Canada’s Haudenosaunee say inconsistent weather is proving to be a sticky situation for maple syrup season. By Candace Maracle from CBC News • Reposted: March 231, 2023
The ideal temperature for maple sap to run is when temperatures fall below 0 C at night and rise above zero during the day.
It’s something Tehahenteh Miller grew up knowing about collecting sap to make maple syrup. Miller, who is Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) and lives in Six Nations, Ont., has been tapping his trees for over a decade.
“If the sun shines, it increases the volume considerably and it’s usually the sunny side that we tap,” said Miller.
Maple trees tapped on Six Nations. Photo: Candace Maracle/CBC
Miller said he has seen changes in the last four or five years. Warmer winter weather followed by cold snaps impedes the maples’ sap flow.
“You look around and you can see a lot of the tops of the trees are dying,” he said.
Miller said that Haudenosaunee teachings predict that once the maple tree starts dying from the top, any conservation effort may be too late to turn things around. He hasn’t tapped his trees for the past three years “to give his trees a rest” from the stress climate change has put on them.
A full bucket of maple sap. Photo: Candace Maracle/CBCSap is used in Haundenosaunee ceremony to honour the maple trees. Photo: Candace Maracle/CBCTim Johnson collects sap from buckets twice a day during the season when sap is running. Photo: Candace Maracle/CBC
Dawn Martin-Hill, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University, has researched how climate change is affecting Six Nations. She’s one of the co-authors of a 2021 report in Climate Services on observed and projected trends of climate change in Six Nations.
“What the climate change study showed here was that Six Nations was going to experience drought, flood, cycles of instability and that will impact the ability for the trees to run sap for the length that they used to,” she said.
Martin-Hill said Haudenosaunee have always understood the inter-connectedness of life.
“Our people don’t have to change a single story that we have in order to adjust to what modern science is beginning to find out and understand,” she said.
Sap drips from a newly drilled tap. Photo: Candace Maracle/CBC)
The sap that is collected from the maple tree is used in ceremony to honour the opening of the maple trees – the time of year when sap runs and can be collected to make syrup.
Origin of maple syrup
Miller said, according to Haudenosaunee teachings, after a harsh winter a Haudenosaunee village was on the verge of starvation when a young man went into the forest and sat by a tree, thinking of a solution. He noticed a squirrel climb a maple tree and lick the water droplets from a broken branch.He fashioned a small bowl from bark to collect sap where it was leaking from the broken branch. After being left out in the sun, the sap began to evaporate, making it extra sweet.
The young man drank the water and determining it was safe to consume, he told the others in the village. The maple sap nourished them and got them through winter without starving.After that, it was decided the maple tree would be honoured every year for this gift.
The Mohawk Longhouse in Six Nations held a ceremony to open the maple trees last week.
Family tradition
Maple sap must be boiled for hours to make syrup.
Mel Squire and her husband, Angus Goodleaf, collect sap on their property in Six Nations.
This is her second year tapping trees after learning from her family who have been doing it for generations.
“I think just getting older and reflecting back on my childhood and watching my grandfather do it … inspired me to get into doing it myself,” she said.
Angus Goodleaf boils sap for maple syrup. Photo: Mel Squire
They check their 20 taps daily to see how much sap has accumulated in buckets. The sap can only be stored for a few days before it must be boiled for hours.
“Forty gallons of sap gave us one gallon [of syrup],” said Squire.
“We can’t sell it. I don’t even know what I’d price it at. It’s more precious than gold at this point. So, it’s quite priceless.”
Of the Haudenosaunee tradition of tapping maple trees each spring, Miller said, “We owe [the trees] a responsibility to not just acknowledge them, but to be participatory. We’re actually practising our culture, reinforcing our culture by doing that. That’s part of our culture and it needs to be kept alive.”
By Robert Lempert, Professor of Policy Analysis, Pardee RAND Graduate School and Elisabeth Gilmore, Associate Professor of Climate Change, Technology and Policy, Carleton University via The Conversation * Reposted: March 21, 2023
The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including the synthesis report released March 20, 2023, discuss changes ahead, but they also describe how existing solutions can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help people adjust to impacts of climate change that can’t be avoided.
The problem is that these solutions aren’t being deployed fast enough. In addition to pushback from industries, people’s fear of change has helped maintain the status quo.
To slow climate change and adapt to the damage already underway, the world will have to shift how it generates and uses energy, transports people and goods, designs buildings and grows food. That starts with embracing innovation and change.
Fear of change can lead to worsening change
From the industrial revolution to the rise of social media, societies have undergone fundamental changes in how people live and understand their place in the world.
Some transformations are widely regarded as bad, including many of those connected to climate change. For example, about half the world’s coral reef ecosystems have died because of increasing heat and acidity in the oceans. Island nations like Kiribati and coastal communities, including in Louisiana and Alaska, are losing land into rising seas.Residents of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati describe the changes they’re experiencing as sea level rises.
Other transformations have had both good and bad effects. The industrial revolution vastly raised standards of living for many people, but it spawned inequality, social disruption and environmental destruction.
People often resist transformation because their fear of losing what they have is more powerful than knowing they might gain something better. Wanting to retain things as they are – known as status quo bias – explains all sorts of individual decisions, from sticking with incumbent politicians to not enrolling in retirement or health plans even when the alternatives may be rationally better.
This effect may be even more pronounced for larger changes. In the past, delaying inevitable change has led to transformations that are unnecessarily harsh, such as the collapse of some 13th-century civilizations in what is now the U.S. Southwest. As more people experience the harms of climate change firsthand, they may begin to realize that transformation is inevitable and embrace new solutions.
A mix of good and bad
The IPCC reports make clear that the future inevitably involves more and larger climate-related transformations. The question is what the mix of good and bad will be in those transformations.
If countries allow greenhouse gas emissions to continue at a high rate and communities adapt only incrementally to the resulting climate change, the transformations will be mostly forced and mostly bad.
For example, a riverside town might raise its levees as spring flooding worsens. At some point, as the scale of flooding increases, such adaptation hits its limits. The levees necessary to hold back the water may become too expensive or so intrusive that they undermine any benefit of living near the river. The community may wither away.
Riverside communities often scramble to raise levees during floods, like this one in Louisiana. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
The riverside community could also take a more deliberate and anticipatory approach to transformation. It might shift to higher ground, turn its riverfront into parkland while developing affordable housing for people who are displaced by the project, and collaborate with upstream communities to expand landscapes that capture floodwaters. Simultaneously, the community can shift to renewable energy and electrified transportation to help slow global warming.
Optimism resides in deliberate action
The IPCC reports include numerous examples that can help steer such positive transformation.
For example, renewable energy is now generally less expensive than fossil fuels, so a shift to clean energy can often save money. Communities can also be redesigned to better survive natural hazards through steps such as maintaining natural wildfire breaks and building homes to be less susceptible to burning.
Costs are falling for key forms of renewable energy and electric vehicle batteries. IPCC sixth assessment report
No one group can enact these changes alone. Everyone must be involved, including governments that can mandate and incentivize changes, businesses that often control decisions about greenhouse gas emissions, and citizens who can turn up the pressure on both.
By Caitlin Looby from the Akron Beacon Journal • Reposted: March 19, 2023
It’s the middle of March and the Great Lakes are virtually ice-free.
Ice has been far below average this year, with only 7% of the lakes covered as of last Monday — and no ice at all on Lake Erie. Lake Erie’s average ice coverage for this time of year is 40%, based on measurements over the past half-century. The lake typically freezes over the quickest and has the most ice cover because it’s the shallowest of the five Great Lakes.
But communities along Ohio’s north coast, including Cleveland, Sandusky and Port Clinton, have seen considerably less ice forming on Lake Erie in recent years.
No ice isn’t a good thing for the lakes’ ecosystem. It can even stir up dangerous waves and lake-effect snowstorms. So, what happens when the lakes are ice-free? What does it mean for the lakes’ food web? Is climate change to blame?
Little ice cover can be disastrous
This winter has already proved how dangerous lake-effect snow can be.
At the end of November, more than 6 feet of snow fell on Buffalo, New York, which sits on the shores of Lake Erie. A few weeks later on Dec. 23, more than 4 feet of snow covered the city and surrounding areas once again. The storm resulted in 44 deaths in Erie and Niagara counties, which sit on Lakes Erie and Ontario, respectively.
Cleveland and Sandusky reside on the shores of Lake Erie as well. The 2022 storm that swept the region on Dec. 23 dropped relatively little snow, only about 2-4 inches, but created dangerous conditions nonetheless.
In some places in Northeast Ohio, temperatures dropped from nearly 40 degrees to zero and below. Wind chills fueled by hurricane-force winds dragged the temperature even lower to minus 30 or even 35 below zero. This storm was the first time in almost a decade that the Cleveland Weather Forecast Office issued a blizzard warning. A 46-vehicle pileup on the Ohio Turnpike near Sandusky claimed four lives.
During stormy winter months, ice cover tempers waves. When there is low ice cover, waves can be much larger, leading to lakeshore flooding and erosion. That happened in January 2020 along Lake Michigan’s southwestern shoreline. Record high lake levels mixed with winds whipped up 15-foot waves that flooded shorelines, leading Gov. Tony Evers to declare a state of emergency for Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha counties.
And while less ice may seem like a good thing for the lakes’ shipping industry, those waves can create dangerous conditions.
The Great Lakes are losing ice with climate change
The Great Lakes have been losing ice for the past five decades, a trend that scientists say will likely continue.
Of the last 25 years, 64% had below-average ice, said Michael Notaro, the director of the Center on Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The steepest declines have been in the north, including Lake Superior, northern Lake Michigan and Huron, and in nearshore areas.
But this also comes with a lot of ups and downs, largely because warming is causing the jet stream to “meander,” said Ayumi Fujisaki Manome, a scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research at the University of Michigan who models ice cover and hazardous weather across the lakes.
There is a lot of year-to-year variability with ice cover spiking in years like 2014, 2015 and 2019 where the lakes were almost completely iced over.
No ice makes waves in the lakes’ ecosystems
A downturn in ice coverage due to climate change will likely have cascading effects on the lakes’ ecosystems.
Lake whitefish, a mainstay in the lakes’ fishing industry and an important food source for other fish like walleye, are one of the many Great Lakes fish that will be affected, said Ed Rutherford, a fishery biologist who also works at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.
Lake whitefish spawn in the fall in nearshore areas, leaving the eggs to incubate over the winter months. When ice isn’t there, strong winds and waves can stir up the sediment, reducing the number of fish that are hatched in the spring, Rutherford said.
Walleye and yellow perch also need extended winters, he said. If they don’t get enough time to overwinter in cold water, their eggs will be a lot smaller, making it harder for them to survive.
Declining ice cover on the lakes is also delaying the southward migration of dabbling ducks, a group of ducks that include mallards, out of the Great Lakes in the fall and winter, Notaro said. And if the ducks spend more time in the region it will increase the foraging pressure on inland wetlands.
Warming lakes and a loss of ice cover over time also will be coupled with more extreme rainfall, likely inciting more harmful algae blooms, said Notaro. These blooms largely form from agricultural runoff, creating thick, green mats on the lake surface that can be toxic to humans and pets.
Lakes Erie and Michigan are plagued with these blooms every summer. And now, blooms cropping up in Lake Superior for the first time are raising alarm.
“Even deep, cold Lake Superior has been experiencing significant algae blooms since 2018, which is quite atypical,” Notaro said.
There is still a big question mark on the extent of the changes that will happen to the lakes’ ecosystem and food web as ice cover continues to decline. That’s because scientists can’t get out and sample the lakes in the harsh winter months.
“Unless we can keep climate change in check … it will have changes that we anticipate and others that we don’t know about yet,” Rutherford said.
Caitlin Looby is a Report for America corps member who writes about the environment and the Great Lakes. Reach her at clooby@gannett.com or follow her on Twitter @caitlooby. Beacon Journal reporter Derek Kreider contributed to this article.
SEQUOIA NATIONAL FOREST, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 19: Smoke rises above young giant sequoia trees during prescribed pile burning on February 19, 2023 in Sequoia National Forest, California. According to the Forest Service, wildfires have destroyed nearly 20 percent of all giant sequoias in the past three years amid hazardous fuel (vegetation) buildup. The Forest Service began emergency action last year to reduce the fuels in 12 giant sequoia groves in the Sequoia National Forest, including prescribed pile burning to reduce wildfire risk. The massive trees can live for over 3,000 years and average between 180 to 250 feet in height. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Some of the tall, stately trees that have grown up in California’s Sierra Nevada are no longer compatible with the climate they live in, new research has shown.
Hotter, drier conditions driven by climate changein the mountain range have made certain regions once hospitable to conifers — such as sequoia, ponderosa pine and Douglas fir — an environmental mismatch for the cone-bearing trees.
“They were exactly where we expected them to be, kind of along the lower-elevation, warmer and drier edges of the conifer forests in the Sierras,” Avery Hill, who worked on the study as a graduate student at Stanford University, told NPR.
Although there are conifers in those areas now, Hill and other researchers suggested that as the trees die out, they’ll be replaced with other types of vegetation better suited to the environmental conditions.
The team estimated that about 20% of all Sierra Nevada conifer trees in California are no longer compatible with the climate around themand are in
The team scrutinized vegetation data dating back to the 1930s, when all Sierra Nevada conifers were growing in appropriate climate conditions. Now, four out of five do.
That change is largely due to higher temperatures and less rainfall in these lower-elevation areas, as well as human activities, such as logging, and an uptick in wildfires.
The Sierra Nevada conifers aren’t standing still. The average elevation of the trees has increased over the past 90 years, moving 112 feet upslope. According to Hill, that’s because lower-elevation conifers have died while conifers at higher elevations where the air is cooler have been able to grow.
But the conifers’ uphill trek hasn’t been able to keep pace with the dramatic increase in temperatures.
The researchers said the number of Sierra Nevada conifers incompatible with their environments could double in the next 77 years.
The new maps can inform forest conservation and management plans
But Hill, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the California Academy of Sciences, hopes that the maps he and his colleagues developed showing the state’s “zombie forests” will help shape people’s understanding of the effects of climate change.
“Conservationists know, scientists know, so many people know that ecosystems are changing and expect them to change more, and people are grappling with this,” he said.
“These maps are unique, in that you can put your finger on a point and say, ‘This area right here is expected to transition due to climate change in the near future,’ and this forces some really difficult questions about what we want this land managed for and do we try to resist these impending changes,” Hill added.
From The University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership and national design firm HGA • Reposted: March 13, 2023
The University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership and national design firm HGA present the current practice, barriers, and opportunities for use of climate projection data and climate change resilience client services.
Climate change impacts are growing every year, threatening lives, business continuity, and infrastructure—costing an average of $152.9 billion dollars per year in the U.S. alone (NOAA, 2022). Yet the Architecture and Engineering (A&E) industry still relies on historical weather data as a primary resource for performance analysis, system sizing, and other design decisions, as climate projection data are not available in the formats used by A&E codes, process guidelines, and software.
The new report “Climate Forward? How Climate Projections Are(n’t) Used to Inform Design” from the University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership (MCAP) and national interdisciplinary design firm HGA, reveals the alarming gap between the current state of A&E practice and climate science.
