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Looking at much of the media reporting ahead of this week's climate conference in Glasgow, you'd think the world was subject to biblical plagues-blasted by fires, floods, hurricanes, drought and disease. But as Bjorn Lomborg has explained recently in these pages, while global warming does pose problems, it is hardly the unmitigated disaster often portrayed. At times, the solutions activists propose can be far worse than what they're trying to prevent.

Humanity has solved much more dangerous problems than climate change over the past century, Mr. Lomborg argues. Even if policy makers do little to slow the rise of global temperatures, it will cost only 2.8% of global gross domestic product a year-a small price compared to that of air pollution, the least of the other major problems mankind has tackled since 1900.

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Opinion | The Real Risks of Global Climate Change

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Looking at much of the media reporting ahead of this week's climate conference in Glasgow, you'd think the world was subject to biblical plagues-blasted by fires, floods, hurricanes, drought and disease. But as Bjorn Lomborg has explained recently in these pages, while global warming does pose problems, it is hardly the unmitigated disaster often portrayed.

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ROME (AP) - Leaders of the world's biggest economies were set to tackle climate change Sunday, the final day of a weekend summit in Rome that is widely expected to set the tone for a major conference on the same issue taking place in Glasgow, Scotland, over the next two weeks.

The Group of 20 countries, which represent more than three-quarters of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, are looking for common ground on how to reduce emissions while helping poor countries deal with the impact of rising temperatures.

If the G-20 summit ends with only weak commitments, momentum could be lost for the larger annual talks in Glasgow, where countries from around the globe will be represented including poor ones most vulnerable to rising seas, desertification and other effects.

The future of coal, a key source of greenhouse gas emissions, has been one of the hardest things for the G-20 to agree on. However, the U.S. and other countries are hoping to get a commitment to end overseas financing of coal-fired power generation, said a senior U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to preview President Joe Biden's plans.

Western countries have moved away from financing coal projects in developing countries, and major Asian economies are now doing the same: Chinese President Xi Jinping announced at the U.N. General Assembly last month that Beijing would stop funding such projects, and Japan and South Korea made similar commitments earlier in the year.

China has not set an end date for building domestic coal plants at home, however. Coal is still China's main source of power generation, and both China and India have resisted attempts for a G-20 declaration on phasing out domestic coal consumption.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said before the Rome summit that he tried but could not get a commitment on a coal phase-out from Xi, who did not travel to the gathering.

In Glasgow, Johnson said, "we want these leaders ... to focus on the commitments they can make, moving away from the use of fossil fuels, moving away from coal-fired power stations domestically."

Climate campaigners were hoping that rich G-20 countries would take steps to meet a long-standing but yet-to-be-fulfilled commitment to raise $100 billion annually to help developing countries move toward greener economies and adapt to the changing climate.

Prince Charles, a long-time environmentalist, was set to address the G-20 on Sunday.

G-20 leaders also discussed the COVID-19 pandemic and the uneven distribution of vaccines in the world. On Saturday they endorsed a global minimum tax on corporations, a linchpin of new international tax rules aimed at blunting fiscal paradises amid skyrocketing profits of some multinationals.

And after a meeting on the sidelines about Iran's nuclear program, Biden, Johnson, Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Emmanuel Macron made a joint statement expressing their "determination to ensure that Iran can never develop or acquire a nuclear weapon."

They also voiced concern that Tehran "has accelerated the pace of provocative nuclear steps" after halting negotiations on a return to the nuclear agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

___ Associated Press writers Jill Lawless, Josh Boak, Zeke Miller and David McHugh in Rome contributed to this report.

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G-20 leaders turn to climate change on last day of summit

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ROME (AP) - Leaders of the world's biggest economies were set to tackle climate change Sunday, the final day of a weekend summit in Rome that is widely expected to set the tone for a major conference on the same issue taking place in Glasgow, Scotland, over the next two weeks.

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The costs of doing nothing vastly outweigh the costs of decarbonising a global economy which, since the Industrial Revolution, has been powered by fossil fuels. That may seem self-evident today, when catastrophic fires and floods offer daily reminders of how expensive continued inaction on climate change is. But 15 years ago, that insight was ground-breaking.

The 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, for which I was a senior economist, was the first time a G7 government had used economic analysis to spell out the case for urgently reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A decade and a half on, its conclusions and recommendations are as valid as ever.

The review also exposed the limitations of using conventional economic modelling to answer transformational questions. It prompted an unhealthy race among economists to insert their own cost presumptions to derive contradictory results.

This points to a lingering problem in economics. Conventional models assume economists know beforehand what the costs of new technologies, preferences and behaviour will be in the future. These are the things that will determine the cost of any green transition. In other words, our estimates of the things we are most interested in are predetermined by assumptions that may not be accurate.

The fact is that the technique known as "static cost benefit analysis", the workhorse of economic modelling, was simply not designed to evaluate the large risks and transitions involved in tackling climate change. This matters because conventional approaches have consistently understated the risks from unmitigated climate change and overstated the costs of a low-carbon transition, thereby delaying policy action.

Forecasting the cost of a systemic transition is fiendishly complex. Adopting new, clean technologies early induces creativity and innovation across the whole economy and generates new learning and experience along the way.

It unleashes economies of scale in discovery and production, as businesses make and distribute things more cleverly and efficiently, dramatically lowering costs. This in turn makes deploying new technologies even more attractive, generating a virtuous cycle of innovation, investment and falling costs.

The cost of generating electricity with solar panels and the cost of storing it in lithium-ion batteries has fallen more than 80% over the last decade. Regardless of the need to decarbonise, people are now set to benefit from cheaper electricity and better performing cars than they otherwise would have. Economists never predicted it and the markets alone would never have delivered it.

Climate Change Committee/IRENA (2020) Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2019.

What happened was that renewable energy generation capacity grew faster than anyone expected, because the costs of installing and running renewables fell sharply. And costs fell sharply because capacity grew faster than anyone expected.

Conventional economic models cannot cope with the destabilising dynamics generated by these amplifying feedbacks, so they miss them entirely, together with the rapid cost cutting they entail. As a result, standard economic and energy forecasting models have been demonstrably wrong for decades.

A self-fulfilling prophecy

No cost benefit analysis can adequately answer the question "What will it cost to decarbonise in the long run?" The answer depends on the choices and actions taken today and in the future.

Once a tipping point is reached, such reinforcing feedbacks make the transition to new technology networks a self-sustaining process. If people expect the low-carbon transition will be cost-effective, they will invest in it.

In this way, expectations of rapid transformation become self-fulfilling. This makes credible and predictable government policy vital to provide investors and companies with confidence that a low-carbon future will be a profitable one.

Ambitious policy to generate a clean energy transition could ultimately be costless. After initial investment costs, it would likely generate considerable savings.

And once the clean innovation machine has been switched on and is running, it has the potential to become more efficient, innovative and productive than the conventional alternative. By driving prices for disruptive technologies extremely low, growth in new sectors will have a positive impact on productivity growth.

Rather than embarking on a fruitless attempt to predict the future using the wrong economic tools, our interests are better served trying to steer and design it. The economics profession is in a better position to cope with the risk and uncertainty this entails. Fifteen years on from the Stern Review, we can say with great confidence that the risks of action are far lower than the risks of inaction. More than that, those risks are in our gift to tame.

The global community has it in its power to make a cleaner, more secure and sustainable but also more efficient, innovative and productive economy a self-fulfilling prophecy. As world leaders gather in Glasgow for the latest UN climate summit, the call for action has never been more urgent.

This story is part of The Conversation's coverage on COP26, the Glasgow climate conference, by experts from around the world.
Amid a rising tide of climate news and stories, The Conversation is here to clear the air and make sure you get information you can trust. More.

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Climate change: how economists underestimated benefits of action for decades

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The costs of doing nothing vastly outweigh the costs of decarbonising a global economy which, since the Industrial Revolution, has been powered by fossil fuels. That may seem self-evident today, when catastrophic fires and floods offer daily reminders of how expensive continued inaction on climate change is.

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Your morning cup may depend on solving issues with a crop that both contributes to and is deeply affected by the changing climate.

A cupping session at Los Papales, a coffee farm in Jinotega, Nicaragua. Credit... Inti Ocon/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images

This article is part of a special report on Climate Solutions, which looks at efforts around the world to make a difference.

Wilston Vilchez, a third-generation coffee farmer in the mountains of Nicaragua, has witnessed drastic climatic changes on his 25-acre coffee and cacao farm for years, but when two hurricanes hit within 15 days last year, many other farmers he knows realized they needed to be part of the solution.

"They might be small farmers, but they believe in doing something different that will benefit them all," he said.

Mr. Vilchez, who also manages an agricultural cooperative of about 300 farmers, said that the effects of climate change - rising temperatures, less predictable rainfall, wild swings from drought to flooding, new pests and more - were making it more and more difficult to earn a living from coffee, an experience felt by farmers around the world.

Various organizations and companies are seeking solutions to these challenges. They are helping farmers to improve production and efficiency, developing new strains of beans or farming wild species, and even growing coffee in labs. Producing coffee makes a significant environmental impact - estimates vary, but about 39 gallons of water are needed for one cup, according to UNESCO's Institute for Water Education.

However, people interviewed at these organizations and companies, and experts in the field, said that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would be the best way to ensure the future of coffee as we know it (or something close to what we know) and of the planet.

According to a 2014 study, under modest declines of greenhouse gas emissions, about 50 percent of the land with conditions suitable for growing the two main species of coffee, arabica and robusta, which account for 99 percent of commercial supply, "could disappear by 2050." Brazil and Vietnam, major producing countries, would be especially hard hit.

Denis Leonel, the manager of the farm Coqueiro, inspecting coffee crops that were affected by frosts in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais in July. Credit... Roosevelt Cassio/Reuters

To the billions of people around the world who rely on drinking coffee (to put it mildly), that forebodes many difficult mornings and possibly rising prices. To the 100 million or so coffee farmers, to say nothing of the tens of millions more who work in transporting, packaging, distributing, selling and brewing coffee, the effects of climate change are making an already precarious existence even more so.

On his farm and across the co-op, Mr. Vilchez works with Blue Harvest, a program from Catholic Relief Services (C.R.S.), started in 2014, which helps Central American coffee farmers restore and protect their water resources, for their benefit and for others who share the watershed downstream.

The program, which built on the organization's earlier work, began as Central America was in the grips of a coffee leaf rust epidemic about a decade ago. Coffee leaf rust is a fungus that decimates coffee plants, often leaving farmers with few choices: cut down their crop and replant, plant something else, or give up the farm. Some have linked the spread of the fungus to climate change because it thrives in warmer conditions with more variable precipitation.

Since climate change is making droughts both more frequent and intense, said Kristin Rosenow, an expert in agricultural development for C.R.S., using water more efficiently and preventing pollution of existing sources are crucially important.

Mr. Vilchez has worked with C.R.S. to restore his soil by planting cover crops. He has also helped other farmers to retain more soil moisture by planting shade trees, a traditional practice, and to employ other low-tech solutions, he said, speaking in Spanish translated by a C.R.S. staff member.

Ms. Rosenow said that these sorts of techniques, among others, like more targeted fertilizer use, had led to an increase of 24 percent in their yields for the farmers, and a 28 percent rise in income, some of which can be attributed to these techniques and some to access to new markets.

Another tactic is planting different varieties that can better withstand both the leaf rust and other climate stressors, according to Hanna Neuschwander, the director of strategy and communications at World Coffee Research.

Next year, World Coffee Research will start a global breeding network, which aims to introduce modern breeding techniques and new varieties in coffee-producing countries to help farmers dealing with new climatic conditions. Based on the information that is obtained, the organization will evaluate how new species perform in different environments around the world, a sort of real-time lab trial.

But there are challenges. When a farmer plants a coffee tree, it takes several years for it to make money. And because coffee trees can live for several decades, a tree that suits today's climate may be completely unsuited to future conditions, said Vern Long, the chief executive of World Coffee Research.

Sacks of coffee in the Zona de los Santos area of Costa Rica. Credit... Jeffrey Arguedas/EPA, via Shutterstock

One possible upside, Ms. Long added: Coffee farmers would not have to expand or move to higher altitudes that may be more suitable in the future but could be heavily forested and biodiverse, leading to loss of carbon sequestration potential and animal and plant habitat.

At the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, Aaron Davis, a coffee scientist who also specializes in climate change, is working on a different solution to ensure sustainability: introducing farmers to wild coffee species, which have not been widely cultivated previously, or at all, but are more tolerant of high temperatures and drought.

"Being a botanist and having done work in climatology, I can't emphasize enough that traditionally used species will not be enough," he said. "If you look at climate change models and projections, we need robust resilience and step change, not incremental change."

Maricel Saenz is also interested in step change, but in a different direction. She is the founder and chief executive of Compound Foods, a "beanless" coffee company that aims to produce coffee in a laboratory environment.

A coffee plant in Sierra Leone. Credit... Agence France-Presse, via Royal Botanical Gardens

Ms. Saenz, 29, is from Costa Rica, so naturally coffee and its future are important to her, she said. "It's a really complex situation, because coffee is one of the main victims and contributors to climate change," she said, citing the energy and water required to grow, transport and brew a cup of coffee.

Compound Foods does not grow any coffee - at least, not in the traditional sense. Instead, the company replicates the microbes from actual coffee cherries, which give a cup of coffee its flavor and aroma, Ms. Saenz said. The microbes are grown on their plant-based formula in bioreactors, a fermentation process similar to what happens naturally at a coffee farm.

At the moment, this makes a cold-brew style extract that mimics the flavor, color and smell of real coffee, but with much less energy and water. They plan to distribute this first product through coffee shops next year and, later, to create coffee grounds that can be brewed at home.

When asked about how her company might affect smallholder farmers who grow most of the world's coffee and often struggle to make a living, Ms. Saenz said that she was hoping to compete with the big industrial farmers and to find ways to support the farmers she grew up knowing.

In both the long and short term, that may mean addressing the root cause itself: greenhouse gas emissions.

As Vincent Amodoi, a project coordinator in Uganda for Farm Africa, a British charity that works with farmers, pastoralists and forest communities in East Africa, including coffee growers, said, "For me, climate change should be one of the major focuses for all governments in the world, and that is just not happening."

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Coffee and Climate Have a Complicated Relationship

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Your morning cup may depend on solving issues with a crop that both contributes to and is deeply affected by the changing climate. This article is part of a special report on Climate Solutions, which looks at efforts around the world to make a difference.

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Navy Blue Earth Ice Cream Global Warming Social Media Graphic

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https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2021/10/17/national/environment/plastic-Environment-Ministry-zero-waste/20211017165450549.html

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파란색 녹는 지구 일러스트 지구 온난화 포스터

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Green Simple Illustrated Leaf Environment Logo (1)

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https://www.wwnytv.com/2021/10/30/watertowns-tree-planting-tradition-continues-despite-rain/

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The planet is warming, from North Pole to South Pole. Since 1906, the global average surface temperature has increased by more than 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius)- even more in sensitive polar regions. And the impacts of rising temperatures aren't waiting for some far-flung future-the effects of global warming are appearing right now. The heat is melting glaciers and sea ice, shifting precipitation patterns, and setting animals on the move.

Many people think of global warming and climate change as synonyms, but scientists prefer to use "climate change" when describing the complex shifts now affecting our planet's weather and climate systems. Climate change encompasses not only rising average temperatures but also extreme weather events, shifting wildlife populations and habitats, rising seas, and a range of other impacts. All of these changes are emerging as humans continue to add heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Scientists already have documented these impacts of climate change:

Ice is melting worldwide, especially at the Earth's poles. This includes mountain glaciers, ice sheets covering West Antarctica and Greenland, and Arctic sea ice. In Montana's Glacier National Park the number of glaciers has declined to fewer than 30 from more than 150 in 1910. Much of this melting ice contributes to sea-level rise. Global sea levels are rising 0.13 inches (3.2 millimeters) a year, and the rise is occurring at a faster rate in recent years. Rising temperatures are affecting wildlife and their habitats. Vanishing ice has challenged species such as the Adélie penguin in Antarctica,...

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Global warming and climate change effects: information and facts

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The planet is warming, from North Pole to South Pole. Since 1906, the global average surface temperature has increased by more than 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius)- even more in sensitive polar regions. And the impacts of rising temperatures aren't waiting for some far-flung future-the effects of global warming are appearing right now.

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-01/tasmanias-love-heart-forest-of-native-trees/100571444

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Garbage, including plastic waste, is seen at the beach of Costa del Este, in Panama City, on April ... [+]
AFP via Getty Images

Just about anywhere you travel in the world, you will encounter plastic pollution. Even the beaches of remote tropical islands are littered with plastic waste. A recent study published in the journal Nature characterized 414 million pieces of plastic - 238 metric tons - on one remote island chain in the Indian Ocean.

The study's lead author, Jennifer Lavers from the University of Tasmania's Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies, said this is an indicator of the staggering amount of plastic debris floating in the oceans:

"Islands such as these are like canaries in a coal mine and it's increasingly urgent that we act on the warnings they are giving us. Plastic pollution is now ubiquitous in our oceans, and remote islands are an ideal place to get an objective view of the volume of plastic debris now circling the globe."

Many are familiar with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a collection of several large areas of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. The total area of this garbage patch - consisting largely of plastic debris - covers an area that is estimated to be twice the size of Texas. The patch consists of more than 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic with an estimated weight of 80,000 metric tons, and it poses a serious threat to marine life such as whales, sea turtles, fish, and birds.

Remote plastic dumps may be out of sight for most people, but they nevertheless impact the health of humans everywhere. Plastics break down in the environment, and their degradation products, such as bisphenol A (BPA), are known to interfere with human hormonal function. Researchers are even finding microplastics in human organs.

But why should plastic pollution be such a serious environmental threat? Don't we recycle our plastics?

It is true that many of us place our plastics in recycle bins. We assume that it gets sorted and reused. But much of that "recycled plastic" nevertheless ends up in landfills.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that used plastics just don't have much value. It is cheaper in most cases to source new plastics than to recycle them. But there are two things that can change that dynamic: Global legislation to address plastic pollution, and new technologies aimed at recycling and repurposing used plastics.

A growing number of community and conservation organizations have urged President Joe Biden to take executive action to address the plastic pollution crisis. A Los Angeles Times editorial also urged President Biden to take the lead on pushing for a global treaty within the Group of Seven (G7) countries.

Support is growing for a global treaty on plastic pollution, such as the Paris Climate Agreement that is aimed at curbing carbon emissions. More than two-thirds of UN member states, and the EU, have stated that they are open to an agreement on plastic pollution.

Climate treaties have driven innovation in the area of reducing carbon emissions. Plastic pollution treaties could do the same for the manufacture, use, and reuse of plastics.

In the next article, I will discuss some of the technical challenges of dealing with used plastics, as well as one Canadian company that has taken an innovative approach to the problem.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work here.

... Read More

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Just about anywhere you travel in the world, you will encounter plastic pollution. Even the beaches of remote tropical islands are littered with plastic waste. A recent study published in the journal Nature characterized 414 million pieces of plastic - 238 metric tons - on one remote island chain in the Indian Ocean.

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https://www.capetownetc.com/news/cape-of-good-hope-spca-goes-green-by-turning-to-renewable-energy/

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The world’s plastic pollution crisis, explained

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Much of the planet is swimming in discarded plastic, which is harming animal and possibly human health. Can plastic pollution be cleaned up?

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By

The world is under unprecedented pressure to avert climate change catastrophe. The 2015 Paris Agreement committed nations to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius - 1.5 degrees preferably - through sweeping emissions cuts. But since that landmark deal, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, along with the frequency and intensity of climate-fuelled disasters. Much hinges on the outcome of the 12-day United Nations climate summit, COP26, in Glasgow from October 31, 2021. It has been billed as the last, best chance for humanity.

Economic impact of climate change

Climate change could cripple economies, both rich and poor. A report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in September said the number of climate-driven disasters, like floods and heatwaves, had increased fivefold over the past 50 years, costing US$3.64 trillion in total losses. Climate change could wipe up to 18 per cent off global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050 if global temperatures rise by 3.2 degrees this century from pre-industrial levels, according to the world's largest reinsurer, Swiss Re Institute.

Cost of natural disaster losses worldwide

Climate-fuelled disasters in 2021

Impact on global GDP

How rising temperatures could hit GDP: four scenarios by 2050.

Causes of climate change

Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, absorb infrared radiation and trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere, which leads to global warming. Many greenhouse gases occur naturally in the atmosphere, such as nitrous oxide (N2O). Others are the result of human activities, like burning fossil fuels for electricity, heat and transport. The top three greenhouse gas emitters are the United States, China and the European Union. Energy production accounts for more than 70 per cent of emissions.

Natural greenhouse effect

Human enhanced greenhouse effect

Annual global carbon dioxide emissions

Evidence of climate change

Human activity has helped push global temperatures up by 1.1 degrees since 1880, the year accurate record keeping began. That might seem small, but it's an unusually large amount in less than 150 years, scientists say. Climate experts have warned that temperatures could increase by 1.5 degrees from pre-industrial levels in the next two decades - and as much as 2.7 degrees this century - which could potentially be catastrophic for Earth. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster: their glaciers contain enough water to raise the oceans by several metres.

Impact on China

China burns half the coal consumed worldwide for most of its electricity needs. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel and the most carbon intensive. Burning it affects air quality and raises temperatures, both seen as contributors to extreme weather events. Average temperatures in mainland China rose by 0.24 degrees every decade from 1951 to 2019, higher than the global average. The number of days with heavy rainfall, when more than 50mm fell over 24 hours, rose at the rate of 3.8 per cent every 10 years from 1961 to 2019. Flooding damages property and infrastructure, and impacts agricultural and industrial production.

Droughts and flooding in major Chinese cities 1760-2018

Flooding in China 1950-2019

Droughts in China 1950-2019

China's fight against climate change

China, which contributes about 30 per cent of the world's CO2 emissions output, aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060. This means adding no more emissions to the atmosphere than what's being removed. Doing so will put pressure on China's energy-intensive sectors, as it requires phasing out fossil fuels for clean, renewable energy.

China's energy mix

Edited by Andrew London
Additional research by Eric Ng and Han Huang
Cover illustration by Adolfo Arranz
Creative Director Darren Long

Sources: Statista, Emergency Response Coordination Centre, The Week, Swiss Re Institute, Our World in Data, BP, NOAA National Centers for Environmental information, National Snow and Ice Data Center, The Ministry of Water Resources of the People's Republic of China, Bernstein, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, China Meteorological Administration, Nasa

View the print version here

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Is it too late to save Earth from climate catastrophe?

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By The world is under unprecedented pressure to avert climate change catastrophe. The 2015 Paris Agreement committed nations to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius - 1.5 degrees preferably - through sweeping emissions cuts. But since that landmark deal, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, along with the frequency and intensity of climate-fuelled disasters.

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Past 7 years set to be warmest on record, sea level at new high

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Record greenhouse gas concentrations have pushed the planet into uncharted territory, with repercussions likely for current and future generations, warned the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) this Sunday.

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http://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level

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g20 agrees on key climate goals around global warming limits and coal financing

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but lacks firm commitments - cnnpolitics

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G20 agrees on key climate goals around global warming limits and coal financing, but lacks firm commitments

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The Group of 20's leaders' summit ended Sunday with an agreement on climate that commits its member nations to end coal financing by the end of the year and to aim to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

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Climate change experts have warned that New Zealand has employed "accounting tricks" to create a target for greenhouse gas emissions cuts that looks far more ambitious than it really is.

On Sunday the country pledged to halve its emissions by 2030 aspart of the Paris agreement to limit global warming to 1.5C. The announcement was made on the eve of the United Nations Cop26 climate conference.

The previous target, known as a nationally determined contribution (NDC), was to reduce emissions by an average of 30% from 2005 levels, over the 2021-2030 period.

The updated NDC, has a target of reducing net emissions by 50% below the gross 2005 levels come 2030, or to reduce average annual net emissions over the next decade to 41% below 2005 gross levels.

The target roughly aligns with commitments by the European Union, Newsroom reports, the primary difference being that the European Union aims to reduce most of its emissions within its own borders. New Zealand, on the other hand, expects that less than a third of its emissions will be reduced onshore.

While New Zealand's share of global greenhouse gas emissions is small, its gross emissions per capita are high and it is one of the world's worst performers on emission increases. Emissions in New Zealand rose 57% between 1990 and 2018 - the second-greatest increase of all industrialised countries. Earlier this year, data showed New Zealand's emissions had increased by 2% in 2018-19.

The Climate Action Tracker has given the country a "highly insufficient" rating, pointing out that despite net-zero emissions by 2050 being enshrined in law, the government's policies focus too heavily on offsetting carbon overseas and through forestry, rather than addressing the root causes such as agriculture.

Bill Hare, from Climate Analytics, a partner organisation to Climate Action Tracker said New Zealand's latest announcement employs "various accounting tricks".

"The headline target that the government has put forward as a 50% reduction from 2005 levels of emissions is what the general public hears, however the government has taken a number of unusual accounting approaches that, when analysed, indicate that the real emission reductions achieved compared to 2005 levels of net emissions is only 22-23%," he said.

"The allowed net emissions in 2030 are calculated as a percentage of gross emissions in 2005, essentially comparing apples and oranges. Gross emissions in 2005 was significantly higher than 2005 emissions."

Global industry campaign manager at Oil Change International, David Tong, said it was similar to the difference between looking at gross income, and pay after tax.

"What's been compared is a total emissions in 2005, to our total emissions, if we achieve this target, in 2030, less the sequestration from forestry and other carbon sequestration within New Zealand. So those are two different data sets."

Part of the problem, is that the government is using Kyoto Protocol accounting rules, which have become less common, rather than the International Panel on Climate Change data method.

"If you want to compare our targets to what is necessary for 1.5C, as both the prime minister and minister James Shaw have done, then it's really important that you use the same numbers as the world's top scientists," he said.

Professor Bronwyn Hayward, from the University of Canterbury and an author for the IPCC report, said Climate Action Tracker has long argued that if New Zealand's commitments are to be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5˚C, the country should set a 2030 target to reduce gross emissions by at least 44%.

"What we have done instead is to set an estimated net target of 41%. There will now be political debate about whether this meets the 1.5 target."

Lawyers for Climate Action NZ Inc spokesperson, James Every-Palmer QC, said that while the target sounded good and is a significant improvement on the current NDC, it is not as good as it sounds.

"The climate does not care about our clever accounting choices, it cares about the level of net emissions. And our failure to walk-the-talk will be apparent to our trading partners in our United Nations framework convention on climate change reporting."

The climate minister James Shaw said while the first priority was to reduce emissions domestically, the country will also boost its emissions reductions through buying overseas carbon credits.

"We will then add to this by working to reduce emissions in other parts of the world. The priority here will be to support developing countries in the Asia-Pacific to meet their sustainable development goals.

But Professor Ralph Sims, from Massey University said: "forest sinks only buy us time, and buying international credits is yet to be agreed under Paris COP rules and remains questionable with double-counting a risk".

