Climate Feedback

If we are trying to keep global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less but 4 degrees is possible even within some of our lifetimes, which world do we prepare for? Talks at today's session on adaptation took on the problem of the multiple futures that decision-makers have to face. Mark Stafford-Smith of CSIRO in Australia talked specifically about long-term decisions - such as planting and managing forests - where the best option depends on which way the climate goes later this century. If you expect strong mitigation that holds down warming, then you try to preserve today's forests and nurse them through, protecting them from fire and other threats. If a moderately high temperature is in store, forest composition will have to change and you can plant new species to facilitate that. With runaway climate change the best option could be opening up the forests to invading weeds and rapid, radical transformation.

This is no hypothetical choice. During February's raging wildfires in southeastern Australia, it appears that even the seed stores in the forest floor were destroyed in some burnt areas. Stafford-Smith recommends that conservation managers trying to bring these areas back to life should divide their efforts to follow all three approaches above. Such a hedging strategy may mean two-thirds of forest plans need to be abandoned and altered as the future unfolds, but it's better then putting all the trees in one basket.

Rob Swart of Wageningen University, The Netherlands, looked at hedging on a much larger scale - the plan Bs we could prepare in case of a true planetary emergency. From geoengineering schemes that risk severe side effects to extreme emissions reductions that would affect the climate only slowly and probably require tight government control, none of the options are attractive. But Swart thinks there should be an international process - separate and parallel to current UN climate policy - for countries to work out ahead of time how they would cooperate on such schemes. If left to a moment of panic, they're unlikely to be carried out thoughtfully and equitably.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on September 30, 2009
Categories: 4 Degrees and Beyond, Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Immersing yourself in the impacts of extreme climate change can give rise to a certain amount of gallows humor. Conversation among my dinner companions last night turned to whether this week's 4 Degrees and Beyond conference or March's Copenhagen Climate Congress provided "more apocalypse for your conference fee". The far more serious question, of course, is how much upheaval and human suffering would come with the substantial warming that delegates here are contemplating. Some interesting talks today looked at the facets of sea level rise and population displacement.

Stephan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research had an intriguing update on a 2007 Science paper in which he'd come up with a new method for projecting sea level rise. Rahmstorf throws out any attempt to use complex climate models on this controversial problem and instead starts from scratch, with observed relationships between temperature rises and sea level rises. Now, working with Martin Vermeer of the University of Technology in Helsinki, he's upgraded the extremely simple equation he used in 2007 to an only slightly less simple equation - one that takes account of the rate of warming and the amount of water that humans sequester in reservoirs. They use this to reconstruct a remarkably faithful record the last millennium's sea levels.

Turning it to IPCC temperature projections, the team finds that sea level rise by 2100 could range, depending on the emissions scenario, from 0.75 to 1.9 metres, and a 4-degree world would likely see 0.98 to 1.3 metres of rise this century. A caveat: the recent sea-rise data that inspired and calibrated this equation and the past data that it explains don't include the full effects of melting ice sheets that could lie ahead. That means 0.75 to 1.9 metres may be a conservative estimate.

But if we're concerned with how creeping seas affect coastal populations, the amount of rise is not the only matter to settle. This was a key argument made by Francois Gemennes of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris. Gemennes' talk was based on a study of environmentally induced migration that I covered earlier this year. When it comes to climate refugees, he says, the numbers that are often tossed around - such as 200 million new migrants by 2050 - are based on the assumption that greater climate impacts will push more people around. What they aren't based on is empirical data about how populations respond to environmental change. But according to the recent EACH-FOR project - the first global-scale survey of environmental migrants - the size of impacts isn't the crucial variable at all: migration largely depends on policies making it possible for people to react to impacts by migrating. In particular, Gemennes argues, the poorest and most vulnerable will not be able to migrate unless they are given resources and exit routes - if we don't encourage migration as an adaptation strategy, they'll be trapped in the frying pan (or flooding delta).

The next event of the conference is a panel discussion on "4 degrees of climate change: alarmist or realist?", which I'll be tracking over on Twitter. Follow @annabarnett.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on September 29, 2009
Categories: 4 Degrees and Beyond, Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Ocean science, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Unless major breakthroughs in policy, industry and individual behavior turn around our emissions trajectory pronto, this century could well see average global temperatures 4 degrees Celsius or more above their pre-industrial baseline. That's the starting point for the 4 Degrees and Beyond conference in Oxford this week. Here, 130 scientists and policy experts are taking a detailed look at a world warmed by twice the amount that's usually considered dangerous.

Putting weight behind the 4-degree premise was new modelling research presented this morning by Richard Betts of the UK Hadley Centre (press release, Guardian). Betts's team used a complex, coupled ocean-atmosphere model to simulate the IPCC's extreme-emissions A1FI scenario (the FI stands for fossil fuel intensive) - an emissions trajectory that's previously been run only on simpler models. It's time to take this scenario seriously, argues Betts, given that our emissions are running at the upper end of what the IPCC projected a decade ago.

