability on Monday found.

Some past studies have questioned the greenness of electric vehicles (EVs), especially because of high emissions linked to making batteries.

“In most of the world, in countries accounting for 95% of road transport, EVs would reduce emissions compared to average petrol cars,” lead author Florian Knobloch, of the Environmental Science Department at Radboud University in the Netherlands, told Climate Home News.

Governments urged to attach green strings to long-term coronavirus recovery plans

The study said it made sense to drive an electric car rather than a fossil-fuel vehicle in major markets including China, the United States and almost all of Europe.

The exceptions, where EVs need electricity generated from coal-fired plants to recharge, were India, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland and Bulgaria, it said.

Transport, mostly by road, accounts for about a quarter of total energy-related carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.

“But it’s not like driving EVs is a silver bullet solution for transport. It’s much better not to drive a car at all,” Knobloch said of the findings by a team also including researchers from the Universities of Exeter and Cambridge.

As electricity sources shift from fossil fuels to renewables such as hydro, solar and wind power, EVs would become relatively more attractive. India, for instance, is shifting to solar power so EVs would make sense within a few  years, he said.

India has previously committed to raise the portion of renewable into its energy mix to 175GW by 2022, with the aim of boosting it to 450GW in the long-term.

The benefits of driving EVs are highest in nations with few fossil fuels in electricity generation. “Average lifetime emissions from electric cars are up to 70% lower than petrol cars in countries like Sweden and France (which get most of their electricity from renewables and nuclear),” the authors wrote.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the global electric car fleet exceeded 5.1 million in 2018, up by 2 million since 2017. China led sales with 1.1 million in 2018 but, worldwide, EVs are still less than 1% of the global car fleet.

Governments have ‘historic opportunity’ to accelerate clean energy transition, IEA says

NGO Transport & Environment (T&E), which campaigns for cleaner transport in Europe, said its research was more favourable to EVs.

“EVs are better than petrol or diesel cars in every country in Europe. This also includes Poland,” Lucien Mathieu, a transport and e-mobility analyst with T&E, told CHN.

Mathieu added that grids were likely to be a lot greener in 15 years’ time – the expected lifetime of a vehicle – if governments stick to pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

There are also massive differences between the carbon footprint of manufacturing, he said. Tesla, for instance, uses clean solar power at a Gigafactory in Nevada to assemble battery packs and reduce emissions.

The post Electric cars help limit climate change despite blackspots in India, Poland appeared first on Climate Home News.

Under the plan, UN Environment urged massive investments in energy efficiency for buildings, a boost for wind and solar energy, cuts in fossil fuel subsidies and a host of other measures. It reckoned the bill would amount to 1% of global GDP, or about $750 billion.

But the global economy rebounded, still reliant on fossil fuels, despite efforts to diversify. Carbon dioxide emissions grew by a huge 5.8% in 2010, after a 1.4% dip in 2009, and have risen most years since.

Will the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 10,000 people worldwide, offer a new chance to shape a greener, more sustainable world when the economy revives?

Read Chloé Farand’s insightful interview with Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, in which he says governments have a “historic opportunity” to usher in an era of climate action when they design long-term stimulus packages.

“Well put @IEABirol,” Christiana Figueres, the former head of UN Climate Change and an architect of the Paris Agreement, commented about the article in a tweet. “We have a massive crisis = opportunity on our hands. We cannot afford to waste it. Recovery must be green.”

In recent years, the idea of green new deals – which echo US President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal after the Great Depression – have caught on in many nations as a way to combat the climate crisis.

And the world now has a lesson to learn from the failings a decade ago.

“We have a responsibility to recover better” than after the financial crisis, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Thursday, saying the global health crisis was unlike any in the 75-year history of the UN.

“We have a framework for action – the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. We must keep our promises for people and planet,” he added.

The task is daunting. The UN says global cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of 7.6% a year are needed over the next decade to get on track to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial times.

But the Covid-19 emergency has opened a new window for a clean energy transition for the world economy.

Slow burn

The pandemic is slowing developing nations’ efforts to work out more ambitious climate plans, which are due to be submitted before talks in Glasgow, still scheduled for November, at the first five-year milestone of the Paris Agreement.

“We are entering into unknown territory,” said Jahan Chowdhury, in-country engagement director for the NDC Partnership, which supports about 75 developing countries design and deliver their climate plans.

The coronavirus is also disrupting Brussels’ legislative process, now unable to work at full capacity. This may delay the EU’s work on its Green Deal, under which the EU Commission wants Europe to be the world’s first carbon-neutral continent, Frédéric Simon at Euractiv writes.

Side effect  

The economic slowdown in China caused by the virus has at least one positive side-effect that is also now visible by satellites over Italy: less deadly air pollution.

The World Health Organisation says air pollution causes seven million deaths worldwide every year, by triggering cancers, heart and lung diseases.

In China alone, reduced air pollution could avert between 50,000 and 100,000 premature deaths if levels stay low for a whole year, according to researchers at the Center for International Climate Research in Norway. They estimate that more than a million people die every year in China from air pollution.

Contaminated 

Illustrating the risks of international travel and face-to-face meetings, the first coronavirus case in Liberia was recorded after an observer returned from a Green Climate Fund meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.

The meeting went ahead after being moved as a precaution from the GCF headquarters in Songdo, South Korea, at a time when the nation had become one of the world’s hotspots for the virus.

This week’s top stories

• Coronavirus slows developing nations’ plans to step up climate action in 2020
• Coronavirus enters Liberia after observer returns from Green Climate Fund meeting
• Coronavirus response to delay EU Green Deal by weeks
• Governments have ‘historic opportunity’ to accelerate clean energy transition, IEA says
• Coronavirus: China’s economic slowdown curbs deadly air pollution

The post ‘Historic opportunity’ – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

If a downturn in air pollution observed by satellites over China in February lasts a year, premature deaths from air pollution could fall by about 50,000 to 100,000, scientists at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo (Cicero) have said.

The coronavirus pandemic has reduced demand for coal and other fossil fuels linked to a closure of factories and less road traffic, both in China and in other parts of the world.

Kristin Aunan, a senior researcher at Cicero, said the possibility of reduced deaths from air pollution was in no way to detract from the severity of the pandemic.

“But we have to remember that air pollution kills people, especially vulnerable elderly people,” she told Climate Home News.

Putting the brakes on – Climate Weekly

So far coronavirus, known as Covid-19, has infected about 170,000 people worldwide and killed 6,500, with cases surging daily in many nations.

Aunan was the lead researcher of a 2018 study that estimated that between 1.15 million and 1.24 million people in China die from air pollution every year.

And the World Health Organisation (WHO) says air pollution kills about seven million people worldwide annually by causing heart disease, lung cancers and respiratory infections.

The Cicero researchers focused on fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, described by the WHO as the most harmful type of pollution of 2.5 micrometres or less across.

Earlier this month, Copernicus, the EU’s Earth Observation Programme, said satellite measurements showed that levels of PM2.5 pollution over China in February 2020 were down by about 20-30% compared to the average for the same month in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

Based on those observations, Aunan and her colleagues wrote that if PM2.5 concentrations “over China remains at a level 20-30% below the baseline situation for a full year, the annual avoided number of premature deaths could amount to 54,000 – 109,000”.

That would correspond to a reduction in deaths from air pollution of 5% to 10%.

She cautioned that the figures were highly uncertain and that the impact would be far less if China’s economy recovers quickly, especially if Beijing seeks to stimulate the economy by burning more fossil fuels.

Nasa has also cited evidence that the decline in air pollution over China “is at least partly related to the economic slowdown following the outbreak of coronavirus”.

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A Copernicus official said the agency would issue satellite images of Italy this week to illustrate how a nationwide lockdown has affected air pollution in the European nation hardest hit by coronavirus.

The European Public Health Alliance, a non-governmental group advocating better health for all, said in a statement that all air pollution aggravated risks in Europe from the virus.