Forest and Bird's chief executiveKevin Hague said the government was relying too heavily on other countries to do the work.
"Unless the government delivers a much better plan to cut emissions that what we have seen so far this target will be mostly met by buying carbon credits from other countries. That's a government subsidy to polluters like the dairy industry."
With the target set, and the country's emissions reduction plan due in May 2022, the most important thing now was for action to back up the ambitions, Hayward said.

"It's meeting them that is the big challenge as we work to make these cuts to our emissions real in all sectors of the economy, and to dramatically increase our efforts to protect people and businesses from increasingly chaotic climate futures."

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New Zealand plan to halve greenhouse gases criticised as an 'accounting trick'

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Climate change experts have warned that New Zealand has employed "accounting tricks" to create a target for greenhouse gas emissions cuts that looks far more ambitious than it really is. On Sunday the country pledged to halve its emissions by 2030 aspart of the Paris agreement to limit global warming to 1.5C.

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World leaders have been meeting for 29 years to try to curb global warming, and in that time Earth has become a much hotter and deadlier planet.

Trillions of tons of ice have disappeared over that period, the burning of fossil fuels has spewed billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air, and hundreds of thousands of people have died from heat and other weather disasters stoked by climate change, statistics show.

When more than 100 world leaders descended on Rio de Janeiro in 1992 for an Earth Summit to discuss global warming and other environmental issues, there was "a huge feeling of well-being, of being able to do something. There was hope really," said Oren Lyons, faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, one of the representatives for Native Americans at the summit.

Now, the 91-year-old activist said, that hope has been smothered: "The ice is melting. ... Everything is bad. ... Thirty years of degradation."

Data analyzed by The Associated Press from government figures and scientific reports shows "how much we did lose Earth," said former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief William K. Reilly, who headed the American delegation three decades ago.

That Earth Summit set up the process of international climate negotiations that culminated in the 2015 Paris accord and resumes Sunday in Glasgow, Scotland, where leaders will try to ramp up efforts to cut carbon pollution.

Back in 1992, it was clear climate change was a problem "with major implications for lives and livelihoods in the future," U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the AP this month. "That future is here and we are out of time."

World leaders have hammered out two agreements to curb climate change. In Kyoto in 1997, a protocol set carbon pollution cuts for developed countries but not poorer nations. That did not go into effect until 2005 because of ratification requirements. In 2015, the Paris agreement made every nation set its own emission goals.

In both cases, the United States, a top-polluting country, helped negotiate the deals but later pulled out of the process when a Republican president took office. The U.S. has since rejoined the Paris agreement.

The yearly global temperature has increased almost 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) since 1992, based on multi-year averaging, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth has warmed more in the last 29 years than in the previous 110. Since 1992, the world has broken the annual global high temperature record eight times.

In Alaska, the average temperature has increased 2.5 degrees (1.4 degrees Celsius) since 1992, according to NOAA. The Arctic had been warming twice as fast as the globe as a whole, but now has jumped to three times faster in some seasons, according to the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program.

That heat is melting Earth's ice. Since 1992, Earth has lost 36 trillion tons of ice (33 trillion metric tons), according to calculations by climate scientist Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds. That includes sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic that melts now more in the summer than it used to, the shrinking of giant ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and melting glaciers.

And Michael Zemp, who runs the World Glacier Monitoring Service, said Shepherd's numbers may be a little low. He calculates that since 1992, the glaciers of the world have lost nearly 9.5 trillion tons of ice (8.6 trillion metric tons), about a trillion tons more than Shepherd's figures.

With more ice melt in the ocean and water expanding as it warms, the world's average sea level has risen about 3.7 inches (95 millimeters) since 1992, according to the University of Colorado. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to cover the United States in water to a depth of 11 feet (3.5 meters), University of Colorado sea level researcher Steve Nerem calculated.

Wildfires in the United States have more than doubled in how much they have burned. From 1983 to 1992, wildfires consumed an average of 2.7 million acres a year. From 2011 to 2020, the average was up to 7.5 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

"The unhealthy choices that are killing our planet are killing our people as well," said Dr. Maria Neira, director of the World Heath Organization's environment, climate change and health program.

The United States has had 265 weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage - adjusted to 2021 dollars - since 1992, including 18 so far this year. Those disasters have caused 11,991 deaths and cost $1.8 trillion. From 1980 to 1992, the U.S. averaged three of those billion-dollar weather disasters a year. Since 1993, the country has averaged nine a year.

Worldwide there have been nearly 8,000 climate, water and weather disasters, killing 563,735, according to the EMDAT disaster databas e. Those figures are probably missing a lot of disasters and deaths, said the Debarati Guha-Sapir, who oversees the database for the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain School of Public Health in Brussels.

Medical researchers earlier this year looked at 732 cities worldwide and calculated how many deaths were from climate change-caused extra heat. They found that on average since 1991, there have been 9,702 heat deaths from global warming a year just in those studied cities, which adds up to 281,000 climate-caused heat deaths since 1992.

But that's a small proportion of what really is happening, said study author Ana Vicedo-Cabrera, an epidemiologist at the Institute of Social and Preventative Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Using those cities, researchers calculated that during the four hottest months of the year, the added heat from climate change is responsible for 0.58% of the globe's deaths.

That comes to about 100,000 heat deaths caused by climate change a year for 29 years, she said.

WHO officials said those figures make sense and calculate the annual death toll from climate change will rise to 250,000 a year in the 2030s.

Scientists say this is happening because of heat-trapping gases. Carbon dioxide levels have increased 17% from 353 parts per million in September 1992 to 413 in September 2021, according to NOAA. The agency's annual greenhouse gas index, which charts six gases and weights them according to how much heat they trap, rose almost 20% since 1992.

From 1993 to 2019, the world put more than 885 billion tons (803 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide in the air from the burning of fossil fuels and making of cement, according to the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists who track emissions.

A pessimistic Lyons, the Native American activist, said, "I would say this meeting in Glasgow is the last shot."

___

Read stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://apnews.com/hub/climate.

___

Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Earth gets hotter, deadlier during decades of climate talks

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World leaders have been meeting for 29 years to try to curb global warming, and in that time Earth has become a much hotter and deadlier planet. Trillions of tons of ice have disappeared over that period, the burning of fossil fuels has spewed billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air, and hundreds of thousands of people have died from heat and other weather disasters stoked by climate change, statistics show.

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The Earth's average global temperature is 1.2 degrees Celsius (around 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than in preindustrial times, causing shifts in weather patterns and more frequent and severe extreme weather events such as storms and droughts.

This global warming, also known as climate change, is the result of humans filling the air with gases that intensify a process called the greenhouse effect.

The greenhouse effect occurs when the sun's rays reach the Earth's atmosphere and the majority of the radiation bounces back out into space. When this happens, a small portion is absorbed by chemicals in our atmosphere. These are known as greenhouse gases.

By looking at air bubbles from hundreds of thousands of years ago until today, scientists have found that temperatures go up or down in lockstep with the amount of greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide.

Human activity has started to change the delicate balance of chemicals in our atmosphere.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, humans have been burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas for energy. When these substances are burned, they emit excess greenhouse gases, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide.

According to measurements taken in February and March from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now reaching levels 50 percent higher than in the preindustrial period. More greenhouse gases means more heat trapped in the atmosphere and, over time, a warmer planet.

When the average temperature of the Earth is raised, even by just a few degrees, we see some pretty dramatic effects. For example, it can cause a rise in ocean temperatures that can lead to more extreme storms and flooding.

Klaus Jacob, a special research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, explained one consequence of warmer oceans.

"As the ocean gets warmer, it expands," Jacob said. "So as sea level rises, you need only smaller and smaller storms to reach the same elevation in New Orleans, or New York City, or anywhere else where we have storms. ... And so you get much more frequent flooding."

At the same time, some areas are dealing with long droughts because warmer temperatures cause more evaporation and dry out the land and vegetation, which leads to problems like crop shortages and widespread forest fires.

The severe current, and potential future, consequences of climate change were laid out in a landmark report conducted by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released in August.

The assessment found that if the world follows the scenario of very low greenhouse gas emissions, it's plausible that warming of greater than 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures can be avoided.

But if that scenario - which involves very drastic, rapid and sustained cuts in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, enforced by governments and businesses - is not followed, the world could be heading toward being 3 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100.

In all cases, there will be more extreme events like hurricanes and heat waves that cause flooding, wildfires and droughts. It's only a question of how severe we allow the situation to become.

When it was published, the report was described as "a code red for humanity" by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

The U.N. timed the report's release to lead into the U.N. Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland. The ongoing fight to limit global warming and to deal with its effects hinges on successful talks between world leaders at the conference, which will take place in early November.

____
Read more from Yahoo News:

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What is the greenhouse effect and how does it lead to global warming?

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The Earth's average global temperature is 1.2 degrees Celsius (around 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than in preindustrial times, causing shifts in weather patterns and more frequent and severe extreme weather events such as storms and droughts. This global warming, also known as climate change, is the result of humans filling the air with gases that intensify a process called the greenhouse effect.

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article 4 : global warming kills marine organism

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article 4 : global warming kills marine organism

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Global warming kills 14 percent of world's corals in 10 years

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Climate change, overfishing, coastal development and declining water quality destroyed crucial marine ecosystems.

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As humans continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, oceans have tempered the effect. The world's seas have absorbed more than 90 percent of the heat from these gases, but it's taking a toll on our oceans: 2021 set a new record for ocean heating.

Rising seas is one of those climate change effects. Average sea levels have swelled over 8 inches (about 23 cm) since 1880, with about three of those inches gained in the last 25 years. Every year, the sea rises another .13 inches (3.2 mm.) Research published in February 2022 shows that sea level rise is accelerating and projected to rise by a foot by 2050.

That translates into as much sea level rise in the next 30 years as occurred over the last century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Rick Spinrad, the NOAA administrator, called the findings "historic," and warned that the projected rise will occur even if carbon emissions are drastically cut.

(How carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases contribute to climate change.)

In the United States, the most vulnerable populations live on the East and Gulf Coasts, where damaging flooding is predicted to occur 10 times more often in 2050 than it does today. The acceleration of sea level rise along these coasts is "unprecedented in at least 120 years," according to a study published in April 2023.

Here's what you need to know about the causes-and consequences-of sea level rise.

Causes of sea level rise

The change in sea levels is linked to three primary factors, all induced by ongoing global climate change:

Thermal expansion: When water heats up, it expands. About half of the sea-level rise over the past 25 years is attributable to warmer oceans simply occupying more space.

Melting glaciers: Large ice formations such as mountain glaciers naturally melt a bit each summer. In the winter, snows, primarily from evaporated seawater, are generally sufficient to balance out the melting. Recently, though, persistently higher temperatures caused by global warming have led to greater-than-average summer melting as well as diminished snowfall due to later winters and earlier springs. That creates an imbalance between runoff and ocean evaporation, causing sea levels to rise.

Loss of Greenland and Antarctica's ice sheets: As with mountain glaciers, increased heat is causing the massive ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica to melt more quickly. Scientists also believe that meltwater from above and seawater from below is seeping beneath Greenland's ice sheets, effectively lubricating ice streams and causing them to move more quickly into the sea. While melting in West Antarctica has drawn considerable focus from scientists, especially with the 2017 break in the Larsen C ice shelf, glaciers in East Antarctica are also showing signs of destabilizing.

Consequences

When sea levels rise as rapidly as they have been, even a small increase can have devastating effects on coastal habitats farther inland, it can cause destructive erosion, wetland flooding, aquifer and agricultural soil contamination with salt, and lost habitat for fish, birds, and plants.

(Here's how warming oceans affects wildlife and storm systems.)

Higher sea levels are coinciding with more dangerous hurricanes and typhoons that move more slowly and drop more rain, contributing to more powerful storm surges that can strip away everything in their path. One study found that between 1963 and 2012, almost half of all deaths from Atlantic hurricanes were caused by storm surges.

Already, flooding in low-lying coastal areas is forcing people to migrate to higher ground, and millions more are vulnerable from flood risk and other climate change effects. The prospect of higher coastal water levels threatens basic services such as Internet access, since much of the underlying communications infrastructure lies in the path of rising seas.

Adapting to the threat

As a result of these risks, many coastal cities are already planning adaptation measures to cope with the long-term prospects of higher sea levels, often at considerable cost. Building seawalls, rethinking roads, and planting mangroves or other vegetation to absorb water are all being undertaken.

In Jakarta, a $40 billion project will aim to protect the city with an 80-foot-high seawall. Rotterdam, home to the Global Center on Adaptation, has offered a model to other cities seeking to combat flooding and land loss. The Dutch city has built barriers, drainage, and innovative architectural features such as a "water square" with temporary ponds.

Of course, communities vulnerable to rising seas can only go so far in holding back the tide. In the Marshall Islands, where rising sea levels are forcing a choice between relocating or building up the land, residents will need help from other nations if they decide to undertake the expensive latter option.

How high will it go?

Most predictions say the warming of the planet will continue and is likely to accelerate, causing the oceans to keep rising. This means hundreds of coastal cities face flooding. But forecasting how much and how soon seas will rise remains an area of ongoing research.

A special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we can expect the oceans to rise between 10 and 30 inches (26 to 77 centimeters) by 2100 with temperatures warming 1.5 °C. That's enough to seriously affect many of the cities along the U.S. East Coast. Another analysis based on NASA and European data skewed toward the higher end of that range, predicting a rise of 26 inches (65 centimeters) by the end of this century if the current trajectory continues.

If all the ice that currently exists on Earth in glaciers and sheets melted it would raise sea level by 216 feet. That could cause entire states and even some countries to disappear under the waves, from Florida to Bangladesh. That's not a scenario scientists think is likely, and it would probably take many centuries, but it could eventually happen if the world keeps burning fossil fuels indiscriminately.

In the meantime, scientists keep refining their models of sea-level changes. They also point out that the extent to which countries work together to limit release of more greenhouse gases may have a significant impact on how quickly seas rise, and how much.

Editor's Note: This story was originally published on February 19, 2019. It has been updated with new data.

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Seas are predicted to rise a foot by 2050, regardless of how much global carbon emissions can be reduced. Why is this happening, and what can we do to adapt?

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https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/global-warming-wall-street-journal-article-cites-bad-evidence-draws-wrong-conclusion.html

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The Wall Street Journal Does it Again: Global Warming Article Draws Wrong Conclusion

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If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you know I am no fan of the Wall Street Journal op-ed section. In fact, I think it’s simply awful: They...

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World leaders have been meeting for 29 years to try to curb global warming, and in that time Earth has become a much hotter and deadlier planet.

Trillions of tons of ice have disappeared over that period, the burning of fossil fuels has spewed billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air, and hundreds of thousands of people have died from heat and other weather disasters stoked by climate change, statistics show.

When more than 100 world leaders descended on Rio de Janeiro in 1992 for an Earth Summit to discuss global warming and other environmental issues, there was "a huge feeling of well-being, of being able to do something. There was hope really," said Oren Lyons, faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, one of the representatives for Native Americans at the summit.

Now, the 91-year-old activist said, that hope has been smothered: "The ice is melting. ... Everything is bad. ... Thirty years of degradation."

Data analyzed by The Associated Press from government figures and scientific reports shows "how much we did lose Earth," said former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief William K. Reilly, who headed the American delegation three decades ago.

That Earth Summit set up the process of international climate negotiations that culminated in the 2015 Paris accord and resumes Sunday in Glasgow, Scotland, where leaders will try to ramp up efforts to cut carbon pollution.

Back in 1992, it was clear climate change was a problem "with major implications for lives and livelihoods in the future," U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the AP this month. "That future is here and we are out of time."

World leaders have hammered out two agreements to curb climate change. In Kyoto in 1997, a protocol set carbon pollution cuts for developed countries but not poorer nations. That did not go into effect until 2005 because of ratification requirements. In 2015, the Paris agreement made every nation set its own emission goals.

In both cases, the United States, a top-polluting country, helped negotiate the deals but later pulled out of the process when a Republican president took office. The U.S. has since rejoined the Paris agreement.

The yearly global temperature has increased almost 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) since 1992, based on multi-year averaging, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth has warmed more in the last 29 years than in the previous 110. Since 1992, the world has broken the annual global high temperature record eight times.

In Alaska, the average temperature has increased 2.5 degrees (1.4 degrees Celsius) since 1992, according to NOAA. The Arctic had been warming twice as fast as the globe as a whole, but now has jumped to three times faster in some seasons, according to the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program.

That heat is melting Earth's ice. Since 1992, Earth has lost 36 trillion tons of ice (33 trillion metric tons), according to calculations by climate scientist Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds. That includes sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic that melts now more in the summer than it used to, the shrinking of giant ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and melting glaciers.

And Michael Zemp, who runs the World Glacier Monitoring Service, said Shepherd's numbers may be a little low. He calculates that since 1992, the glaciers of the world have lost nearly 9.5 trillion tons of ice (8.6 trillion metric tons), about a trillion tons more than Shepherd's figures.

With more ice melt in the ocean and water expanding as it warms, the world's average sea level has risen about 3.7 inches (95 millimeters) since 1992, according to the University of Colorado. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to cover the United States in water to a depth of 11 feet (3.5 meters), University of Colorado sea level researcher Steve Nerem calculated.

Wildfires in the United States have more than doubled in how much they have burned. From 1983 to 1992, wildfires consumed an average of 2.7 million acres a year. From 2011 to 2020, the average was up to 7.5 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

"The unhealthy choices that are killing our planet are killing our people as well," said Dr. Maria Neira, director of the World Heath Organization's environment, climate change and health program.

The United States has had 265 weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage - adjusted to 2021 dollars - since 1992, including 18 so far this year. Those disasters have caused 11,991 deaths and cost $1.8 trillion. From 1980 to 1992, the U.S. averaged three of those billion-dollar weather disasters a year. Since 1993, the country has averaged nine a year.

Worldwide there have been nearly 8,000 climate, water and weather disasters, killing 563,735, according to the EMDAT disaster databas e. Those figures are probably missing a lot of disasters and deaths, said the Debarati Guha-Sapir, who oversees the database for the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain School of Public Health in Brussels.

Medical researchers earlier this year looked at 732 cities worldwide and calculated how many deaths were from climate change-caused extra heat. They found that on average since 1991, there have been 9,702 heat deaths from global warming a year just in those studied cities, which adds up to 281,000 climate-caused heat deaths since 1992.

But that's a small proportion of what really is happening, said study author Ana Vicedo-Cabrera, an epidemiologist at the Institute of Social and Preventative Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Using those cities, researchers calculated that during the four hottest months of the year, the added heat from climate change is responsible for 0.58% of the globe's deaths.

That comes to about 100,000 heat deaths caused by climate change a year for 29 years, she said.

WHO officials said those figures make sense and calculate the annual death toll from climate change will rise to 250,000 a year in the 2030s.

Scientists say this is happening because of heat-trapping gases. Carbon dioxide levels have increased 17% from 353 parts per million in September 1992 to 413 in September 2021, according to NOAA. The agency's annual greenhouse gas index, which charts six gases and weights them according to how much heat they trap, rose almost 20% since 1992.

From 1993 to 2019, the world put more than 885 billion tons (803 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide in the air from the burning of fossil fuels and making of cement, according to the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists who track emissions.

A pessimistic Lyons, the Native American activist, said, "I would say this meeting in Glasgow is the last shot."

___

Read stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://apnews.com/hub/climate.

___

Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Earth gets hotter, deadlier during decades of climate talks

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World leaders have been meeting for 29 years to try to curb global warming, and in that time Earth has become a much hotter and deadlier planet. Trillions of tons of ice have disappeared over that period, the burning of fossil fuels has spewed billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air, and hundreds of thousands of people have died from heat and other weather disasters stoked by climate change, statistics show.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Temperatures across the world are expected to rise past a level that scientists had hoped to avoid through drastic cuts in carbon emissions, according to a new report from a United Nations panel on climate change. Scientists say many changes from past and future emissions will result in irreversible changes for centuries to come.

The report found it's "unequivocal" that humans are responsible for widespread and rapid changes in warming of the earth's atmosphere, oceans and land. The frequency and intensity of heat waves and rains are expected to escalate as temperatures rise, including in Wisconsin, said Dan Vimont, director of the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"The UN report is broadly consistent with what we found here in Wisconsin, especially conditions and expected changes in the northern part of North America," said Vimont. "One of the things that we've seen is this last decade has been the warmest and wettest on record for Wisconsin. That's consistent with projections from the recent report."

More than 200 scientists released the 3,000-page report Monday. It found global warming has increased faster since 1970 than any other 50-year period in the last two millennia.

The report details the effects of five climate scenarios based on the level of future carbon reductions. Under all, temperatures will likely rise by at least 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit in the next two decades - even with very low emissions.

Wisconsin is already warmer and wetter than it was more than half a century ago. Temperatures have risen by around 2 degrees since the 1950s and are expected to warm between 2.5 to 7.5 degrees Fahrenheit by mid-century. The amount of rain and snowfall each year has increased about 15 percent. And extreme rains are becoming more common, according to updated climate projections from the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts.

"The projections do suggest or do show that we expect more of these heavy rainfall events, as well as longer dry spells in between. And the interplay between those events is going to be really important," said Vimont, who is co-director of the initiative. "Another thing we see here, and another thing that projections suggest is that warmer conditions will be associated with drier soil moisture and more ecological and agricultural drought."

Much of southern and western Wisconsin has been abnormally dry this year with severe drought in southeastern Wisconsin earlier this summer. The dry conditions come just two years after the state saw its wettest year on record.

Chris Pollack, who runs a 150-cow dairy south of Ripon, said farmers have been adapting to larger rain events in recent years. Pollack served as part of Gov. Tony Evers' task force on climate change, which was formed in 2019 and released its report in 2020.

"A lot of farmers are actively working to utilize farming practices that specifically are very much conservation-minded to help keep soil and nutrients in our field, and also, at the same time, sequestering carbon, which is a large part of the equation when you're talking about climate change," said Pollack.

Those practices will be even more vital as the panel of scientists finds heavy rains and flooding will only intensify and become more frequent with warming. As temperatures rise in Wisconsin, annual rainfall could increase up to 15 percent in the next 30 years. And a daily rainfall of 4 inches that typically happens once every 10 to 15 years in southern Wisconsin is likely to occur once every six to 10 years.

Both reports from the UN panel and Wisconsin researchers conclude that rising temperatures in the region are likely to be most pronounced in winter months. In the summer, the number of days hotter than 90 degrees is likely to triple in Wisconsin. Under higher emissions scenarios, southern Wisconsin could experience three months of extremely hot days by the end of the century.

The extreme heat often has disproportionate impacts on communities of color and low-income earners, said August Ball, founder of Cream City Conservation in Milwaukee, who also served on the governor's task force.

"A lot of Milwaukeeans, at least, who are of lower income, don't have access to air conditioning," said Ball.

Milwaukee could see three times as many days with a heat index above 105 degrees by 2050, according to UW-Madison researchers. Extreme heat kills more people across the country than all other weather events combined, said Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at UW-Madison.

"Heat-retaining surfaces like asphalt roads and concrete buildings...can really jack up the temperature. In an urban setting, especially nighttime temperatures can be more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than surrounding areas," said Patz. "And with the inability to get relief at night, anyone that doesn't have air conditioning, that's a big risk."

Until recently, Patz served as a lead author for the United Nations panel on climate change for the last 15 years. He added that research has shown a correlation between heavy rainfall events and increased visits to the doctor's office among children experiencing gastrointestinal illness in northern and central Wisconsin.

Studies have also projected the frequency of combined sewer overflows into Lake Michigan could increase 120 percent by the end of the century, posing greater risk of flooding and waterborne diseases. The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District reported a combined sewer overflow into Lake Michigan that occurred early Sunday morning after parts of southern Wisconsin saw record-breaking severe weather on Saturday.

"It's a global emergency. From my point of view, it's a health emergency," said Patz. "This report is a clarion call for not just talk but serious action."

On Monday, Democrats in the U.S. Senate released a budget resolution that would devote $3.5 trillion toward President Joe Biden's agenda to expand social programs and address climate change by raising taxes on the wealthy. The level of spending has been met with opposition by top republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Ball said she's been disheartened by the nation's progress to transition away from fossil fuels to a green economy.

"Unless we are mindfully creating this green economy with an equitable lens, it's going to be the same players who are going to benefit from the green economy," said Ball. "And the same individuals who have been marginalized, who are going to bear the brunt of it."

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Global Warming Is Happening More Rapidly. Wisconsin Is Already Feeling It.

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Temperatures across the world are expected to rise past a level that scientists had hoped to avoid through drastic cuts in carbon emissions, according to a new report from a United Nations panel on climate change. Scientists say many changes from past and future emissions will result in irreversible changes for centuries to come.

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https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2021/10/26/air-pollution-are-countries-doing-enough-to-clean-up-their-act

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Our podcast on the science and technology making the news. Also this week: how a theory from a medieval theologist has shaped modern science, and is music key to communicating with aliens?

THE WORLD Health Organisation recently declared that air pollution is the greatest environmental threat to health globally. What do cities and governments need to do to clean up their act? Also, we explore how Occam's razor, ​​a theory from a medieval theologist, has influenced science. And, could music be an effective way to communicate with extraterrestrials? Alok Jha hosts. Runtime: 28 min

For full access to The Economist's print, digital and audio editions subscribe at economist.com/podcastoffer and sign up for our new weekly science newsletter at economist.com/simplyscience.

Terms and conditions for the book competition featured in this podcast are available at economist.com/podcast-contest

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Air pollution-are countries doing enough to clean up their act?

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Our podcast on the science and technology making the news. Also this week: how a theory from a medieval theologist has shaped modern science, and is music key to communicating with aliens? THE WORLD Health Organisation recently declared that air pollution is the greatest environmental threat to health globally.

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With Coles and Woolworths supermarkets phasing out single-use plastic bags at their checkout counters, and Queensland and Western Australia bringing in bans on single-use plastic bags for all retailers from July 1, a long overdue step is being taken towards reducing Australia's plastic waste.

However, it is only a small step, and much still needs to be done to tackle the problem.

It is therefore useful to explore what strategies might be effective in informing the public about the issue, and in changing people's consumption and littering behaviour.

Read more: In banning plastic bags we need to make sure we're not creating new problems

Research shows that fear or shock tactics, or strategies based on shame and guilt, are generally not effective, and can even be counterproductive. High-threat fear appeals can be effective provided that the target audience is already taking positive steps toward the desired behaviour change, or feel that they can easily do so. Crucially, this means that campaigns not only need to tell people about an issue, but also provide straightforward advice on what do to about it.

In this context, campaigns such as " Hey Tosser!", run by the New South Wales Environment Protection Authority, are ill-conceived. The problem is that encouraging the public shaming of "tossers" creates an unhelpful stereotype that doesn't actually exist. One study found that Australians are often unaware of their own littering, meaning the campaign might prompt people to identify themselves as "non-tossers" and therefore ignore the message.

The author and social behaviour change expert Les Robinson has suggested that rather than try to scare or shame people into changing, it is more useful to create a positive buzz around change, make new behaviours easy to adopt and sustain, and foster supportive communities to help with change.

This means that whether we want to tackle littering or reduce reliance on plastic bags, it is important to make people feel that they are part of an inclusive movement that is supported by the community and relevant to their own lives.

One example is the WA government's " What's your bag plan? " campaign, which urges shoppers to decide how they will carry their shopping after the demise of plastic bags, by becoming either a "bagger" (reusable bags), a "boxer" (cardboard boxes), or a "juggler" (neither!).

The good and the bad

A recent action by Greenpeace, in which overpackaged fruit and veg were labelled with a sticker saying "I'd like this product to be plastic free" and "We love plastic-free fruit and veg", makes it easy for consumers to view those changes as positive. There is no blaming or shaming, but rather a focus on making it easier for consumers to ask supermarkets for more environmentally conscious options.

On Instagram and Twitter Greenpeace is encouraging consumers to share photos of excessive packaging, under the hashtag #RidiculousPackaging. This is a proactive way for consumers to take action, and for others to start noticing the overuse of plastic in supermarkets.

In contrast, other campaigns seek to emphasise the destructive effects of plastic waste. These can be eyecatching, but without a strong message that customers have the power to make a positive difference, they are unlikely to be effective in implementing sustained behaviour change.

The UK Marine Conservation Society's campaign, showing a drinking straw lodged up a child's nose (echoing a horrific viral video of a sea turtle enduring the same fate), is both shocking and thought-provoking. But with no clear, positive information showing people how they can directly address the problem through changes in their own lives, viewers may simply disengage.

Winning the war

One of the most powerful campaigns in Australia in recent times has been the ABC documentary series War On Waste. Its success can be attributed to a clever mix of shocking information tempered with entertaining and engaging storylines; a lack of blaming and shaming of individuals (although some corporations and politicians have received their share); clear and tangible solutions that viewers can implement; and a feeling of collaborative empowerment.

In combination, these elements have had a positive impact, with the sale of reusable takeaway coffee cups rising sharply after the series aired. If my experience at my local supermarket is any guide, shoppers have taken the message about recycling soft plastics firmly to heart.

Few people would argue against the reduction of plastic waste. Most people are ready and willing to change, and the agencies that are designing campaigns on the issue would do well to remember this. Positive encouragement and advice are preferable to fear, shame or shock tactics.

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Plastic-free campaigns don't have to shock or shame. Shoppers are already on board

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With Coles and Woolworths supermarkets phasing out single-use plastic bags at their checkout counters, and Queensland and Western Australia bringing in bans on single-use plastic bags for all retailers from July 1, a long overdue step is being taken towards reducing Australia's plastic waste.

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https://beta.ctvnews.ca/national/climate-and-environment/2021/10/9/1_5617660.html

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A man who scavenges recyclable materials for a living walks across a mountain of garage amidst smoke from burning trash at Dandora, the largest garbage dump in the capital Nairobi, Kenya Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2021. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

TORONTO -- A new study says that air pollution was responsible for 1.1 million deaths in Africa in 2019 while costing billions of dollars in GDP for African countries.

The study was led by researchers based in Massachusetts and involved researchers from Kenya and Rwanda affiliated with the UN Environment Programme. The authors published their findings this month in The Lancet Planetary Health.

The researchers looked at the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Study, a Lancet study from October 2020 that measured diseases and causes of death in over 200 countries and territories, as well as air pollution data from the World Health Organization.

Most of the air pollution deaths in Africa were related to household air pollution, which accounted for 697,000 deaths that year. Many African households still rely on fuels such as charcoal and kerosene for indoor cookstoves. In Ethiopia and Rwanda, an estimated 98 per cent of households still use these fuels.

But while deaths due to household air pollution have been slowly declining, deaths from ambient air pollution have been on the rise. In 2015, air pollution deaths accounted for 361,000 deaths compared to 383,000 in 2019.

Boston College professor Philip Landrigan, who co-led the study, said the increase in ambient air pollution-related deaths was "the most disturbing finding."

"While this increase is still modest, it threatens to increase exponentially as African cities grow in the next two to three decades and the continent develops economically."

Africa is undergoing a massive economic shift. The continent is experincing rapid urbanization and industrialization, which comes with increased fossil fuel consumption. By 2100, the continent is expected to have 13 megacities and more than triple its population from 1.3 billion to 4.3 billion.

In total, household and ambient air pollution combined were linked to 1.1 million deaths in Africa, making it the second largest cause of death on the continent after AIDS. That's more deaths than tobacco, alcohol, road accidents, and drug abuse.

However, deaths due to communicable diseases, such as AIDS and malaria, are on the decline. The authors say that Africa is "passing through a massive epidemiological transition from communicable to non-communicable diseases," such as the diseases caused by air pollution.

The researchers also looked into the effects of PM2.5, which are pollutants from fossil fuels and wildfires that are made up of tiny particles smaller than 2.5 micrometres. Numerous previous studies have shown that PM2.5 is particularly harmful to the brain development of infants and young children. The researchers calculated that as many as 1.96 billion IQ points have been lost in Africa as a result of air pollution.

In addition to the impact on human health, the researchers also investigated how deaths and illnesses due to air pollution has affected the economies of three African countries. They calculated that the costs are as high as US$3.02 billion in Ethiopia, US$1.63 billion in Ghana and US$349 million in Rwanda. These costs range between 0.95 per cent and 1.19 per cent of the country's GDP.

The authors say their findings underscore the need for investments in renewable energy, reduction of road traffic, restrictions on agricultural burnings and systems to monitor and control trends in air pollution in Africa.

"We encourage Africa's leaders to take advantage of the fact that their countries are still relatively early in their economic development and to transition rapidly to wind and solar energy, thus avoiding entrapment in fossil-fuel-based economies," said Landrigan. "We argue that African countries are in a unique position to leapfrog over mistakes made elsewhere and to achieve prosperity without pollution."

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Air pollution in Africa responsible for 1.1 million deaths in 2019: study

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A man who scavenges recyclable materials for a living walks across a mountain of garage amidst smoke from burning trash at Dandora, the largest garbage dump in the capital Nairobi, Kenya Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2021.

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People around the world are witnessing firsthand how climate change can wreak havoc on the planet. Steadily rising average temperatures fuel increasingly intense wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters that are now impossible to ignore. And while the world has been plunged into a deadly pandemic, scientists are sounding the alarm once more that climate change is still the greatest threat to human health in recorded history.

As recently as August-when wildfires raged in the United States, Europe, and Siberia-World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement that "the risks posed by climate change could dwarf those of any single disease."

On September 5, more than 200 medical journals released an unprecedented joint editorial that urged world leaders to act. "The science is unequivocal," they write. "A global increase of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse."

Despite the acute dangers posed by COVID-19, the authors of the joint op-ed write that world governments "cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions." Instead, they argue, everyone must treat climate change with the same urgency as they have COVID-19.

Here's a look at the ways that climate change can affect your health-including some less obvious but still insidious effects-and why scientists say it's not too late to avert catastrophe.

Air pollution

Climate change is caused by an increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere, mostly from fossil fuel emissions. But burning fossil fuels can also have direct consequences for human health. That's because the polluted air contains small particles that can induce stroke and heart attacks by penetrating the lungs and heart and even traveling into the bloodstream. Those particles might harm the organs directly or provoke an inflammatory response from the immune system as it tries to fight them off. Estimates suggest that air pollution causes anywhere between 3.6 million and nine million premature deaths a year.

"The numbers do vary," says Andy Haines, professor of environmental change and public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and author of the recently published book Planetary Health. "But they all agree that it's a big public health burden."

People over the age of 65 are most susceptible to the harmful effects of air pollution, but many others are at risk too, says Kari Nadeau, director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University. People who smoke or vape are at increased risk, as are children with asthma.

Air pollution also has consequences for those with allergies. Carbon dioxide increases the acidity of the air, which then pulls more pollen out from plants. For some people, this might just mean that they face annoyingly long bouts of seasonal allergies. But for others, it could be life-threatening.

"For people who already have respiratory disease, boy is that a problem," Nadeau says. When pollen gets into the respiratory pathway, the body creates mucus to get rid of it, which can then fill up and suffocate the lungs.

Even healthy people can have similar outcomes if pollen levels are especially intense. In 2016, in the Australian state of Victoria, a severe thunderstorm combined with high levels of pollen to induce what The Lancet has described as "the world's largest and most catastrophic epidemic of thunderstorm asthma." So many residents suffered asthma attacks that emergency rooms were overwhelmed-and at least 10 people died as a result.

Climate change is also causing wildfires to get worse, and wildfire smoke is especially toxic. As one recent study showed, fires can account for 25 percent of dangerous air pollution in the U.S. Nadeau explains that the smoke contains particles of everything that the fire has consumed along its path-from rubber tires to harmful chemicals. These particles are tiny and can penetrate even deeper into a person's lungs and organs. (Here's how breathing wildfire smoke affects the body.)

Extreme heat

Heat waves are deadly, but researchers at first didn't see direct links between climate change and the harmful impacts of heat waves and other extreme weather events. Haines says the evidence base has been growing. "We have now got a number of studies which has shown that we can with high confidence attribute health outcomes to climate change," he says.

Most recently, Haines points to a study published earlier this year in Nature Climate Change that attributes more than a third of heat-related deaths to climate change. As National Geographic reported at the time, the study found that the human toll was even higher in some countries with less access to air conditioning or other factors that render people more vulnerable to heat. (How climate change is making heat waves even deadlier.)

That's because the human body was not designed to cope with temperatures above 98.6°F, Nadeau says. Heat can break down muscles. The body does have some ways to deal with the heat-such as sweating. "But when it's hot outside all the time, you cannot cope with that, and your heart muscles and cells start to literally die and degrade," she says.

If you're exposed to extreme heat for too long and are unable to adequately release that heat, the stress can cause a cascade of problems throughout the body. The heart has to work harder to pump blood to the rest of the organs, while sweat leeches the body of necessary minerals such as sodium and potassium. The combination can result in heart attacks and strokes.

Dehydration from heat exposure can also cause serious damage to the kidneys, which rely on water to function properly. For people whose kidneys are already beginning to fail-particularly older adults-Nadeau says that extreme heat can be a death sentence. "This is happening more and more," she says.

Studies have also drawn links between higher temperatures and preterm birth and other pregnancy complications. It's unclear why, but Haines says that one hypothesis is that extreme heat reduces blood flow to the fetus.

Food insecurity

One of the less direct-but no less harmful-ways that climate change can affect health is by disrupting the world's supply of food.

Climate change both reduces the amount of food that's available and makes it less nutritious. According to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report, crop yields have already begun to decline as a result of rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events. Meanwhile, studies have shown that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can leech plants of zinc, iron, and protein-nutrients that humans need to survive.

Malnutrition is linked to a variety of illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. It can also increase the risk of stunting, or impaired growth, in children, which can harm cognitive function.

Climate change also imperils what we eat from the sea. Rising ocean temperatures have led many fish species to migrate toward Earth's poles in search of cooler waters. Haines says that the resulting decline of fish stocks in subtropic regions "has big implications for nutrition," because many of those coastal communities depend on fish for a substantial amount of the protein in their diets.

This effect is likely to be particularly harmful for Indigenous communities, says Tiff-Annie Kenny, a professor in the faculty of medicine at Laval University in Quebec who studies climate change and food security in the Canadian Arctic. It's much more difficult for these communities to find alternative sources of protein, she says, either because it's not there or because it's too expensive. "So what are people going to eat instead?" she asks.

Infectious diseases

As the planet gets hotter, the geographic region where ticks and mosquitoes like to live is getting wider. These animals are well-known vectors of diseases such as the Zika virus, dengue fever, and malaria. As they cross the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, Nadeau says, mosquitoes and ticks bring more opportunities for these diseases to infect greater swaths of the world.

"It used to be that they stayed in those little sectors near the Equator, but now unfortunately because of the warming of northern Europe and Canada, you can find Zika in places you wouldn't have expected," Nadeau says.

In addition, climate conditions such as temperature and humidity can impact the life cycle of mosquitoes. Haines says there's particularly good evidence showing that, in some regions, climate change has altered these conditions in ways that increase the risk of mosquitos transmitting dengue.

There are also several ways in which climate change is increasing the risk of diseases that can be transmitted through water, such as cholera, typhoid fever, and parasites. Sometimes that's fairly direct, such as when people interact with dirty floodwaters. But Haines says that drought can have indirect impacts when people, say, can't wash their hands or are forced to drink from dodgier sources of freshwater.

Mental health

A common result of any climate-linked disaster is the toll on mental health. The distress caused by drastic environmental change is so significant that it has been given its own name- solastalgia.

Nadeau says that the effects on mental health have been apparent in her studies of emergency room visits arising from wildfires in the western U.S. People lose their homes, their jobs, and sometimes their loved ones, and that takes an immediate toll. "What's the fastest acute issue that develops? It's psychological," she says. Extreme weather events such as wildfires and hurricanes cause so much stress and anxiety that they can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder and even suicide in the long run.

Another common factor is that climate change causes disproportionate harm to the world's most vulnerable people. On September 2, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released an analysis showing that racial and ethnic minority communities are particularly at risk. According to the report, if temperatures rise by 2°C (3.6°F), Black people are 40 percent more likely to live in areas with the highest projected increases in related deaths. Another 34 percent are more likely to live in areas with a rise in childhood asthma.

Further, the effects of climate change don't occur in isolation. At any given time, a community might face air pollution, food insecurity, disease, and extreme heat all at once. Kenny says that's particularly devastating in communities where the prevalence of food insecurity and poverty are already high. This situation hasn't been adequately studied, she says, because "it's difficult to capture these shocks that climate can bring."

Why there's reason for hope

In recent years, scientists and environmental activists have begun to push for more research into the myriad health effects of climate change. "One of the striking things is there's been a real dearth of funding for climate change and health," Haines says. "For that reason, some of the evidence we have is still fragmentary."

Still, hope is not lost. In the Paris Agreement, countries around the world have pledged to limit global warming to below 2°C (3.6°F)-and preferably to 1.5°C (2.7°F)-by cutting their emissions. "When you reduce those emissions, you benefit health as well as the planet," Haines says.

Meanwhile, scientists and environmental activists have put forward solutions that can help people adapt to the health effects of climate change. These include early heat warnings and dedicated cooling centers, more resilient supply chains, and freeing healthcare facilities from dependence on the electric grid.

Nadeau argues that the COVID-19 pandemic also presents an opportunity for world leaders to think bigger and more strategically. For example, the pandemic has laid bare problems with efficiency and equity that have many countries restructuring their healthcare facilities. In the process, she says, they can look for new ways to reduce waste and emissions, such as getting more hospitals using renewable energy.

"This is in our hands to do," Nadeau says. "If we don't do anything, that would be cataclysmic."

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Why climate change is still the greatest threat to human health

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Polluted air and steadily rising temperatures are linked to health effects ranging from increased heart attacks and strokes to the spread of infectious diseases and psychological trauma.

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Reports: Health problems tied to global warming on the rise

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Two new reports show that death, disease and other health problems linked to global warming are rapidly rising.

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Sand, dust may cause more pollution in coming months

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China has experienced continuous improvement in its air quality this year but may suffer more floating sand and dust in the coming winter and spring, officials said.

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On 5 June - World Environment Day - two international campaigns are aiming to keep plastic pollution at the top of the agenda by harnessing the power of social media.

'One Plastic Free Day', a campaign organised by A Plastic Planet - the group behind the recent development of a 'Plastic Free' trust mark to be used in supermarkets - hopes to inspire 250 million people from around the world to avoid plastic-packaged food and drink products for 24 hours, while the United Nations Environment Programme's 'Beat Plastic Pollution' initiative focuses on persuading people to give up single-use plastic bottles.

One Plastic Free Day

A Plastic Planet is encouraging people to make a stand against plastic packaging by taking pictures of the products they have given up for the day and sharing them on social media using the hashtag #PassOnPlastic.

The campaign will focus attention on the growing international consensus for radical measures to reduce plastic packaging waste, calling on global companies to pledge to significantly reduce their plastic footprint.

The campaign, backed by celebrities including adventurer Ben Fogle and Harry Potter actress Bonnie Wright, has supporting partners from across Europe, Asia and the Americas, including Sky Ocean Rescue, Iceland Foods, Dutch supermarket chain Ekoplaza, Volvo Ocean Race, TimeOut and Spotify.

Sian Sutherland, co-founder of A Plastic Planet, said: "Across every continent, people are waking up to the fact that plastic has absolutely no place in food and drink. Where is the logic in wrapping something as fleeting as food in something as indestructible as plastic?

"One Plastic Free Day is all about uniting the world to turn off the plastic tap. It's just one day to think twice before reaching for that plastic-wrapped food and drink product. None of us are plastic saints; just do what you can."

#BeatPlasticPollution

The United Nations is supporting a global awareness campaign to discourage the use of disposable plastic products, particularly single-use cups, using an online game of tag. The #BeatPlasticPollution movement asks people to replace their single-use plastic products with reusable alternatives; participants are encouraged to share their commitment on social media, then tag their friends and spread the message within 24 hours, creating a chain reaction and widening participation.

The campaign has garnered widespread support, with actors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Felton, McFly singer Tom Fletcher, actress and model Dia Mirza and numerous environmental campaigners participating and encouraging their followers to do the same.

There is also a short video to accompany the campaign, which has been viewed over 50,000 times on youtube, and takes a humorous look at the importance of ditching plastic.

Waging war on waste with social media

These are not the only social media campaigns tackling plastic waste launched this year. The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) launched a campaign in February centred specifically around the horrifying fact that 79 per cent of all plastic ever created is still in the environment today. The 'Plastic Planet' campaign also aims to engage consumers and raise awareness using easily digestible facts and stark images to try to help improve the UK's plastic recycling rate.

Environmental behaviour change charity Hubbub launched two significant campaigns last year targeting plastic littering. 'For Fish's Sake' set out to reduce the amount of waste entering the UK's river and marine systems because of 'tidy litterers' - those who place their litter on walls, down storm drains or leave it carefully next to full bins in an attempt to be 'tidy', while doing nothing to alleviate the problem of waste entering our waterways. Hubbub's campaign offered simple steps to address this - find another bin or take your litter home - and saw the pun-tastic hashtag #FFSLDN emblazoned on bins around London.

A second campaign from Hubbub went much further, with a 12-seater boat, 'Poly-Mer', made from Plaswood - a composite material made of 100 per cent recycled plastic - designed to grab attention while collecting litter from the River Thames. Built by Mark Edwards MBE, creator of the Queen's barge, 'Gloriana', 'Poly-Mer' embarks on 'plastic fishing' trips in order to clear plastic litter from the docks around the capital's Canary Wharf. The organisation hopes to construct new vessels from the collected plastic, ultimately aiming to have a flotilla of plastic litter-busting boats deployed across the UK.

Campaigns such as these succeed when they grab the public's imagination, making urgent issues seem relevant and accessible by offering simple steps for people to take everyday. The hashtags #PassOnPlastic and #BeatPlasticPollution are already gaining traction on Twitter, and both the UN Environment Programme and A Plastic Planet will be busy tweeting in the run-up to and throughout World Environment Day.

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Say no to plastic this World Environment Day

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On 5 June - World Environment Day - two international campaigns are aiming to keep plastic pollution at the top of the agenda by harnessing the power of social media.

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By

The world is under unprecedented pressure to avert climate change catastrophe. The 2015 Paris Agreement committed nations to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius - 1.5 degrees preferably - through sweeping emissions cuts. But since that landmark deal, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, along with the frequency and intensity of climate-fuelled disasters. Much hinges on the outcome of the 12-day United Nations climate summit, COP26, in Glasgow from October 31, 2021. It has been billed as the last, best chance for humanity.

Economic impact of climate change

Climate change could cripple economies, both rich and poor. A report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in September said the number of climate-driven disasters, like floods and heatwaves, had increased fivefold over the past 50 years, costing US$3.64 trillion in total losses. Climate change could wipe up to 18 per cent off global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050 if global temperatures rise by 3.2 degrees this century from pre-industrial levels, according to the world's largest reinsurer, Swiss Re Institute.

Cost of natural disaster losses worldwide

Climate-fuelled disasters in 2021

Impact on global GDP

How rising temperatures could hit GDP: four scenarios by 2050.

Causes of climate change

Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, absorb infrared radiation and trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere, which leads to global warming. Many greenhouse gases occur naturally in the atmosphere, such as nitrous oxide (N2O). Others are the result of human activities, like burning fossil fuels for electricity, heat and transport. The top three greenhouse gas emitters are the United States, China and the European Union. Energy production accounts for more than 70 per cent of emissions.

Natural greenhouse effect

Human enhanced greenhouse effect

Annual global carbon dioxide emissions

Evidence of climate change

Human activity has helped push global temperatures up by 1.1 degrees since 1880, the year accurate record keeping began. That might seem small, but it's an unusually large amount in less than 150 years, scientists say. Climate experts have warned that temperatures could increase by 1.5 degrees from pre-industrial levels in the next two decades - and as much as 2.7 degrees this century - which could potentially be catastrophic for Earth. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster: their glaciers contain enough water to raise the oceans by several metres.

Impact on China

China burns half the coal consumed worldwide for most of its electricity needs. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel and the most carbon intensive. Burning it affects air quality and raises temperatures, both seen as contributors to extreme weather events. Average temperatures in mainland China rose by 0.24 degrees every decade from 1951 to 2019, higher than the global average. The number of days with heavy rainfall, when more than 50mm fell over 24 hours, rose at the rate of 3.8 per cent every 10 years from 1961 to 2019. Flooding damages property and infrastructure, and impacts agricultural and industrial production.

Droughts and flooding in major Chinese cities 1760-2018

Flooding in China 1950-2019

Droughts in China 1950-2019

China's fight against climate change

China, which contributes about 30 per cent of the world's CO2 emissions output, aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060. This means adding no more emissions to the atmosphere than what's being removed. Doing so will put pressure on China's energy-intensive sectors, as it requires phasing out fossil fuels for clean, renewable energy.

China's energy mix

Edited by Andrew London
Additional research by Eric Ng and Han Huang
Cover illustration by Adolfo Arranz
Creative Director Darren Long

Sources: Statista, Emergency Response Coordination Centre, The Week, Swiss Re Institute, Our World in Data, BP, NOAA National Centers for Environmental information, National Snow and Ice Data Center, The Ministry of Water Resources of the People's Republic of China, Bernstein, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, China Meteorological Administration, Nasa

View the print version here

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Is it too late to save Earth from climate catastrophe?

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By The world is under unprecedented pressure to avert climate change catastrophe. The 2015 Paris Agreement committed nations to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius - 1.5 degrees preferably - through sweeping emissions cuts. But since that landmark deal, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, along with the frequency and intensity of climate-fuelled disasters.

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https://www.google.co.kr/amp/s/eos.org/articles/air-pollution-killed-a-million-people-in-africa-in-2019

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Air pollution was responsible for 1.1 million deaths across Africa in 2019, with more than half of those fatalities associated with household (indoor) pollutants, according to a study recently published in The Lancet Planetary Health.

"Furthermore, air pollution is costing African countries billions [of dollars] in gross domestic product and can be correlated to a devastating loss in the intellectual development of Africa's children," researchers found.

Edmond Sanganyado, an associate professor of environmental science at Shantou University in China, agreed. Sanganyado was not a part of the new research but said that if African communities did not address air pollution, the results would be catastrophic.

More than 350 million African children live in households that use solid fuels, mostly wood and coal, for cooking and heating. Sanganyado, who is also president of the Zimbabwe Young Academy of Sciences, said emissions from these solid fuels were the main causes of indoor air pollution.

" While use of electrical stoves has helped to reduce indoor air pollution, the gains are now being reversed due to the current electricity shortage in most sub-Saharan African countries."

"This is quite heartbreaking because air pollution affects intelligence in children," he said.

"We think policymakers in African countries need to be concerned about rising levels of air pollution, about the rising levels of disease and death that are already resulting from these increases in pollution and the very great economic losses that their countries will suffer if air pollution continues to increase unchecked," said Boston College professor of biology Philip Landrigan, coauthor of the new study.

Sanganyado said a shift away from wood and coal and toward solar and wind could help reduce the hazard. Household air pollution has fallen over the past 10 years, the study found, although ambient (outdoor) air pollution has increased.

"While use of electrical stoves has helped to reduce indoor air pollution, the gains are now being reversed due to the current electricity shortage in most sub-Saharan African countries," Sanganyado said.

Reliance on Fossil Fuels

"A lot needs to be done to mitigate the effects of pollution, especially on vulnerable groups such [as] children, the sick, and the elderly."

Farai Maguwu, director of the Centre for Natural Resource Governance in Harare, Zimbabwe, added that the report lifts the lid on a silent killer whose catastrophic impacts are growing with each passing day, thanks to an overreliance on fossil fuels. Maguwu was not involved in the new report.

"Places like Hwange [Zimbabwe], where there is a 920-megawatt thermal power generation station, choke [the air] with sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and coal ash.... A lot needs to be done to mitigate the effects of pollution, especially on vulnerable groups such [as] children, the sick, and the elderly," Maguwu said.

Landry Ninteretse, regional director of the conservation nonprofit 350Africa.org, said fossil fuel combustion contributed to both indoor and outdoor air pollution and had to be significantly reduced if the continent wanted to save African populations from preventable diseases.

"The most common health impacts of coal plants include lung damage, breathing problems, renal complications, effects on the nervous system, pulmonary effects, cardiovascular diseases, and an increased potential for cancer," Ninteretse said.

Measurement and Mitigation

Sanganyado said that before Africa developed strategies and technologies to reduce air pollution, there was a widespread need to accurately and regularly measure indoor and outdoor air quality.

"The first step to fight air pollution is to build real-time air monitoring stations across Africa," he said. "Just like with COVID-19, daily monitoring will help us identify hot spots and develop preventive measures. We cannot understand the impact of air pollution or develop effective strategies to combat air pollution if we do not have reliable real-time air quality monitoring," he said.

Addressing the current situation does not have to require significant investments in technology or capital, Sanganyado said. Nature-based mitigation strategies, such as conservation of grasslands and forests, can financially compete with costly air purification technologies.

"This should be good news for African cities; planting trees and having greenbelts throughout the city could help reduce air pollution," he said.

In addition, Ninteretse supported a strong, rapid push for solar and wind power by governments and development partners across Africa. Developing renewables is likely to reduce air pollution, stimulate sustainable and safe growth, and improve the livelihoods of more than half a billion residents of sub-Saharan Africa who live without any electricity at all, he said.

-Andrew Mambondiyani (@mambondiyani), Science Writer

Citation: Mambondiyani, A. (2021), Air pollution killed a million people in Africa in 2019, Eos, 102, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021EO210565. Published on 25 October 2021.

Text © 2021. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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Air Pollution Killed a Million People in Africa in 2019 - Eos

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Air pollution was responsible for 1.1 million deaths across Africa in 2019, with more than half of those fatalities associated with household (indoor) pollutants, according to a study recently published in The Lancet Planetary Health.

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/global-warming-effects

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The planet is warming, from North Pole to South Pole. Since 1906, the global average surface temperature has increased by more than 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius)- even more in sensitive polar regions. And the impacts of rising temperatures aren't waiting for some far-flung future-the effects of global warming are appearing right now. The heat is melting glaciers and sea ice, shifting precipitation patterns, and setting animals on the move.

Many people think of global warming and climate change as synonyms, but scientists prefer to use "climate change" when describing the complex shifts now affecting our planet's weather and climate systems. Climate change encompasses not only rising average temperatures but also extreme weather events, shifting wildlife populations and habitats, rising seas, and a range of other impacts. All of these changes are emerging as humans continue to add heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Scientists already have documented these impacts of climate change:

Ice is melting worldwide, especially at the Earth's poles. This includes mountain glaciers, ice sheets covering West Antarctica and Greenland, and Arctic sea ice. In Montana's Glacier National Park the number of glaciers has declined to fewer than 30 from more than 150 in 1910.

Much of this melting ice contributes to sea-level rise. Global sea levels are rising 0.13 inches (3.2 millimeters) a year. The rise is occurring at a faster rate in recent years and is predicted to accelerate in the coming decades.

Rising temperatures are affecting wildlife and their habitats. Vanishing ice has challenged species such as the Adélie penguin in Antarctica, where some populations on the western peninsula have collapsed by 90 percent or more.

As temperatures change, many species are on the move. Some butterflies, foxes, and alpine plants have migrated farther north or to higher, cooler areas.

Precipitation (rain and snowfall) has increased across the globe, on average. Yet some regions are experiencing more severe drought, increasing the risk of wildfires, lost crops, and drinking water shortages.

Some species-including mosquitoes, ticks, jellyfish, and crop pests-are thriving. Booming populations of bark beetles that feed on spruce and pine trees, for example, have devastated millions of forested acres in the U.S.

Other effects could take place later this century, if warming continues. These include:

Sea levels are expected to rise between 10 and 32 inches (26 and 82 centimeters) or higher by the end of the century.

Hurricanes and other storms are likely to become stronger. Floods and droughts will become more common. Large parts of the U.S., for example, face a higher risk of decades-long "megadroughts" by 2100.

Less freshwater will be available, since glaciers store about three-quarters of the world's freshwater.

Some diseases will spread, such as mosquito-borne malaria (and the 2016 resurgence of the Zika virus).

Ecosystems will continue to change: Some species will move farther north or become more successful; others, such as polar bears, won't be able to adapt and could become extinct.

Read next: Is Global Warming Real?

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The planet is warming, from North Pole to South Pole, and everywhere in between.

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https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-technology-environment-europe-98e55f2c64aa6d3dc76a5fc64f8d4ba2

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World leaders have been meeting for 29 years to try to curb global warming, and in that time Earth has become a much hotter and deadlier planet.

Trillions of tons of ice have disappeared over that period, the burning of fossil fuels has spewed billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air, and hundreds of thousands of people have died from heat and other weather disasters stoked by climate change, statistics show.

When more than 100 world leaders descended on Rio de Janeiro in 1992 for an Earth Summit to discuss global warming and other environmental issues, there was "a huge feeling of well-being, of being able to do something. There was hope really," said Oren Lyons, faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, one of the representatives for Native Americans at the summit.

Now, the 91-year-old activist said, that hope has been smothered: "The ice is melting. ... Everything is bad. ... Thirty years of degradation."

Data analyzed by The Associated Press from government figures and scientific reports shows "how much we did lose Earth," said former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief William K. Reilly, who headed the American delegation three decades ago.

That Earth Summit set up the process of international climate negotiations that culminated in the 2015 Paris accord and resumes Sunday in Glasgow, Scotland, where leaders will try to ramp up efforts to cut carbon pollution.

Back in 1992, it was clear climate change was a problem "with major implications for lives and livelihoods in the future," U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the AP this month. "That future is here and we are out of time."

World leaders have hammered out two agreements to curb climate change. In Kyoto in 1997, a protocol set carbon pollution cuts for developed countries but not poorer nations. That did not go into effect until 2005 because of ratification requirements. In 2015, the Paris agreement made every nation set its own emission goals.

In both cases, the United States, a top-polluting country, helped negotiate the deals but later pulled out of the process when a Republican president took office. The U.S. has since rejoined the Paris agreement.

The yearly global temperature has increased almost 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) since 1992, based on multi-year averaging, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth has warmed more in the last 29 years than in the previous 110. Since 1992, the world has broken the annual global high temperature record eight times.

In Alaska, the average temperature has increased 2.5 degrees (1.4 degrees Celsius) since 1992, according to NOAA. The Arctic had been warming twice as fast as the globe as a whole, but now has jumped to three times faster in some seasons, according to the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program.

That heat is melting Earth's ice. Since 1992, Earth has lost 36 trillion tons of ice (33 trillion metric tons), according to calculations by climate scientist Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds. That includes sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic that melts now more in the summer than it used to, the shrinking of giant ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and melting glaciers.

And Michael Zemp, who runs the World Glacier Monitoring Service, said Shepherd's numbers may be a little low. He calculates that since 1992, the glaciers of the world have lost nearly 9.5 trillion tons of ice (8.6 trillion metric tons), about a trillion tons more than Shepherd's figures.

With more ice melt in the ocean and water expanding as it warms, the world's average sea level has risen about 3.7 inches (95 millimeters) since 1992, according to the University of Colorado. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to cover the United States in water to a depth of 11 feet (3.5 meters), University of Colorado sea level researcher Steve Nerem calculated.

Wildfires in the United States have more than doubled in how much they have burned. From 1983 to 1992, wildfires consumed an average of 2.7 million acres a year. From 2011 to 2020, the average was up to 7.5 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

"The unhealthy choices that are killing our planet are killing our people as well," said Dr. Maria Neira, director of the World Heath Organization's environment, climate change and health program.

The United States has had 265 weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage - adjusted to 2021 dollars - since 1992, including 18 so far this year. Those disasters have caused 11,991 deaths and cost $1.8 trillion. From 1980 to 1992, the U.S. averaged three of those billion-dollar weather disasters a year. Since 1993, the country has averaged nine a year.

Worldwide there have been nearly 8,000 climate, water and weather disasters, killing 563,735, according to the EMDAT disaster databas e. Those figures are probably missing a lot of disasters and deaths, said the Debarati Guha-Sapir, who oversees the database for the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain School of Public Health in Brussels.

Medical researchers earlier this year looked at 732 cities worldwide and calculated how many deaths were from climate change-caused extra heat. They found that on average since 1991, there have been 9,702 heat deaths from global warming a year just in those studied cities, which adds up to 281,000 climate-caused heat deaths since 1992.

But that's a small proportion of what really is happening, said study author Ana Vicedo-Cabrera, an epidemiologist at the Institute of Social and Preventative Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Using those cities, researchers calculated that during the four hottest months of the year, the added heat from climate change is responsible for 0.58% of the globe's deaths.

That comes to about 100,000 heat deaths caused by climate change a year for 29 years, she said.

WHO officials said those figures make sense and calculate the annual death toll from climate change will rise to 250,000 a year in the 2030s.

Scientists say this is happening because of heat-trapping gases. Carbon dioxide levels have increased 17% from 353 parts per million in September 1992 to 413 in September 2021, according to NOAA. The agency's annual greenhouse gas index, which charts six gases and weights them according to how much heat they trap, rose almost 20% since 1992.

From 1993 to 2019, the world put more than 885 billion tons (803 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide in the air from the burning of fossil fuels and making of cement, according to the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists who track emissions.

A pessimistic Lyons, the Native American activist, said, "I would say this meeting in Glasgow is the last shot."

___

Read stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://apnews.com/hub/climate.

___

Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Earth gets hotter, deadlier during decades of climate talks

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World leaders have been meeting for 29 years to try to curb global warming, and in that time Earth has become a much hotter and deadlier planet. Trillions of tons of ice have disappeared over that period, the burning of fossil fuels has spewed billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air, and hundreds of thousands of people have died from heat and other weather disasters stoked by climate change, statistics show.

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“Bad For Humans”: The World Is On Track To Warm 3 Degrees Celsius This Century

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Our current coastlines gone. Bangkok underwater. Massive declines in the fish population. More droughts, downpours, and heat waves.

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Could planting a trillion trees help stop global heating? This man thinks so | Environment | The Guardian

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In 2017, Yishan Wong was ready to retire in Hawaii after leaving behind his career in Silicon Valley. The CEO of Reddit until 2014, Wong had previously held senior positions at Facebook and PayPal. But then came what he calls the "moment" when he decided he was going to take on the climate crisis instead.

"I was literally on a beach trying to retire, and it was too hot," he said. Temperatures in Hawaii at the time were abnormally high, and he thought: "The planet has a climate change problem. I need to solve it."

Wong started looking for "the most cost-effective per unit way" of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. After digging into climate science papers, he settled on his solution: trees.

In 2019, he founded Terraformation, with the aim to help reforest 3bn acres of degraded land around the world - an area bigger than the US - which Wong estimates could hold a trillion trees. He believes these forests could absorb enough CO2 to halt global heating.

Reaching net zero by 2050 means drastically reducing emissions, but to achieve this goal within such a short timeframe, and keep global heating within 1.5C, means also figuring out how to remove carbon from the atmosphere. An estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change envisions the removal of 730bn metric tons of CO2 this century.

Carbon-removal technology - sucking carbon from the air and then storing or using it - is one way to do this but is expensive and will take time to scale up. The International Energy Agency estimates that these technologies absorb about 40m metric tons of carbon a year. Trees, on the other hand, collectively absorb about 7.6bn metric tons a year - more than the annual emissions of the US - even after accounting for the emissions released by deforestation, wildfires and other causes.

"We've already done the R&D," said Wong. "A trillion trees has a very, very strong possibility of solving the [climate] problem," he said, when paired with cuts in carbon emissions. Reforestation is "immediately scalable", he said, adding that the world cannot afford to wait until carbon capture technologies are ready for large-scale deployment: "You're accumulating debt, the planet is warming in the meantime."

Reforestation is also a more inclusive solution to the climate crisis, Wong said, because it is accessible to developed and developing countries alike. Solving the climate crisis will be "a real stretch of the human race's collective abilities", he said, so "you want the simplest, most affordable solution because it will operate at enormous scale."

Terraformation won't plant a trillion trees itself. Instead, it describes its product as "reforestation in a box". Its clients are landowners, conservationists and governments who want to reforest areas around the world. Terraformation's aim is to eliminate the "bottlenecks" to these projects.

The company applies a "holistic" approach, said Jill Wagner, its chief forestry officer. Depending on a project's needs, Terraformation can provide seed banks and nursery kits in shipping containers; it can also offer financing, software and training. The company will also work with clients to sell carbon credits once their trees are planted.

Seed shortages are one of the biggest obstacles to reforestation, said Wagner. "Most people, even in the forestry field, don't bank seeds," she said. "They just collect seeds and propagate what they have for the year. That's really limiting and that's not a way you can scale." Terraformation has produced off-grid, modular seed banks that can hold up to 5m seeds, which the company says is enough to reforest 5,000 acres.

A nursery at Terraformation's Pacific Flight restoration project in the North Kohala region of Hawaii. Photograph: Patrick Kelley/Courtesy of Terraformation

Terraformation began in 2019 by reforesting a 45-acre tract of Wong's own property in the North Kohala area of Hawaii's Big Island. Once a thriving sandalwood forest, it had been destroyed after years of logging and grazing, said Wagner. The company established 6,000 native plants on this property, watered by a solar-powered desalination system. Many of the trees are already over six-feet tall, Wagner said.

The company has raised $30m from Silicon Valley investors and more than $2m so far on the crowdfunding site Republic. It now has 30 projects that are active or in the pipeline. Several projects are in Hawaii but it is also working with partners around the world, including in Uganda, Tanzania, Ukraine, India, Haiti and Ecuador.

Terraformation has "the technology to really reproduce native trees in a systematic way", said María José Iturralde, the CEO of Humans for Abundance, a non-profit that is partnering with the company to reforest 200 hectares (494 acres) in the Amazon rainforest.

Iturralde said that Terraformation had provided "state of the art" nurseries and seed banks, which are helping indigenous families to restore these lands to the native ecosystems of their ancestors. The seed banks will be particularly useful to reforest the guayacan tree, she said, which produces seeds only once every two years.

Processing seeds at one of Terraformation's container restoration seed banks. Photograph: Patrick Kelley/Courtesy of Terraformation

The idea of global reforestation as a climate solution has been around for decades. But it has rocketed up the agenda. Along with Terraformation, trillion-tree-growing campaigns have been started by the World Economic Forum and prominent environmental groups, and tree planting has been embraced by high-profile figures from Jane Goodall to Donald Trump.

However, some scientists have said that tree planting has limitations as a climate solution, not least because the world may not have enough land to support a trillion new trees without harming the environment or people. A study published in 2019 claiming that tree planting was "the most effective solution to climate change to date" generated controversy, with several scientists criticizing its conclusions as overstated. In 2020, the authors issued corrections acknowledging the uncertainty of how much carbon trees could absorb and downgrading their analysis of tree planting as the most effective climate tool to "among the most effective".

"There is a small but important role that forests can play in mitigating climate change," said Joseph Veldman, a professor at Texas A&M University and a leading critic of the paper. But, he added, "can they do so at a scale that can tackle climate change? The answer is clearly, if that's our only action, no."

The main limiting factor for reforestation is the availability of land that can support new trees. A recent study found 678m hectares (nearly 1.7bn acres) around the world that could be reforested, short of Terraformation's goal of 3bn acres. The study excludes grasslands, croplands and population centers, which are not suitable for reforestation. "You don't want to put trees where they did not occur originally. That's bad for biodiversity, and often the trees don't survive," said Susan Cook-Patton, a forest restoration scientist at the Nature Conservancy and co-author of the study.

It's also important not to establish new forests in areas that reflect sunlight and cool the planet, said Sassan Saatchi, a senior scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Planting trees in areas such as boreal regions of Canada and Russia or certain deserts could actually cause a rise in global temperature. "One type of solution is not going to fit all," said Saatchi. "We need to do the calculation for each region differently."

There's also a potential disruption to people when deciding where to place trees. "What I'm concerned about," said Karen Holl, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, is tree-planting initiatives that "look at it as a math problem and don't think about the ecology and the people involved". She added that "it's not just a matter of putting trees in the ground." She highlighted the need to meaningfully engage with local communities - especially indigenous peoples - whose livelihoods might be affected by reforestation.

A woman taking part in Ethiopia's national mass tree-planting drive. The country aims to plant billions of trees a year. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

It's not possible to predict the "side-effects of massive global reforestation", said Wong, because "that's how big projects work". But he said Terraformation will "listen to and co-author with the local community" and will focus on restoring native ecosystems rather than planting monoculture species, which can harm the environment. "If you restore native species where they were, they grow back way faster than you expect," he said.

Wong said he viewed the problem of climate change with an engineering mindset. "You need to shoot for the lowest-risk thing that will get you into the right order of magnitude," he said. "Usually, if you get to a tenth [of the way to the solution], you're in the order of magnitude. You can do 10 times of whatever you're doing now."

Although Wong recognizes the complexities of tree-planting, he also believes that forests can be a big financial opportunity, for example, from carbon credits and agroforestry. "It's a valuable thing when you convert degraded land into a thriving ecosystem," he said.

"Tackling climate change is like building a house; reforestation is like a hammer," said Cook-Patton. "Is it the sole tool that you can use to build the house? Absolutely not. But is it a valuable tool? Yes."

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Could planting a trillion trees help stop global heating? This man thinks so

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Yishan Wong has founded a company, Terraformation, aiming to reforest 3bn acres but others doubt that trees are a magic bullet for the climate crisis

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https://theconversation.com/amp/a-quick-guide-to-climate-change-jargon-what-experts-mean-by-mitigation-carbon-neutral-and-6-other-key-terms-167172

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A quick guide to climate change jargon – what experts mean by mitigation, carbon neutral and 6 other key terms

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The language around climate change can feel overwhelming. A psychology and public policy expert breaks it down in plain English.

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https://amp.france24.com/en/environment/20211031-g20-leaders-release-watered-down-statement-on-climate-commitments-ahead-of-cop26

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G20 leaders say climate pledge ‘not enough’, more action needed at COP26

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The G20 major economies committed on Sunday to the key goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, but some disappointed leaders warned more was needed to make a success of UN climate tal…

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MALVEAUX: Climate Change Alert — Tuvalu is Sinking

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Thanks to world climate change, Tuvalu is sinking, and the evidence is everywhere.

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Sea level rise solutions can save communities and habitats, but they take time to implement. From seawalls to living shorelines, a brief look at the different solutions, and their timelines, that coastal cities have turned to in response to sea level rise.

As sea levels continue to rise and cause problems for individuals and businesses, more and more concerned citizens are calling for their local politicians to take action. Many might already be aware of how community actions can lower flood insurance premiums - but what exactly are these "actions" and how long do they take to execute? Here, we'll discuss several types ofsolutions that U.S. cities can implement to address sea level rise and how long they take.

One solution that cities employ to decrease flooding from tides and storms is constructing seawalls. These barriers are often built to a height of five to six feet above sea level and cost approximately $600 to $2,000 per linear foot. When seawalls age or become damaged from constant exposure to saltwater or the impact of waves, they need to be replaced. They also need to be replaced or built higher as sea levels continue to rise.

Seattle, W.A. Source

New York City is building a $335 million flood protection system in Manhattan through the Rebuild by Design project, which was implemented after the city suffered $19 billion in damages from Hurricane Sandy.

Time to execute: 4-5 years

Similar to seawalls, beaches and dunes can act as a natural wall and reduce the impact of storm surge. The bigger the beach or larger the dune, the more water can be stopped from reaching homes and roads. Towns can add sand to make beaches bigger or to prevent them from eroding. Using this type of natural infrastructure can protect against flooding while maintaining beaches for the community to enjoy.

Time to execute: 12 weeks

Raising roads above sea level can help drain water and reduce tidal flooding. In order to make sure that higher roads don't channel flood waters into homes and stores at lower elevations, cities often use stormwater pumps to remove this excess water.

Raised roads; Miami Beach Stormwater Program

Time to execute: 2 years

With higher seas, water doesn't drain out to the ocean as easily. Drainage systems are designed to channel excess rainwater from the streets and drain it into the sea, but the pressure from rising sea levels and higher tides can push too much water into these pipes, causing water to spill out into streets. Pumps can speed up the process of getting water out of the streets by vacuuming up the flood water and releasing it back into the sea.

Time to execute: 2-5 years

Flooding can disrupt sewage systems and in particular, threaten septic tanks. Since saltwater is corrosive, it can breakdown tanks and cause sewage to spew out, creating health hazards. Towns can upgrade sewage systems so that stormwater doesn't seep into pipes, upgrade septic tanks, or replace them with sewer lines for about $15,000 per replacement.

Time to execute: 3 years

Coastal communities can restore natural infrastructure, which can act as a buffer against storms and coastal flooding. Natural structures such as barrier islands, oyster and coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass, and salt marshes can work alone or in unison with built infrastructure, like seawalls, to absorb storm surge. These projects are often cost-effective, can improve the natural environment for the community, and save important habitats.

Time to execute: 1-2 years

In places like Hampton Roads, Virginia, the land is sinking. This is because so much groundwater has been pumped out of the ground that the earth is now caving in to fill the empty space. Towns can slow down land sinkage by limiting further groundwater pumping, and initiating pilot projects to reverse land sinkage.

SWIFT filtration system, Virginia.

Hampton Roads Sewage District has planned a $25 million pilot project called SWIFT that will begin experimenting with injecting a million gallons of purified wastewater in the ground per day. The project budget could increase to $1 billion.

Time to execute: 5-10 years

In some coastal areas, shorelines are being lost to storms, sea level rise, erosion, and subsidence. Though communities are implementing many of the solutions available to help stave off extreme land loss, some are considering relocation. This option may not be the best fit for all coastal communities facing the imminent threat of sea level rise, but for some, it is the best solution to keep residents safe.

There are many more solutions we haven't covered here, that may have incredible benefits for your city. Across the globe, we can see innovative and resourceful solutions from communities that are coming together to combat sea level rise. Learning from how these cities have responded to sea level rise may inspire future solutions that U.S. cities can adapt for their own unique situations.

What works for one city may not work for another. Choosing the right solution will depend on factors like local climate, resources (both natural and economic), and laws. One of the main considerations is how sea level rise impacts the area - some cities, like Hampton Roads, Virginia, may be more affected by land sinkage, whereas other cities, like Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, are more threatened by coastal erosion.

Learn how sea level rise affects your state here.

The first step to any of these solutions is making sure that local officials are aware of your concerns about sea level rise and flooding so they can prioritize implementing solutions. Not sure who to contact? Try looking up your address or city on Flood iQ, where you can find both your flood risks and who to contact about them.

The important thing to remember about all of these solutions is that they take time to execute, so it's imperative for cities and residents to remain proactive. Knowing what issues sea level rise and flooding may pose today and 10-30 years from now will give coastal communities the ability to prepare for and prevent these problems by finding solutions that protect property, economy, and quality of life.

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Sea level rise solutions can save communities and habitats, but they take time to implement. From seawalls to living shorelines, a brief look at the different solutions, and their timelines, that coastal cities have turned to in response to sea level rise.

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https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/sustainable/5-plastic-substitutes.htm

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Maria Trimarchi, Patrick J. Kiger, Vicki M. Giuggio

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Top 10 Eco-friendly Substitutes for Plastic

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Without a doubt, plastic is useful. It’s also everywhere — filling up landfills and recycling bins. These 10 twists on the common polymer are trying to change that reality.

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https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2021/oct/31/data-shows-global-warming-effects/

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World leaders have been meeting for 29 years to try to curb global warming, and in that time Earth has become a much hotter planet.

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https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/31/reasons-to-be-hopeful-the-climate-solutions-available-now

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Reasons to be hopeful: the climate solutions available now

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Plastic in the ocean | Magazine Articles | WWF (worldwildlife.org)

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https://www.newfoodmagazine.com/article/157371/water-usage-reduction/

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Rising Waters: How NASA is Monitoring Sea Level Rise

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Our global sea level is rising at a faster and faster rate-impacting communities along coastlines worldwide. From space, planes, and ships, @NASA is #SeeingTheSeas while studying the causes and effects of our rising waters.

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Reducing unnecessary consumption (ararental.org)

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United Rentals, Stamford, Conn., lists sustainability as one of its core values. Rental Management recently asked Matthew Flannery, president and CEO, United Rentals, to answer questions about what sustainability means to the world's largest equipment rental company and how this core value is implemented. His responses follow.
Rental Management: In your Corporate Responsibility Report, you list sustainability as one of the core values of United Rentals. You state that it is to "engage in practices that lead to positive change by encouraging social accountability and environmental responsibility." What does that definition mean regarding the practices at United Rentals?
Matthew Flannery: Our core values are more than initiatives or programs. They're principles that are integrated into how we do business. We don't just tell employees to do something, we want them to understand why that action matters and have a sense of ownership about it. For example, reducing our energy consumption - that's a company goal that ties to our values, and each branch is using an electronic scorecard to track how they're doing and see where they can improve. We feel it's important to lead by example. We've always said that we're not interested in being just the biggest, we also want to be the best. That's sustainability in a nutshell. If we benefit the environment, we benefit everyone, and our scale can increase that benefit exponentially. It's a goal that matters to all our stakeholders.
Rental Management: Do you see the practice of renting equipment as a sustainable action and that renting equipment could be used by others to improve their sustainability?
Flannery: Yes, when you think about the rental model, it's a sharing model. Work gets done by fewer manufactured machines, with less idle time. It reduces unnecessary consumption of energy and materials. We find that rental equipment, in general, has a higher utilization rate than assets owned by our customers. Also, we manage the age of our fleet to keep it up to date with efficiency technologies. It can be difficult for a contractor to make that level of investment.
Rental Management: How long have consumption and production, as well as climate action, been part of the United Rentals report?
Flannery: We began disclosing our consumption data with our first Corporate Responsibility Report, which covered the years 2010 and 2011. Since then, we've put out a report each year showing internal trends that reflect our progress. Our current report includes our first publicly announced sustainability target - a greenhouse gas intensity reduction goal.
Rental Management: The report states that you have implemented policies and procedures to reduce energy, divert waste from landfills, properly dispose of harmful substances and reduce significant spills. Can you elaborate on what those policies are, the training you offer and what targets you are trying to meet?
Flannery: The policies and procedures are different in each case. Waste mitigation is a good example. We make sure our waste is handled correctly by the vendors we use, we manage our materials consumption, use recycling techniques like oil refining, reduce paper waste with our rental management system and refurbish equipment when it makes sense.

Another good example is the customized logistics and route-optimization tool we use for delivering and picking up equipment. It helps us to reduce the number of empty loads, lower fuel consumption and emissions, use less fuel idling in traffic and have less wear and tear on our delivery equipment.

We also have Lean and 5S programs that identify new ways to improve - and that's just for one goal. Other goals, like emissions reduction, have their own policies and procedures.
Rental Management: Your reach continues to grow. That means your footprint of greenhouse gas emissions has the potential to increase significantly. In your latest report, you stated that your goal is to reduce those emissions by 35 percent by 2030. What steps do you have in place to achieve that goal?
Flannery: The 35 percent reduction is a GHG (greenhouse gas) intensity goal, which takes the future growth of our direct operations into account. The intensity measure is revenue: MWh per million dollars of revenue for energy and CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) per million dollars for emissions. We've reported two sequential year-over-year declines in intensity in both metrics so far, driven by the various programs detailed in the report, such as fuel types and lighting upgrades.
Rental Management: Is this goal of reducing emissions strictly at your corporate and branch operations, which you document as 77 percent coming from your delivery, sales and service vehicles, and the other 23 percent from your energy consumption at your branches and corporate offices? Or does it also include the use of your equipment at industrial locations and job sites?
Flannery: We're starting with our own operations, which we call Scopes 1 and 2, where we have direct control of emissions. In the future, we hope to extend this to Scope 3, our whole value chain. A lot of Scope 3 will be beyond our direct control but within our realm of influence. Scope 3 emissions reduction is more complicated to calculate and requires our collaboration with customers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and other partners. It's a large commitment, but one that we're prepared to make. We're currently evaluating the value chain to identify the most viable actions.
Rental Management: How is United Rentals creating a culture of sustainability?
Flannery: The last 20-plus years have shown us that knowledge is the key to cultural change. Our job at the corporate level is to provide the team with data and goalposts so that everyone shares in the accountability and pride. Each branch team sees energy data that shows their performance and trends, and we communicate our progress in areas like lighting retrofits. Our driver scorecards document idling metrics. Sustainability isn't a hard sell at United. This is something our employees care about, and they can see that our customers care about it, too.
Rental Management: You are the largest rental operation in the world. How do you intend to use your influence to make sustainability a dominant initiative throughout the industry?
Flannery: First, by setting an example and showing that sustainability can coexist with customer-focused rental operations in a financially healthy business model. Also, as we look at expanding to our full scope of influence, we believe that engagement is key. We want to engage more directly with our customers on environmental issues and communicate our customers' needs and expectations to our suppliers. This will provide the large-scale feedback needed to drive meaningful change. It won't happen overnight. It will be an evolution of change over the coming years, and we can be the catalyst as the industry leader.

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United Rentals, Stamford, Conn., lists sustainability as one of its core values. Rental Management recently asked Matthew Flannery, president and CEO, United Rentals, to answer questions about what sustainability means to the world's largest equipment rental company and how this core value is implemented. His responses follow.

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Our latest coverage of climate change | The Economist

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Climate change affects everything from geopolitics to economies to migration. It shapes cities, life expectancies and wine lists. And because it touches everything The Economist reports on, we examine it from every angle imaginable.

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https://theconversation.com/amp/cop26-a-global-methane-pledge-is-great-but-only-if-it-doesnt-distract-us-from-co-cuts-171069

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Boris Johnson and Joe Biden led the pledge to cut methane emissions. UK government/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

Leading an alliance of more than 100 countries, US President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have launched the Global Methane Pledge - an agreement to cut methane emissions by 30% between 2020 and 2030.

Methane is a greenhouse gas which has caused about 0.5°C of global warming, according to the latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Each molecule added to the atmosphere is about 26 times more potent at warming than a CO₂ molecule, but only remains in the atmosphere for about a decade. Methane leaks from oil and gas wells, landfills and is belched out by livestock. Countries signed up to the agreement encompass two-thirds of the global economy and half of the top 30 methane emitters, including Brazil. China, India and Russia however have not signed at the time of writing.

I have been working on and talking publicly about methane emissions and their effect on the climate for about a decade. During that time, the levels of methane in the atmosphere have gone rapidly upwards, causing more global warming. So while I think it would be great to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030, what is that niggling at the back of my mind?

It's the suspicion that so much noise about methane cuts will (deliberately or not) be a good news story that obscures slow progress on CO₂ emissions. You might ask: is this such a problem? Isn't any action to be applauded? Yes, and no. Yes, because any reduction is greenhouse gas emissions is progress towards the Paris Agreement temperature goals. That is undeniable. No, if it displaces effort away from the main driver of global warming - fossil CO₂ emissions.

We may not know how much displacement is happening, but we do know that for the past 30 years, since the Rio Earth Summit, the world has failed to reduce CO₂ emissions. And so, because we have effectively left it too late to have a smooth reduction in CO₂ emissions down to zero while limiting warming to well below 2°C, we hope that perhaps methane is going to save our bacon.

How can methane reductions be so much more effective than CO₂ reductions, when methane contributes less to global warming than CO₂? It's because methane is much shorter-lived in the atmosphere than CO₂, and therefore reducing emissions of methane actually reduces the amount of methane in the atmosphere within decades. Methane has a half-life of around a decade, so roughly speaking, if you emit 10 tonnes of methane today, 5 tonnes remain in the atmosphere after a decade. If we completely stopped emitting methane today, the methane-caused global warming would halve in about 20 years. This is in stark contrast to CO₂, which lives for so long in the climate system that even with no emissions at all, the CO₂-caused global warming will remain the same for centuries.

So this makes it quite clear that all the way along on the pathway to net-zero CO₂ emissions, our ever-diminishing annual CO₂ emissions are causing additional warming, which will remain for hundreds of years. This is why slow progress on CO₂ is so damaging. Every tonne of CO₂ we emit will stay in the climate system, warming the planet, for hundreds, potentially even thousands, of years.

Short-term wins or long-term success?

Reductions in methane emissions do provide a quick win in terms of shaving off up to a few tenths of a degree of global warming. This decrease in temperature is proportional to the rate of methane emissions reductions though. Once the reductions stop (e.g. we stabilise global methane emissions at 30% below 2020 levels) then methane-caused warming will stabilise, and then start to slowly rise again. This is because while the atmosphere responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels relatively fast (a few years), the deep ocean responds much more slowly. The whole climate system would take hundreds of years to equilibrate to changes, and so if we "froze" the atmospheric composition, temperature would slowly rise over centuries. If we were able to decrease methane emissions after 2030, at a rate of about 3-5% per decade, this would counter the slow equilibration, and give a stable level of methane-caused global warming.

The fact that methane emissions cuts bring down temperature on a near-term basis only has led to two distinct conclusions being drawn from the same fundamental science.

Position one is that cutting methane emissions produces results faster than cutting CO₂ emissions, and therefore we should do this to put the handbrake on global warming. This argument places a priority on limiting global warming in the short term. However, if limited funds are spent on methane cuts instead of CO₂ cuts (such as by a company with a set budget for emission reduction projects) then temperatures will be lower in the short term but higher in the long term.

Position two is therefore that we should prioritise CO₂ cuts over methane cuts. The cumulative nature of CO₂ means that if we reach net zero in 2050 with rapid action starting from 2025, we will have lower sum-total CO₂ emissions and therefore lower temperatures than if we delay even longer and only start reducing emissions in 2035. All efforts should go towards CO₂ reductions, and until we are confident we are on track with CO₂, there is no time to waste on methane.

These two conclusions arise from the same science. It is the surrounding assumptions - whether we can act on two fronts at once, or if action on methane inevitably detracts from actions on CO₂, whether we should prioritise near-term warming so society can adapt to a slightly more gradual change in climate, whether by 2100 we will have cracked carbon removal and storage so we can remove all the CO₂ later?

These are discussions that go way beyond the climate science, which is why it is great that methane is having its day at COP26 - so long as the political discussions are based on a solid foundation of the science, so that the consequences of any decisions are understood.

While these contrasting viewpoints may seem confusing, there is one simple fact that nobody can disagree with. Fossil fuels are the cause of about a third of all anthropogenic methane emissions. Therefore, if we stopped fossil extraction and use by 2030, the Global Methane Pledge would be achieved at the same time as eliminating most anthropogenic CO2 emissions. It's that simple.

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COP26: a global methane pledge is great - but only if it doesn't distract us from CO₂ cuts

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Leading an alliance of more than 100 countries, US President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have launched the Global Methane Pledge - an agreement to cut methane emissions by 30% between 2020 and 2030.

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World leaders have been meeting for 29 years to try to curb global warming, and in that time Earth has become a much hotter planet.

Trillions of tons of ice has disappeared over that period, the burning of fossil fuels has spewed billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air, and hundreds of thousands of people have died from heat and other weather disasters stoked by climate change, statistics show.

When more than 100 world leaders descended on Rio de Janeiro in 1992 for an Earth Summit to discuss global warming and other environmental issues, there was "a huge feeling of well-being, of being able to do something. There was hope really," said Oren Lyons, faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, one of the representatives for Native Americans at the summit.

Now, the 91-year-old activist said, that hope has been smothered: "The ice is melting. ... Everything is bad. ... Thirty years of degradation."

Data analyzed by The Associated Press from government figures and scientific reports shows "how much we did lose Earth," said former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief William K. Reilly, who led the American delegation three decades ago.

That Earth Summit set up the process of international climate negotiations that culminated in the 2015 Paris accord and resumes today in Glasgow, Scotland, where leaders will try to ramp up efforts to cut carbon pollution.

Back in 1992, it was clear that climate change was a problem "with major implications for lives and livelihoods in the future," U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said this month. "That future is here, and we are out of time."

World leaders have hammered out two agreements to curb climate change.

In Kyoto in 1997, a protocol set carbon pollution cuts for developed countries but not poorer nations. That did not go into effect until 2005 because of ratification requirements. In 2015, the Paris agreement made every nation set its own emission goals.

In both cases, the United States, a top-polluting country, helped negotiate the deals but later pulled out of the process when a Republican president took office. The U.S. has since rejoined the Paris agreement.

The yearly global temperature has increased almost 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit since 1992, based on multiyear averaging, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth has warmed more in the past 29 years than in the previous 110. Since 1992, the world has broken the annual global high temperature record eight times.

In Alaska, the average temperature has increased 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1992, according to NOAA. The Arctic had been warming twice as fast as the globe as a whole, but it now has jumped to three times faster in some seasons, according to the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program.

That heat is melting Earth's ice.

Since 1992, Earth has lost 36 trillion tons of ice, according to calculations by climate scientist Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds. That includes sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic that melts now more in the summer than it used to, the shrinking of giant ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and melting glaciers.

And Michael Zemp, who runs the World Glacier Monitoring Service, said Shepherd's numbers may be a little low. He calculates that since 1992, the glaciers of the world have lost nearly 9.5 trillion tons of ice, about a trillion tons more than Shepherd's figures.

With more ice melt in the ocean and water expanding as it warms, the world's average sea level has risen about 3.7 inches since 1992, according to the University of Colorado. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to cover the United States in water to a depth of 11 feet, University of Colorado sea level researcher Steve Nerem calculated.

Wildfires in the United States have more than doubled in how much they have burned. From 1983-92, wildfires consumed an average of 2.7 million acres a year. From 2011-20, the average was up to 7.5 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

"The unhealthy choices that are killing our planet are killing our people as well," said Dr. Maria Neira, director of the World Heath Organization's environment, climate change and health program.

The United States has had 265 weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage -- adjusted to 2021 dollars -- since 1992, including 18 so far this year. Those disasters have caused 11,991 deaths and cost $1.8 trillion. From 1980-92, the U.S. averaged three of those billion-dollar weather disasters a year. Since 1993, the country has averaged nine a year.

Worldwide there have been nearly 8,000 climate, water and weather disasters, killing 563,735, according to the International Disaster Database. Those figures are probably missing a lot of disasters and deaths, said the Debarati Guha-Sapir, who oversees the database for the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain School of Public Health in Brussels.

Medical researchers earlier this year looked at 732 cities worldwide and calculated how many deaths were from climate change-caused extra heat. They found that on average since 1991, there have been 9,702 heat deaths from global warming a year just in those studied cities, which adds up to 281,000 climate-caused heat deaths since 1992.

But that's a small proportion of what really is happening, said study author Ana Vicedo-Cabrera, an epidemiologist at the Institute of Social and Preventative Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Using those cities, researchers calculated that during the four hottest months of the year, the added heat from climate change is responsible for 0.58% of the globe's deaths. That comes to about 100,000 heat deaths caused by climate change a year for 29 years, she said.

WHO officials said those figures make sense and calculate the annual death toll from climate change will rise to 250,000 a year in the 2030s.

Scientists say this is happening because of heat-trapping gases. Carbon dioxide levels have increased 17% from 353 parts per million in September 1992 to 413 in September 2021, according to NOAA. The agency's annual greenhouse gas index, which charts six gases and weights them according to how much heat they trap, rose almost 20% since 1992.

From 1993 to 2019, the world put more than 885 billion tons of carbon dioxide in the air from the burning of fossil fuels and making of cement, according to the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists who track emissions.

A pessimistic Lyons, the Native American activist, said, "I would say this meeting in Glasgow is the last shot."

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World leaders have been meeting for 29 years to try to curb global warming, and in that time Earth has become a much hotter planet. Trillions of tons of ice has disappeared over that period, the burning of fossil fuels has spewed billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air, and hundreds of thousands of people have died from heat and other weather disasters stoked by climate change, statistics show.

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https://theconversation.com/amp/the-science-everyone-needs-to-know-about-climate-change-in-6-charts-170556

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With the United Nations' climate conference in Scotland turning a spotlight on climate change policies and the impact of global warming, it's useful to understand what the science shows.

I'm an atmospheric scientist who has worked on global climate science and assessments for most of my career. Here are six things you should know, in charts.

What's driving climate change

The primary focus of the negotiations is on carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is released when fossil fuels - coal, oil and natural gas - are burned, as well as by forest fires, land use changes and natural sources.

The Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s started an enormous increase in the burning of fossil fuels. It powered homes, industries and opened up the planet to travel. That same century, scientists identified carbon dioxide's potential to increase global temperatures, which at the time was considered a possible benefit to the planet. Systematic measurements started in the mid-1900s and have shown a steady increase in carbon dioxide, with the majority of it directly traceable to the combustion of fossil fuels.

Once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide tends to stay there for a very long time. A portion of the carbon dioxide released through human activities is taken up by plants, and some is absorbed directly into the ocean, but roughly half of all carbon dioxide emitted by human activities today stays in the atmosphere - and it likely will remain there for hundreds of years, influencing the climate globally.

During the first year of the pandemic in 2020, when fewer people were driving and some industries briefly stopped, carbon dioxide emissions from fuels fell by roughly 6%. But it didn't stop the rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide because the amount released into the atmosphere by human activities far exceeded what nature could absorb.

If civilization stopped its carbon dioxide-emitting activities today, it would still take many hundreds of years for the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to fall enough naturally to bring the planet's carbon cycle back into balance because of carbon dioxide's long life in the atmosphere.

How we know greenhouse gases can change the climate

Multiple lines of scientific evidence point to the increase in greenhouse emissions over the past century and a half as a driver of long-term climate change around the world. For example:

Long-term records from ice cores, tree rings and corals show that when carbon dioxide levels have been high, temperatures have also been high.

Our neighboring planets also offer evidence. Venus' atmosphere is thick with carbon dioxide, and it is the hottest planet in our solar system as a result, even though Mercury is closer to the sun.

Temperatures are rising on every continent

The rising temperatures are evident in records from every continent and over the oceans.

The temperatures aren't rising at the same rate everywhere, however. A variety of factors affect local temperatures, including land use that influences how much solar energy is absorbed or reflected, local heating sources like urban heat islands, and pollution.

The Arctic, for example, is warming about three times faster than the global average in part because as the planet warms, snow and ice melt makes the surface more likely to absorb, rather than reflect, the sun's radiation. Snow cover and sea ice recede even more rapidly as a result.

What climate change is doing to the planet

Earth's climate system is interconnected and complex, and even small temperature changes can have large impacts - for instance, with snow cover and sea levels.

Changes are already happening. Studies show that rising temperatures are already affecting precipitation, glaciers, weather patterns, tropical cyclone activity and severe storms. A number of studies show that the increases in frequency, severity and duration of heat waves, for example, affect ecosystems, human lives, commerce and agriculture.

Historical records of ocean water level have shown mostly consistent increases over the past 150 years as glacier ice melts and rising temperatures expand ocean water, with some local deviations due to sinking or rising land.

While extreme events are often due to complex sets of causes, some are exacerbated by climate change. Just as coastal flooding can be made worse by rising ocean levels, heat waves are more damaging with higher baseline temperatures.

Climate scientists work hard to estimate future changes as a result of increased carbon dioxide and other expected changes, such as world population. It's clear that temperatures will increase and precipitation will change. The exact magnitude of change depends on many interacting factors.

A few reasons for hope

On a hopeful note, scientific research is improving our understanding of climate and the complex Earth system, identifying the most vulnerable areas and guiding efforts to reduce the drivers of climate change. Work on renewable energy and alternative energy sources, as well as ways to capture carbon from industries or from the air, are producing more options for a better prepared society.

At the same time, people are learning about how they can reduce their own impact, with the growing understanding that a globally coordinated effort is required to have a significant impact. Electric vehicles, as well as solar and wind power, are growing at previously unthinkable rates. More people are showing a willingness to adopt new strategies to use energy more efficiently, consume more sustainably and choose renewable energy.

Scientists increasingly recognize that shifting away from fossil fuels has additional benefits, including improved air quality for human health and ecosystems.

[ Understand new developments in science, health and technology, each week. Subscribe to The Conversation's science newsletter.]

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The science everyone needs to know about climate change, in 6 charts

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With the United Nations' climate conference in Scotland turning a spotlight on climate change policies and the impact of global warming, it's useful to understand what the science shows. I'm an atmospheric scientist who has worked on global climate science and assessments for most of my career.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/learning/lesson-plans/explore-7-climate-change-solutions.amp.html

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In this lesson, students will use a jigsaw activity to learn about some of the most effective strategies and technologies that can help head off the worst effects of global warming.

Migrating cranes flying near Straussfurt, Germany. Climate change and biodiversity are "more deeply intertwined than originally thought," one of the leaders of a new report said. Related Article Credit... Jens Meyer/Associated Press

Earlier this summer, a report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations, found that some devastating impacts of global warming were unavoidable. But there is still a short window to stop things from getting even worse.

This report will be central at COP26, the international climate summit where about 20,000 heads of state, diplomats and activists are meeting in person this week to set new targets for cutting emissions from coal, oil and gas that are heating the planet.

In this lesson, you will learn about seven ways we can slow down climate change and head off some of its most catastrophic consequences while we still have time. Using a jigsaw activity, you'll become an expert in one of these strategies or technologies and share what you learn with your classmates. Then, you will develop your own climate plan and consider ways you can make a difference based on your new knowledge.

What do you know about the ways the world can slow climate change? Start by making a list of strategies, technologies or policies that could help solve the climate crisis.

Which of your ideas do you think could have the biggest impact on climate change? Circle what you think might be the top three.

Now, test your knowledge by taking this 2017 interactive quiz:

After you've finished, reflect on your own in writing or in discussion with a partner:

What solutions to climate change did you learn about that you didn't know before?

Were you surprised by any of the answers in the quiz? If so, which ones and why?

What questions do you still have about solving climate change?

As you learned in the warm-up, there are many possible ways to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Below we've rounded up seven of the most effective solutions, many of which you may have been introduced to in the quiz above.

In this jigsaw activity, you'll become an expert in one of the climate solutions listed below and then present what you learned to your classmates. Teachers may assign a student or small group to each topic, or allow them to choose. Students, read at least one of the linked articles on your topic; you can also use that article as a jumping-off point for more research.
Climate Change Solutions

Renewable energy: Scientists agree that to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, countries must immediately move away from dirty energy sources like coal, oil and gas, and instead turn to renewable energy sources like wind, solar or nuclear power. Read about the potent possibilities of one of these producers, offshore wind farms, and see how they operate.

Refrigerants: It's not the most exciting solution to climate change, but it is one of the most effective. Read about how making refrigerants, like air-conditioners, more efficient could eliminate a full degree Celsius of warming by 2100.

Transportation: Across the globe, governments are focused on limiting one of the world's biggest sources of pollution: gasoline-powered cars. Read about the promises and challenges of electric vehicles or about how countries are rethinking their transit systems.

Methane emissions: You hear a lot about the need to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but what about its dangerous cousin, methane? Read about ideas to halt methane emissions and why doing so could be powerful in the short-term fight against climate change.

Agriculture: Efforts to limit global warming often target fossil fuels, but cutting greenhouse gases from food production is urgent, too, research says. Read about four fixes to earth's food supply that could go a long way.

Nature conservation: Scientists agree that reversing biodiversity loss is a crucial way to slow climate change. Read about how protecting and restoring nature can help cool the planet or about how Indigenous communities could lead the way.

Carbon capture:Eliminating emissions alone may not be enough to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, so some companies are investing in technology that sucks carbon dioxide out of the air. Learn more about so-called engineered carbon removal.

Questions to Consider
As you read about your climate solution, respond to the questions below. You can record your answers in this graphic organizer (PDF).

1. What is the solution? How does it work?

2. What problem related to climate change does this strategy address?

3. What effect could it have on global warming?

4. Compared with other ways to mitigate climate change, how effective is this one? Why?

5. What are the limitations of this solution?

6. What are some of the challenges or risks (political, social, economic or technical) of this idea?

7. What further questions do you have about this strategy?

When you've finished, you'll meet in "teaching groups" with at least one expert in each of the other climate solutions. Share what you know about your topic with your classmates and record what you learn from them in your graphic organizer.

Option 1: Develop a climate plan.
Scientists say that in order to prevent the average global temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the threshold beyond which the dangers of global warming grow immensely, we will need to enact all of the solutions you learned about - and more. However, the reality is that countries won't be able to right away. They will have to consider which can have the biggest or fastest impact on climate change, which are the most cost-effective and which are the most politically and socially feasible.

Imagine you have been asked to come up with a plan to address climate change. If you were in charge, which of these seven solutions would you prioritize and why? You might start by ranking the solutions you learned about from the most effective or urgent to the least.

Then, write a proposal for your plan that responds to the following questions:

What top three solutions are priorities? That is, which do you think are the most urgent to tackle right away and the most effective at slowing global warming?

Explain your decisions. According to your research - the articles you read and the quiz you took in the beginning of the lesson - why should these solutions take precedence?

How might you incentivize companies and citizens to embrace these changes? For some ideas, you might read more about the climate policies countries around the world have adopted to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Option 2: Take action.
Thinking about climate change solutions on such a big scale can be overwhelming, but there are things you can do in your own life and in your community to make a difference. Choose one of the activities below to take action on, or come up with one of your own:

Share climate solutions via media. Often, the news media focuses more on climate change problems than solutions. Counteract this narrative by creating something for publication related to one or more of the solutions you learned about. For example, you could submit a letter to the editor, write an article for your school newspaper, enter a piece in one of our upcoming student contests or create an infographic to share on social media.

Make changes in your own life. How can you make good climate choices related to one or more of the topics you learned about? For example, you could eat less meat, take public transportation or turn off your air-conditioner. Write a plan, explaining what you will do (or what you are already doing) and how it could help mitigate climate change, according to the research.

Join a movement. This guest essay urges people to focus on systems, not themselves. What groups could you get involved with that are working toward some of the solutions you learned about? Identify at least one group, either local, national or international, and one way you could support it. Or, if you're old enough to vote, consider a local, state or federal politician you would like to support based on his or her climate policies.

Want more Lessons of the Day? You can find them all here.

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In this lesson, students will use a jigsaw activity to learn about some of the most effective strategies and technologies that can help head off the worst effects of global warming. Earlier this summer, a report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations, found that some devastating impacts of global warming were unavoidable.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/danieladelorenzo/2021/11/02/air-pollution-caused-by-global-food-production-is-killing-more-than-890000-people-a-year-study-finds/?sh=5e1924ce1bfc

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TOPSHOT - An Indian farm labourer burns paddy stubble in a field on the outskirts of Jalandhar in ... [+]
AFP via Getty Images

The food we eat is one of the leading sources of the toxic ambient fine particulate matter PM2.5, leading to over 890,000 premature death per year, according to a new study examining air pollution released through the global food supply chain.

The study by the University of Minnesota, looked into emissions across five stages of food production: pre-production (land-use change, fertilizer production) production (on-farm energy use, manure management, grazing, fertilizer use agricultural waste burning) post-production (food industry, retail), distribution, and waste.

Most PM2.5 emissions are generated by the energy and transport sectors, by burning fossil fuels which release pollutants in the air. However, the agriculture sector has its own share of such pollutants: the research found the global food system is a significant contributor to total anthropogenic emissions of primary PM2.5 (58%), ammonia (72%), nitrogen oxides(13%), sulfur dioxide (9%), and all other organic compounds released which do not include methane (19%).

Exposure to air pollution is the world's leading environmental (health) risk factor for mortality. According to the WHO, air pollution kills an estimate of 7 million people worldwide every year, where 4.2 million of death are linked to exposure to PM2.5. Reducing air pollution can improve public health and well-being while reducing greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

"Food systems pose a wicked problem. We pointed out the paradigm of "eating enough and eating right": it is of utmost importance to meet the food demands of a growing population, but we also need to meet it with the least environmental damage," said Srinidhi Balasubramanian, lead author of the study while carrying her Postdoctoral Research at the University of Minnesota now Assistant Professor in the Environmental Science and Engineering Department at the Indian Institute of Technology di Bombay.

By reviewing more than 4746 peer-reviewed English language publications from the past decade, the researchers found land-use change, livestock and crop production, and agricultural waste burning produces the highest amount of PM2.5 and directly affect human health. Agricultural production emissions deriving from energy use in farms and fertilizers use were dominant in North America and Europe. In Asia, Africa, and South America, land-use change from forest to feedstock and crop production, manure management, and agricultural waste burning were the primary contributors to PM2.5 emissions, particularly in Brasil, Angola, Indonesia and Thailand.

Research indicated that the number of premature deaths yearly might be even higher than the 890,000 calculated, as air pollution regulations in several countries often do not include the emissions accounting within the agricultural sector: "We identify gaps in emissions data and air quality predictions as a major limitation in our understanding of the air quality impacts of the global food system." Emissions from agriculture-driven land-use change and livestock in Africa, as an example, are poorly constrained in comparison to the United States and Europe," continued Balasubramanian.

Little is reported as well on ammonia emissions, which is heavily featured within fertilizers, and has a key role in the formation of ambient PM2.5.

Accelerating climate action in all different production stages of the agricultural sector will be vital to decrease air pollution, but without measuring emissions, countries might be unable to identify effective mitigation strategies that could reduce pollution.

Countries their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the non-binding plans set by national governments defining their intensions with regards to climate change-related actions, offer some examples of how a focus on air pollution can increase climate change mitigation ambition and ultimately tackle food supply chain emissions.

Worker at an abatoir in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. (Photo by TONY KARUMBA / AFP) (Photo by TONY ... [+]
AFP via Getty Images

Most companies in the agriculture sector suggest technological solutions can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, proposing climate-smart and sustainable intensification of agriculture to curb emissions.

"Focusing on technological improvements cannot address the core problem and will only delay and deepen the engulfed climate, environmental, health, food and nutrition security crises," says Lasse Bruun, CEO of 50by40, a global coalition of more than 70 organisations dedicated to cutting the global production and consumption of animal products by 50% by 2040.

Technological developments were found to be only a complementary mitigation practice (link to 10%) whereas reducing intensive farming practices, such as limiting fertilizers use, remains the most effective way for the food supply chain to meet global emission reduction targets.

Livestock farming and industry, which contribute to increasing PM2.5 emissions through land-use, will also need a deep transformation: "A just livestock transition can accelerate equitable food distribution, improve public health and the environment, and result in beneficial socio-economic benefits," continued Bruun.

Increased commitments from stakeholders along the whole food supply chain will be key to tackle emissions: lowering nitrogen oxidesand sulfur dioxide emissions within food retail, distribution and transportation could be mitigated by shifting away from fossil fuels towards cleaner and energy-efficient technologies.

Currently, over one third of food worldwide is lost or wasted along the supply chain. New food waste management practices as well as a reduction of food production could help decrease ammonia emissions released by the decomposition of organic waste at landfill sites, which enters the air we breathe.

... Read More

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Air Pollution Caused By Global Food Production Is Killing More Than 890,000 People A Year, Study Finds

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The food we eat is one of the leading sources of the toxic ambient fine particulate matter PM2.5, leading to over 890,000 premature death per year, according to a new study examining air pollution released through the global food supply chain.

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Water Pollution: Everything You Need to Know

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Our rivers, reservoirs, lakes, and seas are drowning in chemicals, waste, plastic, and other pollutants. Here’s why―and what you can do to help.

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A key goal of COP26 is to keep the goal of limiting global warming to an increase of 1.5 C 'within reach'

Posted: October 28, 2021
Last Updated: October 31, 2021

High school students advocate for the lower of two UN climate targets, 1.5 C, during a climate protest in Montreal in 2019. Some environmental experts say keeping global warming to 1.5 C would lead to less extremes of heat, rainfall and drought than the original target of 2 C. (Louise Gravel/Radio-Canada)

Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This story is part of a CBC News initiative entitled "" to show and explain the effects of climate change and what is being done about it.
Keeping a 1.5 C limit on global warming "within reach" is one of the key goals of the ongoing United Nations climate conference, COP26. That's the lower of two targets in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. But why are there two targets? What's the difference between them in terms of impacts? Are they both reachable? Here's a closer look.

What are the official targets to limit global warming?

Article 2.1.a of the Paris Agreement names a key goal as: "Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change."

Have questions about COP26 or climate science, policy or politics? Email us: ask@cbc.ca. Your input helps inform our coverage.

One of the key goals of COP26, which opens on Oct. 31 in Glasgow, is to "Secure global net zero by mid-century and keep 1.5 degrees within reach."

Net zero means we are no longer adding heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Some greenhouse gases might still be emitted, but they would be "cancelled out" by the removal of an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases. (This is very similar to carbon neutrality, but includes more than just CO2.)

So far, the world has warmed 1.1 C above pre-industrial temperatures, the United Nations reports.
WATCH | Inaction and inequity key concerns ahead of COP26 climate summit
The Conference of Parties (COP), as it's known, meets every year and is the global decision-making body set up to implement the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in the early 1990s, and subsequent climate agreements.

Why are there two targets in the Paris Agreement?

UN negotiations had been looking at a target of 2 C for a long time. But in 2010, there was an agreement to review by 2015 whether the science suggested that goal needed to be strengthened. That included consideration of a 1.5 C goal, which had been called for by some groups representing developing countries. Among them was the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), which represents many vulnerable countries in UN climate negotiations.

"That process concluded that the globally agreed goal of two degrees as a kind of guardrail was not safe ... for the most vulnerable," said Frances Fuller, the advisor on mitigation and science for AOSIS.
WATCH | What half a degree of warming could mean for climate change
The group and its peers pushed hard during Paris negotiations, and eventually the 1.5 C target was added as one to work toward in the longer-term.

What is the difference between the climate impacts of 1.5 C and 2 C?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a special report looking into the difference between 1.5 C and 2 C of warming in 2018.

Compared to 1.5 C of warming, an extra half a degree of warming would lead to more intense and frequent extremes of heat, heavy rainfall and drought, the report found.

"Every bit of global warming matters and makes things worse," said Kirsten Zickfeld, professor of climate science at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., who was one of the report's lead authors.

In some cases, that worsening is proportional to the amount of warming.

But in other cases, it isn't. Feedback loops amplify the impacts more and more as the temperature increases. That's the case for sea ice loss in the Arctic. The melting of white ice exposes water, which is dark and absorbs more heat, causing the sea ice to melt faster, exposing more water and so on.

That's one of the reasons Canada, and especially its Arctic region, is warming much faster than the world average - and will continue to do so.
WATCH | Arctic nations discuss mitigating impact of climate change
"If we talk about 1.5 degrees warming [on average globally], it may actually mean five degrees warming in some regions of the Arctic," said Zickfeld. Meanwhile, an average of 2 C of warming globally might translate to 7 C of warming in parts of the Arctic.

Scientists are also concerned about tipping points or thresholds that lead to irreversible processes, such as the melting of the Greenland or East Antarctic ice sheets.

Zickfeld said that particular tipping point is estimated to be at around 2 C of warming.

"The likelihood that we will trigger any of these tipping points at 1.5 is less than at two degrees," she said.

What could the difference mean to humans?

The report showed that a half-degree difference in global temperature could make a dramatic difference in the number of people exposed to risks to their health, safety and livelihoods.

"The global population exposed to increased water shortages would be 50 per cent less under 1.5 C than 2 C," Zickfeld said.

Similarly, impacts on yields of maize, rice, wheat and marine fisheries aren't proportional to the amount of warming - with serious consequences for food security.

"Several hundred million fewer people would be exposed to climate-related risks by 2050 and be susceptible to poverty if we limit warming to 1.5 as opposed to 2 C," Zickfeld said.

Impact on severe heat exposure, maize harvest, sea-level rise, decline in marine fisheries (CBC News)

By 2100, the sea level will be 10 centimetres higher with 2 C of warming than with 1.5 C. While that doesn't sound like a lot, it exposes an extra 10 million people to risks of deadly and damaging flooding from sea level rise.

Fuller said the difference is dire for many of the countries AOSIS represents.

Above 1.5 C, sea level rise will "engulf entire nations," she said. "We cannot let go of the 1.5 goal, and to go beyond that would be accepting the decimation of our communities, livelihoods, nations, culture."
WATCH | 'We're beyond urgency,' says Marshall Islands climate envoy
If residents of such countries are forced to flee, the losses go beyond health, safety and economic losses, Fuller said. "You've lost your national identity, you've lost your country," she said. "That's not something we're willing to accept."

What could happen to other living things on Earth?

Local extinctions of plants, animals, insects and coral reefs are expected to increase much more with 2 C of warming compared to 1.5 C, with the higher limit potentially leading to the near extinction of coral reefs.

Impact on vertebrates, insects, plants, corals, shifts in ecosystems (CBC News)

Fuller said the destruction of coral reefs and other coastal ecosystems would also have huge impacts on people.
WATCH | An impassioned marine biologist on a mission to save the world's reefs
"Tourism is almost entirely dependent on our coastal ecosystems," she said. "And with that type of sea-level rise, it would mean decimation of entire economies."

What does 'keep 1.5 C within reach' mean?

IPCC modelling shows all simple paths that keep warming below 1.5 C require the world to cut emissions to 45 per cent below 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net zero around 2050.

Fuller said that means short-term action and targets in the next 10 years is "really, really important" to ensure the world doesn't blow past 1.5 C.

Currently, countries' pledges to 2030 are on track for to 2.6 C or 2.7 C, while pledges to get to net-zero, mostly by 2050, would reduce that to 2.2 C of warming if fully implemented.

Is that possible?

Zickfeld believes so. "We know what we need to do and we have the means - the technological and economic means - to do it," she said. "We can do it if political leaders really step up and the global community is committed to achieving this."

Fuller said she heads to COP26 with "cautious optimism."

"I think that there is a lot of momentum at the moment to make some transformational change," she said. "However, we do need to see more."

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How shaving half a degree off global warming targets could lessen the effects of climate change

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Posted: October 28, 2021 Last Updated: October 31, 2021 Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This story is part of a CBC News initiative entitled " " to show and explain the effects of climate change and what is being done about it.

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It is common knowledge that around two-thirds of the world is made up of water, which means that taking care of the Earth's water should be a priority for everyone around the globe. When harmful microorganisms and chemical substances contaminate bodies of water, they cause the water quality to decrease and potentially make it toxic. Water pollution can have negative effects on our health, the environment and the economy.

When discussing the issues that can arise due to water pollution, there are three major areas to consider:

Health: According to the United Nations, every year there are more deaths caused by polluted water than all types of violence combined, including war. Waste from humans and animals that contaminates water carries bacteria and viruses that cause the spread of diseases such as typhoid, cholera and giardia.

Environment: All the species in an ecosystem rely on each other in order to survive. Outside substances, such as pollutants found in wastewater, can disrupt the complicated relationships between species that an ecosystem needs in order to thrive.

Economy: Polluted water can have many negative effects on the economy. It directly impacts sectors such as commercial fishing, recreational businesses, tourism and even property values, all of which rely heavily on clean water. Polluted drinking water can also cause treatment costs to rise, which in turn makes the cost of drinking water rise as well.

But what are the causes of water pollution, and what can we do about them?

The Causes of Water Pollution

Water is one of the most important elements on Earth when it comes to sustaining life. Unfortunately, it is also extremely susceptible to pollution. This is largely because water is a universal solvent that can dissolve many substances. While this is a wonderful quality that we take advantage of for everyday tasks such as cooking, cleaning and taking medication, it is also the exact quality that causes water to become polluted so easily.

There are many causes of water pollution. Below, we will focus on seven of the major ways that water can become polluted.

1. Industrial Waste

Industries and industrial sites across the world are a major contributor to water pollution. Many industrial sites produce waste in the form of toxic chemicals and pollutants, and though regulated, some still do not have proper waste management systems in place. In those rare cases, industrial waste is dumped into nearby freshwater systems. When industrial waste is not treated properly (or worse, not treated at all), it can very easily pollute the freshwater systems that it comes into contact with.

Industrial waste from agricultural sites, mines and manufacturing plants can make its way into rivers, streams and other bodies of water that lead directly to the sea. The toxic chemicals in the waste produced by these industries not only have the potential to make water unsafe for human consumption, they can also cause the temperature in freshwater systems to change, making them dangerous for many water dwelling organisms.

2. Marine Dumping

The process of marine dumping is exactly what it sounds like, dumping garbage into the waters of the ocean. It might seem crazy, but household garbage is still collected and dumped into oceans by many countries across the world. Most of these items can take anywhere from two to 200 years to decompose completely.

3. Sewage and Wastewater

Harmful chemicals, bacteria and pathogens can be found in sewage and wastewater even when it's been treated. Sewage and wastewater from each household is released into the sea with fresh water. The pathogens and bacteria found in that wastewater breed disease, and therefore are a cause of health-related issues in humans and animals alike.

4. Oil Leaks and Spills

The age-old phrase "like water and oil" is used when describing two things that do not mix easily or at all. Just as the saying states, water and oil do not mix, and oil does not dissolve in water. Large oil spills and oil leaks, while often accidental, are a major cause of water pollution. Leaks and spills often are caused by oil drilling operations in the ocean or ships that transport oil. wildlife.

5. Agriculture

In order to protect their crops from bacteria and insects, farmers often use chemicals and pesticides. When these substances seep into the groundwater, they can harm animals, plants and humans. Additionally, when it rains, the chemicals mix with rainwater, which then flows into rivers and streams that filter into the ocean, causing further water pollution.

6. Global Warming

Rising temperatures due to global warming are a major concern in terms of water pollution. Global warming causes water temperatures to rise, which can kill water-dwelling animals. When large die-offs occur, it further pollutes the water supply, exacerbating the issue.

There are many everyday ways you can help reduce global warming, which will in turn help lower water pollution. These methods include recycling, carpooling and using CFL bulbs in your home.

7. Radioactive Waste

Radioactive waste from facilities that create nuclear energy can be extremely hazardous to the environment and must be disposed of properly. This is because uranium, the element used in the creation of nuclear energy, is a highly toxic chemical.

Unfortunately, accidents still occur at these facilities, and toxic waste is released into the environment. The coal and gas industries are, in many ways, no better. This is one of the major impetuses behind the development of alternative, clean sources of energy, including solar and wind.

Combatting Water Pollution

Water pollution is a major issue across the world and is caused by many contributing factors. It can greatly disrupt entire ecosystems and be extremely harmful to our health and economy. Water is an extremely valuable resource, and proper water treatment policies and management are imperative in the fight to keep the world's water supply clean.

There are numerous ways that each of us can help reduce water pollution, and the Natural Resources Defense Council has outlined a few, including:

1. Don't flush trash. Being mindful not to flush non-degradable products, such as plastic, down your toilet is one small but great way to stop contributing to the problem and start becoming part of the solution.

2. Pick up after your pets. Waste from animals is full of bacteria, and if not disposed of properly, that bacteria can find its way into the water supply through storm drains and runoff. The recommended disposal method is to use a bag made from recycled plastic to throw it in the trash.

3. Maintain your car. Antifreeze, oil, coolant and other chemicals can leak out of your car if it's not properly cared for. Then, rainwater washes those chemicals into the groundwater supply. Regular maintenance can reduce the amount of pollutants emitted by your car, and it enhances the vehicle's performance as well.

These are just a few ways to start the process of combatting water pollution, and they are contained to the actions you carry out in your home. There are bigger issues that need to be addressed, though, and that's where leaders come in. Changes to policy and advances in science can help tackle the larger issues contributing to water pollution, such as marine dumping and offshore oil spills. Earning a water resources master's degree online will prepare you with an advanced understanding of the growing complexity of water issues impacting the state, nation and globe. East Central University's online M.S. Water Resource Policy and Management trains students for leadership roles that make water policy decisions that impact various communities. Our program integrates knowledge from multiple disciplines to address the complex challenges of water resource decisions and to develop solutions that are socially acceptable, politically and economically viable and environmentally sustainable. Because our program is fully online, you'll be able to earn your degree on a schedule that works for you.

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What are the Causes of Water Pollution? | ECU Online

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There are many causes of water pollution. This article focuses on seven of the major ways that water pollution can occur. Learn More.

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Learn about the effects of pollution on freshwater from National Geographic.

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By Jun Ji-hyeAn increasing number of people around the world have been suffering damage from abnormal weather conditions caused by climate change in recent years, such as torrential rain, scorching heat and droughts. This article is the last in a series on various environment problems, government countermeasures and expert opinions on how to solve them. ― ED.
Korea still left behind in efforts to slow down global warming

Despite growing concerns over climate change both inside and outside the country, South Korea has ranked low in its response, according to an annual report ― the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) ― released by three international environmental research institutes: Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute and the Climate Action Network.

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Climate change is omnipresent: Nobody is safe from climate crisis

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By Jun Ji-hyeAn increasing number of people around the world have been suffering damage from abnormal weather conditions caused by climate change in recent years, such as torrential rain, scorching heat and droughts. This article is the last in a series on various environment problems, government countermeasures and expert opinions on how to solve them.

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Water pollution occurs when a body of water becomes contaminated, usually by chemicals or microorganisms. Water pollution can cause water to become toxic to humans and the environment.

Water is an essential resource for all life on Earth. If a water source becomes contaminated due to pollution, it can lead to health issues in humans, such as cancer or cardiovascular conditions.

This article explores the causes of water pollution, how it can affect human health, and what people can do to help prevent it.

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Image credit: JEAN AURELIO PRUDENCE/L'Express Maurice/AFP via Getty Images

Water is a natural resource that all living creatures require. Clean water is also used in manufacturing and for social and economic development.

However, according to the United Nations (UN), 2.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water services.

The UN and the World Health Organization (WHO) list the following statistics on water pollution:

Over half the global population do not have safely managed sanitation services.

Around 2 billion people live in countries with high levels of water stress, meaning the amount of water available is less than the amount required.

Experts estimate that by 2025, half the world's population will live in a water-stressed environment.

Around 785 million people do not have basic drinking-water services.

Since the 1990s, water pollution has worsened in almost all rivers in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

Water is sometimes referred to as the universal solvent, as it dissolves more substances than any other liquid. However, this ability means that water is easily prone to pollution.

Below are just some of the many ways that water pollution can occur.

Sewage and wastewater

After being used, water becomes wastewater. Wastewater can be domestic, such as water from toilets, sinks, or showers, or from commercial, agricultural, or industrial use. Wastewater also refers to rainwater that washes oil, grease, road salt, debris, or chemicals from the ground into waterways.

The UN estimates that 80% of wastewater returns to the ecosystem without being treated or reused.

In 2017, the UN found that 2 billion people worldwide did not have access to facilities such as toilets or latrines. The organization also discovered that 673 million people openly defecate outside.

Agriculture

The agriculture industry is one of the biggest consumers of fresh water. In the U.S., it is responsible for around 80% of the nation's water consumption. Agriculture is also the main source of pollution in rivers and streams in the U.S.

One way that agriculture causes water pollution is through rainwater. When it rains, pollutants, such as fertilizers, animal waste, and pesticides get washed from farms into waterways, contaminating the water.

Contaminates from agriculture usually contain high amounts of phosphorous and nitrogen, which encourage the growth of algal blooms. These blooms produce toxins that kill fish, seabirds, and marine mammals, as well as harming humans.

Additionally, when these algal blooms die, bacteria produced as the algae decompose use up oxygen in the water. This lack of oxygen causes "dead zones" in the water where fish cannot live.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimate that there are roughly 245,000 square kilometers of dead zones globally.

Plastics and garbage

Approximately we produce 1.4 billion tons of waste each year. Of this annual waste, 10% comprise plastics. Due to the widespread use of plastics, experts estimate that 4.8-12.7 million tons of waste enter the ocean each year.

Plastic and garbage can enter the water in many ways:

debris falling off ships

trash blowing into the ocean from landfills

garbage swept into the sea via rivers from people discarding used items such as food packages

people throwing their trash on to the beach

Once in the water, plastic and garbage can harm marine life and human health. Fish may eat trash, mistaking it for food, and end up dying.

As plastic slowly breaks apart, microplastics form. These are small fragments of plastic that are less than 5 millimeters in size. Fish may consume these microplastics, which may then be eaten by humans.

The UN state that plastic debris in the ocean causes the deaths of over a million seabirds each year. Plastic debris is also responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 marine mammals annually.

Oil

Oil pollution can occur when oil tankers spill their cargo. However, oil can also enter the sea via factories, farms, and cities, as well as via the shipping industry.

Radioactive waste

Radioactive waste can endure in the environment for thousands of years, making safe disposal difficult. If improperly disposed of, it can enter the water, making it hazardous to humans, marine life, and the environment.

Fracking

Fracking is the process of extracting oil or natural gas from rock. The technique uses large amounts of water and chemicals at high pressure to crack the rock. The fluid created by fracking contains contaminants that can pollute underground water supplies.

The following are some negatives ways that water pollution can directly affect human health.

Ingesting microplastics

A person may ingest microplastics via drinking water or through eating contaminated seafood. At Tokyo Bay in 2016, scientists examined 64 anchovies for microplastic consumption - had microplastics in their digestive systems.

People have also discovered them within salt, beer, and other food items.

Studies show microplastics may cause oxidative stress, inflammatory reactions, and metabolic disorders in humans. However, further research is needed to confirm these effects.

Consuming water contaminated by sewage

The WHO note that, globally, around people use a drinking water source with fecal contaminants. Contaminated water can harbor bacteria, such as those responsible for diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, hepatitis A, and polio.

According to the UN, every year, approximately 297,000 children under five die from diseases linked to poor sanitation, poor hygiene, or unsafe drinking water.

Drinking water containing chemical waste

Chemical pollutants, such as pesticides, fertilizers, and heavy metals can cause serious health problems if ingested.

In 2014, residents in Flint, Michigan, experienced water contamination due to inadequate testing and treatment of their water supply. The contaminated water caused rashes, hair loss, and itchy skin. Lead levels in the bloodstream of children who drank the water doubled.

A person who ingests chemical toxins in their water can be at risk of:

cancer

hormone disruption

altered brain function

damage to immune and reproductive systems

cardiovascular and kidney problems

Swimming in contaminated water can also trigger:

A person who wishes to reduce water pollution can help by:

reducing plastic usage and recycling plastics when possible

disposing of household chemicals properly

keeping up with the maintenance of their vehicle to ensure it is not leaking harmful substances

avoiding using pesticides

making sure to clean up dog waste

making sustainable choices regarding food and drinks

considering going vegan or vegetarian

Water pollution is a serious environmental issue that can be caused by many contaminants. Human health can be affected by consuming, entering, or washing in polluted water.

There are various ways to help to limit water pollution. If a person experiences any effects of water pollution, they should speak to their doctor.

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How does water pollution affect human health?

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Water pollution occurs when a body of water becomes contaminated, usually by chemicals or microorganisms. Water pollution can cause water to become toxic to humans and the environment. Water is an essential resource for all life on Earth. If a water source becomes contaminated due to pollution, it can lead to health issues in humans, such as cancer or cardiovascular conditions.

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The Earth's average global temperature is 1.2 degrees Celsius (around 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than in preindustrial times, causing shifts in weather patterns and more frequent and severe extreme weather events such as storms and droughts.

This global warming, also known as climate change, is the result of humans filling the air with gases that intensify a process called the greenhouse effect.

The greenhouse effect occurs when the sun's rays reach the Earth's atmosphere and the majority of the radiation bounces back out into space. When this happens, a small portion is absorbed by chemicals in our atmosphere. These are known as greenhouse gases.

By looking at air bubbles from hundreds of thousands of years ago until today, scientists have found that temperatures go up or down in lockstep with the amount of greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide.

Human activity has started to change the delicate balance of chemicals in our atmosphere.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, humans have been burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas for energy. When these substances are burned, they emit excess greenhouse gases, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide.

According to measurements taken in February and March from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now reaching levels 50 percent higher than in the preindustrial period. More greenhouse gases means more heat trapped in the atmosphere and, over time, a warmer planet.

When the average temperature of the Earth is raised, even by just a few degrees, we see some pretty dramatic effects. For example, it can cause a rise in ocean temperatures that can lead to more extreme storms and flooding.

Klaus Jacob, a special research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, explained one consequence of warmer oceans.

"As the ocean gets warmer, it expands," Jacob said. "So as sea level rises, you need only smaller and smaller storms to reach the same elevation in New Orleans, or New York City, or anywhere else where we have storms. ... And so you get much more frequent flooding."

At the same time, some areas are dealing with long droughts because warmer temperatures cause more evaporation and dry out the land and vegetation, which leads to problems like crop shortages and widespread forest fires.

The severe current, and potential future, consequences of climate change were laid out in a landmark report conducted by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released in August.

The assessment found that if the world follows the scenario of very low greenhouse gas emissions, it's plausible that warming of greater than 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures can be avoided.

But if that scenario - which involves very drastic, rapid and sustained cuts in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, enforced by governments and businesses - is not followed, the world could be heading toward being 3 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100.

In all cases, there will be more extreme events like hurricanes and heat waves that cause flooding, wildfires and droughts. It's only a question of how severe we allow the situation to become.

When it was published, the report was described as "a code red for humanity" by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

The U.N. timed the report's release to lead into the U.N. Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland. The ongoing fight to limit global warming and to deal with its effects hinges on successful talks between world leaders at the conference, which will take place in early November.

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Read more from Yahoo News:

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What is the greenhouse effect and how does it lead to global warming?

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The Earth's average global temperature is 1.2 degrees Celsius (around 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than in preindustrial times, causing shifts in weather patterns and more frequent and severe extreme weather events such as storms and droughts. This global warming, also known as climate change, is the result of humans filling the air with gases that intensify a process called the greenhouse effect.

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Americans go through hundreds of billions of plastic bags each year. In an effort to curb the number of bags being used once and then thrown away, cities around the world have instituted bans or taxes on plastic bags. But are paper or reusable bags much better for the environment? Science shows that there is not a clear answer.
Plastic Bags
A major advantage of plastic bags is that, when compared to other types of shopping bags, producing them carries the lowest environmental toll. The thin, plastic grocery store bags are most commonly made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE). Although production of these bags does use resources like petroleum, it results in less carbon emissions, waste, and harmful byproducts than cotton or paper bag production. Plastic bags are also relatively sturdy and reusable. Many of the studies about different bagging options that show plastic bags production demands less resources assume plastic bags are used at least twice-once coming home and once as a trash bag-and factor this into the calculations about which bags are more sustainable.

Plastic bags are recyclable, though few people recycle them. Recycling plastic bags is a difficult task; they fly away in the recycling plant and get stuck in machinery. Because of this, many cities do not offer curbside recycling for plastic bags. Instead, large-scale retailers offer bag recycling services. However these services are dependent on the consumer bringing the plastic bags back to the store.

Bags that are not recycled end up becoming litter, because they do not biodegrade. In addition to filling up landfills and becoming eyesores, plastic bags that become litter endanger many facets of the environment, including marine life and the food chain. This is because plastic bags, like all plastic materials, eventually break up into microscopic pieces, which scientists refer to as microplastics. Microplastics have been found nearly everywhere: in marine animals, farmland soil, and urban air.

Though scientists have only just begun studying the consequences of microplastic proliferation, and we do not yet know their effect on animals, humans, and the environment, scientists are concerned about how this level of plastic pollution could change our planet. The studies that found plastic bags to be less harmful to the environment than paper and reusable bags did not take effects of litter into account and instead assumed that the plastic bags would be recycled or used as trash bags.
Paper Bags
Paper bags have some advantages over plastic bags when it comes to sustainability. They are easier to recycle, and, because they are biodegradable, they can be used for purposes like composting. However, paper is very resource-heavy to produce: Manufacturing a paper bag takes about four times as much energy as it takes to produce a plastic bag, plus the chemicals and fertilizers used in producing paper bags create additional harm to the environment.

Studies have shown that, for a paper bag to neutralize its environmental impact compared to plastic, it would have to be used anywhere from three to 43 times. Since paper bags are the least durable of all the bagging options, it is unlikely that a person would get enough use out of any one bag to even out the environmental impact.

Still, the fact that paper is recyclable helps lessen its impact. In 2018, 68.1 percent of paper consumed in the United States was recovered for recycling, a percentage that has been rising in the last decade. However, because paper fibers become shorter and weaker each time the recycling process takes place, there is a limit to how many times paper can be recycled.
Reusable Bags
Reusable bags are made from many different materials, and the environmental impact of producing those materials varies widely. One study from the United Kingdom (U.K.) found that, regarding bag production, cotton bags have to be reused 131 times before they reduce their impact on climate change to the same extent as plastic bags. To have a comparable environmental footprint (which encompasses climate change as well as other environmental effects) to plastic bags, a cotton bag potentially has to be used thousands of times. Materials other than cotton, however, perform much better in sustainability metrics. Nonwoven polypropylene (PP) is another popular option. Made from a more durable kind of plastic, these bags need to be reused around eleven times to break even with the impact of conventional plastic.

In addition to varying widely in their eco-friendliness, there is the chance that reusable bags go unused, because consumers have to remember to bring the bags with them to the store. The biggest positive of reusable bags is that their use cuts down on the amount of litter on land and in the ocean. Studies have found that bans on plastic bags in cities in the United States and Europe have decreased the amount of plastic litter in nearby waters.
Things to Consider
Because reusable and paper bags have a huge environmental cost upfront, and plastic bags create greater negative effects after being used, it is hard to determine which type of bag is truly the most sustainable. Regardless of whether the bag is plastic, paper, or another material, the most sustainable choice is the bag you already have. In every study and for every type of bag, it was clear that reusing the bag as many times as you can reduces its impact on the environment. Overall, making the effort to reuse any bag that comes into your possession, and disposing of the bag responsibly, is key.

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Sustainable Shopping-Which Bag Is Best? | National Geographic Society

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Americans go through hundreds of billions of plastic bags each year. In an effort to curb the number of bags being used once and then thrown away, cities around the world have instituted bans or taxes on plastic bags. But are paper or reusable bags much better for the environment?

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https://www.ehn.org/plastic-pollution-2655191194/a-fractured-front-on-u-s-plastic-pollution-regulation

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In recent years, countries across the globe have implemented laws to mitigate plastic production and pollution.

In the past two years, both large developed nations like Australia and smaller developing countries like Sri Lanka and Belize have passed ambitious national laws to phase out a number of plastic products like bags, cutlery, and straws.