They also tried out weakening climate sinks on land and sea - feedbacks that are increasingly apparent in recent research, Betts says. Depending on the strength of the feedbacks, 4 degrees of average warming could be reached well before 2100 - as early as 2060 in a worst case scenario, and in the 2070s according to the team's best guess. Regional warming would be far greater, they found - 7 degrees in many areas, up to 10 in western and southern Africa, and 10 or more in the Arctic.

Sessions afterwards started sketching out consequences in detail. Philip Thornton of the University of Edinburgh looked at agriculture in Africa, where projected impacts are predictably devastating, with yields falling over 50% for certain crops and crop failure years growing more frequent in many regions. Adaptations for this amount of change are a big question mark. Intensive agriculture in highlands - among the few spots that will benefit - may be one possibility for preserving the food supply.

Meanwhile in Finland - where you might expect balmier weather to be a boon - intense climate change may also prove a curse to farmers, reports Reimund Rotter of MTT Agrifood Research Finland. The picture there is complicated - the possible responses depend on many variables. A new type of barley that might compensate for losses to rising temperature or drought would only work in certain soil types, for example. But it's clear that the North as well as the South will have its problems with the radically different 4-degree world.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on September 28, 2009
Categories: 4 Degrees and Beyond, Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Science, Climate prediction, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nature Geoscience’s latest issue highlights the challenges of understanding fluctuating sea level – from 70 million years ago to the future (sea level content free to registered users). A collection of commentaries and research papers look at how sea level has changed in the past and try to project its future evolution. In addition, the issue provides insights into some of the societal impacts of sea level change, and how some countries are planning for the future.

Continue reading "Focussing on sea level" »

Posted by Alicia Newton on June 30, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Alicia Newton, Climate prediction | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Climate change and other environmental problems worldwide are driving migrants from their homelands - but not necessarily onto European and North American shores, as is commonly assumed. The first worldwide survey of climate refugees suggests that most of the displaced won’t make it further than nearby villages or neighbouring countries. The new findings went into a report released yesterday at UN climate negotiations in Bonn - I've covered them in a news feature here.

"There's been a bit of political rhetoric saying we're going to have waves of migrants at our doorsteps, rushing into Europe and North America," says Koko Warner of UN University, the report's lead author. Concerns about these huddled masses came up in a Commentary Warner co-authored in Nature Reports Climate Change last year.

In April, she and a team of collaborators from across Europe wrapped up two years of research, which involved interviewing migrants on five continents for the European Commission’s EACH-FOR programme. "What we found is that the people whose livelihoods are most sensitive to the environment also tend to be the ones who may not have the means to move very far," Warner says.

Instead, says the report, they could be stuck in destinations that are “as precarious as the places they left behind.”

Continue reading "Report disperses migration myth" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 11, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, In the News, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Formerly a taboo topic among conservationists, ‘assisted migration’ or ‘managed relocation’ – literally moving sensitive species to new habitats in order to save them - has recently started to come in for serious consideration. A paper out in PNAS this week offers a quick and innovative way to evaluate candidate species with new visual tools.

Some of the paper’s authors, including Stephen Schneider of Stanford, California and Jessica Hellman of Notre Dame, Indiana were part of a meeting last year on how to make such decisions, which we covered in a news feature at Nature Reports Climate Change.

The authors analyze the possibilities for three candidate species:

Image courtesy of PNAS.

Continue reading "Visualizing the assisted migration argument" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 10, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Biodiversity and Ecology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

International organizations are calling for fisheries to be included in a new global deal on climate change.

Earlier this week, a consortium of 16 organizations including the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Bank and the WorldFish Center issued a policy brief to delegates meeting in Bonn from June 1-12 for the latest round of UN climate talks.

Their key message was outlined in a Commentary by two of the authors of the brief published May 28 on Nature Reports Climate Change. Nick Dulvy, Canadian Research Chair in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, and Eddie Allison, director of the WorldFish Center in Penang, Malaysia, argue that climate impacts represent a serious threat to those who depend on fisheries and aquaculture resources both for protein and as a source of income.

While agriculture and freshwater resources have featured prominently in climate policy discussions, the future of fisheries resources has been largely ignored, write Dulvy and Allison. Yet, one third of the world's 6 billion people rely on fish and other aquatic products for at least one-fifth of their annual protein intake, and more than 36 million people worldwide are employed in the fisheries and aquaculture sector.

And with little ability to diversify to other modes of employment or to adapt to change, those in the developing world will be hardest hit as fish migration routes and spawning and feeding grounds change from those that fishers have learnt to harvest. Fishing communities will also suffer indirectly as extreme events such as floods and hurricanes become more frequent.

Continue reading "A place at the table? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 04, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Mitigation, Olive Heffernan, UN climate talks, Bonn, June 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Russia has been a rather puzzling actor in the complicated diplomatic game which resulted in the Kyoto protocol, and which will be played out again in Copenhagen in December. Climate warming doesn’t make headlines, and has so far not been a big concern, between Moscow and Vladivostok. What prompted Russian leaders to ratify Kyoto was the prospect of making good money from emissions trading, rather than conviction that man-made climate change is a real phenomenon and a threat to society.

Now they have changed their minds. In April, Vladimir Putin and his ministers approved a new climate ‘doctrine’ – well, that’s how they call these things in Moscow – which for the first time officially recognizes severe risks of global warming and calls for immediate action. My story over at Nature News explains the nature and significance of the baffling doctrine, details of which are beginning to leak.