Currently, energy modelers most often use the Typical Meteorological Year (TMY3) dataset produced by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)— based on past median weather conditions for a given location that is sometimes more than three decades old. Our changing climate makes ‘climate normals’ less useful for designers, poorly reflecting the range, frequency, and intensity of potential future weather conditions that a building will need to withstand during its lifespan. Key systems and infrastructure globally will continue to be vulnerable unless design standards change to account for changing climate.
“We know climate change is here and the past is no longer the best predictor of the future. As we seek to make our buildings more energy efficient and ‘climate-friendly’, we must also use climate projection data to ensure our built environment is resilient to the climate of the future.” say Dr. Heidi Roop, MCAP’s Director and a report author. “This report highlights that there is work to do by the climate science community and A&E professionals to ensure we are designing for climate resilience. Clients and professional societies also play a key role in driving a holistic, forward-looking approach to design of the buildings and infrastructure we all rely on.”
The research makes a decisive case for the development and promotion of industry standards, mandates (including building codes), guidance and training for using climate projections in A&E applications. It also articulates the critical role for boundary organizations and climate data developers to build partnerships and capacities to bridge this gap alongside A&E professionals.
“Climate Forward?” also addresses the missed opportunity to extend the life of our buildings. Today’s sustainable design efforts focus primarily on climate change mitigation—that of reducing carbon emissions. In contrast, MCAP and HGA’s research shows how the industry should also shift to design for climate change adaptation—which are a broader set of design measures that factor in the projected climate over the lifespan of the building and systems.
Lead author of the report, Ariane Laxo, HGA’s Director of Sustainability said, “There is tremendous potential in climate resilience services—professional services related to climate change resilience and/or adaptation using climate projection data.” She continued, “identifying the right data formats and timescales to factor in the projected climate over the lifespan of the building, landscape, and systems, will dramatically change the way we design to create a more resilient future. Industry associations need to create standards for how to integrate these data into practice, so we are using consistent methodologies.”
The climate is changing rapidly. Action must be taken now, and must involve substantive collaboration with climate data developers, boundary organizations, A&E associations and professionals, policy makers, building code & standards bodies, higher education institutions, and any organization that hires A&E professionals. The report concludes with recommended actions that could close the gap between climate science and the A&E professionals who are designing buildings and infrastructure that must withstand climate change.
Report authors: Ariane Laxo, HGA, Brenda Hoppe, University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership, Heidi Roop, University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership, Patrick Cipriano, HGA and University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership
About MCAP
The University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership (MCAP) is a partnership among university, public, non-profit, and private sector groups organized to support Minnesota’s ability to adapt to a changing climate. MCAP conducts cutting-edge climate and adaptation research, champions climate leadership, develops the next generation of adaptation professionals, and advances implementation of effective, equitable adaptation actions across sectors, communities, and levels of government. Learn more about MCAP at climate.umn.edu or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.
About HGA HGA is a national interdisciplinary design firm committed to making a positive, lasting impact for our clients and communities through research-based, holistic solutions. We believe that great design requires a sense of curiosity—forming deep insight into our clients, their contexts, and the human condition. We are a collective of over 1,000 architects, engineers, interior designers, planners, researchers, and strategists. Our practice spans multiple markets, including healthcare, corporate, cultural, education, local and federal government, and science and technology. Visit HGA.com or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
How local leaders can partner with financial institutions to support frontline communities. By Erin Ceynar & Samantha Ender from Greenzbiz.com • Reposted: March 1, 2023
Image courtesy of Wells Fargo.
This article is sponsored by Wells Fargo and written by Erin Ceynar and Samantha Ender from the Tides Foundation — a Wells Fargo Climate and Social Justice Fund partner.
Climate change isn’t a problem for the future. It’s happening right now. In 2022 alone, the United States endured wildfires, hurricanes, extreme flooding and decreased crop production.
Despite this real and growing threat, the global community is not moving quickly enough to address climate change. The 2015 Paris Agreement aims to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, a U.N. report released in October notes that without drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the world is on track to warm by an average of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels by the end of the century.
Climate change affects every person on the planet, but frontline communities — those that inhabit areas that face the worst consequences of climate change — are more vulnerable than most. Small fractions of a degree can affect these communities, leading to infrastructure failures, food and water scarcity, and worsening health outcomes. Rather than addressing these imminent dangers to human lives, however, most climate change relief funding focuses on our relatively slow transition to a low-carbon future.
In 2021, the United States and Canada received $810 million in foundation funding for climate change mitigation. Most of those mitigation dollars were directed towards lowering emissions and improving carbon capture in sectors such as forest protection, overlooking the effects of climate change on American communities experiencing floods, landslides and drought.
In New Orleans, devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, extreme rainfall is an ongoing threat. The challenging natural landscape, combined with disinvestment in infrastructure, leaves the community vulnerable to dangerous flooding. In particular, heavy rain in the city’s 7th Ward significantly affects low-income residents of color who live in low-lying areas where affordable housing is more accessible. The flooding also drives toxic contaminants into the soil, producing respiratory and gastrointestinal health concerns.
The Partnership for Resilient Communities (PRC), a project of the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC), supports community leaders of color in strengthening resilient communities. New Orleans community activist Angela Chalk, executive director of PRC partner Healthy Community Services, partnered with ISC to work alongside residents and install rain gardens at their homes to minimize flooding in their neighborhood. The gardens hold water, easing the burden on the city’s old drainage system. This attainable and impactful solution demonstrates how community-driven work can educate residents about climate change while also expanding resources that deliver results.
The rain gardens highlight what we can achieve when frontline communities have a seat at the decision-making table. They intimately understand the challenges they face, the resources they can bring to bear and the solutions that will be successful and durable. In other words, engaging with community leaders provides invaluable context, helping financial partners avoid pitfalls that would otherwise remain hidden.
These grassroots and community-led approaches present homegrown solutions to promote equitable development. Climate interventions that target community-identified problems and give communities decision-making power are more likely to be both successful and sustainable. The goal is to uplift community-driven efforts to create a more resilient, sustainable and vibrant future. However, a lack of access to capital and technical expertise can hamstring these efforts.
Frontline communities need genuine partners who can offer financial support while allowing the community to lead. Financial partners shouldn’t shy away from this approach, falsely assuming that it is slower, less efficient, and less impactful than the usual top-down model.
To achieve climate justice for disinvested communities, financial partners can adopt a cooperative playbook:
Partner with communities from the outset.
Work with community leaders to identify challenges, opportunities and resources.
Work with community leaders to co-develop solutions.
Support on-the-ground, community-designed programs.
Provide the expertise, training and technical resources needed to strengthen community organizations.
Remain committed and engaged for the long term.
Following these steps drastically increases a grant’s impact, strengthens civil society and ensures that the community’s perspective is respected and centered.
As climate change intensifies, the coming years will challenge us all. Resilience demands committed partnerships with funders who have a shared vision of a prosperous and just world. Enduring change is possible when we invest in our communities and find ways to offer support that goes beyond checkbooks. Through these partnerships, we can ensure a robust and lasting impact.
By Mary Mazzoni from Triple pundit • Reposted: February 17, 2023
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is moving the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund forward and making good on its recently renewed commitments to environmental and climate justice.
Created by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the Fund aims to mobilize public and private capital to reduce emissions and combat air pollution across the U.S., with a focus on low-income and historically marginalized communities.
As a first step, the Fund will host two grant competitions worth $27 billion, the EPA announced in its initial guidance last week. A $7 billion competition will award grants to 60 organizations providing clean technologies like community solar and energy storage within U.S. communities. A second will disburse $20 billion to anywhere from two to 15 nonprofit lenders, including community-based lenders and green banks that provide financial assistance for low- and zero-emission technologies in low-income communities.
“The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund will unlock historic investments to combat the climate crisis and deliver results for the American people, especially those who have too often been left behind,” said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan, the first Black man to head the agency, in a statement. “With $27 billion from President Biden’s investments in America, this program will mobilize billions more in private capital to reduce pollution and improve public health, all while lowering energy costs, increasing energy security, creating good-paying jobs and boosting economic prosperity in communities across the country.”
Those are pretty big words, but a host of environmental and climate justice advocates agree about the Fund’s promise. “This is a huge step,” Adam Kent, Sarah Dougherty and Douglass Sims of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s People and Communities Program, wrote of the Fund in a blog. “It has the potential to not only improve lives, but ultimately transform ‘green’ investments into ‘mainstream’ investments by catalyzing far, far more than $27 billion of investments and building a more equitable clean energy future.”
$27 billion and beyond: Mobilizing funds for climate justice in U.S. communities
An estimated 1 out of every 25 premature deaths in the U.S. can be linked to air pollution — more than traffic accidents and shootings combined. People of color and low-income people are more likely to be exposed to high levels of air pollution and as such are at greater risk of premature death. These communities also face outsized impacts from climate change.
Addressing environmental and climate justice issues like these is a key focus in President Joe Biden’s plan to leverage federal funds to advance racial equity. Launched during Biden’s first week in office, the Justice40 Initiative looks to direct 40 percent of the overall benefits of certain federal investments to disadvantaged communities that are underserved and overburdened by pollution.
The Fund will align with Justice40 and take things a step further. “Although the law requires that just over half of Fund investments target low-income and disadvantaged communities, EPA will aim to prioritize investments in these communities throughout the entire $27 billion program,” report Kent, Dougherty and Sims of the NRDC. “This decision could transform how funding flows to underserved communities, and Fund investments can support critical, life-improving projects that otherwise would not have moved forward.”
The $7 billion in grants for clean technologies has the potential to scale transformative solutions like community solar and energy storage that can decarbonize underserved communities while reducing the burden of air pollution. The idea is that a cash infusion from the EPA can help recipient organizations grow and deploy even more community-based projects in pursuit of climate justice, similarly to how a $456 million federal loan helped Tesla become the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer.
“These projects have the potential to create local benefits including savings on energy costs, reliability improvements, and improved air quality, as well as reducing climate pollution,” said Heather McTeer Toney, vice president of community engagement for the Environmental Defense Fund, in a statement.
Further, the EPA’s decision to diversify its portfolio of nonprofit lenders — rather than investing in a single entity — will allow funds to reach more communities through institutions with proven track records of community-based and green lending. “This is a sound decision, as NRDC and many of our environmental justice and community-based partners have pushed EPA to select multiple recipients as a critical feature of Fund implementation,” Kent, Dougherty and Sims wrote.
The next step
Both grant competitions are expected to launch in early summer. Organizations will have two to three months to submit their applications, and the EPA plans to make awards by late September of next year.
The architecture of the Fund is based on input from state, local and Tribal governments, community financing institutions, environmental justice organizations, industry groups, and labor and environmental finance experts, the EPA said — and advocates are calling on the agency to keep the engagement up as it moves to start disbursing grants.
“This is a positive step toward making the just transition affordable and accessible to those most in need,” Jessica Garcia, climate finance policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, said in a statement. “The EPA should continue collecting feedback from the directly impacted communities that this fund aims to serve and developing robust criteria for its applicants to achieve its dual directive of protecting communities from climate impacts and providing them financial tools to safeguard their future. ”
Our overheating planet needs social change more than it needs to avoid the physical tipping points we’ve come to associate with climate disaster, according to a new study from the University of Hamburg. The researchers note that while progress has been made in numerous arenas — such as citizen action, fossil fuel divestment, and implementation of U.N. and legislative policies to curb emissions — consumption patterns and corporate behavior remain prime barriers in the fight against climate change.
Ultimately, one is likely the product of the other, with consumers reacting to the constant onslaught of advertising and social media influence designed to keep them buying with little regard for the real consequences for the climate.
Nowhere is this more obvious than with the push to replace internal combustion engines (ICE) with electric vehicles (EVs) instead of building a nationwide infrastructure of public transportation — as Curbed’s Alissa Walker detailed in her extensive report last month, “An EV In Every Driveway Is an Environmental Disaster”.
“A green future, the story goes, looks a lot like today — it’s just that the cars on the road make pit stops at charging stations instead of gas stations,” Walker wrote. “But a one-for-one swap like that — an EV to take the place of your gas guzzler — is a disaster of its own making: a resource-intensive, slow crawl toward a future of sustained high traffic deaths, fractured neighborhoods, and infrastructural choices that prioritize roads over virtually everything else.”
Truly, a low-carbon future requires systemic change, with society organized not around the personal passenger vehicle but around community and getting the most out of transportation resources through integrated public transit. Swapping out ICE vehicles for EVs does nothing to curb the overconsumption problem. If anything, it intensifies it — with many consumers under the mistaken impression that prematurely replacing their gas-powered car or truck somehow helps the environment.
If anything, staying the course on cars represents a refusal to allow social change, with governments and automakers working together to keep the industry going strong in spite of the environmental and social costs.
And while consumers are consistently blamed for their desires, there is no denying that many of those wants and needs are manufactured by corporate interests and used to sell everything from shiny new vehicles to fast fashion. Would Americans really be so eager to shell out an average of almost $6,000 annually per household on loan payments and car insurance alone if not for the incessant advertising campaigns convincing us that we’ll find freedom, or love, or whatever else we desire in our next brand new car?
Would young people really care about being seen in the same outfit twice if the fashion world didn’t shove the message down their throats that it’s a bad thing? Would fast fashion — with garments that notoriously fall apart after just a few washes — have much of a market if clothing companies didn’t pay influencers to a model a one and done lifestyle?
Putting the onus of change on consumers, even as corporate interests invest in convincing them to do more of the same, is precisely why social change is not forthcoming at the rate that is needed. Indeed, while Americans say they are willing to alter their lifestyles to curb climate change, those who rely on their overconsumption aren’t going to give up trying to sell them more than they need any time soon.
The study, titled Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook, concurs with the U.N.’s determination that humanity will not be able to keep global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius as set out in the Paris Agreement on climate change. The researchers emphasize the need for social change now versus the current focus on individual physical tipping points like melting ice sheets that won’t have much effect on temperatures until 2050.
“The question of what is not just theoretically possible, but also plausible — that is, can realistically be expected — offers us new points of departure,” researcher Anita Engels of the University of Hamberg said in a statement. “If we fail to meet the climate goals, adapting to the impacts will become all the more important.”
Unfortunately, corporate and billionaire interests appear more than willing to force humanity to adapt as they sacrifice the habitability of much of the planet in order to continue business- and consumption-patterns-as-usual.
For companies aiming to become part of the solution on climate change, the Outlook recommends moving beyond the facility level (Scope 1 emissions) to address emissions across the value chain (Scope 3) — particularly how companies influence and interact with their stakeholders. If governments can come together transnationally, and non-government actors like companies take action against climate change within their entire scope of influence, these crucial social tipping points could come closer into reach.
By Navin Singh Khadka, Environment correspondent • BBC World Service • Reposted: February 6, 2023
We are losing wetlands three times faster than forests, according to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. When it comes to restoring them to their natural state there is one hero with remarkable powers – the beaver.
Wetlands store water, act as a carbon sink, and are a source of food. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands says they do more for humanity than all other terrestrial ecosystems – and yet they are disappearing at an alarming rate.
The main problems are agricultural and urban expansion, as well as droughts and higher temperatures brought about by climate change.
But if you have a river and a beaver it may be possible to halt this process.
These furry sharp-toothed rodents build dams on waterways to create a pond, inside which they build a “lodge” where they can protect themselves from predators.