“Covid-19 has also highlighted the need for a long-term EU strategy to address Europe’s invisible epidemic of non-communicable diseases, and measures to tackle air pollution,” it said.

It added that “patients suffering from conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, or respiratory diseases have proved to be particularly vulnerable to the outbreak”.

The European Commission says that more than 400,000 people die prematurely from air pollution every year in the EU.

Aunan told CHN she hoped efforts to combat coronavirus would also put a spotlight on wider health risks such as pollution and climate change, which is disrupting food and water supplies with heatwaves, droughts and floods.

“When we look into the future for climate change and air pollution… all these risk factors are continuously taking lives,” she said.

The post Coronavirus: China’s economic slowdown curbs deadly air pollution appeared first on Climate Home News.

The UK is hosting UN climate talks in November in Glasgow, known as Cop26, hoping to galvanise more ambition despite disruptions to the world economy from the coronavirus outbreak and an oil price war.

The following is a look at the sometimes obscure UN documents whose interpretation will bolster or undermine hopes – of everyone from UN Secretary-General António Guterres to Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg – that 2020 will be a turning point for tougher action:

What are governments expected to do in 2020 under the Paris Agreement?

They’re meant both to set long-term 2050 goals to decarbonise their economies, and to set shorter term targets lasting until 2030. Some of the key texts include words such as “requests” or “invites” or “urges” – stopping short of legal obligations.

How are governments doing to set long-term goals?

Many developed nations are setting targets for “net zero” emissions by 2050. The decision implementing the Paris Agreement “invites” countries to submit such long-term strategies this year:

The Paris Agreement itself includes a more strongly worded instruction to “strive” to work out long-term strategies:

Among submissions so far, the European Union issued its strategy for a net-zero economy in March to UN Climate Change, and other developed nations including Japan, Canada and Mexico have previously done so.

The EU’s biggest economies – Germany and France – have also separately sent in plans, as has Britain. Among developing nations, Costa Rica, Benin, Fiji and the Marshall Islands have submitted plans.

The UK-based Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit estimates that 49% of world gross domestic product is generated in places where the authorities have set, or are proposing to set, a target of bringing carbon emissions to net zero in or before 2050.

Such net zero plans can be powerful roadmaps for action but are often less compelling than shorter-term plans that require governments to take hard choices now.

The risk is that future governments will fail to stick to bold 2050 visions. The US under former President Obama, for instance, submitted a long-term 2050 plan in November 2016 – it has been ignored by President Donald Trump.

How about setting shorter-term targets?

Climate plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which define policies lasting until 2030 or 2025, are the core building blocks of the Paris Agreement. So far, 184 nations have submitted a first NDC. Four – the Marshall Islands, Suriname, Norway and Moldova – have issued a second.

The text of the Paris accord instructs countries “to undertake and communicate ambitious efforts” on NDCs and lays down a requirement – using the word “shall” – that every country has to issue a new NDC every five years once the agreement is up and running. 

The text also says that every NDC will be tougher than the last, to ratchet up global action to limit rising temperatures. This requirement was one reason Trump decided to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement.

The Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, so 2020 is the first test of this five-year ratchet mechanism?

Maybe. A complication is that the process that led to the 2015 Paris Agreement was launched at a UN climate conference in Durban, South Africa, in 2011. And those documents say a deal will be ‘implemented from 2020’:

In 2011, it seemed to make sense for a new accord to start in 2020 since most developed nations already had targets to cut emissions lasting until 2020 under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the predecessor of the Paris Agreement.

So if the Durban timetable applies, governments don’t have to do anything until 2025 – a whole decade after the Paris summit? 

Again, it’s unclear.

In Paris, negotiators realised that 2025 was a long way off, and so they built in 2020 checkpoints into a formal decision implementing the agreement.

Alarming scientific evidence about global warming – from dying coral reefs to melting Antarctic ice – is raising expectations for more ambition around the world. Also, the Paris Agreement won enough ratifications to enter into force far quicker than expected, in November 2016.

That is heaping pressure on governments to do more in 2020 to limit average temperatures to the Paris goal of “well below” 2C above pre-industrial times while pursuing efforts for a tougher ceiling of 1.5C. Current plans put the world on track for warming of more than 3C.

The Cop25 meeting in Madrid in December 2019 toughened calls for action in 2020 by talking about a “serious concern” and “urgent need” to plug gaps between governments’ existing plans and the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement:

Under the 2015 Paris decision, countries with NDCs stretching only to 2025 are asked to send in a new NDC this year stretching to 2030.

That applies to 13 countries – Ecuador, Congo, Gabon, El Salvador, Suriname, Guyana, Belize, Micronesia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Niue, Palau and Tuvalu. Separately, the US also has a goal lasting until 2025, but will formally quit the deal on 4 November.

But most countries, with NDCs stretching to 2030, are merely asked to “communicate or update” their plans by 2020. In practice, almost all nations submitted NDCs in 2015, so it may be enough for them simply to reaffirm these plans in 2020. Merely restating 2015 goals would sap the Glasgow summit.

The next paragraph of the decision, however, says that countries have to submit new plans at least nine months before the relevant Cop. If countries believed the first test was in 2020 rather than 2025, that would mean 9 February, nine months ahead of Cop26 that runs from 9-19 November in Glasgow.

Only three countries – the Marshall Islands, Norway and Suriname – met that February deadline. Together they account for about 0.1% of world emissions.

Paragraphs 23 and 24 of the Paris decision text also say that plans have to be submitted “by 2020” rather than “by the Cop”. In the worst case, that could allow countries to submit plans in December – after Cop26 and the US presidential election on 3 November.

The Madrid decision tries to discourage laggards by asking UN Climate Change to compile a “synthesis report” of NDC submissions in time for Cop26 – clearly implying they have to be submitted in advance.

Isabel Cavelier, a legal expert with the International Climate Politics Hub, told Climate Home News paragraphs 23 and 24 frefer directly to 2020 and so the deadline mentioned of “by 2020” is more important than the nine months mentioned in the generic paragraph 25.

“Law that is specific to a particular context overrules law that is generic (this is the ‘lex specialis’ principle),” she wrote in an email.

“I think the better reading of paragraph 25 is that it does not apply to 2020 updates/recommunications,” echoed Sue Biniaz, who was the US State Department’s lead climate lawyer for almost three decades until 2017.

This article was updated on 13/03/2020 to include the implications of the Cop25 decisions. 

The post Will governments pass the first test of the Paris climate agreement in 2020? appeared first on Climate Home News.

In the worst case, governments could wait until after a critical climate summit in Glasgow in November, known as Cop26, widely billed as a test of global ambition to address global warming at the first five-year milestone of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries have agreed to update their climate plans to limit global warming “well below 2C” above pre-industrial times. There is stark scientific evidence and growing international pressure for this to happen this year.

The United Nations has called for steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions as early as possible in 2020 to help limit global warming to 1.5C – the tougher Paris goal.

But it is now adjusting to the idea that submissions of some countries’ climate plans, also known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), will come late in the year.

“We are aware of the fact that some NDCs may likely be submitted in the last quarter of the year so we are adjusting our work to this reality,” the secretariat told Climate Home News in an emailed response to questions.

So far, only three nations – the Marshall Islands, Suriname and Norway – have submitted enhanced climate plans to the UN. They represent 0.1% of global emissions.

EU plans for 2030 climate target can shape Cop26 momentum, ministers warn

The 2015 Paris texts are ambiguous and merely request countries to communicate or update their climate plans “by 2020”, not “by the Glasgow summit” which lasts from 9-19 November.

Legal scholars says that “by 2020” in UN texts could mean by 31 December. And the US election on 3 November will shape the climate policies of the world’s biggest economy, with repercussions worldwide.

President Donald Trump is pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement, with the withdrawal taking effect on 4 November, but all the Democratic hopefuls have pledged to immediately rejoin.

