Climate change effects could cost investors $4 trillion in assets, report warns

Maria Galluci in the International Business Times: Private investors risk losing more than $4 trillion in assets due to the devastating effects of climate change. Rising sea levels, intense flooding and more severe storms threaten to wipe out or diminish portfolios due to property damage, weaker growth and lower asset returns, the Economist Intelligence Unit said in a report Friday.

Assets at stake amount to roughly one-fourth of U.S. gross domestic product. The number could swell to nearly $14 trillion if the Earth’s temperatures warm by a staggering 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to the pre-industrial era. From the public-sector perspective, extreme warming represents value losses of $43 trillion, or 30 percent of the entire stock of the world’s manageable assets, the report said.

“Institutional investors need to assess their climate-related risks and take steps to mitigate them; very few have begun to do this,” the report said.

Climate scientists say the world is on track to warm by at least 2 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050 if countries don’t take dramatic steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, tailpipes and buildings. Even lesser degrees of warming will have dire consequences for the world’s food supplies, coastal communities and human health....

2008 flooding from Hurricane Ike in Key West, Florida, National Guard photo

Mobile schools acclimatise to educate girls in rural Kenya

Kagondu Njagi at the Thomson Reuters Foundation:  At 16 years of age, Nagirasia Lengima is already a mother of two. But parenthood doesn't stop her from indulging in her latest passion: school. Like a growing number of girls from nomadic communities in northern Kenya, Lengima is defying cultural prejudices - and climate pressures - by getting an education at a mobile school.

Run by non-profit groups, the schools bring learning to girls whose families are forced to move around the region to survive. In Laisamis village, Marsabit County, at a school run by the Nairobi-based development charity Adeso, it is Lengima's turn to demonstrate what she has picked up from the morning session.

After playing around with some numbers on the chalkboard, she elicits cheers from the 59 other pupils in the class as she produces the answer with a double stroke. "Mathematics and Kiswahili are my favourite subjects," said Lengima. "I want to go into business in the future."

But circumstances are conspiring against her. Teachers have largely abandoned the area to escape sporadic attacks by Islamist militant group Al Shabaab. And increasingly erratic weather often pushes pastoralist families away from their settlements in search of water and grazing, limiting children's access to formal education.

Temperatures in Northern Kenya can reach over 30 degrees Celsius, and the region regularly suffers from both drought and heavy rainfall. Adeso works with the weather to give girls access to informal schooling which otherwise may have been impossible....

Christopher Michel took this photo of a Masai girl doing math problems in 2013, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

The oceans can’t take any more: researchers fear a fundamental change in the oceans – even if greenhouse emissions are successfully reduced

A press release from the Alfred Wegener Institute: Our oceans need an immediate and substantial reduction of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. If that doesn’t happen, we could see far-reaching and largely irreversible impacts on marine ecosystems, which would especially be felt in developing countries. That’s the conclusion of a new review study published today in the journal Science. In the study, the research team from the Ocean 2015 initiative assesses the latest findings on the risks that climate change poses for our oceans, and demonstrates how fundamentally marine ecosystems are likely to change if human beings continue to produce just as much greenhouse gases as before.

Since the pre-industrial era, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has risen from 278 to 400 ppm (parts per million) – a 40 percent increase that has produced massive changes in the oceans. “To date, the oceans have essentially been the planet’s refrigerator and carbon dioxide storage locker. For instance, since the 1970s they’ve absorbed roughly 93 percent of the additional heat produced by the greenhouse effect, greatly helping to slow the warming of our planet,” explains Prof Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-author of the new Ocean 2015 study and a researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research.

But the oceans have also paid a high price: as far down as 700 metres the water temperatures have risen, which has forced some species to migrate up to 400 kilometres closer to the Earth’s poles within the past decade. Given the increasing acidification in many regions, it’s becoming more and more difficult for corals and bivalves to form their calcium carbonate skeletons. In Greenland and the western Arctic, the ice is melting at an alarming rate, contributing to rising sea levels. As a result of these factors, the biological, physical and chemical processes at work in marine ecosystems are changing – which will have far-reaching consequences for marine life and humans alike.