Their technique is to chew tree trunks until they fall, and to use the trunk and branches as building materials, along with stones at the base, and mud and plants to seal the dam’s upstream wall.
The dam causes flooding, slows down the flow of water and keeps it on the landscape longer.
“This transforms simple streams into thriving wetland ecosystems,” says Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University.
“The amount of food and water available in their wetlands makes them ideal habitat for many different species. That’s part of why beavers are what’s known as a keystone species.”
Image caption, Beavers chew the base of selected trees until they fall
Over the past 50 years, Canada and several states across the US have reintroduced beavers. Initially this was done to restore beaver numbers, after they were hunted nearly to extinction for their fur and meat in the 19th Century.
But the restoration of wetland ecosystems has also brought huge biodiversity benefits, including the return of many species of frogs, fish and invertebrates.
A study by Finnish researchers in 2018 found that ponds engineered by beavers contained nearly twice as many mammal species than other ponds. Weasels, otters and even moose were all more prevalent.
“Beaver wetlands are pretty unique,” says Nigel Willby, professor of freshwater science at University of Stirling.
“Anyone can make a pond, but beavers make amazingly good ponds for biodiversity, partly because they are shallow, littered with dead wood and generally messed about with by beavers feeding on plants, digging canals, repairing dams, building lodges etc.
“Basically, beavers excel at creating complex wetland habitats that we’d never match.”
Eager beavers
Dams built by beavers can be up to 5m high, and the largest one so far recorded – in Alberta, Canada – is 850m long
While beavers chop down trees, the tree stumps often sprout new shoots instead of dying – effectively the beavers carry out coppicing
The North American beaver and the Eurasian beaver were confirmed to be separate species in the 1970s
A healthy wetland ecosystem also sequesters large amounts of carbon, and by acting as a sponge and soaking up floodwaters it can soften the impacts of climate change, scientists say.
Wetlands store water during wet seasons and release it slowly during drought episodes.
“When you enter a period of drought, all the plants living in a floodplain rely on stored water in the soil to keep green and stay healthy. If they don’t have much water to access they will start to wilt and wither and dry out,” says Dr Fairfax.
Image caption, A beaver dam in Wyoming, USA
She and her team studied 10 different wildfires in five US states between 2000 and 2021 and found in each one beavers and their ecosystem engineering reliably created and preserved wetland habitat, even during megafire events.
“Beaver wetlands have a lot of stored water, so plants in them don’t really feel droughts, they stay green and lush. And when wildfire came through, they were not burnt and we found that they stayed well-watered.”
But experts say beavers are only part of the solution to restore wetlands. Other necessary measures include planting woodland along the banks of lakes and rivers, and restoration of peatland and saltmarsh, says Prof Willby.
And crucially, beavers are only found naturally in North America and Eurasia.
Introducing them to inappropriate places can be counter-productive. This was demonstrated in Argentina and Chile, where beavers introduced from North America in the 1940s multiplied exponentially in the absence of predators, resulting in severe forest loss.
The Global Wetlands Outlook published in 2021 by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands found the most widespread wetland deterioration in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Image caption, Lake Chad is a shadow of its former self
The drastic shrinking of Lake Chad, closer to the border of Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria in West Africa is one of the most striking examples.
It has shrunk by 90% since the 1960s mainly due to a steep rise in water demand from a rapidly growing population, unplanned irrigation and now climate-change-induced drought.
“Conflicts, mainly between farmers and cattle-rearers, over the limited remaining water of the lake was already there and now drought is further drying it up and fighting over the water has gone worse” says Adenike Oladosu, a wetland conservation activist in Nigeria.
Image caption, The Rio Negro is the largest wetland protected under the 1971 Ramsar Convention on Wetlands
Barron Joseph Orr, lead scientist with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, says wetlands are often resilient ecosystems, but prolonged droughts now pose a growing threat.
“Climate change projections show increased drought severity in drylands that could compromise wetland resilience and reduce important habitat services,” he says.
In other areas too, drought can damage wetlands, but the beaver can help protect them. There have already been more than 100 successful reintroduction projects in North America and northern Europe.
In Europe the population is believed to have tripled in the last 20 years, according to Prof Willby, with beavers now re-established in most European countries. Sweden, Germany and Austria led the way, according to the Natural History Museum, but the UK followed in the early 2000s.
“The early motivation for bringing beavers back to the UK was mostly about playing a part in restoring a declining species to its native range,” Prof Willby says.
“But the value it could have as a keystone species for other biodiversity and in natural flood management was gaining a lot more traction, and these are the arguments usually put forward now to support the local releases of translocated animals or fenced trials happening in many places.”
A fire burned in a national forest in southern New Mexico.Credit…USDA Forest Service, via Associated Press
By Philip Higuera, Professor of Fire Ecology, University of Montana; Jennifer Balch, Associate Professor of Geography and Director, Earth Lab, University of Colorado Boulder; Maxwell Cook,Ph.D. Student, Dept. of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder and Natasha Stavros, Director of the Earth Lab Analytics Hub, University of Colorado Boulder via The Conversation * Reposted: February 5, 2023
It can be tempting to think that the recent wildfire disasters in communities across the West were unlucky, one-off events, but evidence is accumulating that points to a trend.
In a new study, we found a 246% increase in the number of homes and structures destroyed by wildfires in the contiguous Western U.S. between the past two decades, 1999-2009 and 2010-2020.
This trend is strongly influenced by major fires in 2017, 2018 and 2020, including destructive fires in Paradise and Santa Rosa, California, and in Colorado, Oregon and Washington. In fact, in nearly every Western state, more homes and buildings were destroyed by wildfire over the past decade than the decade before, revealing increasing vulnerability to wildfire disasters.
What explains the increasing home and structure loss?
Entire neighborhoods were reduced to ash when a wildfire spread into Santa Rosa, California, in 2017. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
As fire scientists, we have spent decades studying the causes and impacts of wildfires, in both the recent and more distant past. It’s clear that the current wildfire crisis in the Western U.S. has human fingerprints all over it. In our view, now more than ever, humanity needs to understand its role.
Wildfires are becoming more destructive
From 1999 to 2009, an average of 1.3 structures were destroyed for every 4 square miles burned (1,000 hectares, or 10 square kilometers). This average more than doubled to 3.4 during the following decade, 2010-2020.
Nearly every Western state lost more structures for every square mile burned, with the exception of New Mexico and Arizona.
But among wildfires that do burn homes or other structures, humans play a disproportionate role – 76% over the past two decades were started by unplanned human-related ignitions, including backyard burning, downed power lines and campfires. The area burned from human-related ignitions rose 51% between 1999-2009 and 2010-2020.
This is important because wildfires started by human activities or infrastructure have vastly different impacts and characteristics that can make them more destructive.
As a result, of all the wildfires that destroy structures in the West, human-caused events typically destroy over 10 times more structures for every square mile burned, compared to lighting-caused events.
The December 2021 Marshall Fire that destroyed more than 1,000 homes and buildings in the suburbs near Boulder, Colorado, fit this pattern to a T. Powerful winds sent the fire racing through neighborhoods and vegetation that was unusually dry for late December.
As human-caused climate change leaves vegetation more flammable later into each year, the consequences of accidental ignitions are magnified.
The amount of flammable vegetation has increased in many regions because of an absence of burning due to emphasizing fire suppression, preventing Indigenous fire stewardship and a fear of fire in any context, well exemplified by Smokey Bear. Putting out every fire quickly removes the positive, beneficial effects of fires in Western ecosystems, including clearing away hazardous fuels so future fires burn less intensely.
How to reduce risk of destructive wildfires
The good news is that people have the ability to affect change, now. Preventing wildfire disasters necessarily means minimizing unplanned human-related ignitions. And it requires more than Smokey Bear’s message that “only you can prevent forest fires.” Infrastructure, like downed power lines, has caused some of the deadliest wildfires in recent years.
Actions to reduce risk will vary, since how people live and how wildfires burn vary widely across the West.
States with large tracts of land with little development, like Idaho and Nevada, can accommodate widespread burning, largely from lighting ignition, with little structure loss.
Climate change remains the elephant in the room. Left unaddressed, warmer, drier conditions will exacerbate challenges of living with wildfires. And yet we can’t wait. Addressing climate change can be paired with reducing risks immediately to live more safely in an increasingly flammable West.
The Little Sable Lighthouse on Lake Michigan. Many of the legal diversions of water tap Lake Michigan. Photo: MI PR
From Michigan Radio | By Lester Graham • Published February 2, 2023
This week a nationwide Associated Press story looked at the possibility of pumping water from the Mississippi River to the drought-stricken West. That might sound familiar. For years, people in the Great Lakes region have been wary of those dry states looking at diverting water from the Great Lakes.
The cost to pump water that far would be enormous, as Michigan Radio’s Mark Brush reported in 2015. It would require hundreds of miles of large pipes. Since much of the distance would be uphill — across at least one mountain range — many new power plants would be needed to power the pumping stations along the way. In the past, it was believed the cost of that water would astronomical.
With years-long droughts in Western states, some areas are desperate for water. And when you’re desperate you might be tempted to spend astronomical amounts. The thinking is pretty simple: If the Great Lakes have so much water and we have so little, doesn’t it make sense to give us access?
“I think that’s very intuitive to people,” said University of Michigan professor Richard Rood. He studies climate change and its effects.
But the Great Lakes states have an agreement that bans diverting water from the lakes. The Great Lakes Compact was approved partly because they were concerned about diversions closer to home. Towns straddling or just outside the basin wanted access to the water. The Great Lakes Compact bans water diversions in most cases. And even if a diversion is approved, it takes a unanimous vote from all eight Great Lakes states.
Climate change and its effects are challenging all our notions about controlling water. Economic and political pressures are building.
“I believe that once those stresses get high enough, that really all treaties, all things that have been done by humans will be up for negotiation,” Rood said.
Climate change effects are happening sooner and causing challenges that are catching policymakers unprepared.
The water levels of the Great Lakes is a good example. The lakes have always had a cycle of high levels and then low levels. But the much quicker water-level changes, along with higher highs and lower lows, are new.
When water levels get extremely high as they have been in recent years, there aren’t a lot of mechanisms to lower the level. There’s no pressure valve.
“I feel as if one of the most important things to do to anticipate climate change for this region is to start to seriously think about water and water management associated with the Great Lakes,” Rood said.
He did not specifically say that the excess water could or should be pumped elsewhere. But all the tools and all the rules regarding the Great Lakes could be subject to unprecedented economic and political pressure if officials are not prepared.
Rood says they need to start looking at things anew.
“I think all of those compacts, all the agreements, any engineering assets that are currently available were designed for an old climate. And when they were considering the new climate, I don’t think that they actually considered how quickly the climate is changing.”
As soda consumption has dropped in the West, companies are making an effort to woo new customers in other places. This Coke bottle ad is in Mozambique. Photo: Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images
That’s a question Coca-Cola and other soda makers are wrestling with as soda drinking has waned in U.S. and European markets.
In the 2010s, Coke made a big push into rural parts of lower income countries to sell more soda. So they made smaller, more durable bottles – a 1-cup serving size that could be sold more cheaply and last longer on the shelves.
They built solar-powered coolers that allowed sellers to keep Coke bottles cold in places off the electrical grid – and offer mobile phone-charging to their customers.
And they launched “splash bars” – small businesses run by women that sold shots of Coke, Fanta and other Coca-Cola products for as low as 7 U.S. cents a serving to make the beverage affordable to everyone.
Eduardo J. Gómez is the author of the new book Junk Food Politics: How Beverage and Fast Food Industries Are Reshaping Emerging Economies. Photo: Eduardo J. Gómez
The company presented this strategy as a win-win – they benefited because their product was becoming more available in remote areas and female entrepreneurs had a new way to earn a living.
That’s a story that Eduardo J. Gómez tells in his new book. As he points out, Coke’s characterization of a win-win isn’t universally embraced.
Gómez, director of the Institute of Health Policy and Politics at Lehigh University, says Coca-Cola is one of many junk food companies – fast-food giants like McDonald’s and KFC – who are targeting “emerging economies” – countries where income is on the rise along with trade with wealthier nations.
In these countries, many people see the ability to buy so-called junk food – not just soda but packaged chips and candies and fast food from chains – as a sign they’re made it. And the junk food manufacturers try to put a positive face on their campaignsto expand their audience. They forge partnerships with local governments to fight hunger and poverty – even as the rising consumption of junk food leads to soaring rates of obesity and diabetes.
In his new book, Junk Food Politics: How Beverage and Fast Food Industries Are Reshaping Emerging Economies, Gómez describes a two-way street, where industry and political leaders work together to launch well-meaning social programs – but also skirt regulations that would harm industry’s profits. The result, Gómez says, is that junk food industries thrive in low resource countries at the expense of children and the poor, who develop long-term health problems from consuming sugar-laden, ultra-processed foods.
NPR spoke with Gómez about junk food barges, soda taxes and why healthy eating campaigns aren’t cutting it against ads for candy and fried chicken. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity:
Let’s start with an easy question. What is junk food?
Johns Hopkins University Press
I define junk food as highly ultra-processed fast foods, from KFC to burgers, candies, confectionery, ice cream. Junk food is also Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Mountain Dew – high-sugar, carbonated soda drinks.
What role does junk food play in lower- and middle-income countries?
There’s a proliferation of these junk foods now, not only in cities but in rural communities in India, in Mexico, even into the Brazilian Amazon.
In the emerging economies, these foods that were not [previously] accessible suddenly became very accessible in the 1990s or early 2000s.
We’re seeing [a vast and rapid] infiltration of these foods because of what I call “fear and opportunity.” “Fear” that industries have of losing market [share] in Western nations, and “opportunity” because there’s a [growing] middle class in these emerging economies that are eager to purchase them.
What is junk food politics?
Junk food politics is a two-way street. It’s when [junk food] industries influence politics and society so they can avoid regulations that will impact their profitability, such as taxes on junk foods and regulations on marketing and sales.
We often think industry is to blame. But governments are also to blame [because political leaders partner with industry on their own political agendas – which gives industry clout to undermine policies that would cut their profits].
What’s a good example of junk food politics in action?
In Brazil, for example, you have the rise of industry groups, [like the Brazilian Food Industry Association] that were very, very influential in lobbying the congress and infiltrating national agencies that are working on regulations [like advertising restrictions for junk food]. They’re engaging in partnerships [with governments and communities where] they can be perceived as a solution to the problems [of obesity and diabetes] by, for instance, helping to improve the [sharing] of nutritional information. They’re building legitimacy and avoiding costly regulations.
At the same time, [Brazil’s] President Lula [in his prior term] had a famous anti-hunger campaign. And Lula worked with Nestlé to strengthen this program and went as far as creating an office within his presidential palace to partner with industries that wanted to contribute to this anti-hunger program. And so that was a strategic, two-way partnership that benefited industry and benefited the government.
Of course, President Lula’s intentions were admirable in alleviating hunger. But perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to partner with companies that produce a lot of these ultra-processed foods, because it indirectly legitimizes the company. It amplifies the popularity of their products and their harmful consequences to health.
As low-resource countries rise in wealth, rates of obesity and diabetes also tend to rise. What is the scope of the problem? Why does it happen?
The incidence of childhood obesity is growing much faster in developing countries [than in the West]. [Rates of] type 2 diabetes among adolescents are extremely high in India and China and Mexico.