With global politics not favourable to greater climate ambition, the election of a Democrat to the White House could send shockwaves through the climate diplomacy process.

Joe Biden, President Barack Obama’s former vice president, who won 10 of the 14 states in Super Tuesday’s vote, promised to “lead a major diplomatic push to raise the ambitions of countries’ climate targets,” including putting pressure on China to stop outsourcing pollution abroad.

Bernie Sanders is pledging a massive $200 billion to the Green Climate Fund, which helps developing nations cope with climate change, against $0 by Trump.

The full implementation of many vulnerable countries’ climate plans are dependent on receiving climate finance. That could encourage some nations to sit on the fence in defining their plans until after the US election.

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At the last climate talks in Madrid in December, Sue Biniaz, the state department’s lead climate lawyer for the four administrations before Trump’s and a key architect of the Paris accord, told CHN “there is a timing issue with 2020” being both the year of the US election and when countries are expected to ramp up ambition.

“It if matters to countries what the US does [in the election]… do they take on a higher target kind not knowing, do they wait and see if the US is going to turn Democrat…? In some ways, I wish we had picked 2021 [for raising ambition] in 2015 because we would have more clarity on that issue.” she said.

But some environmental experts say the US election may be of scant concern to most developing countries.

“My own sense is that countries will decide to submit or not submit their revised NDC at Cop26 based on their own political circumstances rather than trying to second guess US election results,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.

For now, the hope is still that most nations will issue their plans in advance of the Glasgow summit – a key political moment when countries are under pressure to step up to the science and people’s demand for greater action to curb emissions.

African countries need rich nations to take the lead on ambition at Cop26

Christiana Figueres, an architect of the Paris Agreement who headed the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said the risk that some countries will wait until after the US election, perhaps even until December, to communicate new or updated climate plan “is a possibility, but I don’t think so.”

Countries planning tougher action “are going to submit with or without the United States,” she told CHN.

“They know what the right thing is to do by the planet, and also by the stability of their economy … they are not playing this comparison game and looking over their shoulders,” she said.

However, the timing of major economies’ submissions of new or updated climate plans to the UN will largely underpin this year’s momentum for action.

Countries’ current climate plans put the world on track for 3C of warming or more by the end of the century, according to the UN. That will cause ever more severe disruptions to water and food supplies with more heatwaves, floods and rising seas.

UN Environment warned cuts in emissions of 7.6% a year will be needed over the next decade to get on track to limit warming to 1.5C. Failing to take ambitious action in the 2020s, could make the 1.5C goal slip out of reach.

Among the largest emitters, no-one is willing to move first or alone – making dialogue between great powers vital. In 2014, a US-China agreement to curb emissions preceded the adoption of the Paris Agreement a year later.

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At an EU-China summit in September, the EU is hoping to engage Beijing in a race to the top to ensure global action to curb emissions remains meaningful even without the US on board.

Much hopes ride on the expectation that both sides can agree to enhance ambition – a move that could unlock confidence for greater action.

In a statement signed of the sidelines of the G20 last year, China committed to “update” its climate target “in a manner representing a progression beyond the current one” but fell short of saying when.

Earlier this week, 12 European ministers wrote a letter to the EU Commission’s climate chief Frans Timmermans, urging him to present plans for a new 2030 climate target by June 2020, three months earlier than the Commission’s proposed date of September. This, they said, would enable to align EU policies with this year’s global timetable for action.

The EU Commission plans to explore options to increase its 2030 goal to cut emissions by 50-55% below 1990 levels, against current commitments of 40%.

The announcements of the UK’s own climate plan will also be key to set the tone ahead of the Glasgow summit and leverage greater action overseas.

The UK said it will come forward with an increased climate plan this year, “in good time ahead of Cop26“.

UK’s Nigel Topping seeks broad movement to drive global economy to net zero by 2050

UN Climate Change told CHN submissions of countries’ climate plans several months in advance of Cop26 would allow time for a deep analysis of current commitments and how they will affect global climate policies.

“The alternative to a deep quantitative analysis would be an overview of NDCs, which the secretariat could prepare in a month or so,” it said in an email.

UN Climate Change said it expected climate plans to be submitted before Cop26, noting the decision at the last climate talks in Madrid for the UN body to prepare a synthesis report for the Glasgow summit.

Sveinung Rotevatn, Norway’s minister of climate and environment, said he was disappointed that so few nations had met a symbolic deadline of 9 February 2020 to submit their plans.

“However, this is not a surprise,” he told CHN. Among others “We knew that … the European Union needs more time to land its process, but that they will before Glasgow,” he said. “We hope most countries will submit in the months to come – at the very latest before the Cop in Glasgow.”

Norway has argued that the Paris Agreement laid an obligation on countries to submit new, upgraded plans by 9 February, based on a paragraph in the Paris decisions requiring plans to be submitted nine months before a Cop held at five-yearly intervals after Paris.

Many other nations reckon the deadline was not binding, partly because other documents say the Paris agreement was due to formally start in 2020, meaning new pledges will be due in 2025, 2030, 2035 and so on.

This year, it may be enough for countries that already have goals for 2030 to reaffirm plans submitted in 2015.

The post Legal gaps and US election could delay climate ambition before Glasgow summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

Representatives of more than 30 different gene banks around the world will visit the Svalbard Seed Vault, on a Norwegian island 1,000 kilometres from the North Pole, to deposit samples including Peruvian potatoes, English wildflowers and Cherokee corn.

The Seed Vault “is the ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply, offering options for future generations to face the challenges of climate change and the need for nutritious food to feed a growing global population,” organisers said.

The vault will receive more than 60,000 seed varieties, packaged in around 170 boxes. The number of varieties in the vault – from wheat to rice, from beans to maize – will rise to about 1,050,000 from 992,032. The vault has space for about 4.5 million samples.

UN biodiversity meeting needs to deliver transformative change, not just targets

The vault had been above one million before but Syria’s civil far forced a withdrawal 50,000 samples in 2017 to replace a destroyed collection in the Syrian city of Aleppo, Hannes Dempewolf, of the Crop Trust which is a partner in running the vault, told Climate Home News.

Among new seeds are 27 wild plant species from meadows  at Highgrove in England, an estate owned by Britain’s Prince Charles.

“It has proved to be an exhausting and often demoralising task to persuade people of the utterly essential role played by all this diversity in maintaining vibrant, healthy ecosystems that sustain both people and our planet,” he said in a statement.

“It’s more urgent than ever that we act now to protect this diversity before it really is too late,” he added.

Among other new contributors on Tuesday are the Cherokee Nation, the first US-based indigenous tribe to deposit seeds including Cherokee White Eagle Corn and Cherokee Candy Roaster Squash.

And Peru’s International Potato Center will deposit seeds including those of wild relatives of potatoes. “There are estimations that as much as 20% of plant species are in danger of extinction, losses that will be accelerated by climate change,” it said.

Blasted into a mountainside in permafrost, the vault is designed to stay frozen even if the power fails and seas rise in coming centuries. It is managed and operated in a partnership between the Norwegian ministry of agriculture and food, the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre and the Crop Trust, an international group based in Germany.

Protect 30% of Earth to avert ‘irreversible’ biodiversity loss – former ministers

The Crop Trust has shifted from publicising the vault as a backup able to survive the worst cataclysms such as nuclear war. The headline on its media release announcing the opening in 2008 said: “’Doomsday Seed Vault’ to Open in Arctic Circle.”

Now it focuses on less apocalyptic roles.

“It’s not for doomsday, it’s not for the end of of the world,” said Dempewolf, the trust’s senior scientist. “It’s about an earthquake or an electrical fire that can wipe out a collection, or civil war like in Aleppo.”

He said there were examples of universities simply destroying seed collections, for instance if a professor retired.

Such losses “are like a stab in the heart,” he said.

