Will the costs of “loss & damage” be shared by polluting nations?

From an Article by Bob Berwyn and Zoha Tunio, Inside Climate News, Nov. 19, 2022

SHARM El-SHEIKH, Egypt—A new COP27 agreement that establishes a funding mechanism to compensate developing countries for losses and damages caused by global warming may be the biggest breakthrough in global climate policy since the 2015 Paris Agreement. If it sticks?

The deal was reached as two weeks of nail-biting negotiations here went into overtime with little to show for all the talk. Many negotiators arrived at the conference halls Saturday morning with their suitcases packed for the trip home while facing the prospect of being called out for failing to make progress on one of the key promises of the United Nation’s effort to address increasingly severe climate change impacts like floods, droughts and deadly heat waves.

Along with finding ways to stop the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to slow global warming, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was established in 1992 to address the fundamental inequalities of climate change impacts. Developed countries in the Global North are responsible for about 79 percent of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, but less developed countries in the Global South have taken the biggest hit from climate change and don’t have the financial and technical resources to recover from them.

That disparity is at the heart of global climate justice and the 1992 United Nations climate framework committed all the parties to take “into account their common but differentiated responsibilities,” with developed countries committing to assist developing countries “that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in meeting costs of adaptation to those adverse effects … by providing new and additional financial resources.”

The 2015 Paris Agreement added more detail by recognizing “the importance of averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including extreme weather events and slow onset events” like sea level rise.

“The issue of climate justice has been at the heart of the climate negotiations from its inception over three decades ago,” said Lavanya Rajamani, an international law expert who advised African nations at COP27. “Yet it is only now that its crucial importance in addressing climate change is being realized. The U.N. climate regime needs to place as much emphasis on adaptation, loss and damage and support as it has on target-setting for mitigation, in fairness to vulnerable nations, and in light of the increasing incidence of devastating impacts as mitigation efforts fall short.”

On Saturday at COP27, 30 years after those first promises were made, developed countries finally agreed to “establish new funding arrangements for assisting developing countries in responding to loss and damage, including a focus on addressing loss and damage by providing and assisting in mobilizing new and additional resources.”

The 11th hour deal was sealed Saturday afternoon when the United States reversed its earlier opposition and agreed to the creation of a specific loss and damage fund, surprising climate activists who just hours earlier had been excoriating the U.S. for its decades of obstruction.

This response to the long-standing demand by developing countries was overdue, said Harjeet Singh, who leads global political strategy for Climate Action Network International, an umbrella organization representing 190 civil society groups in 130 countries.

Intensifying global warming impacts require a systemic response, not just piecemeal post-disaster relief efforts, he said. “Humanitarian aid is welcome, but was never sufficient to help people recover from these impacts,” he said, “We wanted the U.N. climate change system to come in and actually create a mechanism that can help people at scale.”

Under the framework U.N. climate treaty, “Countries with the greatest historical responsibility for emissions, and the greatest capacity to act, have committed to bear the costs of climate change,” said Brian O’Callaghan, lead researcher with Oxford University’s economic recovery project. “Rich countries should act with speed or otherwise increase their future liability.”

The complex negotiations on loss and damage featured shifting alliances among various groups of countries that, at different times in the process, put competing proposals on the table. Ahead of COP27, United States climate envoy John Kerry was careful not to commit to a specific loss and damage mechanism, promising only that the U.S. was open to talking about the issue in the coming years.

Singh said that before COP27 started, the United States appeared to be opposed to the creation of a specific loss and damage fund, preferring to talk about potentially restructuring existing climate finance mechanisms to address those climate impacts that go beyond countries’ capacities to adapt.

The collective push from developing countries and resistance from a large part of the developed world led some attendees to fear a repeat of COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2009, where a similar rift between the wealthy nations most responsible for climate change and poorer ones that are enduring its worst impacts led to an impasse.

At the end of the two-week talks in Copenhagen, world leaders dropped many of their goals for the negotiations and significantly lowered their targets. The parties agreed to recognize the scientific evidence for keeping global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, but made no tangible commitments to reduce emissions in order to achieve that goal.