Critics point out that Russia plans to focus on adaptation to climate change, while putting less emphasis on actually reducing its emissions. Others say Russia’s new climate policy has been quietly constructed behind closed doors, without any involvement from industry, NGOs and the public. That’s all true; but Russia’s recognition of the scientific basis of climate change, and its apparent willingness to pro-actively partake in international climate protection efforts, outweighs these flaws. Let’s see what Moscow will put on the table in Copenhagen.

Sure, all eyes in December will be on China, and Russia’s taciturn climate diplomacy has in the past been a fickle and half-hearted affair. Even so, one must not under-estimate Moscow’s influence at international negotiation tables.

The climatic importance of Russia’s natural landscape, in particular its boreal forests and its permafrost soils, is beyond doubt anyway. For example, huge amounts of old carbon that accumulated over thousands of years are stored in permafrost soils which occupy more than 60% of Russia’s 17 million square-kilometre land area. How much of it will be released as the southern permafrost boundary shifts northwards as a result of climate warming, possibly by up to 100 kilometres in the next 20-25 years?

A paper in Nature this week suggests that, globally, permafrost thawing may lead to the release of an extra billion tonnes of carbon per year into the atmosphere. The team measured carbon flows at a tundra site in Alaska where permafrost has been thawing for 20 years, and then calculated from the data the likely trajectory of global carbon release from thawing permafrost. Here's an editor's summary.

Russian scientists were not involved in the study, led by Edward Schuur of the University of Florida in Gainesville. That’s a pity. If Moscow’s new interest in climate led to more frequent east-west collaborations in science, such as on permafrost, it would be a boon.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on May 28, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Climate Policy, Climate Science, GHG emissions, Mitigation, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics, UN Conference on Climate Change, Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Uncertainty in regional climate projections isn’t going away, and that’s an inconvenient truth the development community will have to face, says Christoph Müller of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany.

Müller recently authored a report on expected climate change impacts in sub-Saharan Africa, at the behest of the German Development Institute (GDI), a Bonn-based think tank. A top recommendation of the final report, published 24 April and presented at the IHDP conference last month, is that adaptation strategies should not be motivated by specific impact projections, but instead should work on reducing vulnerability to environmental change in general.

An expert on climate impacts on agriculture and land-use, Müller found while scoping the report for GDI that there was a mistaken assumption by development experts that many of the current uncertainties in predicting climate change will soon clear up. “In the adaptation community, they often have the feeling that if we wait for another five years, we will know exactly what the weather will be,” he says.

So he turned the focus of the report around from cataloging impacts to dealing with uncertainty. “This report basically is trying to raise awareness that you will never get very accurate projections of what you will have to adapt to. Don’t wait for that. You have to adapt to uncertainty,” says Müller.

I talked to Müller to find out more about what adaptation planners in sub-Saharan Africa are up against and how they might tackle changes they can't forsee. What climate models agree on is that the continent will warm a bit more than the global average - roughly 2.0 to 4.5 degrees centigrade, according to three emissions scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“But that’s where the certainty stops,” he says. Precipitation projections, for example, are important for many impacts studies - of freshwater availability, agricultural production, and development of water-hungry industries - but global climate models differ wildly on precipitation in African locales. “There’s maybe only a few locations in sub-Saharan Africa where you don’t have a scenario that says it’s going to get significantly wetter and another scenario that says it’s going to get significantly drier,” Müller points out.

A particular problem for sub-Saharan Africa is that observational data from meteorological stations is sparse, and many stations formerly sending out data have stopped ('historical' stations on map, below) - making it hard to produce local projections. This is usually achieved through a technique called ‘downscaling’, which involves using weather statistics and interpolating data to add details between the distant grid points of a global climate model. But without recent observations to constrain the calculations, it becomes near impossible to fill in this extra information with any degree of accuracy.

Continue reading "Development community must accept uncertainty" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on May 27, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Society, Uncertainty | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some of my fellow Open Meeting attendees were musing at dinner about how many Bonn Declarations exist. The top ten Google results point to six different texts named after the eminent city. The organizers of this conference originally proposed to add yet another Bonn Declaration to the list, one laying out the way forward for research on human dimensions of global change. But it turned out not to be easy to articulate a common vision that the motley group gathered here - who work on everything from emissions scenarios to development policy to the sociology of knowledge - could accept.

Continue reading "IHDP: the Bonn Declaration that wasn't" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on May 01, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, IHDP Open Meeting 2009, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A group of ambassadors from the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) stopped by the IHDP conference yesterday and held a panel discussion on dealing with the leading edge of dangerous climate change. For AOSIS countries that stand to be swallowed by rising seas or devastated by droughts and storms, their continued existence is on the line in this year's climate negotiations. At the UN meeting here in Bonn in March, the group issued a statement saying, "The survival of the small island states should be the benchmark for the success of the Copenhagen agreement." I nabbed AOSIS chair Dessima Williams of Grenada for a quick interview on the island states' agenda.

What kind of agreement is needed for small island states to survive?