But the U.S., a leading producer and consumer of plastics, remains woefully behind, even as it stands as one of the world's biggest polluters. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the country produced 35.7 million tons of plastic waste in 2018, more than 90% of which was either landfilled or burned. The U.S. ranks second in the world in total plastic waste generated per year, behind only China - though when measured per capita, the U.S. outpaces China. In 2019, the U.S. also opted not to join the United Nations' updated Basel Convention, a legally binding agreement aimed at preventing and minimizing plastic waste generation that was signed by about 180 other countries.

More than 90 countries have established (or have imminent plans to establish) either bans or fees on single-use plastic bags or other products, according to data from the non-profit ocean conservation organization Oceana. The U.S. is not one of them. Though Americans have been aware of plastic pollution as an environmental concern as early as the mid-20th century, U.S. action against plastics has been piecemeal - the federal government has left it up to individual cities, counties, and states to decide whether and how to regulate plastics.

The plastic problem is growing increasingly urgent. More than 1 million plastic bags are used every minute, with an average "working life" of only 15 minutes. Experts believe the ocean will contain one ton of plastic for every three tons of fish by 2025 and, by 2050, more plastics than fish (by weight).

Not only does the ocean (and all life reliant on it) suffer from plastic pollution, but human health is also at risk. Microplastics have well-documented impacts on human health, and have been found in 90% of bottled water and 83% of tap water. Our incessant plastic consumption is cultivated by "throwaway" culture, fueled by the plastic and oil and gas industries' efforts to sustain high plastics consumption while distracting people with recycling campaigns.

However, a new proposed federal bill-the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act -offers potential solutions, and could transform the U.S. from a hindrance to the global movement against plastics into a much-needed ally. Such federal action could help stop the fractured approach to tackling plastics in the U.S., and shift the burden from consumers to plastic manufacturers.

Advocates say even if the bill doesn't pass in full, its component parts, especially those that are more bipartisan, could likely peel off and be recycled into other legislation. For example, a part of the bill addressing plastic pellets, or "nurdles," has already broken off and become its own piece of potential legislation, the Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act.

U.S. lags behind plastic pollution regulation

The European Union passed a comprehensive directive a couple of years ago. (Credit: campact/flickr)

Other countries not only produce less plastic than the U.S., but they've also more successfully legislated against plastic pollution. The European Union passed a comprehensive directive a couple of years ago, for example, that requires member countries to ban a slew of single-use plastic products, collect plastic bottles for recycling and reuse, and label disposable plastic products appropriately, at minimum. Many countries are going beyond those requirements.

In Canada a federal ban on plastic bags, stir sticks, ringed beverage carriers, cutlery, straws, and food takeout containers made from hard-to-recycle plastics is set to take effect at the end of the year.

It's not just Western or "wealthier" nations who have successfully implemented measures against plastics. Dozens of countries across Africa, Asia, and Central and South America have legislation in place to quash the single-use plastic crisis.

Christy Leavitt, the U.S. Plastic Campaign Director at Oceana, told EHN that the EU directive is just one example for the U.S. to emulate. Oceana has surveyed countries around the world, taking inventory of the global anti-plastic legislation and assessing where the U.S. sits comparatively, and found progressive policies in many pockets of the world.

"Chile passed what is, if not the most comprehensive, one of the most comprehensive single-use plastic foodware policies in the world," Leavitt said. Beyond banning single-use bags and straws, Chile prohibits all eating establishments from providing single-use cutlery or containers. Grocery and convenience stores must also display, sell, and take back refillable bottles, creating a cyclical system of bottle reuse.

As early as 2002, the East African country Eritrea banned plastic bags in its capital city Asmara. The country implemented a nationwide ban on the import, production, sale, or distribution of plastic bags in 2005. Rwanda banned plastic bags in 2008 and then all single-use plastics in 2019, with heavy fines and even jail time for anyone found importing, producing, selling or using single-use plastic items.

When countries across the globe with fewer resources than the U.S. successfully push out harmful plastic products, it gives the U.S. no excuse to be so behind, Leavitt added.

In the absence of national legislation in the U.S., local governments at the city, county, and state levels have regulated plastics. As a result, there is a diverse set of mandates and ordinances scattered across the country.

One paper in the Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning says that "as of August 2019, eight

U.S. states, 40 counties, and nearly 300 cities had adopted policies that, either through a ban, fee, or combination thereof, aim to reduce the consumption of single-use plastic bags."

To Rachel Krause, a public administration researcher at the University of Kansas and author of the paper, it's curious to see such a large issue relegated to local governments. "We tend to say that policy responses should be at scale or in proportion to policy problems," she told EHN, "but local governments aren't at scale with climate change, local governments aren't at scale with global plastics. And yet, in a lot of places in the United States, that's where we're seeing the action happen."

Local action against single-use plastic, by definition, has limited reach and is less efficient than sweeping national policy would be. Ordinances at a city or county level are also prone to being struck down by statewide preemption laws, when states ban local governments from taking action.

Eighteen states have some sort of preemption law in place. In Texas, for example, individual cities like Laredo tried to implement plastic bag bans, but the Texas Supreme Court knocked them down in 2018, saying they conflicted with state solid waste management laws.

That said, "the amount of just individual pieces of legislation that have been introduced at the state and local level, in the last five years has, increased by an order of magnitude, maybe more," Alex Truelove, the Zero Waste Campaign Director with U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), told EHN. The legislative landscape felt so much more sparse just a few years ago, Truelove added - a great sign, since the more states engaging in anti-plastics discourse, the harder the issue is to ignore on a national level. Plus, "every time something passes, we learn something" about what does and does not work.

The problem is "it's much easier to block something than to get something passed," University of Southern Maine environmental policy researcher Travis Wagner told EHN. This is especially true at the federal level. He added that the federal government explored possible legislation against plastics as far back as the 1970s, as bottle bills were adopted around the country.

"Bottle bills," also known as "container deposit laws," typically work by mandating small deposits on drink containers like plastic bottles and metal cans that customers can get back if they recycle those bottles. Oregon passed the first bottle bill in the U.S. in 1971, and by 1986, 10 states had enacted some kind of bottle bill into law (there are still only 10 states doing this to date). In the 1970s, Wagner said, it seemed like there was enough momentum to pass a national bottle bill, "but politically, it was just really, extremely difficult."

In the half century since the federal government first considered taking a national stance on plastics, the issue has only gotten worse.

Individuals get blamed as plastic production skyrockets

Historically, the conversation around plastic pollution in the U.S. has centered on individuals' and communities' abilities to recycle. (Credit: Brian Yurasits/Unsplash)

Historically, the conversation around plastic pollution in the U.S. has centered on individuals' and communities' abilities to recycle. But Leavitt said that recycling was an ideal pushed on the public by the plastics industry as "a way for [them] to put the blame of plastic pollution and the responsibility to fix it on consumers. And it worked. While we focused on recycling, industry exponentially increased the amount of plastic it produced."

The idea that it is the individual's responsibility to recycle, to not litter, and to buy less was so pervasive "that it's become embedded in our psyche," added Wagner. "That's the industry saying 'It's not us, it's you.'"

Meanwhile, records and reports from as early as 1973 suggest top industry executives knew that plastic recycling could never be successful on a large scale.

"It's all coming down to dollars and cents for the industry," Shannon Smith, Manager of Communications and Development for the nonprofit FracTracker Alliance, told EHN. "The misperception is that there's a demand for all of this plastic, and so the industry is just responding to the demand of consumers, where it's really the opposite." In reality, she added, there's an oversupply of fracked gas in the U.S., and one of the best ways to profit from all that supply is to generate more demand for plastic. "So it's totally industry driven."

Plastics are primarily made from the natural gas byproducts ethane and propane, which are turned into plastic polymers in high-heat facilities in a process known as "cracking." The U.S. is the world's leading producer of natural gas, with 30 cracker plants currently in operation and at least three more expected by mid-2022. To add insult to injury, Smith said, "the fracking industry has never been profitable," and petrochemical companies and facilities are actually the frequent recipients of government subsidies. "We're subsidizing them, we're paying for their ability to make a profit while they're sacrificing our health."

It's time to put the responsibility of managing plastic waste back on the companies producing it, Truelove said. "If f your bathtub is overflowing, the first thing you do is turn off the tap," he added.

Break Free From Plastic Pollution

Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), pictured here, and Representative Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), introduced the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. (Credit: merkley.senate.gov/)

A new piece of federal legislation seeks to turn off the proverbial tap. First introduced in 2020 and reintroduced in March 2021 by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Representative Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, if passed, would comprehensively address plastic production, consumption, and waste management in the country.

"The idea behind the bill was to really kind of assemble all of the best ideas from not just around the country, but honestly from around the world," said Truelove. The EU directive, for example, was a great precedent and a beacon for the direction the U.S. could follow, he added.

Congressman Lowenthal wrote to EHN that "this bill incorporates best practices and important common-sense policies. While it may be ambitious - it is by no means radical." The bill would ban single-use plastic bags and other non-recyclable products, include a bottle bill, and channel investments to recycling and composting infrastructure. "The legislation makes producers responsible for the end use of their own products," added Congressman Lowenthal. Producers of plastic packaging would be required to design and finance waste and recycling programs.

Truelove also mentioned that the bill, importantly, sets a minimum for states to abide by, allowing individual local governments to pursue or keep more aggressive policies -"we don't want to punish the states that have those stronger laws."

The proposed bill also includes components of environmental justice, requiring the EPA and other agencies to more rigorously study the cumulative environmental and health impacts of incinerators and petrochemical plants, while also placing a moratorium on new or expanding facilities. Frontline and fenceline communities - so named because they are situated next to these industrial plants, right up to the fences - are the most harmed by the poor air and water quality inflicted by the plastics industry. They are also disproportionately communities of color.

The future of plastics regulation

The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act has not been put into law yet. It is currently co-sponsored by 12 other senators, but the timeline for when it might be passed is still very unclear.

Truelove is hesitant to make predictions, but he's optimistic that, in the long run, some form of federal legislation will pass. Wagner is more skeptical: "I am optimistic, but not at the national level." In his mind, individual states will continue to lead.

Though the full Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act has no clear path forward at the moment, pieces of the bill are already breaking off and being discussed more seriously. Lowenthal wrote that breaking off elements of the bill and integrating them with more narrowly focused legislation with bipartisan support, or attaching them to bills at the verge of being passed, is a practical move to get parts of the bill through Congress bit by bit.

"A lot of this work tends to be incremental. It almost has to be, by nature, just the way our institutions are built," said Truelove.

But even if the bill is passed, it's still no panacea. The plastics and petrochemical industries will likely continue pushing for what Truelove calls "false solutions," like chemical recycling innovations (where plastics are broken down again into polymers, effectively turning them into diesel fuel - a different environmental nightmare) or flashier anti-littering campaigns.

"What we're doing is an affront to [industry's] business model," he added. "You've got Dow, DuPont, Chevron, Exxon, and so on...and they're incredibly powerful organizations with a lot of political influence." To substantially move towards less plastic production and more reusable products, the government will need to push past those distracting pseudo-solutions, even when they seem like they could be profitable.

"It's totally doable," said Truelove. "I mean, I think if we can get to the moon, we can figure out how to make it easy for people that have reusable foodware or reusable packaging for shipping."
Banner photo credit: Naja Bertolt Jensen/Unsplash

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A fractured front on U.S. plastic pollution regulation

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In the absence of national legislation in the U.S., local governments at the city, county, and state levels have regulated plastics. As a result, there is a diverse set of mandates and ordinances scattered across the country. One paper in the Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning says t...

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https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/everyday-plastics-pollute-leaching-thousands-chemicals/amp

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Bits of plastic litter the world. It's become a big and growing problem from the depths of the ocean to Arctic glaciers and even European mountain peaks. Much research has lately focused on how plastic products in the environment break down into smaller pieces and where those bits wind up. But two new studies find it's not just the plastic pieces that pose a problem. Intact plastics can release pollution - tens of thousands of chemicals. And those pollutants likely end up in water and food, those studies now conclude.

Many of these chemicals come from additives. Such additives include pigments, fire retardants and more. They make plastics stronger, more colorful or better in some way. But those additives are not chemically bonded to the plastic. That means they can move out and into the environment through a process known as leaching.

Most studies of plastic pollution have focused on pure plastic. These are types to which additives have not yet been added. Both of the new studies used plastic bags and containers as we use them, complete with additives. And through normal use, these plastics can release other chemicals as pollutants, the studies now report.

"We do not know whether there are health consequences from the plastic chemicals [pollutants] we looked at," says Martin Wagner, one of the authors. Still, he argues, people should be concerned. "They are being sold products they use every day without knowing whether the chemicals they are exposed to are safe."

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Unsafe to eat?

Wagner is a biologist at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. He recently teamed up with Lisa Zimmermann at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main in Germany. She's an ecotoxicologist. That means she studies how chemicals may poison organisms in the environment. Together, they became part of a team that studied whether pollutants can leach from plastics into food.

They looked at everyday food containers. These included different types of plastic bags, bottles, fruit trays, coffee cup lids, gummi-candy packaging, shower shoes and yogurt cups. In all, these included eight different types of plastic. Each used different additives. The team extracted chemicals from each plastic sample. They also put a piece of each sample into water and kept it in the dark at 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit) for 10 days. Afterward, they tested the water for signs of any leaching of chemicals from these plastics.

It's raining plastic, and here's an explanation why - and why we should care.

They also tested the extracted chemicals and those that leached from water in toxicity tests. For instance, they looked at whether the chemicals could sicken cells. They also tested whether the chemicals might mimic or block hormones. And they used a device known as a mass spectrometer (Spek-TRAH-meh-tur) to identify the total number of different chemicals released by the plastics.

Chemicals leaching into water were toxic at concentrations we might encounter under normal use, they found. And every type of plastic leached at least some toxic chemicals. Only a few of the plastics leached chemicals that mimic or interfere with the body's hormones. In total, some plastics leached a few hundred chemicals. Others, they found, leached tens of thousands.

The team shared its findings September 7 in Environmental Science & Technology.

Shining some light on the subject

When plastic bags and products are discarded, they can end up as litter. Massive amounts of trashed plastic wind up in our oceans. For many years, researchers thought sunlight would simply crack or otherwise break down the trash into smaller bits of the original plastic. Anna Walsh wondered if sunlight might also cause plastics to leach pollutants into the water. An environmental scientist, she works at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. It's in Woods Hole, Mass. There, she's part of a team that studies ocean chemistry.

Shana Novak/DigitalVision/Getty Images Plus

Her group analyzed pieces of common plastic bags. These were made from polyethylene (Pah-lee-ETH-ul-een), a plastic commonly found littering the ocean. They cut pieces and placed them in beakers of seawater. Some were left in the dark for six days at room temperature. Others were placed for five days under lights that included all the wavelengths in sunlight. These were chilled to keep the water at the same temperature as the dark samples.

Plastics leached twice as much pollution in sunlight as in darkness, they found. One bag leached 263 different chemicals in the dark but more than 13,000 when exposed to light! Others leached even more. And the longer bags were exposed to sunlight, the more chemicals they leached. "Sunlight can lead to these transformations relatively quickly," Walsh says. In weeks to a few months, they can leach "tens of thousands of different chemicals."

Her team shared its findings September 21 in Environmental Science & Technology.

What that means for ocean health is still unknown, Walsh says. But scientists are working on it. "We're making great strides towards understanding how the many different plastic types in the ocean break down, how long they last and their effects," she says.

Chemists had long thought plastic would last forever in the environment. But the truth is much more complicated. "Plastics are extremely tough materials," Walsh admits. "But sunlight has the power to break them into all of these chemicals that we saw in the study."

Risks remain a mystery

"It is good to see that more and more studies use realistic circumstances for their exposure experiments," says Susanne Kühn. She is a marine biologist at Wageningen Marine Research in the Netherlands. It's troubling, she says, that people "are exposed to substances where we do not know how toxic they may be."

What's more, she adds, there's no government regulations to ensure these chemicals are used safely. The Zimmermann study "support[s] the growing body of evidence that plastics can be harmful, not only when ingested directly but also when in contact with human food," Kühn says.

The good news is that we "can reduce exposures to these chemicals by reducing the use of plastics," says Wagner in Norway. He suggests eating less food that comes in plastic packaging. "This will not only be good for us," he argues, "but also for the environment."

Power Words
More About Power Words

Arctic: A region that falls within the Arctic Circle. The edge of that circle is defined as the northernmost point at which the sun is visible on the northern winter solstice and the southernmost point at which the midnight sun can be seen on the northern summer solstice. The high Arctic is that most northerly third of this region. It's a region dominated by snow cover much of the year.

biologist: A scientist involved in the study of living things.

cell: (in biology) The smallest structural and functional unit of an organism. Typically too small to see with the unaided eye, it consists of a watery fluid surrounded by a membrane or wall.

chemical: A substance formed from two or more atoms that unite (bond) in a fixed proportion and structure. For example, water is a chemical made when two hydrogen atoms bond to one oxygen atom. Its chemical formula is H ₂ O. Chemical also can be an adjective to describe properties of materials that are the result of various reactions between different compounds.

chemistry: The field of science that deals with the composition, structure and properties of substances and how they interact. Scientists use this knowledge to study unfamiliar substances, to reproduce large quantities of useful substances or to design and create new and useful substances.

concentration: (in chemistry) A measurement of how much of one substance has been dissolved into another.

environment: The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the process and the condition those things create. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature and humidity (or even the placement of things in the vicinity of an item of interest).

extract: (v.) To separate one chemical (or component of something) from a complex mix. (noun) A substance, often in concentrated form, that has been removed from some source material.

glacier: A slow-moving river of ice hundreds or thousands of meters deep. Glaciers are found in mountain valleys and also form parts of ice sheets.

hormone: (in zoology and medicine) A chemical produced in a gland and then carried in the bloodstream to another part of the body. Hormones control many important body activities, such as growth. Hormones act by triggering or regulating chemical reactions in the body. (in botany) A chemical that serves as a signaling compound that tells cells of a plant when and how to develop, or when to grow old and die.

leach: (in geology and chemistry) The process by which water (often in the form of rain) removes soluble minerals or other chemicals from a solid, such as rock, or from sand, soil, bones, trash or ash.

litter: Material that lies around in the open, having been discarded or left to fall where it may. (in biology) Decaying leaves and other plant matter on the surface of a forest floor. (in zoology) A group of young animals born at the same time to the same mother.

marine biologist: A scientist who studies creatures that live in ocean water, from bacteria and shellfish to kelp and whales.

organism: Any living thing, from elephants and plants to bacteria and other types of single-celled life.

pigment: A material, like the natural colorings in skin, that alter the light reflected off of an object or transmitted through it. The overall color of a pigment typically depends on which wavelengths of visible light it absorbs and which ones it reflects. For example, a red pigment tends to reflect red wavelengths of light very well and typically absorbs other colors. Pigment also is the term for chemicals that manufacturers use to tint paint.

plastic: Any of a series of materials that are easily deformable; or synthetic materials that have been made from polymers (long strings of some building-block molecule) that tend to be lightweight, inexpensive and resistant to degradation.

pollutant: A substance that taints something - such as the air, water, our bodies or products. Some pollutants are chemicals, such as pesticides. Others may be radiation, including excess heat or light. Even weeds and other invasive species can be considered a type of biological pollution.

polyethylene: A plastic made from chemicals that have been refined (produced from) crude oil and/or natural gas. The most common plastic in the world, it is flexible and tough. It also can resist radiation.

risk: The chance or mathematical likelihood that some bad thing might happen. For instance, exposure to radiation poses a risk of cancer. Or the hazard - or peril - itself. (For instance: Among cancer risks that the people faced were radiation and drinking water tainted with arsenic.)

seawater: The salty water found in oceans.

spectrometer: An instrument that measures a spectrum, such as light, energy, or atomic mass. Typically, chemists use these instruments to measure and report the wavelengths of light that it observes. The collection of data using this instrument, a process is known as spectrometry, can help identify the elements or molecules present in an unknown sample.

technology: The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry - or the devices, processes and systems that result from those efforts.

toxic: Poisonous or able to harm or kill cells, tissues or whole organisms. The measure of risk posed by such a poison is its toxicity.

toxicity: A measure of the potential for some substance to poison or cause harm to living things. The harm may not occur immediately. The harm may not occur immediately. Depending on the dose, organism and the toxic material, any harm may not show up for days, weeks or even years.

Alison Pearce Stevens is a former biologist and forever science geek who writes about science and nature for kids. She lives with her husband, their two kids and a small menagerie of cuddly (and not-so cuddly) critters.

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Everyday plastics can pollute, leaching thousands of chemicals

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Bits of plastic litter the world. It's become a big and growing problem from the depths of the ocean to Arctic glaciers and even European mountain peaks. Much research has lately focused on how plastic products in the environment break down into smaller pieces and where those bits wind up.

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Some plastics that could be recycled end up in landfill because of poor facilities, or confusion about what is and isn't recyclable (Credit: Alamy)

Every year, more than 380 million tonnes of plastic is produced worldwide. That's about the same as 2,700,000 blue whales - more than 100 times the weight of the entire blue whale population. Just 16% of plastic waste is recycled to make new plastics, while 40% is sent to landfill, 25% to incineration and 19% is dumped.

Much of the plastic that could be recycled - such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is used for bottles and other packaging - ends up in landfill. This is often due to confusion about kerbside recycling or contamination with food or other types of waste.

Other plastics - such as salad bags and other food containers - find their way to landfill because they are made up of a combination of different plastics that can't be easily split apart in a recycling plant. Litter dropped in the street and lightweight plastics left in landfill sites or illegally dumped can be carried by the wind or washed into rivers by the rain, ending up in the ocean.

Chemical recycling is an attempt to recycle the unrecyclable. Instead of a system where some plastics are rejected because they are the wrong colour or made of composites, chemical recycling could see all types of plastic fed into an "infinite" recycling system that unmake plastics back into oil, so they can then be used to make plastic again.

The way plastic is currently recycled is more of a downward spiral than an infinite loop. Plastics are usually recycled mechanically: they are sorted, cleaned, shredded, melted and remoulded. Each time plastic is recycled this way, its quality is degraded. When the plastic is melted, the polymer chains are partially broken down, decreasing its tensile strength and viscosity, making it harder to process. The new, lower grade plastic often becomes unsuitable for use in food packaging and most plastic can be recycled a very limited number of times before it is so degraded it becomes unusable.

The emerging industry of chemical recycling aims to avoid this problem by breaking plastic down into its chemical building blocks, which can then be used for fuels or to reincarnate new plastics.

The most versatile version of chemical recycling is " feedstock recycling". Also known as thermal conversion, feedstock recycling is any process that breaks polymers down into simpler molecules using heat.

The process is fairly simple - take a plastic drinks bottle. You put it out with your recycling for collection. It is taken, along with all the other waste, to a sorting facility. There, the rubbish is sorted, either mechanically or by hand, into different kinds of materials and different kinds of plastics.

Your bottle is washed, shredded and packed into a bale ready for transportation to the recycling centre - so far, the same as the conventional process. Then comes the chemical recycling: the plastic that formerly made up your bottle could be taken to a pyrolysis centre where it is melted down. Next it is fed into the pyrolysis reactor where it is heated to extreme temperatures. This process turns the plastic into a gas which is then cooled to condense into an oil-like liquid, and finally distilled into fractions that can be put to different purposes.

Chemical recycling techniques are being trialled across the world. UK-based Recycling Technologies has developed a pyrolysis machine that turns hard-to-recycle plastic such as films, bags and laminated plastics into Plaxx. This liquid hydrocarbon feedstock can be used to make new virgin quality plastic. The first commercial-scale unit was installed in Perth in Scotland in 2020.

The firm Plastic Energy has two commercial-scale pyrolysis plants in Spain and plans to expand into France, the Netherlands and the UK. These plants transform hard-to-recycle plastic waste, such as confectionery wrappers, dry pet food pouches and breakfast cereal bags into substances called "tacoil". This feedstock can be used to make food-grade plastics.

In the US, the chemical company Ineos has become the first to use a technique called depolymerisation on a commercial scale to produce recycled polyethylene, which goes into carrier bags and shrink film. Ineos also has plans to build several new pyrolysis recycling plants.

In the UK, Mura Technology has begun construction of the world's first commercial-scale plant able to recycle all kinds of plastic. The plant can handle mixed plastic, coloured plastic, plastic of all composites, all stages of decay, even plastic contaminated with food or other kinds of waste.

Mura's "hydrothermal" technique is a type of feedstock recycling using water inside the reactor chamber to spread heat evenly throughout. Heated to extreme temperatures but pressurised to prevent evaporation, water becomes "supercritical" - not a solid, liquid, nor gas. It is this use of supercritical water, avoiding the need to heat the chambers from the outside, that Mura says makes the technique inherently scalable.

"If you heat the reactor from the outside, keeping an even temperature distribution is really hard. The bigger you go the harder it gets. It's a bit like cooking," explained Mura's chief executive, Steve Mahon. "It's hard to fry a big steak all the way through but if you boil it, it's easy to make sure it's cooked evenly all the way through."

The plastic waste arrives on site in bales - contaminated, multi-layer plastic such as flexible films and rigid trays that would otherwise have gone to incineration or energy-from-waste plants. The bales are fed into the front-end sorting facility to remove any inorganic contaminants such as glass, metal or grit. Organic contaminants such as food residue or soil are able to pass through the process. The plastic is then shredded and cleaned, before being mixed with supercritical water.

Once this high-pressure system is depressurised and the waste exits the reactors, the majority of liquid flashes off as vapour. This vapour is cooled in a distillation column and the condensed liquids are separated on a boiling range to produce four hydrocarbon liquids and oils: naphtha, distillate gas oil, heavy gas oil and heavy wax residue, akin to bitumen. These products are then shipped to the petrochemical industry.

As with other feedstock techniques, there is no down-cycling as the polymer bonds can be formed anew, meaning the plastics can be infinitely recycled. With a conversion rate of more than 99%, nearly all the plastic turns into a useful product.

Mahon said: "The hydrocarbon element of the feedstock will be converted into new, stable hydrocarbon products for use in the manufacture of new plastics and other chemicals." Even the "fillers" used in some plastics - such as chalk, colourants and plasticisers - aren't a problem. "These drop into our heaviest hydrocarbon product, heavy wax residue, which is a bitumen-type binder for use in the construction industry."

The hot, excess gases generated during the process will be used to heat the water, increasing its energy efficiency, and the plant will be powered by 40% renewable energy. "We want to use as much renewable energy as possible and will be seeking, wherever practical, to aim for 100%," says Mahon.

Mura's Teesside plant, due for completion in 2022, aims to process 80,000 tonnes of previously unrecyclable plastic waste every year, as a blueprint for a global rollout, with sites planned in Germany and the US. By 2025, the company plans to provide one million tonnes of recycling capacity in operation or development globally.