In their new study, the research team from the Ocean 2015 initiative employs two emissions scenarios (Scenario 1: Achieving the 2-degree goal / Scenario 2: Business as usual) to compile the main findings of the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report and the latest professional literature, and to assess those findings with regard to the risks for our oceans. “If we can successfully limit the rise in air temperature to two degrees Celsius through the year 2100, the risks, especially for warm-water corals and bivalves in low to middle latitudes, will become critical. However, the remaining risks will remain fairly moderate,” explains lead author Jean-Pierre Gattuso. But a rapid and comprehensive reduction of carbon dioxide emissions would be needed in order to achieve this ideal option, he adds....

An Australian pelican watches a beach sunrise, shot by bigwavephoto big wave photo, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License 

Focus on Poverty: Coffee farmers on climate front line

Roger Williamson in SciDev.net: There is a coffee crisis brewing, SciDev.Net recently reported in a story about the effects of climate change on the crop, primarily the highly prized Arabica coffee beans. A major study modelled 21 scenarios of climate change up to 2050 on a band of 60 tropical countries either side of the equator where Arabica coffee is grown.

Although 2050 sounds far ahead, it takes three to five years to get a first crop. And coffee planted now should be productive for much of the 2020-50 period.

The common-sense view is to say: “Big food companies will be able to get coffee from somewhere — after all, Vietnam developed a coffee industry quickly.” Or: “Even if there is a couple of degrees of warming, farmers can just grow the coffee higher up the mountains.”

But it is not as easy as that. Peter Läderach of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, and a coauthor of the study, points out that smallholders, or farmers in major coffee producing countries such as Brazil, cannot simply move production to higher altitudes for many reasons including land tenure, terrain and to avoid further deforestation.

Indeed, most of the possible solutions — such as irrigation, extensive pest control, new or alternative crop varieties, shade systems or cultivation of new areas — are either costly or have other negative consequences. One of the few promising approaches seems to be the intercropping of bananas and coffee — with the banana plants providing an additional cash crop and shade for the coffee plants.

The economic impact will be significant, both for exporters and smallholders. Coffee is an important export for tropical countries, even though Mark Pendergrast, author of an economic history of coffee Uncommon grounds, picks apart the ‘rural myth’ that it is second only to oil in value as a traded commodity....

Coffee beans shot by Sten Porse, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Researchers connect climate change to food safety

Wageningen UR: Climate change can affect our food safety in a number of ways. In a European study, researchers at Wageningen University and Ghent University (Belgium) state that there is often a relationship between long-term changes in temperature and rainfall and vegetable and fruit contamination. For example, flooding may result in increased concentrations of harmful bacteria that can be quickly broken down again by UV light. Similarly, in one region fungi that produce toxins may increase due to global warming, while they decrease in other regions. The researchers have published their findings in a special issue of the scientific journal Food Research International that they edited.

In the future, in a changing climate, will we be able to continue eating safe vegetables and fruit or will this come under pressure? This is the question asked by the Ghent and Wageningen researchers. They have brought together the latest information and scientific findings on the impact of climate change on food safety in the special issue. The special issue was initiated by researchers and includes several papers from the  Veg-i-Trade project financed by the European Union.

These are the first studies into the relationship between climate change and food safety. The researchers find that there is every reason to expand this research. They believe that more scenario analyses, which have been used for years in climate study in general, should also be included in food safety research. One of the first scenario analyses was included in the Veg-i-Trade study.

Field studies and statistical analyses within the Veg-i-Trade project show that there is in fact often a relationship between vegetable and fruit contamination and climate variables such as temperature and rainfall. A preliminary study into toxic
substances from fungi shows, for example, that an increased risk of contamination of tomatoes may be expected at the end of the 21st century in Poland. In Spain, however, it will be too hot then for this kind of fungi, so the risk of contamination will be lower. Another study shows that in a flooded lettuce field the likelihood of flooding is increased by climate change, resulting in higher concentrations of harmful bacteria. UV light will then cause these concentrations to decrease again rapidly.