Continue reading "IHDP: No time for pessimism, says small islands leader" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 30, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, IHDP Open Meeting 2009, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week’s Nature has an extended climate special made of original research papers, features, commentaries, editorials, essays and book reviews. Here’s the content at a glance.

An uplifting read the package is not, but this will hardly surprise devoted readers of these pages. What’s it all about then? Well, Gavin Schmidt and David Archer, in their news and views piece, get to the heart of it: “Dangerous climate change, even loosely defined, is going to be hard to avoid.”

Some highlights:
Malte Meinshausen and colleagues find that cumulative emissions from 2000 to 2050 of about 1,400 billion tonnes of CO2 yield a 50% probability of exceeding 2 °C warming – the somewhat randomly defined threshold of dangerous climate change - by the end of the twenty-first century Here's an editor's summary of the paper. Just to be clear: Known 2000-2006 emissions were almost 250 billion tonnes.

Myles Allen and colleagues take a slightly different approach to calculating the climate response to anthropogenic emissions. They show that cumulative emissions of one trillion tonnes of carbon (3,670 billion tonnes CO2) over the entire 1750-2050 period yield a 90% probability of warming between 1.3 and 3.9 °C above pre-industrial temperatures, with 2 °C of warming being the best estimate. About half a trillion tonne has been emitted since the onset of industrialization. Here's an editor's summary.

In clear, if we want a reasonably good chance of staying beyond 2°C warming, we cannot afford burning all the oil, gas and coal buried in the ground. We can’t actually afford burning more than half the proven reserves. If we continue burning fossil fuels at current rates we will leave the ‘safety zone’ in less than 20 years. Let’s face it: We have a bad hand – and we can’t bluff the planet.

Continue reading "The wheel of climate fortune" »

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on April 30, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Climate Science, Climate prediction, GHG emissions, Quirin Schiermeier, Topics, Uncertainty | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday I caught a speedy summary of the climate vulnerability of Nigerian cities that included a glimpse into public perceptions there. Felix Olorunfemi of the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research surveyed 300 people door-to-door in the city of Ibadan and found that awareness of climate change was low, that it was seen as a complex and abstract problem, and that knowledge of such environmental problems wasn't correlated with action taken to address them.

What was striking about this 'not our problem' attitude was that it also cropped up in another case study during the same session. Research presented by Johanna Wolf from the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia revealed it among people whose lives may in fact be directly at risk from global warming: elderly English pensioners.

Continue reading "IHDP: From London to Ibadan, 'it's not our problem'" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 29, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, IHDP Open Meeting 2009, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last year, I reported on efforts to merge climate modelling with weather forecasting to create probabilistic climate predictions, with the ultimate aim of providing information that could aid adaptation.

Given enough money to build a world climate research facility with hundreds of petaflops of computing power, scientists could study simulations at the kilometre scale, and answer some of the big questions in climate science, such as how and when regions will be affected, concluded the World Modelling Summit for Climate Prediction last May.

Now, a group of scientists led by Suraje Dessai of the University of Exeter and the Tyndall Centre, UK argue that better climate predictions will not necessarily aid adaptation, and that waiting for better predictability in order to act on climate change would be a ‘significantly flawed’ approach.

Writing in the latest issue of EOS, a newsletter of the American Geophysical Union, Dessai and co-authors say that, in any case, the ability to predict future climate is limited by inherent uncertainty that will always leave ‘some level of irreducible ignorance in our understanding’. Furthermore, our ability to predict other factors that are likely to influence the outcome of adaptation efforts, such as population growth or changes in technology, is even more limited than our ability to predict the climate.

But this lack of predictability should not be seen as an excuse to postpone strategies for adaptation, they argue. After all, many organizations such as water authorities only need to know the range of possible representations of future climate to better understand their vulnerabilities. The authors call on decision makers to examine their adaptation strategies over a wide range of potential future scenarios of climate and other economic, political and cultural factors. Society will benefit more, they say, from knowing the vulnerability of climate-influenced decisions in the face of large uncertainty than from any foreseeable increase in the accuracy and precision of climate predictions.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 08, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Climate Science, Climate prediction, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Although the Inuit people of the North American Arctic are generally thought to be vulnerable to climate change, particularly in the wake of record sea ice loss, it can be difficult to quantify all of the risks to their way of life. In a new paper in Climatic Change, a group of researchers led by Gita Laidler of Carleton University assessed the ability of the residents of Igloolik, a coastal community north of the Arctic Circle, to adapt to changing conditions. The team reports that although the hunters have so far adapted to thinning ice and changing seasons, societal changes among the younger generations may leave the community increasingly at risk.

Continue reading "Climate and society in the Arctic" »

Posted by Alicia Newton on January 23, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Alicia Newton, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK will get an intriguing new climate research centre next week, with the launch of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at the London School of Economics and the University of Leeds. In a Q&A for Nature Reports Climate Change, I've interviewed Andrew Gouldson, who will co-direct the centre with Judith Rees under chairman Lord Nicholas Stern - and who envisions a strong focus on regional impacts of climate change.