The post ‘Noah’s Ark’ Arctic seed vault gets new crops, recovers to one million samples appeared first on Climate Home News.

Christiana Figueres, who headed the UN Climate Change secretariat from 2010 to 2016, urged governments, cities and citizens to halve world greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and cut emissions to net zero by 2050 to tackle what she called a “dire emergency”.

“This decade is the critical, decisive decade for the future of humanity and the planet,” she told Climate Home News of her book, “The Future we Choose”, which will go on sale on Tuesday.

It is co-written with Tom Rivett-Carnac, who also helped build the 2015 Paris climate pact.

Figueres, a former Costa Rican diplomat, said the UN summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in December will be a vital moment to chart the course towards a cleaner future away from fossil fuels.

UN Environment says that a goal of almost halving greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade works out at annual emissions cuts of 7.6% per year worldwide in the 2020s – rates previously associated with wars, recessions or slumps such as the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Emissions have risen in most recent years.

In a phone interview from Costa Rica, Figueres, 63, said it was not wide-eyed naivety to reckon such unprecedented cuts were possible and advocated an attitude of “stubborn optimism” for the 2020s to achieve a goal of limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial times.

“We know there are going to be many stumbling blocks along the way. This is difficult. We cannot delude ourselves,” she said. “There is no guarantee of success but not trying is a guarantee of failure.”

‘Mysterious’ seasons harm Nigeria’s farmers who need help with climate change

Among hurdles to action are the United States, where Trump doubts climate change is a major problem and is seeking to bolster jobs in the fossil fuel industry.

Figueres said the US risked losing out to China and other nations which were investing heavily in renewable energies such as solar and wind.

“That is so short-sighted on the side of the federal government, to keep its [fossil fuel] industry in the 20th century,” she said. “It is similar to giving signals to the US communications industry to say ‘you know what, we don’t think cellphones are really the thing. Let’s go back to landlines’.”

In the book, she also criticises those who doubt mainstream scientific findings that climate change is primarily caused by human activities.

“President Donald Trump is the most prominent example,” the book says, adding: “Denying climate change is tantamount to saying you don’t believe in gravity.”

Trump is pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement in a withdrawal that will formally take effect on 4 November – five days before the start of the climate talks in Glasgow. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Figueres’ remarks.

Figueres said she was encouraged that all the current Democratic candidates to take on Trump promised to rejoin the Paris Agreement if elected.

‘Mysterious’ seasons harm Nigeria’s farmers who need help with climate change

Her book portrays an imaginary 2050 scenario when the world suffers the impacts of inaction – people wear masks against pollution, crops are grown under cover to ensure stable conditions. Most coral reefs are dead, rising seas are forcing evacuations inland, and the European Union has disbanded under political strain.

An alternative imagines what could happen if governments act – the air is clean, trees have been planted almost everywhere. High speed electric rail networks in the US have replaced most domestic flights, fossil fuels are a thing of the past.

She said she took heart from a flattening of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2019, according to the International Energy Agency, that might be a hint that a peak in emissions was close after decades of steady growth.

Her book also points to breakthroughs long thought impossible – the US moon landing in 1969, the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and the end of apartheid in South Africa.

“This is a revolution for the high road … at a global level,” she said, also noting that her father, late Costa Rican president José Figueres Ferrer, decided to abolish the national army in 1948, the only nation to have done so.

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And technology is helping – prices of solar panels have fallen 90% in the past decade. Pressure for action is also growing, for instance by Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg, as well as green commitments by more and more companies, investors and cities.

Figueres said individuals can play their part by making climate change a top priority in voting and changing their lifestyles. She said she had cut her own carbon footprint by dropping red meat from her diet and travelling by public transport when possible.

But she still has high emissions from travel – Figueres and Rivett-Carnac will unveil the book in New York on Tuesday, then go on a tour in places including Washington, Australia and Paris.

At a news conference in Bonn when she was appointed to the UN job in 2010, she was asked when she reckoned climate change would be solved.

‘Not in my lifetime,” she said, something she writes in the book was an error. Now, she said an emphatic “yes” to the same question. Barring accidents and illness, she will be 73 in 2030 and 93 in 2050. She hopes her genes favour longevity – and one of her grandfathers lived to 105.

The post World faces ‘decisive decade’ to fix global warming, former UN climate chief says appeared first on Climate Home News.

Read Orji Sunday’s gripping report about how smallholder farmers in Nigeria, who grow 90% of the food crops in Africa’s most populous nation, are trying to adapt when rains don’t fall as normal.

“It wasn’t this way in the past. Rain came in its time. Sunshine came in its season … But the seasons are becoming mysterious,” said Michael Okorie, 54, a smallholder farmer in Nigeria whose yam crop failed last year after an unseasonal deluge followed an unusual dry period.

And the continent is becoming more vulnerable.

“Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced the dramatic consequences of climate extremes becoming more frequent and more intense over the past decades,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in its 2018 report about efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.

It’s not all doom and gloom – new solutions, such as cold storage powered by solar panels in Nigeria, are helping to extend the shelf lives of vegetables such as carrots or peppers that often rot after harvest.

Still, African nations need help. They fill the bottom 12 places in the UN Development Programme’s 2019 Human Development Index that measures life expectancy, education and per capita income. Niger is last, below Central African Republic, Chad and South Sudan.

Our latest overview of the Paris Agreement shows that four African nations – OPEC members Angola and Libya, as well as Eritrea and South Sudan – have not yet ratified the pact. Worldwide, 189 of 197 countries have formally endorsed the accord, which will lose a key member in November when the US formally pulls out under President Donald Trump.

Orji Sunday’s story about Nigeria is part of Climate Home News’ African reporting programme, supported by Future Climate for Africa.

Check out stunning stories in the series including about drought in Zimbabwe, erosion in Nigeria, and forest ownership in Tanzania. And look out for more in coming months.

This week we’re launching a new reporting programme, seeking articles about how communities – especially women, youth and indigenous peoples – are building resilience to climate change in the most vulnerable regions of the world.

In partnership with the Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF), we’re looking for inspiring stories especially from the Bay of Bengal, East Africa and the Arctic.

South Korean coal

The Berlin-based Climate Analytics research group called on Seoul to phase out existing coal-fired power plants by 2029, stop new construction and halt funds for coal projects in other Asian nations.

It said that South Korea, where per capita emissions are more than double the world average, isn’t doing enough to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. Coal-fired plants under construction could last well into the 2050s, by when the IPCC says coal used in power generation should be “close to zero” worldwide to achieve the 1.5C goal.

Biodiversity losses

About two dozen former foreign ministers called for the world to expand protected areas to 30 percent of the oceans and land by 2030 at a summit due in Beijing in October (assuming the coronavirus outbreak is solved by then).

They said the 30% should be “strongly” protected – without defining exactly what that means. Biodiversity campaigners say that too many existing parks and reserves exist only on paper with a failure to enforce restrictions.

This week’s top stories:

• ‘Mysterious’ seasons harm Nigeria’s farmers who need help with climate change
• South Korea urged to exit coal by 2029 to stick to Paris climate agreement
• Protect 30% of Earth to avert ‘irreversible’ biodiversity loss – former ministers say
• Climate Home News launches front line climate justice reporting programme
• Which countries have not ratified the Paris climate agreement?

And in climate conversations:

• Climate finance: failing to serve the most vulnerable?

The post Africa at risk – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

Climate Analytics, a non-profit science and policy research institute based in Germany, said South Korea now has 60 coal fired plant units, accounting for a third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, and another seven units under construction.

With expected lifetimes of 30 years, the new plants could be in operation into the 2050s.

“Korea must phase out coal power by 2029 in order to do its part to limit climate change under the Paris Agreement,” Climate Analytics said in a study, urging a far more rapid shift to renewable energies such as solar and wind power.

With only the existing plants, the country will overshoot its fair budget for greenhouse gas emissions by 2.5 times, it estimated.