One of the conclusions from a study into possible forms of adaptation to climate change is that adaptation to future climate change will have to be very different for different countries, sectors and companies. According to this research the focus here will have to be on increasing the adaptive capacity....

A lettuce field, shot by Daniel Ventura, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Study finds climate change may dramatically reduce wheat production

A press release from Kansas State University: A recent study involving Kansas State University researchers finds that in the coming decades at least one-quarter of the world's wheat traded will be lost to extreme weather from climate change if no adaptive measures are taken.

Vara Prasad, professor of crop ecophysiology and director of the USAID Feed the Future Sustainable Intensification Innovation Lab at Kansas State University, is part of a collaborative team that found wheat yields are projected to decrease by 6 percent for each degree Celsius the temperature rises if no measures to adapt to extreme weather fluctuations are taken.

Based on the 2012-2013 wheat harvest of 701 million tons worldwide, the resulting temperature increase would result in 42 million tons less produced wheat per degree of temperature increase. To put this in perspective, the amount is equal to a quarter of the global wheat trade, which reached 147 million tons in 2013. Changes in genetics and crop management can minimize some of these losses.

"It's pretty severe," Prasad said. "The projected effect of climate change on wheat is more than what has been forecast. That's challenging because the world will have to at least double our food supply in the next 30 years if we're going to feed 9.6 billion people."

Prasad is a co-author on the study, "Rising temperatures reduce global wheat production," published in a recent issue of the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.

..."Extreme temperature doesn't only mean heat; it also means cold," Prasad said. "Simply looking at the average temperature doesn't really show us anything because it's the extremities that are more detrimental to crops. Plants can handle gradual changes because they have time to adapt, but an extreme heat wave or cold snap can kill a plant because that adjustment period is often nonexistent."....

Wheat, shot by Scott Bontz (Dehaan), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Pakistan suffering heavy losses from Indian mills' emissions

Faiza Ilyas in Dawn (Pakistan): Apart from damaging public health and crop cultivation, heavy fog mainly created by hazardous emissions from the coal-based Indian steel mills are causing a loss of $2 billion annually to Pakistan’s aviation industry.

The Sindh coast doesn’t face the threat of complete drowning from the intruding sea by 2060 as was recently reported in the press, but there are all indications that Pakistan would be seriously impacted by changes in weather conditions, which would become more intense in the coming years. Building dams could help Pakistan prevent flooding.

These were some important points highlighted by deputy director general of the meteorological department Dr Ghulam Rasool at a press briefing held on Saturday. It was arranged by Green Media Initiative in collaboration with the Karachi Press Club.

...“Pakistan ranks 10th among countries that would suffer the most from climate change. Every aspect of the phenomenon would impact us. Our coasts are now more vulnerable to tropical cyclones as their intensity would increase in the Arabian Sea and reduce in the Bay of Bengal,” he said, adding that sea level rise would contribute to sea intrusion.

According to Dr Rasool, of the total 8,123 glaciers in Pakistan, only 8,000 are advancing while the rest are reducing. The Siachen Glacier is the fastest melting glacier in the world. The deployment of armed forces of both Pakistan and India in that region is also contributing to decline in the ice mass....

Karachi traffic, shot by 元 from Tokyo, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Atribution 2.0 Generic license

Sub-Saharan African countries are failing to plan for climate change

Lindsey Jones in the Guardian (UK): Communities around the world are feeling the impacts of climate change already, but many of the most severe effects will be felt in the decades to come, particularly from mid-century onwards. Nowhere is this more apparent than in sub-Saharan Africa which will be one of the hardest hit regions of the world.

Right now, African countries are busy investing in infrastructure and development to help support current economic growth. Many of these long-lived investments – such as ports, large dams, and social infrastructure, such as hospitals and schools – will most likely last well beyond 2050. But by then, Africa’s climate may look quite different to what it does today. Factoring climate change into long-term investments and planning decisions is essential for supporting climate-resilient development – but it’s not happening.