CCCEP's experts will be closely in touch with policymakers and other local stakeholders, Gouldson says, in a way that "builds both their capacity and ours — ours to do good research, and theirs to use that research to take better decisions on climate change." One of the stakeholders, and a funder of one of the five research streams at the new centre, is the insurance company Munich Re. As I wrote last month, another new project that aims for the cutting edge of policy-relevant research is a hurricane model projection that Greg Holland is now wrapping up at NCAR - also partly insurance industry-funded. Could these academic-public-private three-ways be the way forward? Let us know in the comments.

I thought the most interesting part of the interview was what Gouldson had to say on the new UK Climate Change Act, which imposes a legally binding requirement to cut emissions 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. Here's an extract:

AG: At the national level, I think Britain's been very proactive indeed. The government has been quite brave signing up to this medium- to long-term target which is really quite ambitious. But I don't think there's a public understanding, or possibly even a public acceptance, of what a low-carbon economy might look like — one which is 60, 70, 80 per cent decarbonized.

AB: Does that make it less likely that the policy will actually come through with results?

AG: In the next 10 to 15 years, not necessarily, because there are lots of mitigation options that are relatively affordable and technologically viable. I think the question is what happens in the phase after that. Is there a political appetite to do some really quite painful things which would involve some powerful people or parties losing out? I think there's a need now, in the next few years, to build some sort of broad consensus on the need to shift towards a low-carbon economy.

Read the full interview here.

Anna Barnett

Image: Andrew Gouldson, photographed by Stevie Kilgour at the University of Leeds.

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 23, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Economics, Politics, Regional climate, Research, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As a vast, flat delta, Bangladesh is perhaps the country most clearly associated with the threat of rising seas – without protective barriers along the coast, even a moderate increase in sea level could cause flooding deep inland. Estimates suggest that even a one-metre rise could swallow 15 to 20 per cent of the land area, where some 20 million people reside.

But while sea level rise may pose the greatest challenge for Bangladesh, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is likely to be felt at ‘ground zero for climate change’ in numerous different ways – among them dwindling water supplies, saltwater damage to crops, loss of biodiversity and fiercer storms tearing through the region.

Over on Nature Reports Climate Change, a feature by Mason Inman looks at the changes that are already being witnessed on the ground in Bangladesh and how the region is preparing for the changes yet to come. Mason travelled to Bangladesh in November to report this feature with support from a Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism.

In areas such as Bhola, where people have lost land to the ocean, many are looking to the Netherlands for inspiration – and calling for strengthening of existing embankments as well the construction of new, taller and stronger sea walls.

Continue reading "Bangladesh’s battle with climate change " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 15, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Olive Heffernan, Regional climate, Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The recent food crisis, which saw crop prices sky rocket in 2007/08, demonstrated the fragile nature of the world’s food system. Coping with the short-term challenges of food price volatility is daunting, but the longer-term challenge of avoiding a perpetual food crisis due to global warming could be far more serious.

Temperatures in crop growing seasons across the world will exceed the most extreme seasonal temperatures on record by the end of the century, new research suggests.

View image

Writing in the latest issue of Science, David Battisti at the University of Washington and Rosamond Naylor at Stanford University warn that unprecedented seasonal average temperatures will threaten global food security unless adaptations such as heat and draught tolerant crops, the creation of jobs outside of agriculture for those regions where farming will no longer be viable and appropriate irrigation systems are introduced.

In a new study, they use data from 23 global climate models produced for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 scientific analysis to show that there is a 90% chance that the tropics, sub-tropics and temperate regions will experience unprecedented seasonal average temperatures by the end of the 21st century.

Their research looks at historical case studies of three regions – France, the Ukraine, and the Sahel in Africa – that have experienced extreme heat waves, to illustrate the size of the impact on food production. For example, France felt some of the greatest impacts of the 2003 heat wave in Western Europe, which saw temperatures rise to 32 -33°C in June to August - nearly 4°C higher than the country’s average historical temperature for those months. Over this period, production of maize fell by 30%, fruit harvests declined by 25% and wheat harvests dropped by 21%.

Continue reading "Adaptation needed to avoid world food crisis" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on January 08, 2009
Categories: Adaptation, Features, Journal Club, Natasha Gilbert, Society | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I hadn’t anticipated quite so much rain during the AGU’s Fall conference in San Francisco, but apparently this exact week is, on average, the city’s wettest of the year. Or so I heard at today’s session on how the region is likely to be impacted by climate change.

California has been long recognized as a leader on climate policy, both on the home front and even internationally. It passed its first climate bill twenty years ago and just last week, the state adopted the nation's most sweeping climate action plan to date, pledging to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 15% by 2020.

A close look at how the region is expected to fare under various warming scenarios makes its leadership in this arena look a lot like common sense. While temperatures in California are expected to increase in line with global averages, more worrying for the state is the projected water shortages, according to Dan Cayan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, San Diego, who spoke at AGU today. California faces the possibility of a 10% decrease in precipitation over the course of the century and could concurrently lose half of its late spring snowmelt. That's bad news for a region that is already heavily reliant on external water sources.

Sea-level rise will also be part of the equation, especially for the numerous coastal properties with little protection, said Peter Gleick, president of the Oakland, California –based Pacific Institute. Should those in the interior think they’re better off, though, climate models show that inland regions will warm more rapidly than the coast and will likely be more populated in the future owing to lack of available living space on the coast.