"[Our] recycling of waste plastic into virgin-equivalent feedstocks provides the ingredients to create 100% recycled plastics with no limit to the number of times the same material can be recycled - decoupling plastic production from fossil resource and entering plastic into a circular economy," says Mahon.

Scientists such as Sharon George, senior lecturer in environmental science at Keele University, have welcomed Mura's development. "This overcomes the quality challenge by 'unmaking' the plastic polymer to give us the raw chemical building blocks to start again," says George. "This is true circular recycling."

Yet in the past 30 years, chemical recycling has shown serious limits. It is energy-intensive, has faced technical challenges and proved difficult to scale up to industrial levels.

In 2020, a report by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (Gaia), a group of organisations and individuals who promote social movements to reduce waste and pollution, concluded that chemical recycling is polluting, energy intensive and prone to technical failures. The report concluded that chemical recycling was not a viable solution to the plastic problem, especially at the pace and scale needed.

Additionally, if the end product of chemical recycling is an oil used for fuel then the process does not reduce the need for virgin plastic, and burning such fuels would release greenhouse gases just as ordinary fossil fuels do.

"Environmental NGOs are keeping a close eye on emerging recycling methods," says Paula Chin, sustainable materials specialist at the conservation organisation WWF. "These technologies are in their infancy and they are by no means the silver bullet solution to the plastic waste problem. We should focus on increasing resource efficiency as a way to minimise waste through greater reuse, refill and repair systems - not relying on recycling to be the saviour."

But Mura argues that their plant will fill a much-needed niche. "[Chemical] recycling is a new sector, but the scale at which it is developing, specifically for Mura, shows both the urgent need for new technology to tackle the rising problem of plastic waste and environmental leakage, and an opportunity to recycle a valuable ready-resource, which is currently going to waste," Mahon says.

Mura's process aims to complement existing mechanical processes and infrastructure, not compete with them, recycling materials that would otherwise go to landfill, incineration or into the environment. All the waste plastic they process will be made new plastics or other materials, none will be burnt for fuel.

Mura hopes its use of supercritical water for efficient heat transfer will allow them to scale-up to industrial levels, lowering energy use and costs. It could be a crucial factor for success where others have failed.

One of the main reasons chemical recycling has failed to take off so far has been financial collapse. In a 2017 report, Gaia noted multiple projects that had failed, including the Thermoselect facility in Germany which lost more than $500m (£350m) over five years, the UK's Interserve which lost £70m ($100m) on various chemical recycling projects, and many other companies that faced bankruptcy.

Financial difficulty is something that has held back not just chemical recycling but all kinds of plastic recycling. "The economics do not stack up. Collecting, sorting and recycling packaging is simply more expensive than producing virgin packaging," says Sara Wingstrand, New Plastics Economy Project Manager at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Wingstrand says the only path to "dedicated, ongoing and sufficient funding at scale" for recycling is through mandatory, fee-based Extended Producer Responsibility schemes. These would see all industries that introduce plastic contributing funding to collect and process their packaging after its use. "Without them, it is very unlikely recycling of packaging will ever scale to the extent required," says Wingstrand.

But Mahon believes a system like Mura's is another way to shift the balance sheets in favour of plastic recycling by producing an oil that can be sold at a profit. Mura has recently announced partnerships with the plastic manufacturers Dow and Igus GmbH, and the construction firm KBR.

"The interesting thing here is that Mura can find value in plastics that aren't usually economically viable to recycle mechanically," says Taylor Uekert, researcher at the Cambridge Creative Circular Plastics Centre, University of Cambridge.

Even with the ability to unmake all types of plastic so they can be reused again, it is unlikely to make all of the problems with plastic pollution go away. With so much ending up in landfill and the environment, plastic will continue doing what it was made to do - endure.

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The emissions from travel it took to report this story were 0kg CO2. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. -- Join one million Future fans by liking us on If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "The Essential List". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram. Find out more about how we calculated this figure here.

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The way we normally recycle plastics is a downward spiral of waste and degraded materials, but there is another option - turning plastic back into the oil it was made from.

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https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2021-09-02/countries-take-steps-toward-curbing-plastic-waste-in-oceans

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GENEVA (AP) - An intergovernmental conference has taken early steps toward drawing up an agreement to curb plastic pollution and marine litter around the world, which can choke off sea life, harm food safety and coastal tourism, and contribute to climate change.

A draft resolution presented by Peru and Rwanda, and backed by the European Union and several other countries, at the end of a two-day Geneva conference on Thursday amounts to a procedural step, but one that aims to build momentum for drawing up language as early as next year on a binding global deal.

The draft, which mostly aims to set up a committee to negotiate the language of a possible accord, is expected to be considered at a U.N. Environment Assembly meeting in February.

Supporters hope to unify fragmented efforts to curb such waste around the world. They hope to take into account the full lifecycle of plastics - from production to consumption to waste management, treatment and prevention.

Conference organizers say up to 12 million tons of plastic waste ends up in the oceans each year, and the flow is expected to triple by 2040. So far, nearly 5 billion tons of plastic produced since the early 1950s has ended up in either landfills or in the natural environment, they said.

Political Cartoons on World Leaders

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"The end goal, or the target, is to have zero waste," said Oliver Boachie, a special adviser to the government of Ghana, which co-organized the conference with Ecuador, Germany and Vietnam. More than 1,000 representatives from over 140 countries took part, along with advocacy groups.

Boachie told reporters there were no holdouts among countries, but that some unspecified countries were still assessing prospects for an accord and drawing up national policies on the matter. There were no "fixed positions," he said, expressing optimism that countries will eventually "come around."

An agreement could be built around legislation in more than 120 countries - including European Union member states and nearly three dozen African countries - that restricts or bans single-use plastics. But some countries are hesitant: For example, Japan has expressed opposition to a binding deal - preferring a voluntary solution - and the United States has resisted calls for a ban on single-use plastics.

"There was no illusion that this would be a piece of cake," Boachie said.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Countries Take Steps Toward Curbing Plastic Waste in Oceans

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GENEVA (AP) - An intergovernmental conference has taken early steps toward drawing up an agreement to curb plastic pollution and marine litter around the world, which can choke off sea life, harm food safety and coastal tourism, and contribute to climate change.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/20/carbon-emissions-to-soar-in-2021-by-second-highest-rate-in-history

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Carbon dioxide emissions are forecast to jump this year by the second biggest annual rise in history, as global economies pour stimulus cash into fossil fuels in the recovery from the Covid-19 recession.

The leap will be second only to the massive rebound 10 years ago after the financial crisis, and will put climate hopes out of reach unless governments act quickly, the International Energy Agency has warned.

Surging use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, for electricity is largely driving the emissions rise, especially across Asia but also in the US. Coal's rebound causes particular concern because it comes despite plunging prices for renewable energy, which is now cheaper than coal.

Speaking exclusively to the Guardian, Fatih Birol, the executive director of the IEA, and one of the world's leading authorities on energy and climate, said: "This is shocking and very disturbing. On the one hand, governments today are saying climate change is their priority. But on the other hand, we are seeing the second biggest emissions rise in history. It is really disappointing."

Emissions need to be cut by 45% this decade, if the world is to limit global heating to 1.5C (2.7F), scientists have warned. That means the 2020s must be the decade when the world changes course, before the level of carbon in the atmosphere rises too high to avoid dangerous levels of heating. But the scale of the current emissions rebound from the Covid-19 crisis means "our starting point is definitely not a good one", said Birol.

Birol compared the current surge of emissions to the financial crisis, when emissions rose by more than 6% in 2010 after countries tried to stimulate their economies through cheap fossil fuel energy. "It seems we are back on course to repeat the same mistakes," he warned. "I am more disappointed this time than in 2010."

Emissions plunged by a record 7% globally last year, owing to the lockdowns that followed the Covid-19 outbreak. But by the end of the year, they were already rebounding, and on track to exceed 2019 levels in some areas.

The IEA's projections for 2021 show emissions are likely to end this year still down slightly on 2019 levels, but on a rising path. Next year there could be even stronger rises as air travel returns, Birol added. Aviation would normally contribute more than 2% of global emissions, but has been almost absent this past year.

He called on governments to bring forward new climate policies urgently and seek a green recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. "Last year, I expressed my hope that the economic recovery from Covid-19 should be green and sustainable. But these numbers indicate that this recovery is currently anything but sustainable for our climate," he said.

The US president, Joe Biden, is convening a climate summit this week, with the leaders of 40 countries expected to attend, at which he will urge countries to come forward with strong commitments on cutting emissions this decade. Birol said this was an opportunity for countries to change course and put policies in place for a green recovery.

"If governments take clear and imminent action, with the amount of cheap clean energy technologies we have, we can transform this disappointment to some good outcomes," he said.

The IEA is considered the global gold standard for energy data, and its projections for 2021 are based on comprehensive soundings from around the world, including data from existing energy sources and new plants scheduled to come onstream. Energy data from the end of last year showed fossil fuels ahead of 2019 levels, and the surge has continued in the first part of this year.

In its Global Energy Review, published on Tuesday, the IEA found that global carbon emissions from energy use, which accounts for the great majority of greenhouse gas emissions, were on course to rise by 1.5bn tonnes in 2021, after having fallen last year. That represents a 5% rise to 33bn tonnes of carbon dioxide for the year. After more than half a decade of decline, global coal demand is forecast to grow by 4.5%, approaching its all-time peak in 2014.

China is planning to build scores of coal-fired power stations, despite pledging last year to reach net zero emissions by 2060. The country's five-year economic plan, set out by Beijing last month, contained little detail on curbing emissions before 2030. However, after a surprise visit to Shanghai by the US climate envoy, John Kerry, the US and China pledged cooperation on greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.

Coal use is also surging in the US, reversing annual declines since 2013. Birol said this was the result of high gas prices, which are driving a switch from gas to coal for electricity generation. Donald Trump as president scrapped regulations put in place by Barack Obama to curb coal use by power stations. Biden is considering further measures to hasten the move to renewable energy.

Nicholas Stern, a climate economist and the chair of the Grantham research institute on climate change at the London School of Economics, said the IEA findings "show that countries really must act with greater urgency to accelerate the transition to zero-carbon pathways if we are to have a chance of emissions being reduced in line with the Paris agreement. This is a crucial and historic opportunity to build back differently from the polluting ways of the past and in particular to move much more quickly away from coal. A strong and sustainable recovery will come from less coal not more."

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Carbon emissions to soar in 2021 by second highest rate in history

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Carbon dioxide emissions are forecast to jump this year by the second biggest annual rise in history, as global economies pour stimulus cash into fossil fuels in the recovery from the Covid-19 recession.

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https://theconversation.com/cities-and-climate-change-why-low-rise-buildings-are-the-future-not-skyscrapers-170673

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More than half of the world's 7.8 billion people live in cities and urban areas. By 2050, an additional 2.5 billion will be living there. As that figure continues to climb and ever more people flock to metropolitan areas in the hope of a better life, the big question is: how do we fit everyone in?

It is the job of city developers and urban planners to figure out how to build or adapt urban environments to accommodate the living and working needs of this rapidly expanding population. There is a popular belief that taller, more densely packed skyscrapers are the way forward, because they optimise the use of space and house more people per square metre and limit urban sprawl.

But given the global commitments to emissions-reduction targets and mitigating climate change, is this the most sustainable solution from a carbon-reduction perspective?

Our recent study, which examined whether building denser and taller is the right path to sustainability, busts this myth: we found that densely built, low-rise environments are more space and carbon efficient, while high-rise buildings have a drastically higher carbon impact.

Impact on the environment

We assessed the whole-life cycle of carbon emissions - meaning both operational and "embodied" carbon - of different buildings and urban environments. Operational carbon is generated while a building is in service. Embodied carbon is all the hidden, behind-the-scenes carbon produced during the extraction, production, transport and manufacture of raw materials used to construct a building, plus any produced during maintenance, refurbishment, demolition or replacement.

This aspect is often overlooked, especially in building design, where operational efficiency is always to the fore. The argument for cutting carbon at the design stage has been made by numerous researchers, and it is gaining traction with leading international organisations such as the World Green Building Council. But it's still something that is largely disregarded, mainly because embodied impact assessment is voluntary, and there is no legislation concerning its inclusion. But it must be advocated for if we are to reach our 2050 emissions targets.

At a global scale, the construction sector is responsible for a significant impact on the environment, as is clear from the graph below. The largest contribution comes from its consumption of energy and resources, which boils down to the design stage - the part of the process that no one is looking at.

Now that new buildings have to be more energy efficient and the energy grid is being decarbonised, this hidden embodied energy varies from 11%-33% for projects such as Passive House designs (a building standard that uses non-mechanical heating and cooling design techniques to lower energy use) to 74%-100% for near-zero energy builds (high performance buildings where the low amount of energy required comes mostly from renewable sources).

Given the focus on driving down the energy impact of day-to-day operations, the proportional share of embodied energy consumption has been driven up. So as energy demand becomes lower when the building is in use, the materials and activities required to build it in first place produce proportionally more impacts across the building's lifespan. For example, low and near-zero energy buildings are made by improving insulation and using more materials and additional technologies, which greatly increases the hidden energy impact and carbon cost.

Moving to a smaller scale, the embodied carbon share across construction materials shows that minerals have the largest proportion by far, at 45%. The graph below shows the breakdown of materials, where concrete dominates in terms of hidden carbon contribution. This is important because skyscrapers rely heavily on concrete as a structural material. So the type of materials we use, how much we use, and how we use them is crucial.

How we can fix it

We developed four different urban scenarios shown in the graph below, based on data from real buildings: high-density, high-rise (HDHR) which are tall and close together; low-density, high-rise (LDHR) which are tall but more spread out; high-density, low-rise (HDLR) which are low and close together; and low-density, low-rise (LDLR) which are low level and more spaced out.

To do this, we split the building stock into five main categories: non-domestic low-rise (NDLR); non-domestic high-rise (NDHR); domestic low-rise (DLR); domestic high-rise (DHR); and terraced/house. We gathered numerous data, including height, number of storeys, building footprint (the land area the building physically occupies), facade material and neighbouring constraints. This includes the number and area of blocks and green spaces within one square kilometre, average street width and average distance between buildings.

These parameters were all fed into a computer model to analyse the data looking at the following:

1. How whole life-cycle carbon changed based on the buildings and the number of people accommodated within an area of 1km².

2. How whole life-cycle carbon changed due to an increasing population based on four fixed population sizes - 20, 30, 40 and 50 thousand people - and the land use required to accommodate them under the four different urban scenarios.

Our findings show that high-density low-rise cities, such as Paris, are more environmentally friendly than high-density high-rise cities, such as New York. Looking at the fixed population scenarios, when moving from a high-density low-rise to a high-density high-rise urban environment, the average increase in whole life-cycle carbon emissions is 142%.

Equating this to the potential savings per person, based on the fixed population size, building high-density low-rise offers a saving of 365 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per person compared with high-density high-rise.

It's time for urban planners to start embedding this new understanding of the whole carbon life-cycle of a building, balancing the impact of urban density and height while accommodating expanding populations. To achieve urban sustainability the world will need more Parises and fewer Manhattans.

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Cities and climate change: why low-rise buildings are the future - not skyscrapers

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More than half of the world's 7.8 billion people live in cities and urban areas. By 2050, an additional 2.5 billion will be living there. As that figure continues to climb and ever more people flock to metropolitan areas in the hope of a better life, the big question is: how do we fit everyone in?

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https://theconversation.com/the-science-everyone-needs-to-know-about-climate-change-in-6-charts-170556

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With the United Nations' climate conference in Scotland turning a spotlight on climate change policies and the impact of global warming, it's useful to understand what the science shows.

I'm an atmospheric scientist who has worked on global climate science and assessments for most of my career. Here are six things you should know, in charts.

What's driving climate change

The primary focus of the negotiations is on carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is released when fossil fuels - coal, oil and natural gas - are burned, as well as by forest fires, land use changes and natural sources.

The Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s started an enormous increase in the burning of fossil fuels. It powered homes, industries and opened up the planet to travel. That same century, scientists identified carbon dioxide's potential to increase global temperatures, which at the time was considered a possible benefit to the planet. Systematic measurements started in the mid-1900s and have shown a steady increase in carbon dioxide, with the majority of it directly traceable to the combustion of fossil fuels.

Once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide tends to stay there for a very long time. A portion of the carbon dioxide released through human activities is taken up by plants, and some is absorbed directly into the ocean, but roughly half of all carbon dioxide emitted by human activities today stays in the atmosphere - and it likely will remain there for hundreds of years, influencing the climate globally.

During the first year of the pandemic in 2020, when fewer people were driving and some industries briefly stopped, carbon dioxide emissions from fuels fell by roughly 6%. But it didn't stop the rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide because the amount released into the atmosphere by human activities far exceeded what nature could absorb.

If civilization stopped its carbon dioxide-emitting activities today, it would still take many hundreds of years for the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to fall enough naturally to bring the planet's carbon cycle back into balance because of carbon dioxide's long life in the atmosphere.

How we know greenhouse gases can change the climate

Multiple lines of scientific evidence point to the increase in greenhouse emissions over the past century and a half as a driver of long-term climate change around the world. For example:

Long-term records from ice cores, tree rings and corals show that when carbon dioxide levels have been high, temperatures have also been high.

Our neighboring planets also offer evidence. Venus' atmosphere is thick with carbon dioxide, and it is the hottest planet in our solar system as a result, even though Mercury is closer to the sun.

Temperatures are rising on every continent

The rising temperatures are evident in records from every continent and over the oceans.

The temperatures aren't rising at the same rate everywhere, however. A variety of factors affect local temperatures, including land use that influences how much solar energy is absorbed or reflected, local heating sources like urban heat islands, and pollution.

The Arctic, for example, is warming about three times faster than the global average in part because as the planet warms, snow and ice melt makes the surface more likely to absorb, rather than reflect, the sun's radiation. Snow cover and sea ice recede even more rapidly as a result.

What climate change is doing to the planet

Earth's climate system is interconnected and complex, and even small temperature changes can have large impacts - for instance, with snow cover and sea levels.

Changes are already happening. Studies show that rising temperatures are already affecting precipitation, glaciers, weather patterns, tropical cyclone activity and severe storms. A number of studies show that the increases in frequency, severity and duration of heat waves, for example, affect ecosystems, human lives, commerce and agriculture.

Historical records of ocean water level have shown mostly consistent increases over the past 150 years as glacier ice melts and rising temperatures expand ocean water, with some local deviations due to sinking or rising land.

While extreme events are often due to complex sets of causes, some are exacerbated by climate change. Just as coastal flooding can be made worse by rising ocean levels, heat waves are more damaging with higher baseline temperatures.

Climate scientists work hard to estimate future changes as a result of increased carbon dioxide and other expected changes, such as world population. It's clear that temperatures will increase and precipitation will change. The exact magnitude of change depends on many interacting factors.

A few reasons for hope

On a hopeful note, scientific research is improving our understanding of climate and the complex Earth system, identifying the most vulnerable areas and guiding efforts to reduce the drivers of climate change. Work on renewable energy and alternative energy sources, as well as ways to capture carbon from industries or from the air, are producing more options for a better prepared society.

At the same time, people are learning about how they can reduce their own impact, with the growing understanding that a globally coordinated effort is required to have a significant impact. Electric vehicles, as well as solar and wind power, are growing at previously unthinkable rates. More people are showing a willingness to adopt new strategies to use energy more efficiently, consume more sustainably and choose renewable energy.

Scientists increasingly recognize that shifting away from fossil fuels has additional benefits, including improved air quality for human health and ecosystems.

This story is part of The Conversation's coverage of COP26, the Glasgow climate conference, by experts from around the world.
Amid a rising tide of climate news and stories, The Conversation is here to clear the air and make sure you get information you can trust. Read more of our U.S. and global coverage.

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The science everyone needs to know about climate change, in 6 charts

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With the United Nations' climate conference in Scotland turning a spotlight on climate change policies and the impact of global warming, it's useful to understand what the science shows. I'm an atmospheric scientist who has worked on global climate science and assessments for most of my career.

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https://www.nytimes.com/guides/year-of-living-better/how-to-reduce-your-carbon-footprint

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Climate change can be overwhelming. Here’s how to think about your effects on the environment and the steps you can take to lessen that impact.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/13/carbon-emissions-will-drop-just-40-by-2050-with-countries-current-pledges

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Current plans to cut global carbon emissions will fall 60% short of their 2050 net zero target, the International Energy Agency has said, as it urged leaders to use the upcoming Cop26 climate conference to send an "unmistakable signal" with concrete policy plans.

In its annual World Energy Outlook, redesigned this year as a "guidebook" for world leaders attending the summit in Glasgow, the IEA predicted that carbon emissions would decrease by just 40% by the middle of the century if countries stick to their climate pledges.

The organisation said the difference between current plans and the change necessary to reach the net zero target was "stark", requiring up to $4tn (£2.94tn) in investment over the next decade alone to bridge the divide.

The IEA's executive director Fatih Birol told the Guardian that major economies recovering from Covid-19 were already missing the opportunity to spur investment in clean energy.

"We are witnessing an unsustainable recovery from the pandemic," he said, pointing to sections of the report that show coal use growing strongly, contributing to the second-largest increase in CO ₂ emissions in history.

Birol called for developing economies in particular to make tougher commitments to reducing carbon emissions. But he said this could not happen without leaders of wealthier nations attending Cop26 taking steps to unlock the flow of money into emerging economies, by applying pressure on private investors.

Cop stands for conference of the parties under the UNFCCC. This year is the 26th iteration, postponed by a year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and it is being hosted by the UK in Glasgow.

For almost three decades, world governments have met nearly every year to forge a global response to the climate emergency. Under the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), every country on Earth is treaty-bound to "avoid dangerous climate change", and find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally in an equitable way.

The conference officially opened on 31 October, and more than 120 world leaders will gather in the first few days - although Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping were notable absentees. The leaders will then depart, leaving the complex negotiations to their representatives, mainly environment ministers or similarly senior officials. About 25,000 people are expected to attend the conference in total. The talks are scheduled to end at 6pm on Friday 12 November.

Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent

Thank you for your feedback.

"I'd like to see world leaders ... come together and give a political message to the world that we are determined to have a clean energy future.

"[They should say] we are determined, if you invest in old energy sources, dirty energy sources, you are risking to lose your money. If you invest in clean energy, you'll make handsome profits."

The IEA's outlook estimates that 70% of the $4tn investment required to reach net zero must flow into emerging markets and developing economies.

Birol said the most powerful world leaders could make it a "mandatory task" for organisations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to prioritise clean energy projects in those countries, acting as a catalyst for private capital.

The warning comes as the UK and Europe wrestle with sky-high gas prices that threaten to increase winter costs for consumers, shut down factories and disrupt under-pressure supply chains for food and retail.

The crisis has highlighted the danger of relying on fossil fuels subject to price volatility, but also the fact the region still relies heavily on gas, with renewables as yet unable to meet energy needs.

The IEA said the price crunch had given "advance warning" of the risk of moving too slowly towards renewables. Birol condemned as "inaccurate and misleading" recent claims that the energy price crisis had been partly caused by efforts to make the transition. "We will see that in a clean energy world, the shocks coming from doubling of oil and gas prices will be much less felt by consumers," he said.

As heavy industry in the UK pleaded with the government for more support to survive high energy costs, Birol acknowledged that "temporary measures" may be needed to save struggling industries, as long as this was not at the expense of the clean energy transition.

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Despite the IEA's warnings about inadequate progress towards net zero, the organisation - set up by major economies in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis - said much of the extra investment required to reach the target could be done relatively easily.

More than 40% of the required reduction in emissions could come from measures that "pay for themselves", the IEA said, such as improving efficiency, limiting gas leakage, or installing wind or solar in places where they are already cheap and efficient.

The IEA also pointed to the potential economic opportunities of net zero. It said existing pledges to reduce emissions would create 13m jobs but that stepping up the measures to meet the target would double that figure.

The required investment would create a market for wind turbines, solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, electrolysers and fuel cells of well over $1tn a year, comparable with the current oil market, it said.

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Carbon emissions 'will drop just 40% by 2050 with countries' current pledges'

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Current plans to cut global carbon emissions will fall 60% short of their 2050 net zero target, the International Energy Agency has said, as it urged leaders to use the upcoming Cop26 climate conference to send an "unmistakable signal" with concrete policy plans.

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Did you know that plastic takes 450 years to decompose? It takes even longer in landfills, about 1,000 years.

The worst part is that plastic is literally everywhere, as it is something we use and throw away on a daily basis. It's gotten to the point where plastics are clogging rivers and sewers and causing floods.

While the government has the responsibility to take action on this, here are some of the things that Greenpeace suggests we can do to help.
1. Carry around a reusable bottle
There are places where you can get water for free, so carrying a reusable bottle with you is a great idea. Regularly doing so will help cut down the use of plastic bottles.
2. Don't use plastic straws
These slim plastic products cause more harm than good. For instance, plastic straws are incredibly bad for ocean creatures: a turtle was documented with a piece of it stuck in its nose.

Use paper straws instead of plastic straws if you don't want to cut out using straws entirely.
3. Use reusable coffee cups & tumblers
Are you an avid coffee drinker? Carry around reusable coffee cups or tumblers with you instead of using plastic cups. Statistics indicate that 2.5 billion cups are thrown away each year, and only 1 in 400 cups end up recycled.

Read also: Seaweed, Indonesia's answer to the global plastic crisis
4. Start carrying shopping bags
Carrying extra bags around with you to help with your shopping can also do wonders for the environment.

Ever since Jakarta went on a plastic bag diet back in 2017, there has been a huge decline in the amount of plastic waste from shopping bags, and it has brought many benefits for the people living in the city.
5. Don't use disposable spoons and forks
Those one-time-use spoons and forks are contributing to the plastic waste problem, and it's a difficult one to tackle, considering how the cutlery in some places are mostly made of plastic.

Consider bringing your own stainless steel cutlery the next time you go out for a bite.
6. Avoid microbeads like the plague
Microbeads are beginning to be banned all over the world, although products containing them are still being sold in some parts of the world. They are mostly found in cosmetics and personal care products, like facial scrubs and exfoliating body washes, and they harm marine life.

Keep an eye out for products containing polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and nylon.
7. Buy refill packages of cleaning products
Instead of buying new plastic bottles of detergents and other cleaning products, you can save plastic by buying the refill packets instead. (ely/kes)

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7 ways to reduce plastic usage and make the planet greener

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Did you know that plastic takes 450 years to decompose? It takes even longer in landfills, about 1,000 years. The worst part is that plastic is literally everywhere, as it is something we use and throw away on a daily basis. It's gotten to the point where plastics are clogging rivers and sewers and causing floods.

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https://theconversation.com/amp/global-warming-below-1-7-c-is-not-plausible-reveals-our-study-of-the-social-drivers-of-decarbonisation-163104

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Christopher Hedemann, Eduardo Gresse, Jan Petzold

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Global warming below 1.7°C is ‘not plausible’, reveals our study of the social drivers of decarbonisation

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Our team of 40 researchers combined natural and social sciences to assess the plausible limits of future climate change.