New research, coordinated by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN), shows that governments and businesses across sub-Saharan Africa are failing to consider long-term climate information in their investments and planning decisions. This includes studies from Zambia, Malawi, Rwanda, Ghana and Mozambique. The worst case scenario is that poor use of climate information could lock societies into patterns that make them highly vulnerable to droughts, floods, high temperatures or sea-level rise in the future.

Why do decision-makers have this blind
spot? First and most importantly, other challenges such as eradicating poverty and promoting access to primary and secondary education are extremely pressing, forcing decision-makers to think and act in short time frames.

Secondly, long-term climate information is often ill-suited to informing local economic, social and environmental contexts in sub-Saharan Africa.

Close-up aerial photo of Zambezi River at the junction of Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana. Shot by Brian McMorrow, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Iceland rises as its glaciers melt from climate change

Mari N. Jensen at the University of Arizona College of Science: The Earth’s crust under Iceland is rebounding as global warming melts the island’s great ice caps, a University of Arizona-led team reports in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The paper is the first to show the current fast uplift of the Icelandic crust is a result of accelerated melting of the island’s glaciers and coincides with the onset of warming that began about 30 years ago, the scientists said.

Some sites in south-central Iceland are moving upward as much as 1.4 inches per year — a speed that surprised the researchers. "Our research makes the connection between recent accelerated uplift and the accelerated melting of the Icelandic ice caps," said first author Kathleen Compton, a UA geosciences doctoral candidate.

Geologists have long known that as glaciers melt and become lighter, the Earth rebounds as the weight of the ice decreases. Whether the current rebound geologists detect is related to past deglaciation or modern ice loss has been an open question until now, said co-author Richard Bennett, a UA associate professor of geosciences. "Iceland is the first place we can say accelerated uplift means accelerated ice mass loss," Bennett said.

To figure out how fast the crust was moving upward, the team used a network of 62 global positioning satellite receivers fastened to rocks throughout Iceland. By tracking the position of the GPS receivers year after year, the scientists "watch" the rocks move and can calculate how far they have traveled — a technique called geodesy.

The new work shows that, at least for Iceland, the land’s current accelerating uplift is directly related to the thinning of glaciers and to global warming. "What we’re observing is a climatically induced change in the Earth’s surface," Bennett said....

The geyser called Strokkur erupts in Iceland, shot by Andreas Tille, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Predicting ENSO devastation

Sandhya Sekar in SciDev.net:A new computer model can help forecast the socio-economic devastation caused by rainfall and floods triggered by the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomena.  Philip Ward from VU University, Amsterdam, who with his colleagues created the ‘cascade’ modelling framework, says that it is capable of predicting the effect of ENSO on floods at the global and regional scales.

“During El Niño years, the risk is higher than average in north-eastern India, the findings suggest,” says Ward in an interview with SciDev.Net. “On the other hand, some basins in eastern India show lower than average damage during La Niña years.”

ENSO refers to the effects of anomalous sea surface temperatures off the western coast of South America that cause climatic changes across the tropics and subtropics. Southern Oscillation refers to temperature variations on the surface of the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean (warming and cooling known as El Niño and La Niña, respectively) and in  surface  air pressure in the tropical western Pacific.

Ward’s approach, published in September in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combines three different models that predict rainfall, water drainage patterns and also the socio-economic impacts of floods, including on GDP.

The models found abnormal flood volumes across more than a third of the earth’s surface during El Nino years when the oceans were warmer than usual, and also during La Nina years when the oceans were colder.  “Our models and results are already at a resolution of one square kilometre which we have found to be very useful for many users of the data in practical applications,” Ward tells SciDev.Net....

Sunrise over the South Pacific, NASA image from the International Space Station

Study counters case for climate change-violence link

Lou Del Bello in SciDev.net: Climate change is far from being solely to blame for violence in Sub-Saharan Africa, say researchers — other factors matter much more. Their paper, published on 10 November in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradicts earlier studies that found that higher temperatures are a major risk factor in conflict.