But this year, civil society groups applied relentless pressure during the talks, and Singh credited activists with keeping negotiators and the public focused on the topic of loss and damage. At the same time, developing countries maintained a unified front in the talks, “which actually made a huge difference in getting this over the line,” he said. Ultimately, it was the United States taking the step and backing the loss and damage funding mechanism that made the difference, he added.

The fact that the agreement came during a climate summit on a continent enduring some of the world’s most severe climate impacts gave it particular relevance. During the two-week conference, 14 flood alerts were issued for Africa, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

“After 30 years a loss and damage fund is coming home and it’s coming home on African soil,” said Mohamed Adow, director of energy and climate change for Power Shift Africa on Saturday afternoon during a press conference by Climate Action Network International.

As written, the loss and damage agreement includes views from all countries, but discussions about “some of the thorny issues around who will pay and where it (the funding mechanism) is going to be located have been moved to next year,” Singh said. “In fact, that’s exactly what we as civil society … were also demanding, because the most important thing to be done here was to establish the fund. You cannot do everything in two weeks.”

Yet to be determined is how the fund will be administered, who will pay into it, and which countries will receive money. He said there is still a long road ahead before it actually starts helping people hurt by climate impacts, “but the important thing is we now can send a message of hope to people who are suffering right now.”

Q.E.D.

WV Interfaith Power & Light is part of a national campaign for bold action

Dear WVIPL Friends and Supporters,

We wanted to make sure you know about an upcoming event for which we are co-sponsors, along with Citizens’ Climate Lobby of West Virginia, WV Rivers Coalition, ReImagine Appalachia, WV Citizen Action Education Fund, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, and the First Presbyterian Church of Charleston.

This Conference on Climate will take place at Charleston’s First Presbyterian Church (16 Leon Sullivan Way, Charleston, WV 25301) on Saturday, June 4, from 10am-3pm.

Featured speakers at the conference will include the following:

** — Bill Myers, Pastor, First Presbyterian Church, Charleston, WV

** — Rev. Jeff Allen, United Methodist Pastor and Executive Director of WV Council of Churches

** — Rev. Mitch Hescox, President, The Evangelical Environmental Network

** — Rev. Ron English, Restorative Justice Facilitator with American Friends Service Committee; ordained into the ministry by Drs. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, GA

** — Robin Blakeman, Ordained Minister, Presbyterian Church of the USA, with validated ministry in environmental stewardship; Steering Committee, WV Interfaith Power & Light

** — Bishop Marcia Dinkins, Founder and Executive Director of Black Women Rising

All are welcome, and we encourage you to share this information widely with your networks! If you are on Facebook, there is also a shareable event there. This conference is free of charge to attend, and you can register and/or find more information at: https://tinyurl.com/wvaclimate.

We look forward to seeing you there! Sincerely,

>>>> WVIPL Staff and Steering Committee

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See Also: California Interfaith Power and Light’s Allis Druffel on CNN HLN Local Edition – YouTube

Allis Druffel is the Southern California Outreach Director for California Interfaith Power & Light, and recently appeared on CNN Headline News Local Edition alongside David Mowry of Unitarian Universalist Church of Riverside, a member congregation of CIPL

THIS YEAR 2020 Is Our Last, Best Chance to Save the Planet

From an Article by Justin Worland, TIME — America Must Change, July 9, 2020

From our vantage point today, 2020 looks like the year when an unknown virus spun out of control, killed hundreds of thousands and altered the way we live day to day. In the future, we may look back at 2020 as the year we decided to keep driving off the climate cliff–or to take the last exit. Taking the threat seriously would mean using the opportunity presented by this crisis to spend on solar panels and wind farms, push companies being bailed out to cut emissions and foster greener forms of transport in cities. If we instead choose to fund new coal-fired power plants and oil wells and thoughtlessly fire up factories to urge growth, we will lock in a pathway toward climate catastrophe. There’s a divide about which way to go.