Continue reading "AGU 2008: On the home front" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 17, 2008
Categories: AGU, Adaptation, Climate prediction, Extreme Events, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

“People are broadly concerned, but not entirely convinced”, concludes the latest poll on public opinion of global warming by social marketing group Ipsos Mori.

Despite the deluge of media reports in the last year documenting the scientific consensus on climate change and the startling rapidity at which impacts are being seen around the world - most notably perhaps the ever-decreasing Arctic sea ice - 60% of the British Public is uncertain that climate change is caused by humans, and many others believe that scientists are overstating the problem.

Writing in Sunday’s Observer, Juliette Jowit provides the following explanation:

There is growing concern that an economic depression and rising fuel and food prices are denting public interest in environmental issues. Some environmentalists blame the public's doubts on last year's Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, and on recent books, including one by Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, that question the consensus on climate change.

While it’s reassuring to know that the public questions the status quo, if Jowitt is correct, what’s frustrating is the ability of blatantly misrepresentative arguments to sway public opinion.

The Great Global Warming Swindle resulted in a record 250 complaints to regulatory watchdog Ofcom (including the first ever peer reviewed complaint), but that’s still a fraction of the 2.5 million viewers. Like many of those who saw the Channel 4 documentary, readers of Lawson’s offering on climate change ‘An Appeal to Reason’ are probably unaware it has been scientifically discredited in almost every review, including one on Nature Reports Climate Change by Sir John Houghton, Honorary Scientist at the UK’s Hadley Centre.

As Sir Houghton writes:

Promised as a "rare breath of intellectual rigour" and a "hard headed examination of the realities" of climate change, this offering is neither cool nor rational….and is largely one of misleading messages.

Lawson’s fundamental misunderstanding of basic scientific concepts is first displayed in his interpretation of the temperature records for the first part of this century, with which he attempts to discredit the science of climate change, and the work of many thousands of researchers who’ve dedicated entire careers to the problem. More recently, he repeats this in an amusing attack on the recent Nature paper by NASA’s Cynthia Rosenzweig.

Writing as a guest over on Susan Hills’ blog, Lawson’s piece starts off with a failure to grasp the term 'meta-analysis' – he clearly thinks that this is merely a lumping together of existing data. On the contrary, Rosenzweig and colleagues have used a powerful scientific tool to analyze changes in early 30,000 phenomena in the natural world - no mean feat - and in doing so, have shown that warming is aready having a worldwide impacts.

As Houghton rightly points out, Lawson is in need of climate science 101. But then, it seems, he's not alone - at least on that count.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 24, 2008
Categories: Adaptation, Climate Policy, Climate Science, Communicating Climate Change, Features, In the News, Mitigation, Olive Heffernan, Opinion, Reviews | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBacks (0)

Development economist Jeffrey Sachs, famous for the economic turnarounds he's helped engineer as an advisor to Latin American and Eastern European governments, is also known for his optimism that the living standards of the world's poorest can be raised much higher without sacrificing either the wealth of the industrialized world or crucial natural resources. But among analysts of global change, optimism is relative. "I believe that there is most likely a path of sustainable development, but we can't quite be sure," Sachs told a sold-out lecture hall at the London Zoo last night. "It's a question mark."

Sachs spoke on big themes from his new book Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, notably the need for expansion beyond market-based thinking to face problems not dreamt of in Adam Smith's philosophy. Before and after this rousing overview (if you'd bet ahead of time that Sachs would quote John F. Kennedy at length, you'd have won), I had the chance to get some nittier, grittier details on how Sachs wants to deal with climate change.

More and better government investment in foreign aid and green tech is the number-one key for Sachs - only the US presidential turnover seemed to run a close second, and cap-and-trading was off in the distance. So he didn't hesitate to offer a laundry list of projects that he thinks need much more political commitment - among them carbon capture and storage, passively heated and cooled green buildings, and super duper climate computers.

Technological solutions often raise ownership problems, though. If, for example, the agrobiotech industry produces new 'climate-proof' crop varieties that survive floods and droughts - an innovation Sachs welcomed at a recent climate modelling summit - can the developing world afford to buy the seeds?

"One of the things we’ve learned from the battle over access to anti-retroviral medicines," Sachs said - and this was a battle he himself fought - "is that it’s possible to create hybrid systems where you have intellectual property rights applied mainly in the high-income markets and you have access at the cost of production, or on a no-profit basis, in the poor countries."

In the case of African food shortages, he added, simple, readily available remedies like chemical fertilizers and high-yield non-GMO crops had been "sitting on the shelf" until the global food price crisis grabbed headlines. We shouldn't have to wait for disasters before we take the equivalent action on climate change, he said.

What about politics? Since Sachs's talk didn't go much beyond sighing relief at Bush's departure, I asked him afterward about his hopes for the upcoming G8 conference in July. More dubious optimism here: "There are a lot of things I'd hope for. That doesn't mean I'm expecting much to happen."

Honoring commitments to monetary aid and technology transfer is the first step, he told me. To get a global climate agreement out of the UN process, he also thinks we need to start by welcoming the economic growth of rapidly developing nations like China and India. "That's the icebreaker on this first date," he said. From that viewpoint, country-specific emissions targets can be set that correspond to growth along the greenest possible paths.