For instance, last year a different group concluded that a shift towards hotter conditions by a single statistical unit known as a ‘standard deviation’ — equivalent to, for example, warming an African country by 0.4 degrees Celsius for a year — caused a four per cent rise in the likelihood of personal violence and a 14 per cent increase in conflict between groups.

But now a team led by John O’Loughlin, a geographer at the University of Colorado Boulder in the United States, says that previous research may have overlooked other key triggers such as political instability, poverty and geographical conditions.

O’Loughlin’s team examined these factors alongside exceptionally hot or dry periods in Sub-Saharan Africa to assess the chances of increased violence. Breaking the area down into subregional grids, the researchers pinpointed 78,000 ‘conflict events’ from the past 33 years and matched them with weather conditions and social and geographical factors.

They found that conflicts such as riots, protests or violence against civilians were more common when temperatures were particularly high. But they also discovered an inconsistent relationship between temperature deviations on the one hand and different types of conflict and different subregions on the other.

And, more critically, they found that longer periods of higher temperatures and wet or dry conditions had less impact on conflict than other influences, such as recent nearby violence and a lack of democracy, says O’Loughlin....

A British jeep passes a sign warning against looting on the outskirts of Ravenna, Italy, 7 December 1944. From the Imperial War Museum

Domestic climate change study paints bleak picture for Vietnam

Bao Cam in Thanh Nien News: Vietnam is suffering increasing damage from climate change, according to a recent report by a parliamentary committee. A report by the Committee of Science, Technology and Environment presented to the National Assembly, Vietnam’s legislature, showed that Vietnam is among the countries to be hit hardest by climate change in the coming years.

Natural disasters have cost the country around 1.5 percent of its annual gross domestic product (GDP) in the past two decades, the report said, citing findings of a study conducted by the committee. Typhoon Xangsane, for example, caused US$1.2 billion of damage in the central region in 2006.

Officials said Vietnam has yet to become a major greenhouse gas emitter, but its emissions continue to rise. “The threat of climate change has grown more vivid in Vietnam over the past 50 years,” the report said. “The average temperature increased by 0.5 degree Celsius, the sea rose more than 0.2 meters, natural disasters, floods and typhoons grew stronger and left many dykes became more vulnerable,” it said.

“Flooding caused by high tide has worsened in Ho Chi Minh City, Can Tho, and the Mekong Delta’s Ca Mau and Vinh Long provinces.” According to the report, areas suffering from the salinization of ground water and/or desertification have expanded due to rising temperatures....

Flood in Vietnam, 2011, shot by European Commission DG Echo, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Pakistan's agricultural economy facing climate change risks

The Daily Times (Pakistan):
Senior Environmental experts said on Wednesday that national agricultural economy was being affected by five major risks related to climate change.  Talking to APP senior researcher, Kashif Salik working with Sustainable Policy Development Institute (SDPI) said that being a predominantly agricultural economy, climate change is estimated to decrease crop yields in Pakistan not only as a result of flooding, but also as a result of changing temperatures, which in turn will affect livelihoods and food production.

He said that deterioration of climate is irreversibly harming Pakistan, as glacier melting in the Himalayas is projected to increase flooding and affect water resources within the next two to three decades. Deforestation is the second leading contributor of carbon emissions worldwide after the burning of fossil fuels, and after seas, forests are the second largest storehouse of the carbon, he added.

“Being a predominantly agricultural economy, climate change is estimated to decrease crop yields in Pakistan not only as a result of flooding, but also as a result of changing temperatures, which in turn will affect livelihoods and food production” he further said. “The glacial melt will affect fresh water flows with dramatic adverse effects on biodiversity and livelihood with possible long-term implications on regional food security” he informed.