In early April, as COVID-19 spread across the U.S. and doctors urgently warned that New York City might soon run out of ventilators and hospital beds, President Donald Trump gathered CEOs from some of the country’s biggest oil and gas companies for a closed-door meeting in the White House Cabinet Room. The industry faced its biggest disruption in decades, and Trump wanted to help the companies secure their place at the center of the 21st century American economy.

Everything was on the table, from a tariff on imports to the U.S. government itself purchasing excess oil. “We’ll work this out, and we’ll get our energy business back,” Trump told the CEOs. “I’m with you 1,000%.” A few days later, he announced he had brokered a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to cut oil production and rescue the industry.

Later in April, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, in a video message from across the Atlantic, offered a different approach for the continent’s economic future. A European Green Deal, she said, would be the E.U.’s “motor for the recovery.”

“We can turn the crisis of this pandemic into an opportunity to rebuild our economies differently,” she said. On May 27, she pledged more than $800 billion to the initiative, promising to transform the way Europeans live.

For the past three years, the world outside the U.S. has largely tried to ignore Trump’s retrograde position on climate, hoping 2020 would usher in a new President with a new position, re-enabling the cooperation between nations needed to prevent the worst ravages of climate change. But there’s no more time to wait.

We’re standing at a climate crossroads: the world has already warmed 1.1°C since the Industrial Revolution. If we pass 2°C, we risk hitting one or more major tipping points, where the effects of climate change go from advancing gradually to changing dramatically overnight, reshaping the planet. To ensure that we don’t pass that threshold, we need to cut emissions in half by 2030. Climate change has understandably fallen out of the public eye this year as the coronavirus pandemic rages.

Nevertheless, this year, or perhaps this year and next, is likely to be the most pivotal yet in the fight against climate change. “We’ve run out of time to build new things in old ways,” says Rob Jackson, an earth system science professor at Stanford University and the chair of the Global Carbon Project. What we do now will define the fate of the planet–and human life on it–for decades.

The time frame for effective climate action was always going to be tight, but the coronavirus pandemic has shrunk it further. Scientists and policymakers expected the green transition to occur over the next decade, but the pandemic has pushed 10 years of anticipated investment in everything from power plants to roads into a monthslong time frame.

Countries have already spent $11 trillion to help stem the economic damage from COVID-19. They could spend trillions more. “It’s in this next six months that recovery strategies are likely to be formulated and the path is set,” says Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank chief economist known for his landmark 2006 report warning that climate change could devastate the global economy.

There’s No Substitute for EARTH

“You can get Time Magazine now at your newstand.”

Very Large Ice Crack (upclose)

A Really Big Crack In An Antarctic Ice Shelf Just Got Bigger

From a News Report of WAMU,  Rae Ellen Bichell, National Public Radio, January 6, 2017

Right now, a big chunk of Antarctic ice is hanging on by a frozen thread. British researchers monitoring the crack in the Larsen C ice shelf say that only about 12 miles now connect the chunk of ice to the rest of the continent.

“After a few months of steady, incremental advance since the last event, the rift grew suddenly by a further 18 km [11 miles] during the second half of December 2016,” wrote Adrian Luckman in a statement Thursday by the MIDAS Project, which is monitoring changes in the area.

The crack in question has been growing for years and is now a total of roughly 70 miles long. When the fissure reaches the far side of the shelf, an iceberg the size of Delaware will float off, leaving the Larsen C 10 percent smaller.

A NASA scientist  (John Sonntag) with project IceBridge took this photo of the crack in November.

“This event will fundamentally change the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula,” Luckman wrote. Ice shelves are important because they provide a buffer between the sea and the ice that sits on land, in this case on the Antarctic Peninsula. Without a healthy ice shelf, water from melting glaciers can flow straight to the sea, raising the sea level.

It’s normal for the front of an ice shelf to crack and break off, known as calving. But it’s unusual for that to happen faster than the ice shelf can refreeze.

Some scientists worry that the missing piece will destabilize the whole ice shelf. A smaller ice shelf, Larsen B, completely splintered in a little over a month in 2002, a process that started with a similar crack. Another ice shelf, Larsen A, had disintegrated a few years before.