The rural poor are also becoming obese and getting diabetes. This is something we don’t normally assume. In India, for example, in the 1990s and early 2000s, obesity was seen as a “disease of luxury.” It was perceived that only people with status and money that could go to fast food establishments were having this problem. For many years the government didn’t do anything because they perceived [growing rates of diabetes and obesity]as affecting a small minority of the population.
But now, it’s become a general issue because of the increased access to junk foods.
How has access increased? How did junk foods go from being concentrated in cities to being common food items in rural places?
[Junk food distribution]started in cities, and over time they [expand] out to other areas of the country. In Brazil, for a while, Nestlé had these large blue Nestlé boats that traveled throughout the Amazon and distributed candy and cookies throughout the Amazon. [The “junk food barges,” as critics called them, have stopped]. In rural India, there are shops where people pay for one small shot of Coca-Cola while getting their phones charged.
In every country, junk food is something that’s voluntarily bought. It’s voluntarily eaten. So why are programs that encourage healthy eating and daily exercise and nutrition labeling not enough to convince people to avoid it?
Of course we want people to have nutritional information – we want people to know more, and we want them to know what they’re eating. And there’s growing commitment and success on better food labels. Chile, for example, has introduced more effective food labels – on products high in salt, sugar and fat, they have adopted these black octagon images that are on the food products – that have rippled out through the Americas.
But people are always flooded with marketing and access [to processed foods]. Even when you have this knowledge, there are incentives for you to eat these products that are readily available and less healthy.
What I hear you saying is that healthy eating and exercise campaigns focus on the individual, but poor health and nutrition are rooted in bigger, systemic problems.
Yes, absolutely. Nutritional information is very important, but it’s insufficient. We need to address socioeconomic factors, marketing factors, all these things that play into [making junk foods an easy, accessible choice].
You say governments in low-resource countries have made some progress on taxing junk foods and improving the labeling. What else do you think needs to happen?
Noneof these governments have committed to restricting advertising. [Countries have, instead, relied on voluntary pledges from companies to refrain from marketing unhealthy foods to children.] In a lot of these countries, there are no firm laws on what can be sold in schools. And even when they have laws or rules that prohibit the sale of junk foods in schools, they are not effectively being enforced.
There’s a paradox: While countries [such as Mexico, Brazil, India and Indonesia] have done a great job of increasing nutritional awareness, obesity and diabetes is still skyrocketing. And that’s because governments are doing a little bit on the fringes but not really getting to the heart of the problem. They’re not taking on these industries through regulations to sales and advertising.
What does junk food politics cost society?
There’s an extremely high cost to society, mainly from the health consequences. If you develop type 2 diabetes as a consequence of high sugar intake, it has a tremendous impact on your quality of life. Argentina, for example, has seen a crisis in the affordability of insulin. In the context of global universal health care, we don’t pay enough attention to ensuring that the poor do not go broke in getting the medicines that they need to address their high blood pressure, their [blood] sugar.
What’s the solution? What can cut into the influence that junk food politics has on public health?
The solution is having a government that is committed to ensuring the health of all of society. One that provides activists and communities with a voice that is equal to, or exceeds, the voice of industries within government. One that has no fear of taking on the powerful industries and creating regulations that protect vulnerable populations – especially children and the poor – over the interests of major corporations.
And the solution, too, is our work in communities as researchers and as community members, to raise the awareness about the importance of good nutrition and exercise, and to increase awareness about the need for access to healthier foods.
And just wondering if climate change will play any role?
That’s the topic of my next book – climate change and malnutrition.
And your thesis is that with the changing climate …
… the availability of healthy foods becomes increasingly scarce.
The late comic George Carlin once said, “You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge.”
A recent assessment of the educational background of world leaders underscores Carlin’s quip, and it provides at least one explanation for global leaders’ consistent inaction regarding climate change: They all went to the same schools.
The new project by youth campaign group Mock COP found that the 30 top universities in the world have not fostered the leadership skills and civic engagement necessary for our world leaders to navigate the impending ecological crisis.
Entitled “1.5 Degrees,” referencing the solemn recommendation from climate scientists that the planet must not warm beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius to prevent catastrophe, the project demonstrates that current world leaders are birds of a feather — an idle feather at that.
Just as Carlin said, the converging interests of world leaders — who share common backgrounds, educations, worldviews, priorities and goals — has resulted in an informal conspiracy of inertia.
Top universities failed leaders, and leaders fail us
“The people with the privilege to study at the so-called ‘top’ universities, and go on to become key decision-makers across society, are being educated at institutions that do not act in the public good and do not ensure their graduates are prepared to lead a more just and sustainable future,” the 1.5 Degrees website reads.
The project includes a ranking that grades the world’s top universities on how their engineering, law, economics, politics and health courses, which are traditionally chosen by decision-makers, align with the actions needed to tackle the climate crisis.
The ranking of top universities includes Yale, Cambridge, Oxford and Stanford Universities, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Imperial College London. No institution received a favorable grade. MIT, as well as Beijing’s Tsinghua and Peking Universities, scored the worst at preparing their graduates for a low-carbon future.
The team of young activists at Mock COP ultimately concluded that the most educated among us are often the worst enablers of climate destruction. They further found that critical courses pertaining to environmental citizenship are “influenced by large corporates working against the advice of the world’s leading climate scientists.”
By and large, leaders around the world are consistent in their approach to climate change — they don’t approach it at all. This can’t come as a surprise, though, once the common education factor is acknowledged. For example, Mock COP found that 20 current heads of state attended Harvard University. These schools shape their students’ worldviews, so if world leaders all went to the same few top universities, it is no wonder that they are acting in lockstep.
“World leaders consistently let us down at conferences like Davos, where they have the opportunity to create real, lasting change,” said Josh Tregale, a mechanical engineering student and Mock COP campaign coordinator, in a statement — referring to the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting earlier this month. “Had our leading decision makers undertaken university courses which effectively taught the facts of the climate crisis and instilled sustainable thinking, then they would understand the urgency and act accordingly. Instead they are uneducated on the facts and unprepared for climate leadership.”
This all adds up to world leaders are well-meaning and inept at best — and ill-intentioned and adept at worst. Neither is very reassuring, but now that the issue has been identified, Mock COP hopes to influence change.
Youth organizers at Mock COP push for curriculum reform to tackle climate change
Mock COP hopes this project will serve to influence curriculum reform and create more of an emphasis on civic duty and environmental engagement at these top universities. If the most exclusive and accomplished institutions begin to prioritize this sort of education, the rest of academia should follow suit.
The team expects this information to help climate-minded young people decide where to study, as many students may think twice about attending these top institutions after Mock COP’s report.
The planet is not dying from ignorant people making mistakes. It is dying from self-interested, highly educated people making deliberate decisions that prioritize profits over planet. It is time to start teaching the people who have the power to save the planet that saving the planet is not only in their best interest — it’s in their job description.
How a ‘blizzard of false information’ undermines the threat of climate change
Atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon, shown here at a research station in the Antarctic in the mid-1980s, remembers being laughed at by colleagues when she first presented her research on the cause of the thinning ozone layer. Photo: Submitted by Susan Solomon
If you’re over 30, you likely remember a time when there was a lot of hand-wringing and furrowed brows over the ozone hole and skin cancer, as well as the threat of acid rain destroying ecosystems.
In the 1980s and ’90s, those global environmental crises created buzz and grabbed headlines, but in the decades that followed, the world turned its attention to another threat: climate change.
Yet the success stories of how those threats were tackled — through the co-operation of scientists, policy-makers and the public — are often overlooked, if not outright denied.
A barrage of misinformation on social media, including various tweets and videos, claims those issues were never real in the first place. It’s a conspiracy theory that takes on various shapes, but the underlying common thread is the false claim that climate change is just the latest in a series of hoaxes invented by governments to control the public.
One TikTok video (reminder: this is misinformation) with more than three million views dismisses several global threats as “politics,” listing off a series of examples: “In the ’80s, it was acid rain will destroy all the crops in 10 yrs; in the ’90s it was the ozone layer will be destroyed in 10 years; in the 2000s it was the glaciers will all melt in 10 years …,” the TikTok poster says.
The video claims it was all “fear-mongering nonsense” that never came true.
Watching the video during an interview with CBC News, atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon nods knowingly. It’s not the first time she’s confronted that attitude.
“I’ve heard that kind of — I don’t want to even call it a line of argument — I’ve heard that kind of assertion in the past,” said Solomon, who is a professor in the department of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“It’s a little bit like saying, ‘I had a heart attack and my doctor put a stent in. They told me I had to exercise and now I feel great. So I think that was all just nonsense to make money for the medical establishment.”
This image, circulated on social media, is an example of a popular conspiracy theory that falsely claims climate change is a hoax, along with acid rain and ozone depletion. (Climate Knight/Facebook)
Scientists set the record straight
It was Solomon’s research in the 1980s that helped establish the cause of the thinning ozone: refrigerants called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.
She recalls a particular meeting where colleagues were discussing ozone depletion. Solomon, 30 at the time, said she presented her paper identifying how refrigerants were breaking apart in the stratosphere.
“People just laughed,” she said.
But Solomon knew she was on to something, and her work contributed to the growing body of evidence that ultimately led to the signing of the Montreal Protocol in 1987, phasing out the harmful refrigerants.
That treaty is working, according to a recent international report, which said the ozone is expected to recover by 2066.
“The fact that we have actually done the right things and fixed certain problems is a cause for celebration. It’s not a cause for pretending that those problems never existed,” Solomon said.
The reason acid rain doesn’t grab headlines anymore is similar — it wasn’t a hoax, it’s another case of governments responding to the scientific community’s alarm bells with regulations, which worked.
“The acid rain story [and] the ozone story show that we are capable of dealing with environmental problems and that we can make significant progress,” said Mike Paterson, a senior research scientist at the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Experimental Lakes Area in northwestern Ontario.
Paterson wrote his master’s thesis on acid rain in the 1980s, and he recalls the very real impacts at the time, such as declining fish populations in North America and northern Europe.
Scientists established the cause — sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides produced by burning fossil fuels — and North America eventually took action with a series of policy reforms in the 1990s that successfully curbed emissions and reduced the acidity of rain.
Mike Paterson, a senior research scientist at the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Experimental Lakes Area in northwestern Ontario, wrote his master’s thesis on acid rain in the 1980s, and he recalls the very real impacts at the time. Photo: Bartley Kives/CBC
How misinformation threatens climate action
The fact that the global threat of climate change is happening in a digital age rampant with misinformation adds a novel layer of complexity to solving the crisis, with its severity constantly being undermined.
A government-funded report published this week by the Council of Canadian Academies — a non-profit organization that gathers experts to examine evidence on scientific topics — states that “targeted misinformation campaigns have played a documented role in creating opposition to policies addressing climate change.”
The report, called Fault Lines, used modelling to estimate that COVID-19 misinformation and its impacts on vaccine hesitancy likely contributed to 2,800 deaths and 13,000 hospitalizations in Canada over a nine-month span in 2021.
The study highlights how misinformation can cause real harm — and warns of the threat that it poses to dealing with future crises by eroding trust in science and making people more susceptible to falling down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.
Cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky, who contributed to the report, studies misinformation and public opinion around climate change.
“Exposure to misinformation about climate change leads people to take it less seriously and to be less willing to support policy actions,” Lewandowsky, who is the chair of cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol in England, said in an interview with CBC News.
Women carry belongings salvaged from their homes after flooding caused by unusually heavy monsoon rains displaced millions of people in Pakistan in 2022. Attribution analysis has found that human-caused climate change likely contributed to the disaster. Photo: Fareed Khan/The Associated Press
Society is “drenched” in misinformation, he said, and the solution must go beyond teaching individuals how to debunk conspiracy theories and include shifts on a broader scale.
“We also have to look at the structures that are in place right now and that are assisting people with nefarious intentions to spread misinformation,” Lewandowsky said.
“We’re living in an environment where outrage or anger or fear — anything that evokes attention or captures attention — is being favoured by the algorithms of social media.”
Even if there is a strong scientific consensus on global warming, a steady stream of misinformation makes it difficult for people to sift through it all and sort fact from fiction, he said.
“If people are exposed to this blizzard of false information about climate change, then their right to be informed about risks is being undermined.”
If misinformation isn’t addressed, Lewandowsky said, it will make it all the more difficult for the public to realize and react to how serious climate change truly is, as it increasingly contributes to deadly disasters around the world.
By Daniel Sperling, Distinguished Blue Planet Prize Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Founding Director, Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Davis via The Conversation • Published: January 26, 2023
California is embarking on an audacious new climate plan that aims to eliminate the state’s greenhouse gas footprint by 2045, and in the process, slash emissions far beyond its borders. The blueprint calls for massive transformations in industry, energy and transportation, as well as changes in institutions and human behaviors.
These transformations won’t be easy. Two years of developing the plan have exposed myriad challenges and tensions, including environmental justice, affordability and local rule.
For example, the San Francisco Fire Commission had prohibited batteries with more than 20 kilowatt-hours of power storage in homes, severely limiting the ability to store solar electricity from rooftop solar panels for all those times when the sun isn’t shining. More broadly, local opposition to new transmission lines, large-scale solar and wind facilities, substations for truck charging, and oil refinery conversions to produce renewable diesel will slow the transition.
I had a front row seat while the plan was prepared and vetted as a longtime board member of the California Air Resources Board, the state agency that oversees air pollution and climate control. And my chief contributor to this article, Rajinder Sahota, is deputy executive officer of the board, responsible for preparing the plan and navigating political land mines.
We believe California has a chance of succeeding, and in the process, showing the way for the rest of the world. In fact, most of the needed policies are already in place.
What happens in California has global reach
What California does matters far beyond state lines.
In the U.S., through peculiarities in national air pollution law, other states have replicated many of California’s regulations and programs so they can race ahead of national policies. States can either follow federal vehicle emissions standards or California’s stricter rules. There is no third option. An increasing number of states now follow California.
So, even though California contributes less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, if it sets a high bar, its many technical, institutional and behavioral innovations will likely spread and be transformative.
What’s in the California blueprint
The new Scoping Plan lays out in considerable detail how California intends to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 48% below 1990 levels by 2030 and then achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.
It calls for a 94% reduction in petroleum use between 2022 and 2045 and an 86% reduction in total fossil fuel use. Overall, it would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 85% by 2045 relative to 1990 levels. The remaining 15% reduction would come from capturing carbon from the air and fossil fuel plants, and sequestering it below ground or in forests, vegetation and soils.
To achieve these goals, the plan calls for a 37-fold increase in on-road zero-emission vehicles, a sixfold increase in electrical appliances in residences, a fourfold increase in installed wind and solar generation capacity, and doubling total electricity generation to run it all. It also calls for ramping up hydrogen power and altering agriculture and forest management to reduce wildfires, sequester carbon dioxide and reduce fertilizer demand.
This is a massive undertaking, and it implies a massive transformation of many industries and activities.
Transportation: California’s No. 1 emitter
Transportation accounts for about half of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, including upstream oil refinery emissions. This is where the path forward is perhaps most settled.
The state has already adopted regulations requiring almost all new cars, trucks and buses to have zero emissions – new transit buses by 2029 and most truck sales and light-duty vehicle sales by 2035.
