Welcome to Carbon Brief’s Cropped.
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
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Key developments
Europe focuses on biodiversity
‘WORSE THAN TERRORISM’: Climate change and biodiversity loss pose a more “fundamental threat” to the UK than terrorism or Vladimir Putin, UK foreign secretary David Lammy said in his first major policy address, the Independent reported. Giving a speech at London’s Kew Gardens, Lammy said that climate change and biodiversity loss “may not feel as urgent as a terrorist or an imperialist autocrat”, but they are “more fundamental…systemic…pervasive…and accelerating towards us”, the Independent said. The Financial Times said that Lammy pledged that climate change and biodiversity loss would be “central to all the Foreign Office does”, and that he will create “special representatives” in each area. The Guardian noted this will be the first time the UK has appointed a special envoy for nature.
RISE OF RIBERA: Elsewhere, Teresa Ribera, Spain’s ecological transition minister, has been appointed as EU commissioner Ursula von der Leyen’s second-in-command, with a “vast portfolio” including climate and competition policy, Politico reported. The Guardian said that the “outspoken” Ribera is to become one of six vice-presidents in the incoming EU executive led by von der Leyen, which is expected to start work at the end of the year. Euronews said that green activists have “breathed a sigh of relief” at the appointment.
AGRICULTURE COMMISSIONER: Von der Leyen has also appointed a new agricultural commissioner in Christophe Hansen, a Luxembourg MP from the centre-right Christian Social People’s party, the Irish Independent reported. According to the newspaper, von der Leyen has given Hansen “100 days to prepare a vision for the EU agriculture and food sectors”, tasking him with ensuring they are both competitive and “within the boundaries of our planet”. Portuguese news agency Lusa said that Portuguese farmers have “high expectations” that Hansen will prioritise the needs of agricultural workers. Elsewhere, DeSmog has mapped “Ireland’s powerful farming lobby”.
Australia’s deforestation hotspots
OUTLIERS: A new report from the environment and heritage department of the New South Wales government found that more than 45,000 hectares of native vegetation were cleared in 2022 to make way for farming, infrastructure and other projects. Nathaniel Pelle, a campaigner with the Australian Conservation Foundation, told the Sydney Morning Herald that Australia is an “outlier among wealthy countries for forest loss”. He added: “Europe has been historically cleared, Canada has been historically cleared, the US and Australia have been historically cleared, but what separates us from them is that we’re still doing it.” Deforestation in the state is “among [the] worst in the world”, the newspaper wrote.
‘ZOMBIE INDUSTRY’: The report showed that land clearing has been on the rise since 2015, when the previous government announced upcoming changes to its land-clearing laws, the outlet said. In a separate article, the Sydney Morning Herald called logging in the neighbouring state of Victoria the “‘zombie’ industry that won’t die”. According to the newspaper, “commercial logging officially ended” on 1 January, but timber mills “continue to process native hardwood timbers” – sourced from private landowners and from the government’s “fuel-reduction” wildfire-prevention strategies. The outlet wrote: “Environment groups say logging is now taking place without proper planning or oversight, leaving threatened species at risk.”
EPA ON THE AGENDA: Despite promises to “develop new nature legislation” and put nature “back on the priority list”, Australia’s Labor government – elected in May 2022 – “has not lived up to…early rhetoric” around nature protection, Adam Morton wrote in a column for the Guardian. Morton noted that the push to create a national environment agency, Environment Protection Australia, “look[s] to be in trouble”, as deals with either the Greens or the Coalition look unlikely. Writing in the Conversation, environmental-law expert Dr Justine Bell-James said: “All this is bad news for our threatened species and sick ecosystems. We know what needs to be done. But our government is showing worrying signs of letting industry and developers control their environmental agenda.”
Spotlight
Humans and polar bears collide at Earth’s Arctic research hub
In this spotlight, Carbon Brief reports from the Earth’s most-northerly human settlement, which is increasingly facing polar bear encounters amid rapid Arctic change.
Ask anyone living and working in Ny-Ålesund – the Earth’s most northern human settlement, located on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean – what they perceive to be the number one threat to their safety and they will each offer the same answer: polar bears.