Kashif Salik further said that scientific studies showed that average global temperature has risen by about 1 degree Centigrade during the past century. He said that this increase was mostly due to fossil fuel burning and deforestation. Global temperatures are projected to increase further between 1.4 degree Centigrade and 5.8 degree Centigrade by 2100 and to continue to rise long after. “Climate change is a global issue which is of concern for the entire international community”....

Rice terraces in Karakoram, shot by Ziegler175, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license

The most vulnerable populations to climate change: floods, droughts and extreme weather

Catherine Griffin in Science World Report: While climate change can benefit some locations, other areas are more at risk. Now, scientists have taken a look at which sections of the world's population are left most at risk to food shortages and extreme weather events.

Extreme weather events can leave populations with not enough food both in the short- and long-term. That's why scientists decided to take a look at which populations could be most affected by these events. More specifically, they tracked the effects on four countries, including Russia, East Africa, Pakistan and the Philippines, which all experienced extreme weather events that ranged from drought to flooding.

Climate change is expected to increase the intensity and frequency of heatwaves and floods. Although there's no scientific evidence to show that a specific weather event would not have happened without climate change, the risk of the event does indeed increase. In fact, the new findings show that the heat wave that occurred in Russia and the drought that occurred in East Africa were most likely caused by climate change.

"Weather has always affected flood security, particularly for many of the world's poorest people," said John Ingram, one of the lead authors of the new study, in a news release. "Perhaps we think of farmers or fishermen first, but extreme weather will affect many more people in other ways too. While direct measures such as emergency preparedness and the strengthening of response-related institutions is helpful, this study has identified the need for a wider cultural shift to ensure the poorest and most vulnerable are properly protected."...

US Army photo of 2010 flooding in Pakistan

Evidence supports urgent action to avoid grave health consequences from climate change

A press release from the World Health Organization: Evidence is linking climate change to five major health consequences—disease and injury from extreme weather events; changing distribution of insect-borne diseases; diarrhoeal disease from water scarcity or flooding; compromised food security; and air pollution. Over 300 heads of government, leading scientists and development partners agreed that without adequate action climate change poses unacceptable risks to global public health, and they put forward ways for increasing health in tandem with climate change mitigation and adaptation at the WHO’s first-ever Conference on Health and Climate in Geneva, Switzerland, on 27–29 August 2014.

Examples underscoring the urgent need to address climate change as a health issue are rapidly mounting. One of the 128 European region participants from 32 countries attending the Conference, Elisabetta Colaiacomo from Italy’s Ministry for the Environment Land and Sea, described t
hat, “Italy, and the Mediterranean basin, is very much a ‘hot point’ for the impacts of climate change. Extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts and heat-waves, are more frequent now than in the past and present a distinct climate-related threat to health. Urgent actions are needed to develop a prompt response to all the threats to the environment and health. These actions will need to consider local and regional relevance, tackling issues in a concrete and intersectoral manner.” Colaiacomo added, “It is our commitment to work for concrete co-benefits, and bringing together the health and environment communities to strengthen a common dialogue and speak with a stronger voice to face the common challenges.”

...Reflected in the implementation of the Parma “Commitment to act” and the European Regional Framework for Action is the need to develop a health sector that can optimally fulfill a leadership role in climate change mitigation, such as by identifying critical health consequences and reducing carbon emissions from operations. Ainash Sharshenova, Scientific and Production Centre for Preventive Medicine, Ministry of Health, Kyrgyzstan, said, “Kyrgyzstan is a very mountainous country; almost 90% of the land area is more than 1,500m above sea level. As such, we experience specific impacts of climate change, such as melting glaciers and increases in desertification. These effects are having impacts on health through flooding and landslides, as well as extreme weather events. I think it is very important that the health sector leads by example. In Kyrgyzstan, WHO and UNDP/GEF have supported innovation in energy efficiency and use of renewable energy in the health sector. By promoting the use of renewable energy sources and energy-saving technologies in the health sector we have shown that it is sustainable, it can enhance business continuity in rural areas, and it supports both climate change mitigation and adaptation.”