In addition, California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard requires oil companies to steadily reduce the carbon intensity of transportation fuels. This regulation aims to ensure that the liquid fuels needed for legacy cars and trucks still on the road after 2045 will be low-carbon biofuels.
But regulations can be modified and even rescinded if opposition swells. If battery costs do not resume their downward slide, if electric utilities and others lag in providing charging infrastructure, and if local opposition blocks new charging sites and grid upgrades, the state could be forced to slow its zero-emission vehicle requirements.
The plan also relies on changes in human behavior. For example, it calls for a 25% reduction in vehicle miles traveled in 2030 compared with 2019, which has far dimmer prospects. The only strategies likely to significantly reduce vehicle use are steep charges for road use and parking, a move few politicians or voters in the U.S. would support, and a massive increase in shared-ride automated vehicles, which are not likely to scale up for at least another 10 years. Additional charges for driving and parking raise concerns about affordability for low-income commuters.
Electricity and electrifying buildings
The key to cutting emissions in almost every sector is electricity powered by renewable energy.
Electrifying most everything means not just replacing most of the state’s natural gas power plants, but also expanding total electricity production – in this case doubling total generation and quadrupling renewable generation, in just 22 years.
That amount of expansion and investment is mind-boggling – and it is the single most important change for reaching net zero, since electric vehicles and appliances depend on the availability of renewable electricity to count as zero emissions.
Electrification of buildings is in the early stages in California, with requirements in place for new homes to have rooftop solar, and incentives and regulations adopted to replace natural gas use with heat pumps and electric appliances.
The biggest and most important challenge is accelerating renewable electricity generation – mostly wind and utility-scale solar. The state has laws in place requiring electricity to be 100% zero emissions by 2045 – up from 52% in 2021.
The plan to get there includes offshore wind power, which will require new technology – floating wind turbines. The federal government in December 2022 leased the first Pacific sites for offshore wind farms, with plans to power over 1.5 million homes. However, years of technical and regulatory work are still ahead.
For solar power, the plan focuses on large solar farms, which can scale up faster and at less cost than rooftop solar. The same week the new scoping plan was announced, California’s Public Utility Commission voted to significantly scale back how much homeowners are reimbursed for solar power they send to the grid, a policy known as net metering. The Public Utility Commission argues that because of how electricity rates are set, generous rooftop solar reimbursementshave primarily benefited wealthier households while imposing higher electricity bills on others. It believes this new policy will be more equitable and create a more sustainable model.
Industry and the carbon capture challenge
Industry plays a smaller role, and the policies and strategies here are less refined.
The state’s carbon cap-and-trade program, designed to ratchet down total emissions while allowing individual companies some flexibility, will tighten its emissions limits.
But while cap-and-trade has been effective to date, in part by generating billions of dollars for programs and incentives to reduce emissions, its role may change as energy efficiency improves and additional rules and regulations are put in place to replace fossil fuels.
One of the greatest controversies throughout the Scoping Plan process is its reliance on carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS. The controversy is rooted in concern that CCS allows fossil fuel facilities to continue releasing pollution while only capturing the carbon dioxide emissions. These facilities are often in or near disadvantaged communities.
California’s chances of success
Will California make it? The state has a track record of exceeding its goals, but getting to net zero by 2045 requires a sharper downward trajectory than even California has seen before, and there are still many hurdles.
Environmental justice concerns about carbon capture and new industrial facilities, coupled with NIMBYism, could block many needed investments. And the possibility of sluggish economic growth could led to spending cuts and might exacerbate concerns about economic disruption and affordability.
There are also questions about prices and geopolitics. Will the upturn in battery costs in 2022 – due to geopolitical flare-ups, a lag in expanding the supply of critical materials, and the war in Ukraine – turn out to be a hiccup or a trend? Will electric utilities move fast enough in building the infrastructure and grid capacity needed to accommodate the projected growth in zero-emission cars and trucks?
It is encouraging that the state has already created just about all the needed policy infrastructure. Additional tightening of emissions limits and targets will be needed, but the framework and policy mechanisms are largely in place.
Rajinder Sahota, deputy executive officer of the California Air Resources Board, contributed to this article.
By Jan Larson McLaughlin from BG Independent News • Posted: January 24, 2023
Most farmers want to be good stewards of the land. And most acknowledge that some crop practices can help protect the region’s water quality.
But somewhere between believing in conservation methods and actually practicing them is a gap. Those good intentions do nothing to keep harmful nutrients from reaching local waterways, stressed Dr. Robyn Wilson, of the Environmental and Social Sustainability Lab at Ohio State University.
The professor of risk analysis and decision science at OSU would like to help close that gap. Wilson, who spoke last week to the Bowling Green Kiwanis Club, comes to conservation from the unusual perspective of growing up on a farm near Findlay and being trained as a behavioral scientist.
This region – the Great Black Swamp – poses significant challenges for farmers. Because the landscape naturally holds onto water, farmers have worked for centuries to drain the swamp. Their efforts to get rid of the water as quickly as possible have resulted in great crop production.
But the wetlands that previously acted as a filter to runoff, no longer function to slow down the drainage into public waterways, Wilson said. And as climate changes create warmer, wetter and wilder conditions, the problems are exacerbated.
Big spring rains drive nutrients – fertilizer – into ditches, rivers and Lake Erie, leading to harmful algal blooms and poor water quality.
Research has shown that two farming practices could greatly slow the runoff of fertilizer, Wilson said. Planting cover crops and injecting the nutrients under the soil could help solve the water quality issues, she said.
“We know what’s causing it and we know how to fix it,” Wilson said. “We could solve Lake Erie’s water quality problems.”
But while farmers believe these practices could help, fewer than a third have actually implemented the methods, she said. A study of farmers in the Great Black Swamp area showed 65% see themselves as good conservationists.
“Good farmers care about soil health and water quality,” Wilson said. “But we have plenty of farmers with strong conservation identities who are doing very little.”
If 70% of farmers adopted these practices, she said, the region would experience a big difference in water quality.
“It’s the failure we have as humans to follow through with good intentions,” Wilson said.
Farmers have been slow to participate in cover crop programs, despite all the benefits. The cover crops can prevent soil and wind erosion, combat nutrient and soil runoff into nearby waterways, improve the soil and add nutrients, suppress weeds, improve the availability of water in the soil, and break pest cycles.
Surveys of Ohio farmers showed they think differently about cover crops depending on the time of year due to fluctuations in financial stability, the amount of work to do, and stress. In January and February, farmers are more likely to be financially stable, think more clearly, and have time to consider conservation practices.
“Cover crops is one of the trickiest things to ask farmers to do,” Wilson said.
Growing up on a farm and studying as a behavioral scientist, Wilson understands the importance of how conservation topics are presented to farmers. She knows better than using the politically polarizing term “climate change” in a survey.
“They’re all going to throw it away,” if the issue is presented as climate change, she said. The phrase “changing weather patterns” is more acceptable in the farming community.
“All farmers know the climate is changing,” she said. However, there is disagreement over whether the changes are caused by humans.
“I think we have a ways to go on that front,” Wilson said.
The 2018 Camp Fire killed 85 people and destroyed 20,000 buildings in and around Paradise, Calif. Photo: Los Angeles Times
By Jyoti Mishra. Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego • Reposted: January 21, 2023
The big idea
Psychological trauma from extreme weather and climate events, such as wildfires, can have long-term impacts on survivors’ brains and cognitive functioning, especially how they process distractions, my team’s new research shows.
Climate change is increasingly affecting people around the world, including through extreme heat, storm damage and life-threatening events like wildfires. In previous research, colleagues and I showed that in the aftermath of the 2018 fire that destroyed the town of Paradise, California, chronic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and depression were highly prevalent in the affected communities more than six months after the disaster.
We also found a graded effect: People whose homes or families were directly affected by fire showed greater mental health harm than those where who were indirectly effected, meaning people who witnessed the event in their community but did not have a personal loss.
In the new study, published Jan. 18, 2023, our team at the Neural Engineering and Translation Labs, or NEATLabs, at the University of California San Diego, wanted to understand whether the symptoms of climate change-related trauma translate to changes in cognitive functioning – the mental processes involved in memory, learning, thinking and reasoning.
We evaluated subjects’ cognitive functioning across a range of abilities, including attention; response inhibition – the ability to not respond impulsively; working memory – the ability to maintain information in mind for short periods of time; and interference processing – the ability to ignore distractions. We also measured their brain function while they performed cognitive tasks, using brain wave recordings obtained from electroencephalography, or EEG.
A wireless EEG cap records brain activity as a person responds to cognitive tests. The image on the right shows significant differences in electrical brain activity recorded on the scalp between people directly exposed to wildfires and a control group, with greater activity in left frontal cortex (red) for the group directly exposed. Grennan et al., 2022, PLOS Climate, CC BY
The study included three groups of individuals: people who were directly exposed to the fire, people who were indirectly exposed, and a control group with no exposure. The groups were well matched for age and gender.
We found that both groups of people exposed to the fire, either directly or indirectly, dealt with distractions less accurately than the control group.
We also found differences in the brain processes underlying these cognitive differences. People who were exposed to the wildfire had greater frontal lobe activity while dealing with distractions. The frontal lobe is the center for the brain’s higher-level functions. Frontal brain activity can be a marker for cognitive effort, suggesting that people exposed to the fires may be having more difficulty processing distractions and compensating by exerting more effort.
Why it matters
With climate change fueling more disasters, it is incredibly important to understand its impacts on human health, including mental health. Resilient mental health is what allows us to recover from traumatic experiences. How humans experience and mentally deal with climate catastrophes sets the stage for our future lives.
There is much work to be done to understand if the effects we found are replicable in large sample studies. In this work, we focused on a total of 75 study participants. Scientists also need to understand how these effects evolve as climate disasters like wildfires occur more often.
We are also pursuing research with community partners to implement interventions that can help alleviate some the impacts we observed on brain and cognitive functioning. There is no one-size-fits-all solution – each community must find the resiliency solutions that work best in their environmental context. As scientists, we can help them understand the causes and point them to solutions that are most effective in improving human health.
Executives view climate change as both a short- and long-term threat, but most are failing to address it proactively, PwC CEO Survey shows. By Mary Mazzoni from Triplepundit.com • Reposted: January 21, 2023
We’ve heard it for years — “business-as-usual isn’t working” — and the annual PwC CEO Survey indicates executives are well aware. Nearly 40 percent of more than 4,000 responding global CEOs think their companies will no longer be economically viable in a decade if they continue down their current path.
That’s a pretty big deal. Yet while one would think such a grim consensus would spur an immediate push for change, many executives told PwC they don’t have nearly enough time to think and talk about the future. Maintaining current operating performance consumed the biggest share of CEOs’ time last year, according to the survey, and executives admitted they’d rather spend more time evolving their companies’ strategies to meet future demands.
Findings like these reflect the “dual imperative” facing CEOs around the world as they look to reinvent their businesses for the future while navigating a laundry list of daunting challenges in the present day, the PwC CEO Survey found. “If organizations are not only to thrive but survive the next few years, they must carefully balance the dual imperative of mitigating short-term risks and operational demands with long-term outcomes — as businesses that don’t transform, won’t be viable,” Bob Moritz, global chairman of PwC, said in a statement.
So, will business leaders act to save themselves, or will they be too busy with next quarter’s P&L? Let’s take a closer look inside the survey to see what executives are saying — and what it could mean for the future.
Executives view climate change as both a short- and long-term threat, but most are failing to address it proactively, PwC CEO Survey shows
While managing climate risk is a long-term challenge that continues to vex executives, the PwC CEO Survey indicates many are also concerned about the effects of climate change in the here and now.
Most of the CEOs surveyed expect their businesses to feel some degree of impact from climate change within the next 12 months. About half predict the effects of climate change will have a “moderate,” “large” or “very large” impact on their cost profiles. More than 40 percent anticipate impacts to their supply chains, while around a quarter are worried about climate-related damage to their physical assets.
Their concerns are warranted: The 10 most significant climate-related disasters to strike the world last year caused more than $3 billion worth of damage each, according to the World Economic Forum.
Still, the way they respond could use some work. “Deeper statistical analysis of the survey shows that the CEOs who feel most exposed to climate change are more likely to take action to address it,” PwC researchers observed.
“This kind of reactive approach is understandable — when your house is in the path of a forest fire, you reach for the hose — but it creates risks of its own,” they continued. “Combating climate change requires a coordinated, long-term plan. It won’t be solved if the only companies working on it are those that face immediate financial impact.”
Beyond issues with reactivity, the researchers underscore that they “don’t know how much” the actions most often taken by businesses — such as decarbonization initiatives and moves to innovate more climate-friendly products and services — “will move the needle, particularly in the near-term, which, in light of emissions already in the atmosphere, promises continued warming under virtually every scenario.”
While it remains murky if business actions will do anything to curb their climate risk in the short term, the researchers warn that many long-term corporate climate strategies are also incomplete or less effective than they could be — setting the stage for even more serious risk in the years to come.
More than half of all CEOs surveyed, including 70 percent of those at U.S. companies, say their teams have no plans to apply an internal carbon price to decision-making, “even though doing so could help them account for considerations like taxes and incentives, and clarify strategic trade-offs,” the researchers found. Many are also dropping the ball on reporting, as another recent PwC survey found that 87 percent of global investors think corporate reporting contains unsubstantiated sustainability claims, often referred to as “greenwashing.”
CEOs predict declining global economic growth, but is that really a bad thing?
Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of CEOs believe global economic growth will decline over the next 12 months. This is a marked departure from recent years, as more than 75 percent of respondents to the 2020 and 2021 iterations of the PwC CEO Survey said they thought economic growth would improve. It’s also the most pessimistic CEOs have been regarding global economic growth since the PwC CEO Survey began asking this question 12 years ago.
This comes as no major shock, as other recent polling indicates CEOs around the world are bracing for a recession in 2023. Still, it begs a few questions: Is a slowdown in economic growth inevitable, and is it even a bad thing?
In the decades since economist Milton Friedman declared that the social responsibility of business is to increase profits for shareholders, conventional reason has dictated that the ultimate marker of business health is to grow bigger and bigger every year, with solid shareholder returns that climb on a quarterly basis.
Yet study after study indicates that the never-ending pursuit of more consumption, more profit and more money does not equate to better quality of life across the economy — and the spoils of rugged capitalism are not shared equally. In the U.S., for example, CEO pay has grown by a staggering 1,460 percent since 1978, while median worker pay has not even kept pace with inflation, increasing by a mere 18 percent over the same period. U.S. CEOs were paid 399 times as much as a typical worker in 2021.
So, if the dogged pursuit of “more, more, more” does not increase quality of life for the many, and workers by and large find themselves more wage-poor than their parents were, who really benefits from eternal economic growth as a marker of success? Even businesses stand to lose out as CEOs cash their bloated paychecks while predicting their companies will be belly-up within a decade.
Against a backdrop like this, it makes sense that conversations around degrowth are having a major moment in mainstream business circles. As the name implies, degrowth calls for intentional reductions in production and consumption to stay within the boundaries of a resource-constrained world — particularly in rich countries, allowing developing countries to have a greater share of the economic pie (and the global carbon budget).
While respondents to the PwC CEO Survey stop far short of advocating for strategic degrowth, they don’t plan to cope with the impending recession in the way many might expect. While over half of responding CEOs say they are moving to cut operating costs and raise prices, the majority (60 percent) say they do not plan to reduce the size of their workforce in the next 12 months, and 80 percent say they have no plans to reduce compensation.
Still, it makes sense that predictions about the worst recession in a century would be preoccupying for executives, but as Moritz of PwC observed, those that don’t keep the future in mind are destined for failure. This type of push and pull between long-term longevity and short-term profit is one that has defined conversations around stakeholder capitalism and corporate responsibility for as long as they’ve existed. Parsing through these survey responses, it could be that Mother Nature — and the markets — will finally force executives’ hands, pushing into fruition something that for decades was simply words.
Leonardo DiCaprio spent two years traveling the globe to talk to those on the front line of Climate Change and focus on the key sources and impacts of the problems. In the process, he talks to scientists, sustainability and carbon reduction experts, local government officials and world leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
According to The Los Angeles Times: “The origins of wanting to do this movie is to give the scientific community out there a voice,” DiCaprio said before the screening, to more cheers in the packed house, at Toronto’s giant and august Princess of Wales Theater. “Because we have ignored the predictions of the scientific community for way too long.”
A new survey suggests U.S. consumers are largely unaware of the severity of global resource scarcity, but their choice of packaging would be impacted if they had readily available information on how renewable materials mitigate climate change.
Tetra Pak and the Global Footprint Network conducted a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers about their grocery spending habits. An overwhelming 86 percent agreed that if they knew the use of renewable packaging contributed to reducing carbon emissions, it would impact their choice of packaging. Women were particularly motivated to choose renewable packaging options based on this knowledge: 90 percent of females said they would modify their purchasing habits while 77 percent of men did.
According to TetraPak, consumers indicated that they are ready to be held as accountable as government and industry for climate change, and they are ready to support actions to mitigate its harmful effects. While 81 percent of respondents said that no one group is responsible for addressing natural resource constraints, the majority also believes that no single group is doing enough.
“Our survey confirms our belief that with information and education, consumers will respond favorably to the need to pay closer attention to resource challenges and change their individual actions, including making more environmentally responsible decisions around packaging,” said Elizabeth Comere, Director of Environment & Government Affairs for Tetra Pak US and Canada.
The survey also asked respondents about specific actions they would be willing to take to conserve natural resources. The top three responses were:
buying local grown food as much as possible (75 percent)
only buying as much food as a household was going to consume (72 percent)
seeking out food or beverage products that come in renewable packaging (69 percent).
Daily purchasing choices can make a difference, said Mathis Wackernagel, president and co-founder of Global Footprint Network.
“How we meet our basic needs — including food — is a powerful way to shape sustainability. Eating food from local sources and less emphasis on animal-based diets can lower the Ecological Footprint,” he said. “When we buy packaged foods, opting for packaging made from renewable materials also contributes to a lower Ecological Footprint.”
These findings coincide with Earth Overshoot Day, an indicator of when humanity has used up nature’s ‘budget’ for the entire year. Global Footprint Network announced Wednesdaythat we have overshot faster than ever: Overshoot Day moved from early October in 2000 to August 13th this year.
The poll found that 83% of Americans, including 61% of Republicans and 86% of independents, say that if nothing is done to reduce emissions, global warming will be a very or somewhat serious problem in the future.
An overwhelming majority of the American public, including nearly half of Republicans, support government action to curb global warming, according to a poll conducted by The New York Times,Stanford University and the nonpartisan environmental research group Resources for the Future.
Among Republicans, 48 percent said they are more likely to vote for a candidate who supports fighting climate change, a result that Jon A. Krosnick, a professor of political science at Stanford University and an author of the survey, called “the most powerful finding” in the poll. Many Republican candidates either question the science of climate change or do not publicly address the issue.
Although the poll found that climate change was not a top issue in determining a person’s vote, a candidate’s position on climate change influences how a person will vote. For example, 67 percent of respondents, including 48 percent of Republicans and 72 percent of independents, said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who said that human-caused climate change is a hoax.
Over all, the number of Americans who believe that climate change is caused by human activity is growing. In a 2011 Stanford University poll, 72 percent of people thought climate change was caused at least in part by human activities. That grew to 81 percent in the latest poll. By party, 88 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of independents and 71 percent of Republicans said that climate change was caused at least in part by human activities.
Although the poll found that climate change was not a top issue in determining a person’s vote, a candidate’s position on climate change influences how a person will vote. For example, 67 percent of respondents, including 48 percent of Republicans and 72 percent of independents, said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who said that human-caused climate change is a hoax.
Jason Becker, a self-identified independent and stay-at-home father in Ocoee, Fla., said that although climate change was not his top concern, a candidate who questioned global warming would seem out of touch.
“If someone feels it’s a hoax they are denying the evidence out there. Many arguments can be made on both sides of the fence. But to just ignore it completely indicates a close-minded individual, and I don’t want a close-minded individual in a seat of political power.”
In a series of short films debuting this week for Conservation International, Hollywood celebrities and advertising legend Lee Clow of TWBA Media Arts Lab lend a hand to raise awareness of the importance of protecting, preserving and nurturing the environment – for the good of mankind.
Narrated by various leading actors including Julia Roberts, Harrison Ford, Robert Redford, Ed Norton, Robert Redford, Penelope Cruz, Kevin Spacey, and Ian Somerhalder, each film highlights some aspect of the natural world and represents its point of view about the relationship with humanity.
Ford serves on the Conservation International Board of Directors and has been involved with the non-profit for twenty years. He called on his celebrity friends to lend their voices to this important campaign.
In commenting on the campaign, Clow told Fast Company’s Co-Create: “Like so many things right now in our culture and politics, everything seems so polarized that the two extreme ends are the loudest and everyone else in the middle is getting tired and sick of nobody being able to solve anything. That was the hope for this is to be a balanced message that everyone could get on board with.”
The films include the #NatureIsSpeaking hashtag the CI team is encouraging social media discussion with Twitter handles for each of the films’ subjects (@MotherNature_CI, @Ocean_CI, @Rainforest_CI, @Soil_CI, @Water_CI, @Redwood_CI, @CoralReef_CI).
HP, sponsor of the #NatureIsSpeaking hashtag will donate $1 to Conservation International, for every social media mention, up to $1 million.
In a significant new report, CDP has demonstrated that among S&P 500 Industry Leaders, those corporations who have made significant efforts to reduce their impact on climate change have much improved financial performance and return on equity (ROE) than those companies who are not taking such steps and do not disclose their carbon impact. CDP’s analysis shows that, on climate change management, S&P 500 industry leaders:
Generate superior profitability: ROE 18% higher than low scoring peers and 67% higher than non-responders.
Have more stability with 50% lower volatility of earnings over the past decade than low scoring peers.
Grow dividends to shareholders: 21% stronger than low scoring peers.
Exhibit value attributes attractive to equity investors.
The report presents the progress achieved by 70% of S&P 500 companies in integrating climate change risk management into strategic planning, taking action towards emissions reductions and demonstrating a long-term view of how to best manage the assets of shareholders. In the report, Paul Simpson, CEO of CDP says, “There is a palpable sea change in approach by companies driven by a growing recognition that there is a cost associated with the carbon they emit. Measurement, transparency and accountability drives positive change in the world of business and investment.” Here are the CDP leading companies and their corresponding three year return on equity. In commenting on the report, HP Chairman Meg Whitman said, “By integrating sustainability across the entire value chain, companies can capture return on capital today and build leadership and business value for their future. These investments help companies create a competitive advantage, build stability, and provide assurances to stakeholders that they are well positioned for the challenges of the 21st century.” Read the CDP Climate Action and Profitability Report here
55% of global respondents in Nielsen’s corporate social responsibility survey were willing to pay extra for products and services from companies committed to positive social and environmental impact—an increase from 45% in 2011. However, people living in North America lag the global average, with only 42% saying they would be willing to pay extra – a 7% increase from three years ago.
As continued impactful climate change events and social consciousness raises people’s concern about companies’ impact on society, the importance of brand’s corporate responsibility reputations will continue to rise. Brands which act responsibly and communicate those actions effectively will increasingly be the ones rewarded by consumers.
The World Health Organization reports that in 2012 around 7 million people died – one in eight of total global deaths – as a result of air pollution exposure. This finding more than doubles previous estimates and confirms that air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk.
Reducing air pollution could save millions of lives.
The new data reveal a strong link between air pollution exposure and cardiovascular diseases and cancer. The new estimates are not only based on more knowledge about the diseases caused by air pollution, but also upon better assessment of human exposure to air pollutants through the use of improved measurements and technology. This has enabled scientists to make a more detailed analysis of health risks from a wider demographic spread that now includes rural as well as urban areas.
“Cleaning up the air we breathe prevents non-communicable diseases as well as reduces disease risks among women and vulnerable groups, including children and the elderly,” says Dr Flavia Bustreo, WHO Assistant Director-General Family, Women and Children’s Health. “Poor women and children pay a heavy price from indoor air pollution since they spend more time at home breathing in smoke and soot from leaky coal and wood cook stoves.”
“The risks from air pollution are now far greater than previously thought or understood, particularly for heart disease and strokes,” says Dr Maria Neira, Director of WHO’s Department for Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health. “Few risks have a greater impact on global health today than air pollution; the evidence signals the need for concerted action to clean up the air we all breathe.”
After analysing the risk factors and taking into account revisions in methodology, WHO estimates indoor air pollution was linked to 4.3 million deaths in 2012 in households cooking over coal, wood and biomass stoves. The new estimate is explained by better information about pollution exposures among the estimated 2.9 billion people living in homes using wood, coal or dung as their primary cooking fuel, as well as evidence about air pollution’s role in the development of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and cancers.
In the case of outdoor air pollution, WHO estimates there were 3.7 million deaths in 2012 from urban and rural sources worldwide.
Many people are exposed to both indoor and outdoor air pollution. Due to this overlap, mortality attributed to the two sources cannot simply be added together, hence the total estimate of around 7 million deaths in 2012.
“Excessive air pollution is often a by-product of unsustainable policies in sectors such as transport, energy, waste management and industry. In most cases, healthier strategies will also be more economical in the long term due to health-care cost savings as well as climate gains,” says Dr Carlos Dora, WHO Coordinator for Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health. “WHO and health sectors have a unique role in translating scientific evidence on air pollution into policies that can deliver impact and improvements that will save lives.”
According to the 2014 State of Green Business report published by GreenBiz Group in partnership with Trucost plc., companies around the world are struggling to make progress on climate change, resource efficiency and natural capital dependency.
“While more and more companies are undertaking a growing number of initiatives to reduce their environmental impacts, there’s very little progress to show for it. Company initiatives are not having an impact at the scale needed to address such challenges as climate change and the availability of water and natural resources,” said Joel Makower, GreenBiz Group executive editor and the report’s principal author.
The seventh annual edition of the report, which measures the global progress of large, publicly traded companies in addressing a myriad of environmental challenges, reveals little meaningful progress across most metrics, including greenhouse gas emissions, water use, waste disposal and other pollutant impacts.
“The environmental impacts of business – air pollution, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation and water scarcity – are threatening the ability of our finite stock of natural capital to deliver sustainable growth,” said Richard Mattison, CEO of Trucost. “The challenge for business is to identify growth models that result in reduced environmental impact.
”The report also names the 10 sustainable business trends for 2014. Among them are the growth of collaboration among big corporations to solve mutual sustainability challenges, the growth of chemical transparency for consumer products, the emergence of “shadow pricing” as a means for companies to assess their environmental risks and net-positive buildings.
The 2014 report includes the launch of the Natural Capital Leaders Index, a new methodology for identifying companies that are growing their revenue while reducing their environmental impacts. The 2014 Index found 34 companies from 10 countries that met Trucost’s criteria, which include increasing revenue between 2008 and 2012, disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions and a decrease in environmental impacts during that same period.Among the 34 “decoupling leaders” are Carnival Corp., CSX, Intel, Kimberly-Clark, National Australia Bank, Pearson, Tata Power and Verizon.The Index further identifies US and Global “efficiency leaders” that use the least natural capital to generate revenue compared to sector peers – the more traditional sustainability leaders – which include Adobe Systems, AMEC, BMW, Ford, Manpower, McGraw Hill Financial, Pepco Holdings and Sprint Corp.The metrics from the report were drawn from Trucost’s assessment of 4,600 of the world’s largest companies representing 93% of global markets by market capitalization.The State of Green Business report will be the centrepiece of the upcoming GreenBiz Forum (Feb 18-20), taking place in Phoenix, AZ, where speakers will address many of these trends and metrics.The free report can be downloaded from GreenBiz.com.
With little fanfare and a noticeable lack of press coverage, the National Research Council released its report: Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises last week. The 200 page report suggests that a wave of species extinctions rivaling the dinosaurs’ demise might well be coming within the century — and that the time has come to set up early warning systems to detect this and other imminent climate catastrophes.
One of the authors, Anthony Barnosky, made this comment on the report: “Our report focuses on abrupt change, that is, things that happen within a few years to decades: basically, over short enough time scales that young people living today would see the societal impacts brought on by faster-than-normal planetary changes.”
The study was sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Science Foundation, U.S. intelligence community and the National Academies, which is made up of The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine and National Research Council.
Abrupt Changes Already Underway
Some of the abrupt changes are already taking place, according to the report.
The disappearance of late-summer sea ice in the Arctic, with predictions that it may be gone entirely within decades, which “would have potentially large and irreversible effects of various components of the Arctic East Coast system including disruptions in the marine food web, shifts and habitats of summary mammals, and erosion of vulnerable coastlines.”
Because the Arctic region interacts with a large-scale circulation systems of the ocean and atmosphere, changes in the extent of sea ice could cause shifts in climate and weather around the northern hemisphere. The Arctic is also region of increasing economic importance for diverse range of stakeholders, and reductions in Arctic sea ice will bring new legal and political challenges this navigation routes for commercial shipping open and marine access to the region increases for offshore oil and gas development, tourism, fishing and other activities.
Rapidly increasing extinction of plant and animal species at a rate already “probably as fast as any warming event in the past 65 million years, and it is projected that its pace over the next 30 to 80 years will continue to be faster and more intense.” The report cites the following scenarios for species extinction.
If unchecked, habitat destruction, fragmentation, and over-exploitation, even without climate change, could result in a mass extinction within the next few centuries equivalent in magnitude to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. With the ongoing pressures of climate change, comparable levels of extinction conceivably could occur before the year 2100; indeed, some models show a crash of coral reefs from climate change alone as early as 2060 under certain scenarios.
Destabilization of the west Antarctic ice sheet, an “abrupt change of unknown probability,” carries the threat of sea-level rise “at a rate several times faster than those observed today. “
Early Warning System
In the face of these threats, the report urges development of an Abrupt Change Early Warning System (ACEWS) to closely monitor signals of tipping points drawing near, digest the data and feed it into the best predictive models that can be developed. “We watch our streets, we watch our banks,” the report’s chief author, climatologist James White of the University of Colorado at Boulder, told the Los Angeles Times. “But we do not watch our environment with the same amount of care and zeal.” In a press statement releasing the report, Mr. White said “The time has come for us to quit talking and take action. Right now we don’t know what many of these thresholds are. But with better information, we will be able to anticipate some major changes before they occur and help reduce the potential consequences.”
The executive summary of the report concludes with this rather dire warning:
“Although there is much to learn about climate change and abrupt impacts, to willingly ignore the threat of abrupt change could lead to more costs, loss of life, suffering and environmental degradation. The time is here to be serious about the threat of the tipping points so as to better anticipate and prepare ourselves for the inevitable surprises.”
Unilever has launched a worldwide new initiative to motivate millions of people to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. Launched yesterday on Universal Children’s Day in Brazil, India, Indonesia, the UK and the US, Project Sunlight aims to make sustainable living desirable and achievable by inspiring people, and in particular parents, to join what Unilever sees as a growing community of people who want to make the world a better place for children and future generations.
Project Sunlight was launched with the four-minute film embedded here and created by DAVID Latin America and Ogilvy & Mather London at dawn on November 20th in Indonesia and then follow the sun to India, the UK, Brazil and the US. Additional information can be found at an online hub – www.projectsunlight.com – which brings together the social mission stories of Unilever’s brands across the world, and invites consumers to get involved in doing small things that help their own families, others around the world and the planet.
To mark the launch of Project Sunlight on Universal Children’s Day, Unilever will be helping 2 million children through its ongoing partnerships, providing school meals through the World Food Programme; supporting Save the Children to provide clean, safe drinking water; and improved hygiene through UNICEF.
Ogilvy & Mather Chairman and CEO Miles Young, explains: “Unilever asked us to find a new way to talk about sustainability that would make the benefits real for ordinary people. Project Sunlight is founded on the principle that even small actions can make a big difference and that together, we can create a brighter future. We are honored to be a part of such a positive and significant movement for the good of our client and our communities.” Famed film director Erroll Morris directed “Why bring a child into this world?” including moving interviews with expectant parents from around the world.
The project draws on the legacy of Unilever’s founder Lord Leverhulme, who believed that he could change the world with a brand of soap he called Sunlight.
Kudos to Unilever, Ogilvy, DAVID and everyone involved in this important initiative that hits at the heart of the matter: if we can’t work to improve living conditions on our precious planet, how dare you bring a child into this world.
BSR/GlobeScan of 700+ corporate sustainability executives in companies worldwide shows decreasing levels of collaboration between sustainability functions and other core corporate functions.
Survey respondents note a lower level, and decreasing, engagement between sustainability functions and corporate functions, such as investor relations (with 37 percent of those surveyed saying they engage with investor relations, down 1 point from 2011), human resources (34 percent, down 3 points), R&D (32 percent, down 9 points), marketing (28 percent, down 14 points). The weakest area of engagement is between corporate sustainability and finance at 16 percent, down 2 points from 2011. Unless greater collaboration is made in this area, the business case for sustainability and its potential positive impact on financial performance will be very difficult to make.
“The trend toward weaker engagement between sustainability functions and core functions such as finance, marketing, HR, investor relations, and R&D, is concerning.” Chris Coulter, CEO at GlobeScan, noted, “Not only is engagement limited with these strategic areas, but collaboration between them and sustainability teams has declined—in some cases by a significant margin. While there is a clear need for external collaboration, there is an equally important case to be made for greater internal collaboration.”
Additional topline findings from this survey include:
When asked to choose which sustainability issues need collaboration the most, climate change and public policy frameworks promoting sustainability are ranked highest.
Only one in five companies has fully integrated sustainability into business.
Engagement between sustainability functions and corporate functions such as marketing, R&D, and finance remains very low.
Collaboration by BSR member companies focuses more often on engagement with NGOs and other businesses than it does on engagement with government.
Fewer companies collaborate often with governments (46 percent) or media (27 percent), both of which are rated as the most difficult partners for collaboration.
21 percent report that their company is close to full integration. A majority say that their company is either about halfway to integration (51 percent), or is just getting started (22 percent).
“The survey reveals both the sense of urgency to address climate change, and the sense that meaningful progress goes well beyond the steps a single company can take,” observed Aron Cramer, President and CEO of BSR. “No one sector—not business, government, civil society, or consumers—can ‘save us’ from climate change.
20 leading corporations – including Starbucks, Levis, Unilever and Mars -call on President Obama to follow through on climate change preparedness efforts outlined in the Climate Action Plan announced by the President on June 25th.
The corporate signatories of the letter, which rely on the stability of global supply chains for growth and profitability, cited the economic impacts of severe weather events on company operations and called for ongoing and significant investments to be made in strengthening climate change resiliency both in the United States and the world’s most vulnerable countries. Many of the signatories are members of Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy – a group of businesses advocating for meaningful energy and climate legislation.
Critical components of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan included federal investments in climate science, and support for disaster planning and risk management in multiple sectors. On the anniversary of one of the most catastrophic weather events in history, the companies reiterated the need for federal funding of programs and projects that benefit the most vulnerable communities and the businesses they rely on for employment, products and services.
“Our businesses depend upon a resilient infrastructure, resilient communities, and resilient value chains,” the companies wrote in a letter to President Obama today. “In recent years, severe weather events, combined with rising temperatures, have devastated critical infrastructure, decreased crop yields, and threatened water supplies. These trends are being felt globally… We call upon your administration to follow through on commitments for robust support of climate change resilience efforts.”
“Public investment in climate resilience is critical to the economic viability of companies we invest in that rely on consumers, labor, raw materials, and operations located in regions susceptible to extreme weather,” said Bennett Freeman, SVP for Sustainability Research and Policy at Calvert Investments. “We applaud the U.S. government for making investments in resilience and hope to see this strengthened in future years.”
“Extreme weather trends pose challenges to managing reliable supply chains and business planning,” said Anna Walker, Senior Director, Government Affairs and Public Policy at Levi Strauss & Co. “While Levi Strauss & Co. is committed to addressing its climate impact, we believe U.S. government leadership is essential for widespread action on climate resilience to strengthen communities and minimize economic disruption.”
The signatories recognized the Obama Administration’s efforts thus far to address climate change, and expressed support for public and private sector collaboration to continue advancing the implementation of the Climate Action Plan.
“The human and economic costs of severe weather are escalating and it is increasingly important that business and communities integrate climate risk into their operational and decision-making processes,” said Mark Way, Head of Sustainability Americas at Swiss Re America. “As experts on risk, everything we see points to the fact that climate change is something we simply cannot ignore.”
In a massive new study which interviewed 1,000 CEOs around the world, The United Nations and Accenture report that only 32% of CEOs believe the global economy is on track to meet the demands of a growing population within global environmental and resource constraints. Alarmingly, the number of CEOs of saying that sustainability is “very important” to their business success dropped to 45%, a decline from 54% just three years ago.
The third United Nations Global Compact – Accenture CEO Study On Sustainability 2013 points to CEOs concern about an uncertain global economic climate as directly impacting the urgency of addressing sustainable business operations. Despite the report that 63% of CEOs expect sustainability to transform their business within five years – and 76% believe that embedding sustainability into core business will drive revenue growth and new opportunities – many struggle with market expectations, investor pressure and the difficulty of measuring the business value of sustainability.
The report demonstrates how the world’s CEOs are conflicted on the extent to which they believe that business is making sufficient efforts to address sustainability. with 33% agreeing business is making the acceptable effort, while 38% disagree. See the report chart below:
In an executive summary of the CEO survey, the authors conclude:
“CEOs clearly recognize the scale of the global challenge—but may not yet see the urgency or the incentive for their own businesses to do more and to have a greater impact. This disconnect suggests that a gap persists between the approach to sustainability of the majority of companies globally—an approach centered on philanthropy, compliance, mitigation and the license to operate—and the approach being adopted by leading companies, focused on innovation, growth and new sources of value.”
Other key findings in the report include:
83% of CEOs see an increase in efforts by governments and policy makers to provide an enabling environment for the private sector as integral to advancing sustainability.
85% of CEOs demand clearer policy and market signals to support green growth.
Only 29% of CEOs regard climate change as one of the most important sustainability challenges for the future of their business
And just 14% regard water sanitation as an important issue for their business to address.
Clearly the lack of progress on the global economy and the failure of governments and regulators to provide consistent sustainability frameworks are holding back CEOs from focusing their full attention on the long-term issues of sustainability and threatened natural resources. As the report highlights, more urgency is needed:
“As business leaders across the world come together this year to set out an architecture to align business action with global priorities, there is a clear and unequivocal call for greater ambition, greater speed and greater impact.”
In a recent survey of more than 1,800 adults in the United Kingdom, The Carbon Trust Fund found that 68% of people were unable to name a company that is taking sustainability seriously.
In addition, just 5% of respondents see businesses as being most effective in helping the environment. Despite the significant efforts many companies across the world are making to turn their business operations to more responsible and sustainable entities, the UK study underscores how poorly those companies are communicating their actions.
According to Tom Delay, the chief executive of Carbon Trust:
“While it’s clear that consumers still care about the environmental future, their perspective on where the responsibility falls is skewed. It cannot be solely down to environmental groups to shoulder the weight of protecting our planet’s natural resources. Businesses have an enormous role to play here and need to be seen to be doing their part. As businesses look for more ways to grow, sustainability should become a golden opportunity for investment, allowing them to become more resilient to future environmental resource shocks and to cut their costs and grow their revenues. The smart companies will invest now and put sustainability inside their businesses.”
The same survey of UK adults did have some encouraging signs regarding concern for the environment. The demand for green products appears to be increasing with only 6% saying they are less likely to buy a sustainable product and/or service than five years ago while almost three in ten (27%) said they are more likely. Increased concern about the personal impact of what they buy on the environment was the most important reason for this (45%) and 43% of the public surveyed said they lead a more sustainable life than five years ago.
“As countries around the world seek economic growth, strong employment and safe environments, corporations have a unique responsibility to deliver that growth in a way that uses natural resources wisely. The opportunity is enormous and it is the only growth worth having.” – Paul Simpson, Chief Executive Officer, CDP
Fifty of the 500 largest listed companies in the world are responsible for nearly three quarters of the group’s 3.6 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, so finds the CDP Global 500 Climate Change Report 2013 released this week. The carbon emitted by these 50 highest emitting companies, which primarily operate in the energy, materials and utilities sectors, has risen 1.65% to 2.54 billion metric tons over the past four years.
The report is co-written by CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project, and professional services firm PwC. It provides the most authoritative evaluation of corporate progress on climate change.
Inadequate momentum to mitigate climate change is also true of the biggest emitters found in each of the ten sectors covered in the report. Titled Sector insights: what is driving climate change action in the world’s largest companies, the new publication includes industry-specific analysis which shows that the five highest emitting companies from each sector have seen their emissions increase by an average of 2.3% since 2009.
Guardian Sustainable Business offered a biting analysis of the report, concluding companies are making little progress in addressing climate change.
“For all the talk of companies taking the threat of climate change seriously, the latest evidence shows the corporate sector is failing to respond in a meaningful way to the threat of environmental catastrophe,” wrote GSB’s Jo Confino.
Paul Simpson, CEO at CDP says: “Many countries are demonstrating signs of recovery following the global economic downturn. However, clear scientific evidence and increasingly severe weather events are sending strong signals that we must pursue routes to economic prosperity whilst reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. It is imperative that big emitters improve their performance in this regard and governments provide more incentives to make this happen.”
While the biggest emitters present the greatest opportunity for large-scale change, the report identifies opportunities for all Global 500 companies to help build resilience to climate and policy shocks by significantly reducing the amount of carbon dioxide they produce each year. For example, the emissions from nearly half (47%) of the most carbon intensive activities that companies identify across their value chains are yet to be measured. The lack of detailed reporting and information of GHGs from sources related to company activities (Scope 3 emissions), as opposed to those from sources owned or directly controlled by them, may lead companies to underestimate their full carbon impact.
Malcolm Preston, global lead, sustainability and climate change, PwC says: “The report underlines how customers, suppliers, employees, governments and society in general are becoming more demanding of business. It raises questions for some organizations about whether they are focused on sustaining growth in the long term, or just doing enough to recover growth until the next issue arises. With the initial IPCC report only weeks away corporate emissions are still rising. Either business action increases, or the risk is regulation overtakes them.”
Companies that demonstrate a strong commitment to managing their impact on the environment are generating improved financial and environmental results. Analysis of the corporations leading on climate progress, as based on CDP’s acclaimed methodology and including BMW, Nestlé and Cisco Systems, suggests that they generate superior stock performance. Further, the businesses that offer employees monetary incentives related to energy consumption and carbon emissions are 18% more successful at accomplishing reductions.
The CDP Global 500 Climate Change Report 2013 is available to download free. It launches this week at CDP’s annual Global Climate Forum which is broadcast live online. The public disclosures of climate change information from Global 500 companies taking part in CDP this year are also available on the CDP website. Over 4,500 businesses in markets around the world have disclosed through CDP this year. Their data will be disseminated to investors via various channels, such as Bloomberg terminals, where it is downloaded an average of 1 million times every six weeks.
A new Gallup survey of American adults shows rising belief and continued concern about global warming, with 58% say they worry about it.
More specifically, 33% of Americans worry about global warming “a great deal,” 25% worry “a fair amount,” 20% “only a little,” and 23% “not at all.”
Public concern about global warming has waxed and waned over the past two decades, ranging between 50% and 72%. The average percentage over time for “worrying a great deal/fair amount” comes in at just under 60%, similar to the March 7-10 reading from Gallup’s 2013 Environment poll.
The same poll finds 54% of Americans saying the effects of global warming have already begun. This also matches the average in Gallup trends on this measure since 1997. The low points were recorded in 1997 and 2011, when less than half thought global warming’s effects were already manifest. The high point was recorded in 2008, at 61%. This year’s percentage represents a slight increase from the lows reached just a couple of years ago.
Gallup trends throughout the past decade — and some stretching back to 1989 — have shown generally consistent majority support for the idea that global warming is real, that human activities cause it, and that news reports on it are correct, if not underestimated. However, those views have shown significant variability.
Americans’ concerns about global warming peaked at points in the late 1980s and the late 1990s, and again between 2006 and 2008, possibly related to strong environmentalist campaigns to raise awareness of the issue at those times — including the release of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006.
Conversely, concerns receded in 2009 and 2010, particularly among Republicans and conservatives, corresponding with a flurry of publicity about scientists who doubt global warming is caused by human activities, as well as some controversy about global warming research. With all of this dying down somewhat in the last few years, attitudes are returning to previous levels, putting them near the long-term averages.
In contrast to majority acceptance of global warming as real, Gallup finds Americans less than alarmed. One-third worry “a great deal,” and 34% expect it to threaten their way of life. These could be the attitudes that matter most when it comes to Americans’ support for public policies designed to address the issue.
Nearly one billion people do not have access to clean, safe water – that’s the equivalent of 1 in 8 people on the planet! In Africa, preventable waterborne illnesses claim the lives of millions of people each year. No single organization can resolve Africa’s water crisis, but together, with a combination of civil society, non-governmental organizations and government, we can make a positive difference on Africa’s water challenges.
The Replenish Africa Initiative, or RAIN, is therefore the signature community initiative of The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation. Backed by a six-year, $30 million dollar commitment by The Coca-Cola Company, in partnership with other donors, RAIN’s goal is to provide over 2 million people in Africa with access to drinking water by 2015. RAIN will launch over 100 water access programs across Africa, including sanitation and hygiene education programs.