A little more than 1,200km from the North Pole, the tiny Arctic town of Ny-Ålesund started life as a coal mining district in the early 20th century, but today operates solely as an international climate research hub, hosting about 60 scientists at its busiest time in the summer months.
The vast Arctic wilderness surrounding the town is home to one of the world’s largest permanent polar bear populations.
Protective measures
Ever since Ny-Ålesund’s inception, the company running logistics in the town has implemented strict protocols with the aim of protecting people from polar bears.
The few roads leading out of town are marked with polar bear hazard signs. Nearly every communal building in the town carries posters with instructions of what to do in the event of a polar bear sighting.
When researchers go out into the field to carry out their research, at least one of them must act as a “polar bear guard” – meaning they need to pass shooting practice and carry a rifle in case they need to kill a bear in an emergency.
“We are entering a habitat that is not ours,” Dorothea Moser, an ice cores researcher with the British Antarctic Survey, the UK’s polar research institute, told Carbon Brief. “With polar bear protection, we’re trying to protect both us as researchers and the polar bear.”
As part of the protective measures when out in the field, guards carry binoculars and constantly scan the environment around them. If they spot a bear on the horizon, the research team will immediately leave the area and notify the town.
If a polar bear is spotted within contact distance – the animals can run at speeds up to 25 miles per hour – then researchers will let off a flare in an attempt to scare it away.
“We can defend ourselves with flares, we’re scaring away the polar bear and creating more space between us in a defensive way,” Moser added. “Of course, we also have to carry a weapon, but we hope that we never have to use it. In the past 30 years, we have not had any lethal encounters.”
Rapid change
These strict measures have protected both scientists and bears for decades in Ny-Ålesund, but rapid change in the region could threaten this delicate balance.
Svalbard bears were nearly hunted to extinction in the 20th century. However, a ban was put in place in 1973, which saw numbers recover. Now, the Beaufort Sea subpopulation, which includes Svalbard bears, is considered “stable”.
However, climate change is causing Svalbard’s environment to shift rapidly, with temperatures rising seven times faster than the global average.
Rapid warming has had a devastating impact on sea ice, which blankets the Arctic Ocean in the cooler winter months before shrinking back at the height of summer. As the Earth warms, the extent of the sea ice in summer is becoming smaller every year.
This is a problem for polar bears, which use sea ice to hunt seals, their main source of prey. Research has found that the disappearance of sea ice is forcing bears to search further afield for food, sometimes bringing them closer towards human settlements.
Ingrid Kjerstad, research coordinator at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Ny-Ålesund, which oversees all scientific research in the town, told Carbon Brief that their records show the number of polar bears coming into contact with humans in the region has increased in recent years.
An increase in human-bear encounters is a worry for both researchers and wildlife. Although scientists in Ny-Ålesund have avoided shooting a bear, there have been several lethal incidents involving both human and animal fatalities in Svalbard’s capital of Longyearbyen.
The evidence of more human-bear encounters in Ny-Ålesund is still “anecdotal” and has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed science journal, Kjerstad added, but is yet another sign of how rapid environmental change is transforming life at Earth’s northern edge.
News and views
BIODIVERSITY FINANCE: Funding to help developing nations address biodiversity loss grew by more than $4bn in 2022, but mostly in the form of loans, rather than grants, according to new figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported by Climate Home News. The OECD report, which analysed the period from 2015 to 2022, showed that biodiversity funding grew from $11.1bn in 2021 to $15.4bn in 2022. Climate Home News added that the increase came largely from multilateral institutions – mainly development banks – which increased their funding from $2.7bn in 2021 to $5.7bn in 2022, “mostly by offering concessional loans, which are cheaper than borrowing on commercial terms”.
DAM IT: Dams around the world will struggle to cope with increasingly common severe rainfall, “leading to an increased likelihood of failure and risk of catastrophic flooding”, according to two researchers at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. They added that “it is not clear what climate and hydrological data was used to design” most of the world’s dams and spillways. Covering the IHE Delft commentary, Sudanese outlet Dabanga wrote that, due to a lack of preventative maintenance, the Jebel Aulia dam south of Khartoum “may lead to a failed agricultural season” this winter. It added: “A collapse of the dam also threatens people in Khartoum.”
