Four seaside homes in Days Bay, New Zealand including this bach formerly owned by Katherine Mansfield, were heavily damaged by high tides in 2013.
EDITORIAL: Ignorance is bliss – right up until the seawater is soaking through your slippers.
For flood-prone and coastal property owners it’s time for the cold water: scientific consensus is the waters will rise, we can’t build seawalls around the whole country, and the chilly sting will be felt whether it’s delivered by insurers, government databases or warnings on property LIMs.
STACEY SQUIRES/STUFF
Flooding in Christchurch’s Flockton Basin in 2014.
How we deal with that will determine how much pain is felt.
Coastal erosion in Australia
A report on climate change planning, delivered to the Government by an independent group of specialists on Thursday, found data was lacking, adaptation funding was largely non-existent, and a nationwide risk assessment was desperately needed to prioritise work in high-risk areas.
Minister for Climate Change James Shaw predicts a risk assessment will be complete in two years; he believes action and adaptation will minimise the impact and cost to come.
That must progress hand-in-hand with public acceptance of the research and support for legislation; anything less is as pointless as trying to hold back the sea itself.
The only real question is whether change will be driven by the insurance industry or central government. Insurance giant IAG has already signalled a shift to risk-based assessing. More insurers are likely to follow.
Streets in Dunedin were flooded after sustained rainfall in February.
But it looks increasingly like central government is going to take the reins, as it should in an island nation with a strong coastal focus.
There’s a cautionary tale for Shaw’s plan: the scrap Kāpiti Coast District Council endured after slapping hazard warnings on the LIMs of about 1800 coastline properties in 2012. Cheesed-off locals undertook litigation to the High Court. As a result, the council removed the warnings while the science was reviewed.
But that victory was surely just a temporary one. Anyone now considering a coastal property should know what sea level rise is. If they already own one, they shouldn’t be surprised if buyers expect to know how it might affect them.
Areas of South Dunedin will be flooded, as seen in blue, in a sea-level rise scenario.
It’s time to accept these properties may come with some risk, and let government and other agencies get on with the job of preparing without worrying about court battles over lost capital gains.
It’s an inconvenient truth, but it appears that the value of flood-prone property will go down and many coastal towns will face a new threat.
That threat is nationwide: a 2015 Niwa report found nearly 70,000 buildings, 2000 kilometres of roads, and five airports prone to flooding. The area most at risk was Christchurch, followed by Hawke’s Bay.
In Dunedin, serious flooding in 2015 prompted then-environment commissioner Jan Wright to release a report noting there were more homes in the city less than 50 centimetres above the high-tide mark than in any other New Zealand centre.
Otago University produced unsettling maps showing a swath of the city flooded under a climate change scenario. In February a state of emergency was declared as the floods returned.
This is our chilling new reality. The tide is turning; it’s vital public opinion turns too, so we can all meet the challenge of climate change.
Trying to solve the problems that are affecting our world, and believing that they can make a difference.
May 24, 2018
Brian Stauffer
Environmentalists Turned Into Voters
Nathaniel Stinnett
Founder and executive director of the Environmental Voter Project
Nathaniel Stinnett rarely talks about the environment; climate change even less.
For the person who runs the Environmental Voter Project, that may sound surprising. To Mr. Stinnett, it’s pretty obvious, even if it’s difficult.
However, convincing people that environmentalism is important or that climate change is happening isn’t the point.
The point is getting those who consider themselves environmentalists to vote — nearly 16 million did not in the 2014 midterm elections.
Mr. Stinnett, 43, realized if he could get environmentalists to vote, then they would show up in polls of likely voters, and so would their priorities — the environment and climate change.
Politicians would have to pay attention to them to get elected, and these issues would come into the national conversation.
So, with a baby on the way, Mr. Stinnett made the difficult decision to leave a high-paying job at a Boston law firm and take on the cause.
Mr. Stinnett said he and his colleagues used social and peer pressure — much better “behavioral nudges” than talking about the environment. A sample mailer from the group: “Did you know that last time there was a City Council election, 87 percent of your block voted and you didn’t?”
And it’s working. Since starting in Massachusetts in 2015, a report by the group shows that ithas increased turnout in multiple elections by around 5 percent; in its first attempt in Florida (St. Petersburg’s mayoral race), the group added nearly 500 environmentalists to the voter rolls, and it plans to target nearly a million Florida voters in the coming midterm elections.
For the midterms this year, with an army of 1,500 volunteers across the country, they’ll be targeting 2.4 million environmentalists in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Colorado, Florida and Nevada.
It might seem depressing that so many environmentalists (let alone Americans) don’t vote. But Mr. Stinnett sees it as an “enormous opportunity.”
“We have a silent green majority,” he said. “We’ve already won the battle for hearts and minds, and we have this army that could change everything by doing one thing: voting.”
Becoming an Activist for Environmental Justice
Elizabeth Yeampierre
Executive director of Uprose
Elizabeth Yeampierre, a native New Yorker of Puerto Rican heritage, did not plan on being an environmental justice activist.
When she became the leader of Uprose, a Latino community-based organization in Brooklyn, she began by listening to what the community wanted: clean air; more green space; no new power plants in their neighborhood.
In the process of fighting for these things and others, Ms. Yeampierre found herself at the helm of what has become one of the country’s most successful community-based climate and environmental justice groups.
In the process, Ms. Yeampierre, who is descended from African and indigenous people, has helped change what climate activism looks like. She is making a space for young people of color, including at events like the People’s Climate March.
“There are all these stereotypes about minorities not caring about climate change,” she said, “but we live within our carbon footprint, and we do care.”
Cindy Weisner, the executive director of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, met Ms. Yeampierre as they were both helping to organize the People’s Climate March, and was immediately impressed by her ability to connect the needs of her community to the wider environmental and climate justice movement.
“For her to extend out beyond the needs of her community was a real sign showing me personally: this is what leadership means,” Ms. Weisner said.
Ms. Yeampierre, who is in her 50s, said her success was deeply rooted in protest culture and community organizing, not some radical innovation: she listens, she shares.
And she has perspective: “Our ancestors were in shackles, and we’re a testament to their sacrifice and their vision.
“Like them we need to be able to believe we can change things. There has never been a challenge to our survival like climate change,” but that doesn’t mean we give up, she said.
“I can’t live thinking that I didn’t do everything I could.”
The scope of the problem, like so many environmental issues, feels too big to do anything about to most people, including adults.
Enter Boyan Slat. When he was 16, he went scuba diving in Greece, where he said he saw more plastic than fish. The problem of marine plastic pollution became one he wanted to solve.
Within two years — at the same time that he became a legal adult in his native Netherlands — he had started a foundation, The Ocean Cleanup, and began developing a device to get plastic out of the ocean.
Now 23, he is getting ready to deploy his invention to the North Pacific Garbage Patch, where this summer it will begin gathering plastic, which will be taken by barge to land where it will be recycled. The hope is that half of the plastic there will be gone within five years.
Despite his efforts to solve a major environmental problem — he plans to collect the plastic in the four other accumulation zones in the South Pacific, North and South Atlantic and Indian Oceans — he considers himself a technologist, not an environmentalist. For Mr. Slat, marine plastic pollution was something he thought he could fix, through his passion for invention and technology.
“I hope that the Ocean Cleanup can be a blueprint of how you can solve problems,” he said. “Instead of fighting against the stuff you don’t agree with, building the future that you do agree with.”
Carbon Dioxide Emissions Become Fuels and Materials
Kendra Kuhl
Co-founder of Opus 12
Imagine a future where car engines run on particles gathered from the fuel they’ve already burned and where plastic doesn’t sit in landfills forever, but has another life — as plastic.
That’s the future dreamed up by Kendra Kuhl and her co-founders of Opus 12, a clean energy start-up that seeks to turn carbon dioxide emissions into new fuels and materials similar to plastic. And they are in the process of creating it.
Through a complicated process that is hard for a journalist with no background in chemical engineering to explain, carbon dioxide emissions from industrial processes are combined with water and a catalyst in a reactor. When (renewably powered) electricity is applied to the reactor, it can produce fuel or plastics.
Dr. Kuhl and her colleagues are working on creating a commercial-scale prototype, but they hope someday to be able to recycle tons of carbon dioxide emissions every day, preventing additional planet-warming emissions and finding a beneficial use for the gas we have released in such abundance.
Dr. Kuhl, 36, majored in chemistry as an undergraduate at Stanford University and later earned her doctorate in the subject. She was drawn to the field partly because of her talent for it and partly because she wanted to do something about climate change, inspired by her love of the outdoors that came from growing up in Montana.
Ilan Gur, the founding director of Cyclotron Road, a fellowship program that supports scientists trying to build technologies with global impact, selected Dr. Kuhl and her co-founder, Etosha Cave, for their first class of fellows because of their unique application of hard science to the world’s biggest challenge.
“I’m not one to use hyperbole lightly,” Mr. Gur said, “but what she’s working on could be part of a solution that potentially saves the planet.”
Ms. Kuhl is slightly more modest: “Naïvely when I was in high school, I thought, ‘We can make a new technology that can solve this whole problem.’ The deeper into it I’ve gotten the more I’ve realized that a new technology can help, but it takes all kinds of things together to make a difference.”
A Public Defender of Climate Sciences
Georgia Tech
Kim Cobb
Professor of atmospheric and climate sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology
When Kim Cobb, looks at a coral reef, she sees something others might miss: thousands of years of climate history.
She has been researching on Christmas Island in the Central Pacific for more than two decades, and has been able to reconstruct how El Niño has behaved for the last 7,000 years.
Because of her work, scientists can say with greater confidence that El Niño has become more intense as a result of human activity.
And she has seen its effects firsthand. When she visited her research site after the 2015-16 El Niño, she saw a skeleton of the reef More than 75 percent was dead.
“You can’t witness what I did at my research site of 20-plus years, watch it die and in the same year watch an administration get elected that is openly hostile to climate change and climate policy and not be changed by those events,” she said.
Since then, Dr. Cobb, 43, has become more than an award-winning climate scientist — she has become a public defender of climate scientists, their work and the planet.
On Twitter (@coralsncaves), at the March for Science Atlanta last year, and in all her public appearances, she presses for engagement — demanding that audiences live their values; challenging scientists to focus on solutions, not just on identifying problems; encouraging her students to reduce their carbon footprints.
Being a mother of four has also made her more radical. Climate change is even more urgent because of them, she said, and her experience “narrowly escaping” the professional damage so many mothers endure made her want to advance the careers of other women in climate science and science more generally. She has the opportunity to do that as an Advance professor of diversity, equity and inclusion at Georgia Tech.
For Dr. Cobb, climate change and diversity in science are connected. They both require engagement and solutions, and plenty of voices and ideas.
“The medicine of engagement keeps me going personally in what are deep structural long-term challenges that I know I can’t fix alone,” she said.
How We Picked Our Visionaries
People love lists.
We want to check out the best places to travel, catch up with the best inventions of the last 100 years, be in the know about the best-dressed people, the best books, the best schools. And on and on.
Of course, there is a risk to listmaking. Maybe your choices won’t hold up over the years. Maybe the best book of decades ago seems not so great today.
With the listmaking fervor and its risks in mind, we searched for people who would fit our criteria for visionaries. They had to be people who are forward-looking, working on exciting projects, helping others or taking a new direction. We wanted diversity in gender, race and ethnic background.
We assigned writers who are knowledgeable about the subjects we deemed most important. And we limited the list to 30.