By 2050, he explained, that might mean that the North cuts its greenhouse emissions by 80% while India's emissions are allowed to double - a contraction-and-convergence plan. Because China and India have even more to fear from climate change than does the wealthier world, he said, it's an ultimatum they'll have to accept: "You're going to develop. But you're going to do it with the best technology."

Anna Barnett

Photo: Sachs working in the Millennium Village of Mwandama, Malawi.

Posted by Anna Barnett on June 18, 2008
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Mitigation, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In debates over how to mitigate the effects of climate change, is the burgeoning human population an elephant in the room? A projected 9 billion people will have to share a warming planet by 2050, yet as Kerri Smith writes in Nature Reports Climate Change this week, the climatic effects of their rising numbers and shifting demographics has received surprisingly little study.

Population is a touchy subject, bringing to mind oppressive campaigns against growth - like China's one-child system, or forced sterilization programs - as well as false past predictions of an imminent catastrophe. But it’s becoming clear that the problem is more complex than a ticking ‘population bomb’. Numbers are exploding in the world’s poorest societies - a trend that CIA chief Michael V. Hayden recently chose above climate or energy issues as one of the key changes facing the 21st century. Because of the low emissions per head in these societies, Smith explains,

Reducing population growth in Niger, for example, where the population size is predicted to triple by mid-century, would not have a dramatic effect on emissions right now. And in many countries in Europe — where reducing emissions levels is more pressing — populations are declining, so a demography-based climate strategy would be ineffective. In a generation's time, however, when developing countries begin industrializing apace, a large population could be bad news.

An aging industrialized world could wrinkle the picture further, as could increasing urbanization. Meanwhile, Hayden fears that the population patterns themselves will precipitate political instability - which climate change is expected to exacerbate.

The solutions to this complex problem could be subtle, or at least subtler than enforcing a small average family size. Fred Meyerson, an ecologist, demographer and environmental policy researcher, told Smith that simply improving access to family planning in the last 50 years has very effectively reduced population growth, and the UN Population Division's Thomas Buettner pointed out the knock-on effect that this has had on greenhouse gas emissions. (A new book by the WorldWatch Institute’s Robert Engelman puts a finer point on it, arguing that in countries where empowerment of women gives them say over the matter, they invariably choose to have two children or fewer on average.)

And this month's headlines show how far-reaching the links are between slowing population growth and preventing climate-induced crises, Meyerson added in an email:

Each million/billion [people] we add puts more people in the path of natural disasters such as the recent Asian cyclone and drought/starvation, some of which are climate change-induced. Adaptation to those changing conditions (including migration, if needed) is obviously much more manageable with 8 rather 11 billion people. And emissions mitigation - for instance, a move from fossil fuels to biofuels - is also much more problematic if the lion's share of the solar energy budget of the terrestrial surface is needed to meet the food needs of a large population and not available for energy production. (That debate is already ongoing with the spike of food prices and the use of corn for ethanol production, but it will surely increase as we add ~75 million people each year to the population over the next few decades.)

Anna Barnett

Photo: Lusi, SXC

Posted by Anna Barnett on May 16, 2008
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, In the News, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Bali, Indonesia-

Whether we can avoid the worst consequences of climate change will ultimately be determined by whether we are willing to finance it.

Finding an effective means for financial assistance and investments to flow from north to south could be a make or break issue at the UN conference on climate change here in Bali, where delegates from almost 190 nations have convened to agree a ‘roadmap’ for an international climate agreement to follow the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.

NGOs and delegates from the world’s poorest nations, some of which are already beginning to experience the harsh affects of a warming climate, are calling on developed countries to boost funding to help them adapt, and to transfer technology that will help them green their economies.

Under the Kyoto Protocol’s ‘Adaptation fund’, a paltry $163m has been pledged by rich donor countries to developing nations, and just $67m of this has actually been delivered. Yet the sum actually needed to finance adaptation and capacity building in the south is in the region of several tens of billions of dollars, according the World Bank (and reported by the Associated Press). Oxfam says that the very poorest nations also need an up front payment of $1-2bn immediately to address urgent adaptation needs.

The fund, which will finance projects such a building sea walls and irrigating crops, is currently derived from a 2 percent levy on revenues generated by the Clean Development Mechanism, the scheme that allows industrialized nations to pay for carbon credits produced by emissions-reduction projects in the developing world and credit then against their own emissions targets. But it now looks as though the UN will have to expand its funding for adaptation, potentially through a direct tax on emissions.

The transfer of clean technologies to developing nations is another goal of the Kyoto Protocol that has clearly not been met. In part, this is owing to lack of funding from the public sector and a lack of interest from the private sector, says Yvo De Boer, executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change.

The solution, says De Boer, will require the creation of investment potential through mechanisms such as the carbon market that can send a clear price signal to private investors, who are expected to fund 86% of future clean energy technology projects in the south. It will also require “intelligent financial engineering, to make public and private money go where it has never gone before” akin to “embarking on a star trek expedition”, says De Boer.