“Larsen C may eventually follow the example of its neighbour Larsen B,” wrote Luckman. Larsen C is Antarctica’s fourth-largest ice shelf.

Crack at Larsen C Ice Sheet

“If it doesn’t go in the next few months, I’ll be amazed,” he told BBC News.

 >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >

Nearly all coral reefs will be ruined by climate change

From an Article by Katie Herzog, The Grist, January 6, 2017

According to a study in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, 99 percent of the world’s reefs will be affected by coral bleaching by the end of this century if climate change continues apace.

When water is above ideal temperatures, coral expels the symbiotic algae that reside in its tissue and provide it with nutrients. This turns the reefs a ghostly white, and while the coral is not exactly dead at that point, it is more susceptible to disease — and death. A bleaching event on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef last year, for instance, left 67 percent of its shallow-water coral dead.

This isn’t just bad for the reefs themselves; it’s bad for the vast, biodiverse ecosystems that depend on them. That includes the humans who fish these reefs and who cater to reef-loving tourists. The National Marine Fisheries Service estimates that the commercial value of fisheries near coral reefs is over $100 million in the U.S. alone, and reef-related tourism generates billions of dollars a year.

Even if aggressive actions are taken to combat climate change, such as those pledged during the Paris climate talks, it could be too late to prevent mass bleaching events at many reefs, according to the study. Divers, you might want to book those trips sooner rather than later.

Our Government Speaks to the Nation

FACT SHEET: What Climate Change Means for America and the Economy

Press Release, Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, May 6, 2014

“…Science, accumulated and reviewed over decades, tells us that our planet is changing in ways that will have profound impacts on all of humankind…those who are already feeling the effects of climate change don’t have time to deny it—they’re busy dealing with it.” — President Barack Obama, Remarks at Georgetown University, June 25, 2013.

Today, delivering on a major commitment in the President’s Climate Action Plan, the Obama Administration is unveiling the third U.S. National Climate Assessment—the most comprehensive scientific assessment ever generated of climate change and its impacts across every region of America and major sectors of the U.S. economy.

The findings in this National Climate Assessment underscore the need for urgent action to combat the threats from climate change, protect American citizens and communities today, and build a sustainable future for our kids and grandkids.

Developed over four years by hundreds of the Nation’s top climate scientists and technical experts—and informed by thousands of inputs from the public and outside organizations gathered through town hall meetings, public-comment opportunities, and technical workshops across the country, the third National Climate Assessment represents the most authoritative and comprehensive knowledge base about how climate change is affecting America now, and what’s likely to come over the next century.

And, for the first time, to ensure that American citizens, communities, businesses, and decision makers have easy access to scientific information about climate change impacts that are most relevant to them, the U.S. National Climate Assessment is being released in an interactive, mobile-device-friendly, digital format on www.globalchange.gov.

Today’s announcement is a key deliverable of the Climate Action Plan launched by President Obama last June—which lays out concrete steps to cut carbon pollution, prepare America’s communities for climate-change impacts, and lead international efforts to address this global challenge. The Plan acknowledges that even as we act to reduce the greenhouse-gas pollution that is driving climate change, we must also empower the Nation’s communities, businesses, and individual citizens with the information they need to cope with the changes in climate that are already underway.

• Coasts: “More than 50% of Americans – 164 million people – live in coastal counties, with 1.2 million added each year… Humans have heavily altered the coastal environment through development, changes in land use, and overexploitation of resources. Now, the changing climate is imposing additional stresses…” “Coastal lifelines, such as water supply infrastructure and evacuation routes are increasingly vulnerable to higher sea levels and storm surges, inland flooding, and other climate-related changes.”