Narrowing down the numbers was a huge challenge. And that’s a good problem to have. It means there are a lot of people out there who are following their visions.
Since its big entry a decade ago, China has led the global solar energy industry. A massive manufacturing sector that has driven down costs, coupled with supportive government policies, have helped it commission multiple large-scale projects and become the world’s largest producer of solar energy.
Meanwhile, neighbouring India has turned up at the party a little late—but is now racing ahead in terms of big projects.
Half of the world’s 10 largest solar parks under construction currently are in India, says a report by US-based think tank Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
Project. Size. Country
Bhadla Industrial Solar Park. 2,225 MW. India
Pavagada Solar Park. 2,000 MW. India
Minsheng Investment Wuzhong Yanchi PV 2,000 MW. China
Scatec Solar Benban V PV Plant. 1,800 MW. Egypt
Ananthapuramu – I Solar Park. 1,500 MW. India
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar. 1,013 MW. UAE
Kadapa Ultra Mega Solar Park. 1,000 MW. India
Quaid-e-Azam Solar Park. 1,000 MW. Pakistan
Rewa Solar Park. 750 MW. India
Enel Villanueva PV Plant. 754 MW. Mexico
China still has the largest ones. Its 1,547 megawatt (MW) Tengger Desert Solar Park, for instance, is the world’s biggest.
But those that India’s building are larger.
For instance, by early 2019, the work on a 2,225 MW facility at Bhadla, Rajasthan, is expected to be completed.
A third of this plant is already operational.
Also on the cards is a massive 5,000 MW solar park along the Gulf of Khambhat in Gujarat.
Even for rooftop solar installation, India has gone big. A 19 MW system installed on an 82-acre campus of the RSSB Educational and Environmental Society in Amritsar, Punjab, is currently the world’s largest.
“India has pioneered the concept of the ultra mega power plant (UMPP) in a single solar industrial park. This approach has been instrumental in driving economies of scale and procuring global capital flows…over the last two years with an immediate boon in the form of a halving of solar tariffs to a record low of Rs2.44 (per unit),” the IEEFA report said.
The country is targeting an installed capacity of 100,000 MW of solar power by 2022, up from around 21,000 MW now. It is also chasing an overall renewable energy capacity of 175,000 MW by that year.
This spike in activity has made solar energy cheaper than coal-based power and helped with capacity addition. China, meanwhile, is expected to achieve grid parity—when an alternate source of energy is as cheap or cheaper than power purchased from the grid—only by 2022, IEEFA said.
(Meanwhile Australia has a continuing love affair with fossil fuels putting our children and future generations at risk of catastrophic climate change)
The Narendra Modi government has also been working to establish India as a clean energy leader. In March this year, for instance, the country hosted the launch of the International Solar Alliance (ISA), a non-profit group of 121 countries promoting solar energy. Industry experts saw the establishment of the ISA headquarters in India as a sign that India is claiming pole position in climate leadership.
A newspaper poster outside Tyalgum’s General Store shows the political climate in Australia.
Ian Knighton/CNET
This is part of “Fight The Power,” a series about the people, organizations and countries transforming the way we think about energy for the better.
For the past few months, the CNET team has been working on a series of stories about green energy and the role technology and innovation play in pushing renewable energy to the forefront.
We called the series “Fight the Power” because there was a clear common thread. Almost everyone we interviewed in green energy projects cited a lack of government support.
It was a constant theme: Change was occurring, but it was occurring in spite of Australia’s federal government.
The support wasn’t there.
These people were literally fighting the power.
With Fight the Power, we wanted to shine a spotlight on those trying to rescue the environment from the people who govern it.
In Australia, we have a long, complicated history with green energy and fossil fuels.
And right now, we’re in the midst of an energy crisis.
With a prime minister who reportedly pressured AGL, one Australia’s largest energy providers, to keep its coal-fired power plant running for an extra five years instead of investing in green energy alternatives.