A group of finance ministers is now trashing out the details in side meetings at the Bali talks. By the end of the conference, it should be clear whether the worlds’ richest nations are willing to cough up their portion of the much needed cash.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on December 10, 2007
Categories: Adaptation, Conferences and Meetings, In the News, Olive Heffernan, UN Conference on Climate Change, Bali | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

How expensive is climate change, what's the cost of stopping it, and should we pay now or pay later? Scientific American gets a three-sided look at these questions in side-by-side interviews with Nicholas Stern, Bjorn Lomborg and Gary Yohe.

Stern and Yohe push raising the price of carbon emissions via caps and taxes, respectively, as insurance to ward off big future risks, with Lomborg taking the contrarian view that we shouldn't mitigate until renewable energy is cheaper -- and shrugging off the risks. (Lomborg thinks that other problems like HIV/AIDS and malaria need money more immediately, an argument Olive Heffernan took on in NRCC's editorial last month.) Interesting discussions of the values assigned to human lives in the present vs. future (Stern, Lomborg), and to lives threatened by asbestos vs. temperature rise, also ensue.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 29, 2007
Categories: Adaptation, Anna Barnett, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Mitigation, Opinion | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This year’s edition of the UN Human Development Report makes bleak reading. Unless we deal with climate change, it says, efforts to reduce poverty will stall then reverse, the poorest countries will suffer first and not even the richest countries will escape global warming. Efforts to improve health and education are also threatened (summary PDF, full report PDF).

“Ultimately, climate change is a threat to humanity as a whole. But it is the poor, a constituency with no responsibility for the ecological debt we are running up, who face the immediate and most severe human costs,” said Kemal Derviş, administrator of the UN Development Programme (press release PDF).

More droughts, floods and storms are already reinforcing existing inequalities in standards of living, says the report. Climate change must be tackled now. “The world lacks neither the financial resources nor the technological capabilities to act. What is missing is a sense of urgency, human solidarity and collective interest,” says the UN (report home page).

The annual report also ranks the UN’s members in terms of their development, using life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income. Top of the pile this year is Iceland, bottom is Sierra Leone. As Reuters notes, per capita GDP is 45 times higher in the former than in the latter. Without fail this ranking brings a rash of stories where countries celebrate or mourn their position – details and full ranking below the fold.

Continue reading "Climate change ‘will undermine poverty progress’" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on November 28, 2007
Categories: Adaptation, Climate Policy, Daniel Cressey | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's an interesting commenary in Nature this week (currently free to access) by Steve Rayner of the James Martin Institute in Oxford and Gwyn Prins of the LSE, arguing that while emissions abatement is a global priority, the Kyoto Protocol is the wrong tool for the job -- a one-size-fits-all approach that, among other failings, doesn't actually look likely to deliver the reductions that it has promised. Unfortunately, as they argue, this sub-optimal approach has developed an iconic status of its own, so that in many minds to be against Kyoto is tantamount to being against any form of action on climate. They're worried that this means people will uncritically attempt to follow up the Kyoto protocol (which expires in 2012) with a son-of-Kyoto that contains many or all of the same flaws, when they should be having a much more radical rethink.

In their words:

The Kyoto Protocol is a symbolically important expression of governments' concern about climate change. But as an instrument for achieving emissions reductions, it has failed. It has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth. And it pays no more than token attention to the needs of societies to adapt to existing climate change. The impending United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Bali in December — to decide international policy after 2012 — needs to radically rethink climate policy...Already, in the post-Kyoto discussions, we are witnessing that well-documented human response to failure, especially where political or emotional capital is involved, which is to insist on more of what is not working: in this case more stringent targets and timetables, involving more countries. The next round of negotiations needs to open up new approaches, not to close them down as Kyoto did.

Continue reading "The wrong trousers" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on October 24, 2007
Categories: Adaptation, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Mitigation, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (35) | TrackBacks (0)

Olive Heffernan

This week on Nature Reports Climate Change, Amanda Leigh Haag looks at how climate change is increasingly becoming an issue of national security, raising the alarm on issues of border control and immigration policy globally.

The feature details how regions likely to bear the brunt of climate impacts are already beginning to look to neighbouring states for potential resettlement deals, while less vulnerable nations are considering the likely spillover of large-scale migration from areas impacted by severe drought or flooding.

This raises some interesting issues, such as whether adaptation should focus on protecting the rights of people to live in their home, rather than offering relocation programmes, and whether these scenarios are inevitable without drastic measures to prevent further warming….but more on that shortly.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 26, 2007
Categories: Adaptation, Extreme Events, Features, In the News, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Olive Heffernan on behalf on Paty Romero Lankao

For the first time in human history, in this year half of the world's population lives in urban regions. This proportion is expected to go up to more than 60 percent by 2030. In an effort to understand the urban vulnerabilities to climate change, and to highlight innovative solutions to increase cities resilience, the Rockefeller Foundation, along with the Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD), of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, is sponsoring a week-long discussion (July 8-13) on “Building for climate change resilience” within of month-long series of themed conferences aimed at promoting solid innovations for the many environmental and societal challenges facing urban world.

More to follow after the event next week....

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 10, 2007
Categories: Adaptation, Conferences and Meetings, Paty Romero Lankao | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)