E&E News Greenwire

September 24, 2021
Americans have been draining wetlands for farming and development since Colonial times.

But climate change may reverse that tide — from destruction to restoration.

Federal scientists are studying whether heat-trapping carbon dioxide can be sucked out of the atmosphere and sequestered in restored salt marshes, sea grass beds and mangrove swamps. And those wetlands can in turn protect communities along the coast from rising seas and fierce, frequent climate-driven storms.

“The concept that’s forming is that what we need to do is massive-scale ecosystem restoration as soon as possible to begin absorbing as much carbon dioxide as we can and diminish the amount of overshoot that we have in atmospheric greenhouse gases this century,” said Kevin Kroeger, a research chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center.

Across the Lower 48 states, wetlands hold at least 3.2 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent, by one estimate — roughly half the country’s net total greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.

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NBC News

September 13, 2021
Without immediate action to combat climate change, rising sea levels, water scarcity and declining crop productivity could force 216 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050, the World Bank said in a new report on Monday.

The report, Groundswell 2.0, modeled the impacts of climate change on six regions, concluding that climate migration “hotspots” will emerge as soon as 2030 and intensify by 2050, hitting the poorest parts of the world hardest.

Sub-Saharan Africa alone would account for 86 million of the internal migrants, with 19 million more in North Africa, the report showed, while 40 million migrants were expected in South Asia and 49 million in East Asia and the Pacific.

Such movements will put significant stress on both sending and receiving areas, straining cities and urban centers and jeopardizing development gains, the report said.

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The New York Times

August 9, 2021
Nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded.

Humans have already heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, largely by burning coal, oil and gas for energy. And the consequences can be felt across the globe: This summer alone, blistering heat waves have killed hundreds of people in the United States and Canada, floods have devastated Germany and China, and wildfires have raged out of control in Siberia, Turkey and Greece.

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National Geographic

August 9, 2021
Climate change has already touched every corner of the planet and will continue to reshape the human experience for centuries to come, its impacts intensifying as warming grows, scientists warn.

The 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) the planet has warmed since the preindustrial period has pushed Earth toward irreversible change, some of which is unavoidable. But decisive action to cut emissions quickly and thoroughly—keeping total temperature rise as low as possible—can greatly reduce the risks of crossing further dangerous thresholds that would put the planet even more at risk, according to a massive new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released Monday.

“In order to stabilize climate, we have to stop emitting immediately, full stop,” says Charles Koven, one of the report authors and a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

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BirdLife International

July 30, 2021
It has been hard not to be deeply affected by the events of the past few weeks: catastrophic floods in Germany, China and India killing hundreds of people; forest fires in Siberia and North America; and drought and famine in Southern Madagascar. We know these extreme weather events have been triggered by the climate crisis, and it acutely demonstrates that we are now living with the consequences of our collective failure to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.

The effects on human lives and livelihoods are horrendous, and there are very serious impacts on wildlife as well. It was appalling, for example, to see the video taken by a volunteer of Turkish BirdLife partner, Doğa Derneği, of thousands of dead baby flamingos near Lake Tuz (Salt Lake) in Anatolia, Turkey. This unbearable scene was the result of a major water shortage in the region. Lower rainfall and unsustainable irrigation practices going back to the 1960s had caused a drought. The situation will only get worse, unless more sustainable water and agriculture practices are introduced at pace.

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One Earth - Commentary

July 23, 2021

The territories of Indigenous peoples and local communities contain 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity and intersect about 40% of all terrestrial protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) 2019 global assessment stressed the important role of these communities in biodiversity conservation by noting that 35% of the areas formally protected and 35% of all remaining terrestrial areas with very low human intervention are traditionally owned, managed, used, or occupied by Indigenous peoples.

Indigenous peoples sustain nature because we know we are a part of nature. We realize that trying to bend nature to our will would harm us as well as the animals, plants, and ecosystems we all depend on. Instead, Indigenous peoples have a reciprocal relationship with our territories. We know that if we take care of the land, the land will take care of us. And so, we honor our cultural responsibility to be careful stewards. When these relationships are respected and when the rights and responsibilities of Indigenous peoples are recognized and supported, the entire planet will benefit. Our territories span massive, vibrant areas that serve as sanctuaries for humans, animals, and plants; hold massive amounts of carbon; and ensure the health of our water and air. These lands—and the Indigenous relationship to them—have global significance, especially as governments seek ways to achieve increasingly urgent biodiversity and climate goals.

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Edie

July 7, 2021
More than 100 investors, including the likes of Aviva and M&G Investments, representing $4.2trn in assets under management have written to some of the world's biggest banks, calling on them to strengthen climate and biodiversity targets this year.

Convened through the ShareAction coalition, 115 investors have written to 63 leading banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered, calling on them to beef up environmental commitments ahead of key summits this year.

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Thomson Reuters Foundation - OpEd

June 28, 2021
As countries and companies make net-zero promises, nature’s role in absorbing carbon and offsetting emissions has received increasing attention. 

Investing in nature - or so called nature-based solutions - is seen by players from oil majors, agricultural giants to local governments as the key to removing carbon and achieving net-zero.

Carbon removal, or negative emissions, is now central to most net-zero pledges.

For my community, the Maasai pastoralists of Kenya, nature-based solutions are nothing new: ensuring that nature remains intact has always been a central part of how we operate.

Our traditional nature-based solutions have long been recognized as one of the most effective means of restoring ecosystem health and reversing degradation in drylands. In maintaining healthy ecosystems, we have ensured that forests can hold and capture more carbon, helping keep emissions down.

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Green Queen

June 25, 2021
Until now, many of our global efforts to tackle biodiversity loss and climate change have been done separately from each other. Scientists are now calling for a new approach that takes both issues as intrinsically linked—we can’t solve one without the other.  

This is the core message of what is the first collaborative report between experts from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). According to the team of 50 scientists selected by the 12-person committee selected by the two bodies, biodiversity loss and climate change are both driven by human economic activities and are mutually reinforcing. 

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Landscape News

June 24, 2021
Even though Indigenous communities protect some of the most critically important forest ecosystems, conserving a wealth of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity and carbon storage, they remain woefully shortchanged with aid money for climate mitigation, receiving less than 1 percent of such earmarked funding. While development aid for climate mitigation is more than USD 30 billion annually across the globe, support to Indigenous communities for tenure and forest management adds up to an annual USD 270 million, according to a new report put out by Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN).

What’s more, the amount Indigenous communities receive directly is even less, as most of that funding flows through large organizations. Only a little over USD 46 million a year goes to projects that include the name of an Indigenous or local community in the project implementation description. This is an indication, says RFN senior policy advisor Torbjørn Gjefsen, of how few climate mitigation projects are done in direct cooperation with Indigenous peoples.

“It’s an appalling mismatch between the needs, opportunities and resource commitments from donors,” says Alain Frechette, executive director of the Rights and Resources Institute. “Donors and governments need to shift the balance in favor of rights-based actions.”

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World Economic Forum

June 23, 2021
G7 leaders recently announced that “our world must not only become net zero, but also nature positive, for the benefit of both people and the planet.”

This represents a real paradigm shift in how nations, businesses, investors and consumers view nature. In the past, the mantra among a growing number of inspired leaders has been to do less harm, to reduce impact and to tread lightly across our world. Of course, this mantra remains.

But now there is a new worldview gathering pace: "nature positive." This asks: What if we go beyond damage limitation? What if our economic activities not only minimize impact, but also enhance ecosystems?

A nature positive approach enriches biodiversity, stores carbon, purifies water and reduces pandemic risk. In short, a nature positive approach enhances the resilience of our planet and our societies.

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Borneo Bulletin

June 22, 2021
The United Kingdom (UK) COP26 Presidency and the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) recently co-convened ‘ASEAN-UK COP26: Framing the Future for Nature and Climate’, a virtual event exploring the important role that ecosystems, like forests, wetlands, and marine and coastal areas, play in combatting climate change.

The event discussed best practices and experiences from across the ASEAN region, and discussed the need to scale up ambition on nature-based solutions on climate and biodiversity. In addition, the event showcased the findings of the ‘Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity’, and the applicability of its findings to the ASEAN region.

It was also an opportunity to bring the region together in preparation for the regional and global meetings, including the Third ASEAN Conference on Biodiversity, the 15th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), all taking place this year, with the UK presiding over COP26, in partnership with Italy.

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World Economic Forum

June 21, 2021
The twin crises of nature loss and climate change are inextricably linked. For too long, however, biodiversity loss and climate change have been discussed and dealt with in siloes, even by independent international frameworks of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. We may, however, be at an important turning point.

For the first time, intergovernmental scientific bodies for each global challenge, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) have worked together on a report, which is the result of a co-sponsored workshop of 50 climate and biodiversity experts. The report finds that we can either solve both crises or solve neither.

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New Straits Times

June 16, 2021
Scientists and policymakers recognise that climate change and biodiversity loss are interconnected, but in practice they are largely addressed in their own domains.

Followers of the biodiversity loss crisis, therefore, welcomed last week's report on a joint workshop by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Platform on Science-Policy Advice on Ecosystems and Biodiversity (IPBES).

Since 1992, when the two issues (along with desertification) became the subject of individual United Nations treaties, biodiversity has never received the same level of global attention accorded to climate. However, neither will be successfully resolved unless they are tackled together and urgently. That was the main takeaway from the report by 50 leading experts jointly chosen by the IPCC and IPBES.

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Mongabay

June 14, 2021
The push to halt climate change too often neglects the interconnected issue of biodiversity loss, according to a recent report from a panel of scientists with the United Nations.

“What we want to emphasize here is how relevant biodiversity conservation is for climate change mitigation,” said Anne Larigauderie, executive secretary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), in a press conference launching the June 10 report.

In a first-ever collaboration, scientists from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and IPBES teamed up to draw on research looking at the convergence of the biodiversity and climate crises, how they’re affecting all life, including humans, on Earth and what’s being done about them.

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