Climate-Change Impacts on Key Sectors of Society and the U.S. Economy

• Health: “Climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways, including through impacts from increased extreme weather events, wildfire, decreased air quality, threats to mental health, and illnesses transmitted by food, water, and disease carriers such as mosquitoes and ticks. Some of these health impacts are already underway in the United States. Climate change will, absent other changes, amplify some of the existing health threats the Nation now faces. Certain people and communities are especially vulnerable, including children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and some communities of color. Public health actions, especially preparedness and prevention, can do much to protect people from some of the impacts of climate change. Early action provides the largest health benefits.”

• Transportation: “The impacts from sea level rise and storm surge, extreme weather events, higher temperatures and heat waves, precipitation changes, Arctic warming, and other climatic conditions are affecting the reliability and capacity of the U.S. transportation system in many ways. Sea level rise, coupled with storm surge, will continue to increase the risk of major coastal impacts on transportation infrastructure, including both temporary and permanent flooding of airports, ports and harbors, roads, rail lines, tunnels, and bridges. Extreme weather events currently disrupt transportation networks in all areas of the country; projections indicate that such disruptions will increase. Climate change impacts will increase the total costs to the Nation’s transportation systems and their users, but these impacts can be reduced through rerouting, mode change, and a wide range of adaptive actions.”

• Energy: “Extreme weather events are affecting energy production and delivery facilities, causing supply disruptions of varying lengths and magnitudes and affecting other infrastructure that depends on energy supply. The frequency and intensity of certain types of extreme weather events are expected to change. Higher summer temperatures will increase electricity use, causing higher summer peak loads, while warmer winters will decrease energy demands for heating. Net electricity use is projected to increase. Changes in water availability, both episodic and long-lasting, will constrain different forms of energy production. In the longer term, sea level rise, extreme storm surge events, and high tides will affect coastal facilities and infrastructure on which many energy systems, markets, and consumers depend. As new investments in energy technologies occur, future energy systems will differ from today’s in uncertain ways. Depending on the character of changes in the energy mix, climate change will introduce new risks as well as new opportunities.”

• Water: “Climate change affects water demand and the ways water is used within and across regions and economic sectors. The Southwest, Great Plains, and Southeast are particularly vulnerable to changes in water supply and demand. Changes in precipitation and runoff, combined with changes in consumption and withdrawal, have reduced surface and groundwater supplies in many areas. These trends are expected to continue, increasing the likelihood of water shortages for many uses. Increasing flooding risk affects human safety and health, property, infrastructure, economies, and ecology in many basins across the United States… Increasing resilience and enhancing adaptive capacity provide opportunities to strengthen water resources management and plan for climate-change impacts.”

• Agriculture: “Climate disruptions to agriculture have been increasing and are projected to become more severe over this century. Some areas are already experiencing climate-related disruptions, particularly due to extreme weather events. While some U.S. regions and some types of agricultural production will be relatively resilient to climate change over the next 25 years or so, others will increasingly suffer from stresses due to extreme heat, drought, disease, and heavy downpours. From mid-century on, climate change is projected to have more negative impacts on crops and livestock across the country – a trend that could diminish the security of our food supply… Climate change effects on agriculture will have consequences for food security, both in the U.S. and globally, through changes in crop yields and food prices and effects on food processing, storage, transportation, and retailing. Adaptation measures can help delay and reduce some of these impacts.”

• Ecosystems: “Ecosystems and the benefits they provide to society are being affected by climate change. The capacity of ecosystems to buffer the impacts of extreme events like fires, floods, and severe storms is being overwhelmed. Climate change impacts on biodiversity are already being observed in alteration of the timing of critical biological events such as spring bud burst, and substantial range shifts of many species. In the longer term, there is an increased risk of species extinction. Events such as droughts, floods, wildfires, and pest outbreaks associated with climate change (for example, bark beetles in the West) are already disrupting ecosystems. These changes limit the capacity of ecosystems, such as forests, barrier beaches, and wetlands, to continue to play important roles in reducing the impacts of extreme events on infrastructure, human communities, and other valued resources… Whole-system management is often more effective than focusing on one species at a time, and can help reduce the harm to wildlife, natural assets, and human well-being that climate disruption might cause.”