Changing global diets is vital to reducing climate change

AlphaGalileo via University of Cambridge: Healthier diets and reducing food waste are part of a combination of solutions needed to ensure food security and avoid dangerous climate change, say the team behind a new study. A new study, published today in Nature Climate Change, suggests that – if current trends continue – food production alone will reach, if not exceed, the global targets for total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2050.

The study’s authors say we should all think carefully about the food we choose and its environmental impact. A shift to healthier diets across the world is just one of a number of actions that need to be taken to avoid dangerous climate change and ensure there is enough food for all.

As populations rise and global tastes shift towards meat-heavy Western diets, increasing agricultural yields will not meet projected food demands of what is expected to be 9.6 billion people - making it necessary to bring more land into cultivation.

This will come at a high price, warn the authors, as the deforestation will increase carbon emissions as well as biodiversity loss, and increased livestock production will raise methane levels. They argue that current food demand trends must change through reducing waste and encouraging balanced diets.

If we maintain ‘business as usual’, say the authors, then by 2050 cropland will have expanded by 42% and fertiliser use increased sharply by 45% over
2009 levels. A further tenth of the world’s pristine tropical forests would disappear over the next 35 years.

The study shows that increased deforestation, fertilizer use and livestock methane emissions are likely to cause GHG from food production to increase by almost 80%. This will put emissions from food production alone roughly equal to the target greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 for the entire global economy.

The study’s authors write that halving the amount of food waste and managing demand for particularly environmentally-damaging food products by changing global diets should be key aims that, if achieved, might mitigate some of the greenhouse gases causing climate change....

"Belshazzar's Feast," from 1860

Severe drought is causing the western US to rise

Mario Aguilera at the UC San Diego News Center: The severe drought gripping the western United States in recent years is changing the landscape well beyond localized effects of water restrictions and browning lawns. Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have now discovered that the growing, broad-scale loss of water is causing the entire western U.S. to rise up like an uncoiled spring.

Investigating ground positioning data from GPS stations throughout the west, Scripps researchers Adrian Borsa, Duncan Agnew, and Dan Cayan found that the water shortage is causing an “uplift” effect up to 15 millimeters (more than half an inch) in California’s mountains and on average four millimeters (0.15 of an inch) across the west. From the GPS data, they estimate the water deficit at nearly 240 gigatons (63 trillion gallons of water), equivalent to a four-inch layer of water spread out over the entire western U.S.

...While poring through various sets of data of ground positions from highly precise GPS stations within the National Science Foundation’s Plate Boundary Observatory and other networks, Borsa, a Scripps assistant research geophysicist, kept noticing the same pattern over the 2003-2014 period: All of the stations moved upwards in the most recent years, coinciding with the timing of the current drought.

Agnew, a Scripps Oceanography geophysics professor who specializes in studying earthquakes and their impact on shaping the earth’s crust, says the GPS data can only be explained by rapid uplift of the tectonic plate upon which the western U.S. rests (Agnew cautions that the uplift has virtually no effect on the San Andreas fault and therefore does not increase the risk of earthquakes).

For Cayan, a research meteorologist with Scripps and USGS, the results paint a new picture of the dire hydrological state of the west. “These results quantify the amount of water mass lost in the past few years,” said Cayan. “It also represents a powerful new way to track water resources over a very large landscape. We can home in on the Sierra Nevada mountains and critical California snowpack. These results demonstrate that this technique can be used to study changes in fresh water stocks in other regions around the world, if they have a network of GPS sensors.”...

Plate Boundary Observatory GPS station P466, located in the Inyo Mountains near Lone Pine, California. P466 is mounted on a deep-drilled braced (Wyatt-Agnew) monument, and its displacement data were used to determine water loading changes in the western United States. Credit: Shawn Lawrence, UNAVCO

India risks loss of 8.7% of GDP by 2100 on climate change

The Economic Times via PTI (India): A global failure to respond to climate changes could result in about 8.7 per cent economic loss in India's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2100, Asian Development Bank said today.  "India, one of the largest agrarian economies in the world, is deeply at risk from climate change, and could see economic losses of up to 8.7 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) by 2100 if the world fails to respond to a host of climate threats, the Manila bas
ed multi-lateral funding agency said in a report.