CALI INCOMING: The COP16 nature summit will be a key “political moment and a very important moment for biodiversity”, UN biodiversity chief Astrid Schomaker told a press conference on 23 September. Unlike the previous summit, a number of high-profile politicians are due to attend the upcoming talks in Cali, Colombia – including Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Mexico’s president-elect, Dr Claudia Sheinbaum. There will also be a “very strong presence” of Indigenous peoples at the talks, Colombia’s environment minister, Susana Muhamad, told the press briefing. Muhamad also called on richer countries to put more money into the dedicated fund to support biodiversity goals. Meanwhile, Carbon Brief has updated its interactive tracker of national biodiversity strategies and action plans to include new submissions.
ECOCIDE RECOGNITION: Vanuatu has renewed its push to recognise “ecocide” – “the severe and reckless destruction of nature” – under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Pacific Island News Association reported. The Pacific nation first proposed the addition of ecocide in 2019, the news outlet said, and its bid received a boost from a 2021 independent expert report that “outlined the legal framework for ecocide”. The article quoted Vanuatu’s UN ambassador, Odo Tevi, who said that existing laws protecting nature “are insufficient” and that the definition should “focu[s] on the severity of the outcome rather than specific prohibited behaviours”.
SHAPE UP OR SHIP OUT: Drought in South America is forcing grain shippers “to look for alternatives” as the water level on the Paraná River has dropped precipitously, the Argentine trade publication ArgenPorts reported. Argentine officials noted that while water levels are far below normal at present, the effects of the drought “will not be as cruel and harsh as the one that occurred from 2020 to 2022”. Elsewhere, the “unprecedented drought” in Ecuador has led to “mass power cuts”, forest fires and the declaration of a “red alert” in several parts of the country, according to MercoPress.
Watch, read, listen
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: In Scientific American, science historian Prof Naomi Oreskes argued that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault “illustrate[s] why we need to prevent climate disaster rather than plan for it”.
HISTORY REPEATS: Nigeria’s the Cable examined how a burst dam that displaced 400,000 people in Borno state 30 years ago has flooded once again amid extreme rainfall in the country.
CONTINUED STRUGGLE: Despite legal wins across the world, Indigenous peoples still face evictions from their lands and struggle to obtain the reparations promised to them, a Mongabay investigation found.
PESTICIDE LOOPHOLE: An investigation by Unearthed alleged that companies are exploiting loopholes in France’s landmark pesticide ban to ship growing amounts of harmful chemicals overseas.
New science
- Extreme permafrost thaw could lead to a “rapid intensification” of wildfires in western Siberia and Canada, said research in Nature Communications. Using a wide range of climate simulations, the study found that warming-driven rapid permafrost thaw could lead to “massive soil drying, surface warming and reduction of relative humidity”, which could in turn boost fires.
- Prioritising boosting carbon stores on agricultural land could draw down as much CO2 as global tree-planting by 2050 and provide farmers with hundreds of billions of dollars in economic benefits, a new Nature Food study found. The authors used an economic land-use model to project how boosting carbon in agriculture could benefit producers and the planet.
- New research in Environmental Research Letters found that the number of heatwave days affecting global cropland will increase nearly 4.5-fold by the end of the century under a medium-emissions scenario. Using observational data and climate models, researchers found “consistent increases” in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves affecting croplands in the future.
In the diary
- 10-30 September: 79th session of the UN General Assembly | New York
- 22-28 September: Climate Week NYC 2024 | New York
- 23-27 September: 20th meeting of the Persistent Organic Pollutants Review Committee to the Stockholm Convention | Rome
- 29 September: International day of awareness of food loss and waste
- 1-2 October: Forest Europe ministerial conference | Königswinter, Germany
- 8-10 October: Global Nature Positive Summit | Sydney
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org.
The post Cropped 25 September 2024: Biodiversity loss ‘worse than terrorism’; Human-polar bear conflict; Australia’s ‘zombie’ forestry appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes