The World Bank is seeking to persuade governments to take money away from subsidies for fossil fuels and invest it in good causes like climate change.
Governments around the world currently spend over half a trillion dollars a year on making the use of fossil fuels cheaper and the bank wants some of this to be spent on tackling climate change.
In response to calls from the wealthy governments that fund it, the bank is pivoting to focus more on climate change, alongside its traditional goal of eradicating poverty in the developing world.
The bank’s new president Ajay Banga told reporters on Wednesday that accounting tweaks like changes in its equity-to-loan ratio would help with this, as they would allow it to lend about a fifth more than it does now.
But, he told the bank’s annual meeting in the Moroccan city of Marrakech, “it is not going to be enough for the kind of challenges the world has ahead”.
So, he said, the bank would also “look at every other place where pools of money exist which could be used or redirected – whether it is subsidies in the world on fuel and agriculture that cause environmental issues or whether it is voluntary carbon markets.”
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The World Bank does not have the power to force governments to remove these subsidies but it can advise and pressure them.
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Banga’s comments follow a September 2021 International Monetary Fund (IMF) report which said governments spent about $577 billion a year making fossil fuels cheaper.
This was followed in July 2023 by the World Bank’s “detox development” report on “repurposing environmentally harmful subsidies”.
On the release of the report, the bank’s second-in-command Axel Van Trotsenburg said: “People will say that there isn’t money for climate but there is – it’s just in the wrong places.”
He added: “If we could repurpose the trillions of dollars being spent on wasteful subsidies and put these to better, greener uses, we could together address many of the planet’s most pressing challenges.”
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The report said that fossil fuel subsidies increase the use of fossil fuels, reduce the incentives to cut energy use and make it harder for renewable energy to compete.
Petrostates worst offenders
The countries that provide the most subsidies for fossil fuels are economies reliant on fossil fuel production like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela.
Big Western fossil fuel producers like the US, UK and Canada also provide billions of dollars of subsidies, as do major emerging economies like India, China and Indonesia.
IMF research shows that in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, fuel subsidies mean that filling up cars is far cheaper than it would be if left to the free market.
The same research shows that subsidies are making gas much cheaper in a broader group of nations which includes India, Brazil, Canada and Russia.
If the social costs of fossil fuels – like their impact on climate change and air pollution – were included then the price would be even greater than their free market price, the research says.
Reforms spark protests
The G20 group of the world’s biggest economies agreed in 2009 to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies and have repeated that promise at every G20 summit since – without major efforts to put it into practice.
The World Bank says that the subsidies benefit the rich more than the poor. But removing them has often proved politically controversial, as it pushes up living costs for many.
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A 2022 study found that over 40 countries have had riots over fuel prices in the last 20 years including France, Zimbabwe in Iran.
The study’s authors found that fossil fuel exporters are more likely to fix domestic fuel prices with subsidies.
“When these can no longer be sustained, much bigger domestic price adjustments are needed, often leading to riots,” they found.
Banga and the July 2023 World Bank report also call for the removal of fishing subsidies and $500 billion a year of environmentally-damaging agricultural subsidies.
The post World Bank targets dirty subsidies to fund climate action appeared first on Climate Home News.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/10/11/world-bank-targets-dirty-subsidies-to-fund-climate-action/
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Samantha Kemnah looked out the foggy window of her home in New Berlin, New York, at the 150-acre dairy farm she and her husband, Chris, bought last year. This winter, an unprecedented cold front brought snowstorms and ice to the region.
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Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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