‘Mysterious’ seasons harm Nigeria’s farmers who need help with climate change

The 2015 Paris Agreement seeks to limit the rise in average global temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, while aiming for a tougher limit of 1.5C. Worldwide, the UN´s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the 1.5C goal would mean cutting coal use  “close to 0%” of power generation by 2050.

Paola Yanguas Parra, an author of the report at Climate Analytics, told Climate Home News that South Korea should also halt its international role in backing coal in Asian nations including Vietnam and Indonesia.

“This is having a huge carbon footprint in other countries,” she said, citing estimates that Seoul had invested $5.7 billion in 22 foreign coal projects from 2013-19.

A 2019 report by the European Commission showed that South Korea’s greenhouse gas emissions were 13.9 tonnes per capita in 2015, the latest year for which data is available, more than double the world average of 6.7.

South Korea’s existing climate plan submitted as part of the Paris Agreement aims to cut emissions by 37% below projected rates of growth with no climate policies.

“Korea … is increasing the production of renewable energy in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel,” the plan says. The South Korean Environment Ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Thursday’s study.

Sejong Youn, director at South Korea-based climate policy group Solutions for Our Climate (SFOC), said “2029 is an ambitious goal (for exiting coal) but I think it’s necessary to meet the Paris Agreement goals”.

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He told CHN it was unclear if Seoul would scale up the ambition of its climate targets this year, the five-year milestone of the 2015 Paris Agreement when countries are meant to upgrade or reaffirm their plans.

Worldwide, coal accounts for almost 40% of electricity generation and more than 40% of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, the International Energy Agency says.

Some nations are setting dates for phasing out coal.

The Powering Past Coal Alliance, for instance, says it counts 33 governments among its members including G7 members Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada as well as other nations ranging from Ethiopia to the Marshall Islands.

The post South Korea urged to exit coal by 2029 to stick to Paris climate agreement appeared first on Climate Home News.

The 23 ex-ministers from six continents, a group founded by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, also urged governments to complete a UN treaty this year to safeguard life in the high seas, the area beyond the legal jurisdiction of coastal states that makes up two-thirds of the ocean.

“We endorse setting a global target of strongly protecting at least 30% of the land and 30% of the ocean by 2030,” the group, known as the Aspen Ministers Forum, said in a statement about goals for expanding parks and other protected areas for wildlife.

Signatories included Germany’s Joschka Fischer, Britain’s Malcolm Rifkind, Egypt’s Amre Moussa, Argentina’s Susana Malcorra, Israel’s Tzipi Livni and Australia’s Alexander Downer.

Governments are due to meet in Kunming, China, in October, to set new targets for 2030 to try to avert what scientists say is the worst extinction crisis since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago. One million species are now at risk from human activities, a UN report said last year.

Locusts plague destroys livelihoods in Kenya but ‘biggest threat yet to come’

The 2030 goals are meant to build on goals set a decade ago to protect at least 17% of the land and 10% of the seas by 2020.

So far, about 15.1% of terrestrial areas and 7.9% of the seas are protected, according to an overview by the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre. But the Brazilian Amazon, for instance, is under renewed threat from economic development and many fish stocks are at risk.

On land, the loss of habitats, over-exploitation, pollution, climate change and invasive species are among threats to creatures ranging from giraffes to beetles. Over-fishing, plastic pollution and acidification of caused by carbon dioxide emissions are undermining life in the seas.

“Humanity sits on the precipice of irreversible loss of biodiversity and a climate crisis that imperils the future for our grandchildren and generations to come,” the former ministers wrote.

“The world must act boldly, and it must act now,” they wrote.

In documents released last month by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, one proposed goal is for protected areas and other conservation measures to cover “at least [30%] of land and sea areas with at least [10%] under strict protection” by 2030.

The brackets signal that the numbers are not yet agreed.

“It’s good news that biodiversity is being recognised at a higher priority,” Alex Rogers, Science Director for REV Ocean and a visiting professor of zoology at Oxford University, told Climate Home News of the ministers’ appeal.

“The loss of biodiversity is hair-raising,” he said.

But he said government definitions of protected areas, including the 2020 UN targets, are often vague with loopholes that allow continued activities such as deforestation, road-building, hunting and fishing.

He said he hoped Tuesday’s call for “strongly protecting” the seas, for instance, would mean areas where fishing is banned or highly restricted.

Climate Home News launches front line climate justice reporting programme

Rogers said that he recently took part in a yet-to-be published scientific report for a high level panel of world leaders that recommends that 30-40% of the ocean should be protected.

It also said that fisheries policies, such as setting catch quotas, should try to assess the wider risks on biodiversity. Catching too much herring, for instance, can undermine the amount of food available for predators such as seabirds or tuna which also feed on the fish.

(Corrected on 18 February to update Alex Rogers’ affiliation and to show that the high level scientific panel is of world leaders, not limited to the UK)

The post Protect 30% of Earth to avert ‘irreversible’ biodiversity loss – former ministers say appeared first on Climate Home News.

In partnership with the Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF), we are supporting original reporting that focuses on communities, mainly in developing nations, who are suffering most from climate change even though they have contributed little to the problem of rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Articles will put a spotlight on CJRF’s goal of supporting “communities first hit, first to respond, and first to adapt to climate change”. We will highlight women, youth and indigenous peoples on the front lines of climate change who are creating and sharing their own solutions for resilience.

The ideal story for us will capture the attention of our international audience with a combination of on-the-ground reporting from affected communities, scientific evidence, innovative and rights-based solutions, and political tension or controversy.

The grants will cover competitive rates and reasonable travel expenses, to be negotiated in advance.

We plan to publish eight articles under the project, lasting until 30 November 2020. At least half of the stories will focus on CJRF’s priority areas – the Bay of Bengal, East Africa and the Arctic – where climate change is already affecting landscapes and livelihoods.

In the Bay of Bengal, communities in Bangladesh and the Indian states of Orissa and West Bengal are at risk from heat waves, erratic rainfall, and storms surges. Rising seas may force relocation, but how are communities working to delay any moves, or to ensure they move on their own terms?

In the drylands of Tanzania and Kenya in East Africa, more variable rainfall linked to climate change is disrupting food production. How are communities innovating to safeguard their crops, livestock and livelihoods?

In the Arctic, a thaw is threatening the hunting livelihoods of indigenous peoples in CJRF´s focus areas of Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Can they adapt?

If you are a journalist with at least three years’ experience, please send us your pitches. Local reporters will be given preference, although we would also consider pitches from travelling reporters for stories in areas where local reporting is harder to source.

Your pitch should explain the top line of the story and essential context in no more than 150 words. If we like the idea, we will ask for more detail. Briefly explain what sources you would interview and any travel required. Our focus is on written articles but we are also open to multimedia projects.

When pitching for the first time, tell us a bit about your journalism experience and background. Include links to one or two recent stories you are proud of. Editors will work closely with you to give feedback and advice.

For transparency to our readers, each piece would note that it was produced with support from CJRF along with a link to our editorial guidelines that outline how we interact with grant makers while ensuring independence.

You must have fluent spoken and written English. It helps if you have worked with international media before and have some awareness of climate change themes.

Please send your pitches to acting editor Megan Darby md@climatehomenews.com. We will review the first pitches in mid-March and subsequent ideas in coming months and will publish until November.

This article has been amended to update the contact details.

The post Climate Home News launches front line climate justice reporting programme appeared first on Climate Home News.

Sharma, aged 52 and little known outside the UK, will face a massive job at the two-week Cop26 conference in November – a task diplomats often liken to herding cats. Read Chloe Farand’s insightful story capping two weeks of her tireless coverage of the UK’s Cop26 turmoil.

In a reshuffle on Thursday, Johnson elevated Sharma to the role of secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy from his former post as secretary of state for international development.

Cop26 will be a key test of Britain’s diplomatic clout in the world after Brexit.