Report titled 'Assessing the Costs of Climate Change and Adaptation in South Asia' predicts Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka will see an average annual economic loss of 1.8 per cent of their collective GDP by 2050, rising sharply to 8.8 per cent by 2100.  "Without changes to current global behavior, India would see economic losses equivalent to 1.8 per cent of annual GDP by 2050, widening to 8.7 per cent by the end of the century."

But if mitigation and adaptation steps are taken to keep the temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, the damage could be kept below 2 per cent by 2100, it said.  "Agriculture provides employment and livelihood opportunities to most of India's rural population and changes in temperature and rainfall, and an increase in floods and droughts linked to climate change, would have a devastating impact on people's food security, incomes, and lives," said Bindu Lohani, ADB Vice-President for Knowledge Management and Sustainable Development.

Changes in rainfall patterns are likely to benefit rice output in most north-eastern states, however southern states could see annual yields decline by 5 per cent in 2030s, 14.5 per cent in 2050s, and 17 per cent in 2080s.

"The country has 8,000 km of coastline and nearly half the country's 28 states could face serious consequences from a rise in the sea level, with Gujarat expected to suffer the highest level of inundation, and Maharashtra the largest number of affected people," as per the report....

Eggplants for sale in Gujarat, shot by Arne Hückelheim, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Will climate change lead to conflict or cooperation?

Joel Jaeger in IPS: The headline of every article about the relationship between climate change and conflict should be “It’s complicated,” according to Clionadh Raleigh. Director of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, Raleigh thinks that researchers and the media have put too simplistic a spin on the link between climate change and violence.

In recent years, scientists and the United Nations have been increasing their focus on climate conflict. The debate ranges from sensational reports that say the world will soon erupt into water wars to those who do not think the topic is worthy of discussion at all.

Much of the uncertainty over the connection between climate change and armed conflict exists because it is such a fledgling area of interest. According to David Jensen, head of the U.N. Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Environmental Cooperation for Peacebuilding programme, the relationship between climate change and conflict began receiving significant U.N. attention only in recent years.

“While the debate on this topic started in 2006-2007, there remains a large gulf between what is discussed at the global level and in the Security Council, and what is actually happening at the field level,” he told IPS.

A body of peer-reviewed literature on climate change and conflict has recently begun to emerge, but scientists have discovered that the link between climate change and conflict is more complex than they expected.

“A number of studies have found a statistical link between climate change and conflict, but they tend to focus on a specific area and cover a short time period,” Halvard Buhaug, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo’s Conditions of Violence and Peace department, told IPS. “The challenge is to determine whether these studies are indicative of an overarching, more general trend, which hasn’t been documented yet.”

Much of the nuance behind the climate conflict correlations is lost when technical scientific reports are spread to a wider audience...

A frangible bullet stress test, US government photo

Climate 'key driver' in European forest disturbances

Mark Kinver in BBC News: Europe's forests have experienced increased disturbances throughout the 20th Century from wind, bark beetles and wildfires, a study has shown. A team of European-based scientists identified climatic changes as a "key driver behind this increase".

However, they added, how the expected continuation of climate change would affect Europe's forests in the future remained unresolved. The findings have been published online by the journal Nature Climate Change.

The researchers wrote: "Natural disturbances, that is, large pulses of tree mortality from agents such as wildfire, insect outbreaks or strong winds, are integral drivers of forest dynamics and contribute to the diversity and adaptive capacity of ecosystems."

But co-author Rupert Seidl from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna observed: "These disturbances have intensified considerably in recent decades, which increasingly challenges the sustainable management of forest ecosystems."

The authors said the frequency and severity of large wildfires had increased around the globe over the past decade. They added: "In addition, recent bark beetle outbreaks, for example, in North America and Central Europe, have reached unprecedented levels."...

A Black Forest landscape, painted by Hans Thoma in 1886