The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation has been involved in community water programs since 2005. To date, 42 water projects in 27 countries have been supported, in partnership with and co-funded by USAID (United States Agency for International Development) under the Water and Development Alliance (WADA) and other partners. Within The Coca-Cola Company’s three-tier global water stewardship strategy which is focused on Reducing, Recycling and Replenishing the amount of water used in Coca-Cola beverages and their production, The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation’s focus is on Replenishing – or community based water interventions.
The United Nations estimates that Sub-Saharan Africa alone loses 40 billion hours per year collecting water; that’s the same as a whole year’s worth of labor by France’s entire workforce! This is incredibly valuable time.
According to The Water Project, with much of one’s day already consumed by meeting basic needs, there isn’t time for much else. The hours lost to gathering water are often the difference between time to do a trade and earn a living and not. Just think of all the things you would miss if you had to take three hours out each day to get water.
When a water solution is put into place, sustainable agriculture is possible. Children get back to school instead of collecting dirty water all day, or being sick from waterborne illnesses. Parents find more time to care for their families, expand minimal farming to sustainable levels, and even run small businesses. learn more at http://thewaterproject.org
In collaboration with various partners, volunteers, patrons and organizations, RAIN is not just for the immediate future of Africa, but also for the long-term sustainability of its resources. RAIN is also The Coca-Cola Company’s contribution to help Africa meet the UN Millennium Development Goal on water and sanitation.
Canadian lawyer Robert Shirkey wants all Canadians who pump gasoline to understand the threat of climate change. He has started a campaign, ourhorizon.org that calls for labels to be put on gas pump nozzles. The campaign aims to get municipalities in Canadian provinces to pass legislation that require the labels.
If the name of the campaign sounds familiar, it is a reference to the offshore drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon that spilled 4.9 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. As the campaign states, “Our name is a rejection of the system that made BP’s offshore drilling rig the Deepwater Horizona reality.” However, the campaign makes it clear that it does “not blame BP,” but takes the position “that we each share in the responsibility for this tragedy.”
There are 4,000 municipalities in Canada. The campaign’s website contains a database of municipal councilors in Canada, and encourages people to send a letter to their local representative, called a councillor, in Canada. The database has “every single municipal councillor’s email in all of Canada.” Through the website, a user can email a letter to their local councillor just by clicking a button.
Here is a screen shot of the ourhorizon.org home page
The campaign is funded through crowdsourcing via a donation page. The donation page asks users to donate in order to help the campaign do two things:
Fund a legal campaign for every province and territory in Canada in order to empower representatives to pass legislation, which carries an estimated $40,000 price tag
Send a postcard to every elected official in Canada with an image of the campaign’s concept and an explanation on the back, which carries an estimated $20,000 price tag
There are a few interesting facts about the campaign, including that it is market-based, as its website stresses. The purpose of the warning labels is to “supply the market with relevant information and let the market do its thing.” The way it will work is that the “label will change some behaviors but, more importantly, they will create a shift in the social environment to facilitate political action on climate change.”
Canadian Environment Under Siege
Many environmentalists and concerned citizens in Canada have been frustrated to watch the unbridled development of Canadian natural resources by the government at the urging of powerful lobby groups. The continued oil industry development of the Alberta Tar Sands and the promotion of the building of the Keystone XL pipeline have alarmed many people concerned about the future direction of the country. Activists such as Idle No More – a group of First Nations members – are protesting the government’s development of natural resources on Crown Land – in violation of treaties between First Nations groups and the Canadian government. According to Wikipedia, The Idle No More movement generally opposes certain types of resource exploitation, particularly on First Nations territory. The movement takes this stance against resource exploitation, as attributed to First Nations sovereignty and environmental sustainability. The position is supported by many groups including non-governmental and grassroots organizations. In a human rights report on Canada, Amnesty International suggested that the government should have “respect for indigenous rights when issuing licences for mining, logging and petroleum and other resource extraction.” Learn more at idlenomore.ca
Warning Labels Work.
The European Union requires the use of climate change warnings in regards to new car sales. In 2008, the EU’s Department of Transport (DfT) issued new guidelines which required all promotional literature for new cars sales to include information about carbon dioxide emissions.
Warning labels with graphic images are proven to raise public awareness. ourhorizon.org compares the warning labels, which contain strong images, to those on “tobacco packages.” In 2001, Canada became the first country to use images in its cigarette warning labels. The use of such warning labels works, according to a 2009 report by the European Commission, Directorate General for Health and Consumers. The report found the following:
Warning labels on cigarette packages “increase consumers’ knowledge about the health consequences of tobacco use and contribute to changing consumer’s attitudes towards tobacco use as well as changing consumers’ behavior”
Warning labels are “a critical element of an effective tobacco control policy”
Warning labels have a high impact in educating consumers about the risks of tobacco use, and a medium impact in changing smokers’ behavior
Fear-induced warnings (using shocking images related to health risks) are the most effective way to educate consumers on the health risks of tobacco use and to change their attitudes and behavior.
Original post at Triple Pundit by Gina-Marie Cheeseman.
As the President unveils his budget for the coming year, 33 major U.S. companies, including eBay Inc., Nike and Limited Brands signed a “Climate Declaration,” urging federal policymakers to take action on climate change, asserting that a bold response to the climate challenge is one of the greatest American economic opportunities of the 21st century.
“The signers of the Climate Declaration have a clear message for Washington: Act on climate change. We are, and it’s good for our businesses. The cost of inaction is too high. Policymakers should see climate change policy for what it is: an economic opportunity.” said Anne Kelly, Director of BICEP (Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy) coalition.
Together, the Declaration signatories provide approximately 475,000 U.S. jobs and generate a combined annual revenue of approximately $450 billion. Extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy have affected several Climate Declaration signatories and exposed the United States’ economic vulnerability to climate change. Signatories of the Climate Declaration are among the country’s best-known consumer brands, including Starbucks, Levis EMC Corporation, IKEA, Jones Lang LaSalle, L’Oréal, the North Face, the Portland Trail Blazers, Timberland and Unilever, among others.
“From droughts that affect cotton crops to Hurricane Sandy, which caused extensive damage to our operations, climate affects all aspects of our business,” said Eileen Fisher, CEO of New York-based apparel firm Eileen Fisher, which suffered severe damage and business interruption during the 2012 storm. “As a socially and environmentally responsible company, we are trying to affect positive change, but business can’t do it alone. We need the support of strong climate legislation.”
The signatories of the Climate Declaration are calling for Congress to address climate change by promoting clean energy, boosting efficiency and limiting carbon emissions – strategies that these businesses already employ within their own operations.
“Businesses understand that planning for a successful future takes investment today. One of the most important things Congress can do to grow our economy and protect our planet is to pass smart climate change legislation this year. Our workforce, supply chain and consumers are counting on us to lead the way,” said Anna Walker, Director, Government Affairs and Public Policy at Levi Strauss & Co.
BICEP members have supported several climate-driven policies, including historic automotive fuel economy standards signed into law in 2012 and the extension of the Production Tax Credit for wind power. Innovation within the transportation, electric power sectors and IT sectors, among others, will be essential to meeting the climate challenge.
“eBay Inc. is committed to driving a future for commerce that embraces clean energy innovation and is ultimately more sustainable,” said Lori Duvall, Global Director, Green at eBay Inc. “Our efforts extend across our data, employee and distribution center portfolios, our shipping and logistics infrastructure, as well as the actions of buyers, sellers, and merchants on our platforms. We see our participation in this coalition as a key element in bringing to life our vision for enabling greener forms of commerce over the long term.”
The Climate Declaration comes on the heels of the President’s renewed commitment to combat the threat of climate change and a recent study from Ceres, Calvert Investments and WWF indicating that a strong majority of Fortune 100 companies have set renewable energy or greenhouse gas reduction goals. Recent polls conducted by Gallup and Yale University, respectively, indicate that a majority of Americans believe climate change is happening and that corporations, as well as government officials, should be doing more to address the issue.
In the release of its latest 2013 Cone Communications Green Gap Trend Tracker, a record-high 71 percent of Americans consider the environment when they shop, up from 66 percent in 2008*. However, Americans continue to struggle with their role in the life-cycle of products with an environmental benefit.
90% said they believe it’s their responsibility to properly use and dispose of these products, but action isn’t aligning with intent:
• Only 30% say they often use products in a way that achieves the intended environmental benefit
• 42% say they dispose of products in a way that fulfills the intended environmental benefit
• 45% of consumers actively seek out environmental information about the products they buy.
Despite the lack of consistent follow-through, consumers are showing an inclination to learn more.
• 71% of Americans report they regularly read and follow instructions on how to properly use or dispose (66%) of a product.
• 41% said they perform additional research to determine how best to utilize and discard a product for maximum benefit.
Responsible Brands Communicate and Facilitate Change
In a statement, Liz Gorman, Cone Communications’ senior vice president of Sustainable Business Practices said “Consumers are ready to follow through on the intended use or disposal of environmentally preferred products, but they need companies’ help. This is the next evolution of environmental marketing. Clear and candid communication can ensure consumers understand the important role they play in minimizing the impacts associated with the product’s lifecycle. The new green gap is about consumers only taking the ideaof responsibility so far, despite feeling responsible for proper use and disposal. They’re buying with the environment in mind, but they rely on companies to provide access and education to truly ‘close the loop.”
Consumer understanding of environmental messages also presents an obstacle.
Although more than 60 percent of respondents say they understand the environmental terms companies use in their advertising, the majority continue to erroneously believe common expressions such as “green” or “environmentally friendly” mean a product has a positive (40%) or neutral (22%) impact on the environment. Fewer were able to correctly identify these terms as meaning the product has a lighter impact than other similar products (22%) or less than it used to (2%). Despite the attention given to product development and environmental marketing, consumer misunderstanding of “green” claims has remained flat at around 60 percent since 2008.
• 71% of consumers wish companies would do a better job helping them understand environmental terms. Although they feel overwhelmed by the volume of messages in the marketplace, consumers prioritize authenticity over perfection and will punish companies if they feel misled:
• 48% percent say they are overwhelmed by environmental messages
• 69% say it’s okay if a company is not environmentally perfect as long as it is honest
• 78% say they will boycott a product if they discover an environmental claim to be misleading
Abridged from a report on the research in a statement from Cone Communications. Read the full press release here.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, the world’s largest professional services firm, points to a catastrophic future unless radical action is taken now to combat climate change.
“The new normal for businesses is a period of high uncertainty, subdued growth and volatile commodity prices. If regulatory certainty doesn’t come soon, businesses’ ability to plan and act – particularly around energy, supply chain and risk – could be anything but ‘normal’.” said Malcom Preston, PwC’s global lead, sustainability and climate change.
PwC says any investors in long-term assets or infrastructure — particularly in coastal or low-lying regions — need to consider more pessimistic scenarios. Sectors dependent on food, water, energy or ecosystem services need to scrutinise the resilience and viability of their supply chains. More carbon-intensive sectors need to anticipate more invasive regulation and the possibility of stranded assets.
The trigger for its dire warning comes from the failure of the global community to reduce carbon emissions by anywhere near the amount needed to restrict temperature rises.
“Business leaders have been asking for clarity in political ambition on climate change,” says partner Leo Johnson. “Now one thing is clear: businesses, governments and communities across the world need to plan for a warming world – not just 2C, but 4C or even 6C.”
PwC’s latest report shows the required improvement in global carbon intensity to meet a 2C warming target has risen to 5.1% every year from now to 2050. The improvement in 2011 was just 0.7% despite the global economic slowdown, and since the turn of the century the rate of decarbonisation has averaged 0.8%.
“It’s the boy scout motto – be prepared,” says Jonathan Grant, PwC’s director for sustainability and climate change. “Businesses need to be prepared for unpredictability – whether that’s policy, climate or consumer change. Extreme weather events have become more common, and unpredictability looks set to increase. Businesses that have failed to prepare will find it difficult to keep their operations running smoothly as the risk of disruption increases.
PwC, the largest of the big four accounting firms, points out that even if the 5.1% improvement might be achievable in the longer term, it is unrealistic to expect that decarbonisation could be stepped up immediately – which means that the reduction required in future years is likely to be far greater.
“We have passed a critical threshold – not once since the second world war has the world achieved that rate of decarbonisation, but the task now confronting us is to achieve it for 39 consecutive years,” says the report.
It adds: “Even doubling our current rate of decarbonisation would still lead to emissions consistent with 6 degrees [C] of warming by the end of the century. To give ourselves a more than 50% chance of avoiding 2 degrees [C] will require a six-fold improvement in our rate of decarbonisation.
“Governments’ ambitions to limit warming to 2C now appear highly unrealistic. This new reality means that we must contemplate a much more challenging future. Whilst the negotiators continue to focus on 2C, a growing number of scientists and other expert organisations are now projecting much more pessimistic scenarios for global temperatures. The International Energy Agency, for example, now considers 4C and 6C scenarios as well as 2C in their latest analysis.”
Grant add: “Tools like real options analysis, developed as part of the investment decision-making process in the oil industry for example, analyse the impact of significant uncertainty on a decision.
“Working with our clients, the reality is we will have to advise on a much wider range of climate scenarios. Resilience is the watch word. Businesses need to get engaged on the areas materially relevant to their business. For example if you’re a consumer goods company you need to consider the longer-term security of supply of the resources you need, where you will source them from, and the more day-to-day issues of how you deal with the potential for disruption to their supply or delivery caused by extreme weather events.”
PwC’s report says there will need to be radical transformations in the ways the global economy currently functions, a rapid uptake of renewable energy, sharp falls in fossil fuel use or massive deployment of carbon capture and storage, removal of industrial emissions and halting deforestation.
It also warns against seeing the dash for gas as a long-term panacea. While the boom of shale gas in the United States may buy some time to help limit emissions growth, low prices may also reduce the incentive for investment in lower-carbon nuclear power and renewable energy.
This post is adapted from an original article in The Guardian.
Environmental concerns among citizens around the world have been falling since 2009 and have now reached twenty-year lows, according to a multi-country GlobeScan poll. Asked how serious they consider each of six environmental problems to be — air pollution, water pollution, species loss, automobile emissions, fresh water shortages and climate change — fewer people now consider them “very serious” than at any time since tracking began twenty years ago.
A total of 22,812 people from 22 countries were interviewed face-to-face or by telephone as part of the GlobeScan Radar annual tracking poll during the second half of 2012. Twelve of the represented countries have been regularly polled on environmental issues since 1992.
“Scientists report that evidence of environmental damage is stronger than ever—but our data shows that economic crisis and a lack of political leadership mean that the public are starting to tune out,” says GlobeScan Chairman Doug Miller. “Those who care about mobilizing public opinion on the environment need to find new messages in order to reinvigorate a stalled debate.”
Climate change is the only exception, where concern was lower from 1998 to 2003 than it is now. Concern about air and water pollution, as well as biodiversity, is significantly below where it was even in the 1990s. Many of the sharpest falls have taken place in the past two years.
The perceived seriousness of climate change has fallen particularly sharply since the unsuccessful UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December 2009. Climate concern dropped first in industrialized countries, but this year’s figures show that concern has now fallen in major developing economies such as Brazil and China as well.
Despite the steep fall in environmental concern over the past three years, majorities still consider most of these environmental problems to be “very serious.” Water pollution is viewed as the most serious environmental problem among those tested, rated by 58 percent as very serious. Climate change is rated second least serious out of the six, with one in two (49%) viewing it as “very serious.”
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