Sharma’s job will be to rally nations around the world, led by big emitters such as China and the European Union, to do more to curb emissions amid huge uncertainties, not least that the US under President Donald Trump will quit the Paris Agreement on 4 November. Democrats vying to beat Trump on 3 November would all re-join.

Sharma’s appointment seems to grate with assurances by Britain’s diplomatic service that it has marching orders to make climate change the UK’s top international priority this year.

Foreign ministers have often presided at key Cops – Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister commanded talks that led to the Paris Agreement in 2015. Patricia Espinosa, then Mexico’s foreign minister, hammered through the Cancun Agreements in 2010 after clinically dismissing objections by Bolivia.

Sharma replaces Claire O’Neill, who was sacked at the end of January and then made a blistering attack on Johnson, saying he didn’t understand climate change and that preparations were “miles off track.”

So far, only three countries – the Marshall Islands, Suriname and Norway – have submitted upgraded Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the UN, outlining climate policies for the next decade or so.

Sunday 9 February was a theoretical deadline for submissions – nine months to the day before Cop26 opens in Glasgow – for countries making a strict interpretation of texts implementing the Paris Agreement.

‘Don’t shop till you drop’ 

Contrasting with the high diplomacy, Natalie Sauer visited Birmingham, in the north of England, where the UK is holding a “citizens’ assembly” to come up with ideas to achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050.

Her colourful report delves into participants’ reflections on consumption habits and their doubts the government will take their recommendations on board.

At the meeting of 110 sometimes bemused citizens, academics suggested buying less stuff, renting more and repairing possessions ranging from fraying clothes to old bicycles. One participant won applause by asking: “How can we be reassured that the government will follow on our recommendations?”

Locust plague

The worst swarms of locusts in the Horn of Africa in decades is leaving a frightening legacy: billions of eggs that could create a far worse, second-generation plague if they hatch and find enough food in coming months.

Read Sophie Mbugua’s gripping story about the crisis. She met Lawrence Mwarige, a farmer in central Kenya whose crops were destroyed by the swarm last month. In a chilling detail, he initially mistook the impending swarm for a dark rain cloud.

And Cyril Ferrand, FAO resilience team leader for eastern Africa, said eggs were an insect time bomb. “Within the next three months, we could potentially have a 20 times bigger problem than we have now,” he said.

Solar panels

The UK is the world’s seventh largest market for installed solar panels but no one knows exactly where they are, write researchers Dan Stowell and Jack Kelly in a well-read opinion piece. 

Pinpointing the exact location of one million solar panels in the UK, twinned with up-to-the-minute weather forecasts, could help the UK reduce carbon emissions by having fewer gas-fired power plants running on standby to back up the solar panels, they write.

This week’s top stories:

• UK government appoints Alok Sharma as Cop26 president
• Don’t shop till you drop:  advice to UK citizens on net zero climate goals
• UK climate diplomacy ‘already happening’ for Cop26 despite leadership vacuum
• Locust plague destroys livelihoods in Kenya but ‘biggest threat yet to come’
• EU Parliament urges ECB to put climate at heart of strategy review
• Shipping could raise ambition of 2030 climate target, study shows
• Campaigners urge African Union to stop fossil fuel proliferation on continent
• Marshall Islands, Suriname Norway upgrade climate plans before Cop26

And in climate conversations

• One million solar panels! If only we knew where they were…
• Carbon taxes are key to stop deforestation

The post Back on track? – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

Together the three countries account for about 0.1% of world emissions.

Details of updated climate action plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs):

• Marshall Islands

The Marshall Islands, which says its 53,000 citizens account for a fractional 0.00001 percent of global emissions, says it will work to curb the Pacific islands’ vulnerability to storms and sea level rise while developing solar power to break dependence on diesel fuel.

Lacking land for solar power, it said it may place floating panels on lagoons and install panels in novel places such as on schools, basketball courts, hospitals, and at airports.

It was the first to submit a new NDC, in 2018, when it set a new goal of cutting emissions by 58% by 2035 and reaffirmed an aspiration for net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

• Suriname

Suriname says it will step up climate action especially in electricity, road transport, agriculture and forests – sectors that account for 70% of the country’s emissions. Overall, it says that it is already a “carbon-negative country” because its tropical forests soak up carbon dioxide as they grow.

Among measures, the NDC will expand protected areas for forests and wetlands to cover 17% of the South American country by 2030, up from 14%.

The NDC stops short of setting economy-wide targets for emissions but outlines “a cost-effective pathway to decarbonisation of sustainable economic development, maintaining the integrity of natural forest acting as a carbon sink, and strengthening resilience.”

• Norway

Western Europe’s top oil and gas producer plans to cut emissions by 50-55% by 2030 below 1990 levels, in line with a European Green Deal outlined by the European Commission. Norway is not an EU member, but usually matches EU goals, which are currently for a cut of at least 40% by 2030.

It became the first developed nation to submit a new NDC, on 7 February, saying “the deadline is February 9.”

Norway’s emissions were 1.1% above 1990 levels in 2018 and Norway has failed to meet previous targets with domestic action. In 2010, for instance, the government pledged to cut emissions by 30-40% by 2020. It will only meet the goal by buying emissions quotas abroad.

• Other nations

Separately, a total of 107 governments representing 15% of emissions have promised to enhance NDC ambition sometime this year, according to the World Resources Institute think-tank.

There are 197 parties to the 2015 Paris Agreement. NDCs are the building blocks of global action, typically outlining policy goals for the next decade.

Documents implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement say countries are meant to bolster their NDCs every five years and submit the plans at least nine months before the relevant UN conferences, or Cop. This year’s Cop26 will be in Glasgow from 9-19 November, making 9 February a theoretical date for submissions.

But documents dating back to 2011 say the Paris Agreement was originally due to enter into force only in 2020, meaning that formal reviews will only start in 2025, 2030, 2035 and so on, legal scholars say. Governments may be able merely to re-submit existing plans in 2020.

But many governments, climate activists, the UN, cities and companies want urgent upgrades this year to tackle the worsening impacts of warming.

The post Marshall Islands, Suriname, Norway upgrade climate plans before Cop26 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Only three nations have submitted upgraded climate plans nine months before the start of November’s summit in Glasgow, adding to uncertainties after UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson last week sacked Claire O’Neill, who was due to preside at the talks. He has not yet named a replacement.

The UN has billed the 2020 summit, known as Cop26, as a first test of a key principle in the 2015 Paris Agreement that all countries will ratchet up ambition every five years to do more to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

A little-noticed paragraph 25 in the 2015 UN decision implementing the Paris Agreement says that such climate action plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), are meant to be submitted to the UN “at least 9 to 12 months in advance of the relevant session” of the Cop.

Sunday 9 February marks nine months before the start of Cop26, from 9-19 November. NDCs are crucial in defining national policies for the next 5-10 years.

“It’s disappointing,” Andrew Higham, who led drafting of the 2015 Paris Agreement at the UN Climate Change secretariat, told Climate Home News of the dearth of NDCs by the informal February deadline, which is not legally binding.

UK walks diplomatic tightrope for 2020 climate summit after shaky start

Of almost 200 governments, only the Marshall Islands, Suriname and Norway, which issued a new plan on 7 February, have provided new NDCs to rein in their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt their economies to ever more heatwaves, droughts, more powerful storms and rising sea levels.

“The deadline is 9 February,” Norway’s centre-right government said in a statement, revising its NDC goal to cut its emissions by 50-55% below 1990 levels by 2030 from a previous target of at least 40%.

But together, the three nations only account for only about 0.1% of world greenhouse gas emissions.

Asked about the lack of action, a COP26 spokesperson said: “We encourage all parties to submit ambitious NDCs in good time before COP26 this November” and said the UK was “delighted” by the first submissions.

“We … look forward to the rest of our international partners doing so in the coming months,” the spokesperson said.