• Oceans: “Ocean waters are becoming warmer and more acidic, broadly affecting ocean circulation, chemistry, ecosystems, and marine life. More acidic waters inhibit the formation of shells, skeletons, and coral reefs. Warmer waters harm coral reefs and alter the distribution, abundance, and productivity of many marine species. The rising temperature and changing chemistry of ocean water combine with other stresses, such as overfishing and coastal and marine pollution, to alter marine-based food production and harm fishing communities… In response to observed and projected climate impacts, some existing ocean policies, practices, and management efforts are incorporating climate change impacts. These initiatives can serve as models for other efforts and ultimately enable people and communities to adapt to changing ocean conditions.” 

Climate Trends in America

• Temperature: “U.S. average temperature has increased by 1.3°F to 1.9°F since record keeping began in 1895; most of this increase has occurred since about 1970. The most recent decade was the Nation’s warmest on record. Temperatures in the United States are expected to continue to rise. Because human-induced warming is superimposed on a naturally varying climate, the temperature rise has not been, and will not be, uniform or smooth across the country or over time.”

• Extreme Weather: “There have been changes in some types of extreme weather events over the last several decades. Heat waves have become more frequent and intense, especially in the West. Cold waves have become less frequent and intense across the Nation. There have been regional trends in floods and droughts. Droughts in the Southwest and heat waves everywhere are projected to become more intense, and cold waves less intense everywhere.”

• Hurricanes: “The intensity, frequency, and duration of North Atlantic hurricanes, as well as the frequency of the strongest (Category 4 and 5) hurricanes, have all increased since the early 1980s. The relative contributions of human and natural causes to these increases are still uncertain. Hurricane-associated storm intensity and rainfall rates are projected to increase as the climate continues to warm.”

• Severe Storms: “Winter storms have increased in frequency and intensity since the 1950s, and their tracks have shifted northward over the United States. Other trends in severe storms, including the intensity and frequency of tornadoes, hail, and damaging thunderstorm winds, are uncertain and are being studied intensively.”

• Precipitation: “Average U.S. precipitation has increased since 1900, but some areas have had increases greater than the national average, and some areas have had decreases. More winter and spring precipitation is projected for the northern United States, and less for the Southwest, over this century.”

• Heavy Downpours: “Heavy downpours are increasing nationally, especially over the last three to five decades. Largest increases are in the Midwest and Northeast. Increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events are projected for all U.S. regions.”

• Frost-free Season: “The length of the frost-free season (and the corresponding growing season) has been increasing nationally since the 1980s, with the largest increases occurring in the western United States, affecting ecosystems and agriculture. Across the United States, the growing season is projected to continue to lengthen.”

• Ice Melt: “Rising temperatures are reducing ice volume and surface extent on land, lakes, and sea. This loss of ice is expected to continue. The Arctic Ocean is expected to become essentially ice free in summer before mid-century.”

• Sea Level: “Global sea level has risen by about 8 inches since reliable record keeping began in 1880. It is projected to rise another 1 to 4 feet by 2100.”

• Ocean Acidification: “The oceans are currently absorbing about a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere annually and are becoming more acidic as a result, leading to concerns about intensifying impacts on marine ecosystems.”

400 ppm CO2 is too high

Bill McKibben Says No to Big Oil and Gas Companies

From a Program of Bill Moyers & Company, PBS, February 6, 2014

After the State Department issued a long-awaited environmental impact statement on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline last week, environmentalists and those opposed to the 1,179-mile pipeline have intensified their push for the Obama administration to reject the project.

This week, Bill Moyers talks with Bill McKibben, an activist who has dedicated his life to saving the planet from environmental collapse, about his hopes that Americans will collectively pressure Obama to stand up to big oil.

“Most people understand that we’re in a serious fix,” McKibben tells Moyers, “There’s nothing you can do as individuals that will really slow down this juggernaut … You can say the same thing about the challenges faced by people in the civil rights or the abolition movement, or the gay rights movement or the women’s movement. In each case, a movement arose; if we can build a movement, then we have a chance.”

IMPORTANT: See the 27 minute VIDEO of the McKibben interview here.