So far, 107 countries have stated they will enhance their NDCs by the end of 2020, according to the World Resources Institute think-tank. These account for 15.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Five years ago, Higham said the clear intention among nations drafting the Paris Agreement was to have upgrades in 2020 to get on track for its key goal of limiting warming to “well below” 2C above pre-industrial times, while pursuing an even tougher ceiling of 1.5C.

“Any negotiator would be able to find a way of saying ‘we can weasel out of this one’,” said Higham, who is the chief executive of Mission 2020, which seeks to inspire more action. The UN says Paris NDCs put the world on track for warming of more than 3C.

UK’s Boris Johnson urges all countries to set net zero emissions goals in 2020

Originally, the Paris Agreement had been expected to start in 2020 and several legal scholars said the nine-month deadline in the Paris text strictly applies only to future five-year milestones starting with 2025, 2030, 2035 and 2040.

But the Paris Agreement entered into force far earlier than expected in 2016 after many governments ratified, adding pressure for the spirit of paragraph 25 to apply in 2020 amid pressure from voters, companies, cities, NGOs and youth activists led by Greta Thunberg.

And scientific findings since Paris – about the death of tropical coral reefs or a quickening melt of Greenland and Antarctica – have further raised expectations for action. Technology prices, such as for wind and solar power, have also tumbled since 2015, making it easier to raise ambition.

Sue Biniaz, who was the US State Department lead climate lawyer for almost three decades and who worked to draft the Paris texts, said she considered that the nine-month deadline in the Paris decision “does not apply to 2020 updates/re-communications” of NDCs.

For most nations, which set NDCs stretching to 2030, it will be enough to re-submit existing NDCs sometime in 2020 to meet the requests in the Paris texts, she said.

However, she also said “it would be desirable to have some early submissions to create momentum during 2020, but I’m sceptical that at least the major economies would be submitting early,” she told CHN.

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Christiana Figueres, who headed the UN Climate Change Secretariat in 2015 and founded Mission 2020, said the key test this year would be the willingness of G20 nations other than the United States to raise ambition.

The US is poised to quit the Paris Agreement just before Cop26 under a plan by President Donald Trump and will not submit a new NDC. The US presidential election on 3 November may limit any bold decisions by other nations – leading Democratic candidates all says they will seek to rejoin the Paris Agreement if they win.

“To really make a difference we need to see action either from all the G20 countries, or at least from a critical number of them,” Figueres told CHN. It was unclear, for instance, if Australia would issue a new NDC. “The bushfires in Australia have rung all the alarm bells,” she said.

Asked about 9 February, she noted that nations often missed deadlines in UN texts, including in the run-up to the Paris summit.

“I have full confidence they (NDCs) will be rolling in throughout the year,” Figueres said. “A huge number of them came in at the last minute” in 2015.

But Lavanya Rajamani, a professor of International Environmental Law at Oxford University, said nations did better five years ago in the run-up to Paris.

In 2015, big emitters including the US and the EU issued their intended NDCs before a soft March 31 deadline that the UN said applied only to “those parties ready to do so“. China, the top emitter, issued its plan in June 2015.

“There is no getting away from the disappointment that states are not rising to the challenge of addressing climate change in the narrow window of opportunity we have for avoiding the worst impacts,” Rajamani told CHN.

How Cop25 turned its back on climate action

Many G20 nations are unclear about their plans for NDCs this year but are performing better in setting longer-term 2050 goals to decarbonise their economies, beyond NDCs that mainly define policies until 2025 or 2030.

Britain was the first G7 nation to put a plan for net-zero emissions into law by 2050 last year and prime minister Johnson hopes to inspire wider action. Japan, Germany, France and Canada have all submitted long-term plans to the UN.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, however, has said the world needs to focus most on immediate action. He wants countries to cut global emissions by 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 and warned in 2018 that the world risks “runaway climate change” unless it acts to reverse a rise in emissions by 2020.

“Governments should understand that they look more and more disconnected from what their citizens are requesting: urgent action on climate starts now, not in five, not in ten years,” echoed Isabel Cavelier, a legal expert with the International Climate Politics Hub.

She told CHN, however, that her reading of the Paris texts meant there was “no legal specific deadline” before Glasgow for countries that are planning to submit NDCs in 2020.

And Oliver Geden, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said: “As I understand it, the 9-months deadline was never taken seriously by the parties.”

“Of course, it’s in the Paris decisions but if you look at the debate, (the UN) will be happy to have announcements just before Glasgow.”

The post World misses symbolic February deadline to ratchet up climate action before Cop26 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Results of the Iowa Democratic presidential caucus on Monday have been delayed by inconsistencies in reporting the data.

The US will formally leave the 2015 Paris Agreement on 4 November 2020 after Trump decided to withdraw. Formally rejoining the climate accord would take a just month.

Policies by leading candidates in Iowa, based on their published plans:

BERNIE SANDERS

Domestic

Sanders aims for “100% renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonisation of the economy by 2050 at latest”.

His foresees creation of  20 million jobs, including in renewable power, steel, construction, energy efficiency retrofitting, sustainable agriculture. He says he would “directly invest a historic $16.3 trillion public investment toward these efforts, in line with the mobilisation of resources made during the New Deal and WWII”.

He would declare climate change a “national emergency”.

Sanders, accusing the fossil fuel industry of “greed”, says he would make it pay for pollution and prosecute it “for the damage it has caused”.

International

Sanders would “commit to reducing emissions throughout the world, including providing $200 billion to the Green Climate Fund, rejoining the Paris Agreement, and reasserting the US’ leadership in the global fight against climate change”.

Sanders says the policies would help slash emissions both at home and abroad. “We will reduce domestic emissions by at least 71% by 2030,” he says, and help developing nations make deep emissions cuts.

UK’s Boris Johnson urges all countries to set net zero emissions goals in 2020

JOE BIDEN

Domestic

He says he would “ensure the US achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050”.

The “Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face”.

On his first day in office he plans to go beyond the platform he shared, as vice president, with former President Barack Obama by signing executive orders on clean energy and environmental justice. Under the Paris Agreement, Obama pledged cuts in greenhouse gases of 26-28% by 2025, below 2005 levels.

Biden says his climate and environmental justice proposal will make a federal investment of $1.7 trillion over the next ten years, leveraging additional private sector and state and local investments to total to more than $5 trillion.

International 

Biden says he “will go much further” than just recommitting the US to the Paris Agreement. Biden “will lead an effort to get every major country to ramp up the ambition of their domestic climate targets”.

He will make sure those commitments are “transparent and enforceable, and stop countries from cheating by using America’s economic leverage and power of example,” his campaign says. Climate change would be integrated into trade, national security and foreign policies.

US Democrats will carry global hopes for climate action to 2020 poll

PETE BUTTIGIEG

Domestic 

“We aspire to make our society a net-zero emissions one no later than 2050, working aggressively toward immediate targets,” Buttigieg says.

As milestones, he plans to double the clean electricity generated in the US by 2025. By 2035, build a clean electricity system with zero emissions and require zero emissions for all new passenger vehicles.

By 2040, require net-zero emissions for all new heavy-duty vehicles, buses, rail, ships, and aircraft and develop a thriving carbon removal industry. By 2050, achieve net-zero emissions from industry, including steel and concrete, manufacturing, and agriculture sectors.

He would “enact a price on carbon and use the revenue to send rebates to Americans”.

International 

“We will take the steps necessary to rejoin the Paris Agreement on the first day in office and make clear to the world that we are ‘back in, and all in’,” he says.

Buttigieg says he would mobilise support for climate change mitigation and adaptation in developing nations, including “doubling” the US pledge to the Green Climate Fund (GCF). Trump cut off contributions to the GCF after Obama pledged an initial $3 billion. Part of the plan would be to “redevelop bilateral and multilateral relationships on climate change and clean energy with nations like China and India”.

ELIZABETH WARREN

Domestic 

Warren was an original co-sponsor of a Green New Deal proposed by Senator Ed Markey and representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, committing to a 10-year drive to achieve domestic net-zero emissions by 2030.

Her website says “independent economists have estimated that Elizabeth’s plans to address the climate crisis will inject over $10 trillion dollars into our economy and create over 10 million new jobs”.

Among goals, “by 2035, we will achieve 100% clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy in electricity generation. By 2030, we’ll reach 100% zero emissions for all new light-duty passenger vehicles, medium-duty trucks, and all buses. By 2028, we’ll attain 100% zero-carbon pollution for all new commercial and residential buildings.”

Warren plans to sign an executive order on her first day as president imposing a moratorium on all new fossil fuel leases, including for drilling offshore and on public lands.

International 

She says a “Green Marshall Plan” will provide American-made clean energy technology to countries that need it most. “She’ll commit $100 billion over ten years to offer discounts to countries hardest hit by the climate crisis, or as an incentive for regulatory changes that further reduce emissions,” her website says.

Countries will be required to join the Paris Climate Agreement – 187 of 197 nations have so far ratified the deal – and eliminate domestic fuel subsidies as a precondition for entering trade negotiations with the US.

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AMY KLOBUCHAR

Domestic

“In her first 100 days as President, Senator Klobuchar will introduce and work with Congress to pass sweeping legislation that will put our country on a path to achieving 100% net-zero emissions no later than 2050,” her plan says.

She would revive the Obama-era Clean Power Plan for cutting emissions and “will negotiate even stronger emissions standards that account for the progress states have already made”.

Among other measures, she would toughen fuel economy standards, and set “ambitious goals” to reduce the carbon footprint of the federal government. Klobuchar has proposed a $1 trillion infrastructure package that will modernise aging energy infrastructure.

International 

She would work to get back into the Paris Agreement “on day one” as part of a goal to “reestablish US international leadership on climate”.

Klobuchar “will work with international leaders to build consensus around stronger goals to limit global warming to no more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit” (1.5 degrees Celsius)”.

She would also seek to “establish meaningful enforcement of international climate goals.”

That would mean “making accountability for climate commitments a central part of our international agenda, taking on China’s efforts to promote dirty energy sources in other countries, and considering climate goals in all types of international assistance”.

The post Democratic contenders in Iowa caucus aim to rejoin Paris accord in green goals appeared first on Climate Home News.

On a video call hosted by Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg and her “Fridays for Future” youth movement, they said African nations have a role to play even though global warming has been caused overwhelmingly by major industrialised nations.

Deforestation in Africa and local energy policies promoting fossil fuels were all adding to the crisis, said Makenna Muigai of Kenya.

“I urge African leaders and world leaders to take into consideration that all of us at the end of the day will be affected by climate change,” she said.

UN relocates biodiversity talks to Italy from China after coronavirus emergency

Ndoni Mcunu, an environmental scientist at Witwatersrand University in South Africa, said that African nations should make their economies more efficient to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Africa only contributes 5% of the greenhouse gases yet we are the most impacted,” she said. China, the United States and the European Union are the top emitters.

Among policy advice, Vanessa Nakate, 23, of Uganda urged a halt to construction of a pipeline to export Ugandan oil via Tanzania to the Indian Ocean port of Tanga.

“We need to keep the oil in the ground,” she said. She said that activists in Africa often felt ignored, both at home and abroad.

“The biggest threat to action in my country and in Africa is the fact that those who are trying as hard as possible to speak up are … not able to tell their stories,” she said, adding that some feared arrest if they took part in local protests about climate change.

Nakate won unwanted attention last week after she was cropped from a news agency photograph at a meeting of political and business leaders in Davos, Switzerland. Her absence meant the image showed only white activists, including 17-year-old Thunberg.

Nakate said that the controversy about the photograph – subsequently reissued to include her – might end up helping. “I’m actually very optimistic about this. I believe it is going to change the stories of different climate activists in Africa,” she said.

Coronavirus side effect – Climate Weekly

Teenage activist Ayakha Melithafa of South Africa said it was difficult to galvanise local action on climate change when many people in Africa suffered crises, of poverty and unemployment.

“It’s hard to convince people in Africa to care about the climate crisis because they are facing so many socio-economic crises at the same time,” she said.

She called for better public education to show that climate change would exacerbate strains on water and food supplies.

Thunberg, named Time Magazine’s person of the year for 2019, said she wanted to focus on Africa by organising the call.

She said that everyone in power around the world needs “to start treating this crisis as a crisis.”

The post Youth activists urge African governments to do more to curb climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

The insects are ravaging Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia in the worst outbreak in the region in decades, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in a report on Wednesday.

South Sudan and Uganda were also at risk and new swarms could form in Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen, it said.

“Locust swarms have started laying eggs and another generation of breeding will increase locust numbers,” Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer at the FAO, said in a statement.

“Urgent efforts must be made to stop them from increasing to protect the livelihoods of farmers and livestock holders,” he added.

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In Kenya, the FAO said eggs will “hatch in early February and new swarms are expected to form in early April”.

Almost 12 million people in the region already lack secure food supplies and a swarm of locusts covering one square kilometre can devour as much food in a day as 35,000 people, it said.

“Desert Locusts present an extremely alarming and unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods in the Horn of Africa,” FAO said in a statement. FAO said it needed $70 million to support rapid control operations, such as spraying with insecticides.

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Scientists say that more study is needed to understand how far rising temperatures, more variable rainfall and shifting wind patterns caused by climate change will affect locust outbreaks.

The FAO says that desert locusts numbers can boom “if heavy rains fall in successive seasonal breeding areas”. It adds “unless prevented by control, drought or migration to unsuitable habitats, plagues can form”.

Cressman wrote a study in 2013 saying that a warming climate could especially help eggs and young locusts, known as hoppers, to grow faster in the colder parts of the year, giving the pests a head start.

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The lawsuit, launched in 2016 by Greenpeace and Nature & Youth, is part of a mounting trend around the world of plaintiffs turning to the courts to combat global warming and to enforce the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

“The appeal is rejected,” the three-judge panel in the Oslo Court of Appeals ruled, upholding a lower court ruling in 2018 that approved the Conservative-led government’s permits for exploration drilling in the Barents Sea.

Greenpeace said it would appeal to the Supreme Court and said the ruling included glimmers of hope. Article 112 of Norway’s constitution speaks of a right to a healthy environment for future generations.

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“We are happy. It’s a big step forward for us,” head of Greenpeace Norway Frode Pleym told Climate Home News.

Pleym especially welcomed a part of the ruling that greenhouse gases from burning Norway’s fossil fuels abroad should be included in assessing any environmental damage.

That overruled the lower court’s verdict that only local emissions, from exploration and production, should be taken into account in judging harm. Norway is western Europe’s biggest oil and gas exporter.

Overall, however, the Appeals Court backed the government’s approval of exploration licenses, awarded to Equinor, Chevron, Lukoil, ConocoPhillips and others.

The judges said that courts should be cautious about intervening in decisions made by the government and parliament in line with existing laws.

They also said it was uncertain whether exploration in the Arctic would lead to any new oil or gas finds and that any emissions would be regulated by carbon markets.

Ernst Nordtveit, a law professor at Bergen University, ruling and predicted that the Supreme Court would also reach a similar conclusion if it takes up the case in coming months.

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“There is a high threshold for the court to intervene in political decisions in such a complex area,” he told CHN.

The environmental groups argue that any new oilfields in the Arctic would take years to develop and keep pumping for decades, undermining Norway’s pledges to slash greenhouse gases as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

There are now 1,143 climate lawsuits in the US s and 319 cases in other nations, according to databases maintained by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School and Arnold & Porter.

Among the most high profile rulings, the Dutch Supreme Court in December 2019 said the government had done too little to fight climate change. It ordered the government to slash emissions by at least 25% from 1990 levels by the end of 2020.

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