To date, Australia is the only developed country to establish, and subsequently repeal, its own carbon tax.
Roger Jones, a research fellow at the Victoria Institute of Strategic Economic Studies, called it a “perfect storm of stupidity.”
It was a decision that tells you everything you need to know about the discourse surrounding environmental issues in Australia.
We’re in a strange place.
But this isn’t just an Australian problem.
Across the Pacific Ocean, the US is wrestling with similar issues.
The Trump administration isn’t ramping up legislation to help protect the environment, legislation is being rolled back.
In March, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency removed the term “climate change” from strategic plans. The phrase has also been removed from multiple agency websites. The Department of Energy’s Clean Energy Investment Center is now called the Energy Investor Center.
We’re not moving forward, we’re moving backward.
In 2018, innovation, technology and sheer force of will are driving positive change on environmental issues.
In Australia, remote towns are working toward going 100 percent renewable.
In Singapore, companies are finding new ways to take advantage of natural resources. Many entire countries, like Iceland, subsist purely on green energy.
People are helping themselves. That’s worth celebrating — you could argue that private enterprise should carry that weight — but we shouldn’t have to swim against the tide either.
It’s the job of those in power to help facilitate the growth of long-term, sustainable projects that can have a positive impact not just on the economy, but the planet as a whole.
But more often than not it feels like we have to fight the power, and that’s hardly ideal.
Just over a year after bringing a lump of coal to Parliament, Scott Morrison delivered his first federal budget for Australia. His budget is expected to cut investment in climate change from from AU$3 billion in this year to AU$1.6 billion by 2018-19.
Based on current data, Australia is expected to miss the targets set out by the Paris climate accord — a UN agreement designed to help curb global greenhouse emissions — by 26 percent to 28 percent. In July 2017, Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement completely to “save jobs.”
We’re heading in the wrong direction.
We’re ignoring the possibilities. A future powered entirely by renewable energy is not only within reach, it’s already possible. Countries like Iceland, Costa Rica, Albania, Ethiopia, Paraguay, Zambia and Norway are already at 99 percent or 100 percent.
It’s difficult, and it requires a complete rethinking of infrastructure, but it can be done.
And in all likelihood it will be done. Eventually, you’d hope. Surely. 20 years from now? 50 years? But if we get there, if we finally reach that goal, we won’t have our elected officials to thank.
The ones who fight the power will save us in the end.
Rebooting the Reef: CNET dives deep into how tech can help save Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
CNET Magazine: Check out a sample of the stories in CNET’s newsstand edition.
With ambitious renewable energy targets, India on track for Paris
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron during the inauguration of a solar power plant in Uttar Pradesh state, India, on March 12, 2018. Photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
In 2014, well before the Paris Agreement, India’s newly elected central government dramatically raised its Renewable Energy (RE) targets to quadruple RE capacity by 2022, with almost all the gains to come from solar and wind. India aims to simultaneously green its energy supply, meet rising demand and tap into global capital for emerging technology.
Where it stands: A midway status update on the targets and achievements indicates India is behind schedule. Lack of finance is often cited as a bottleneck, but there are other structural challenges India will have to confront in scaling up its RE.
The first major challenge is that while the targets are set top-down, the real action happens at the state level, and the state utilities that buy RE are taking losses, which represents an enormous counter-party risk for RE developers.
The second challenge is the inherently intermittent nature of RE, whose nominal costs are relatively inexpensive. But when system-level costs (e.g., those of transmission and other generators that have to balance the grid) are considered, RE costs increase. Today, these hidden or system-level costs are more than 50% higher than figures typically circulated in the press. This is before accounting for the eventual need to add storage technologies — since RE’s output is not just variable but often doesn’t coincide with grid demand, which peaks in the evening — and the stress higher RE will place on the rest of the coal-heavy system.
With better grid management, higher transmission (important, as most RE is concentrated in a handful of states) and demand shifting to match supply, RE’s system-level costs should come down.
The bottom line: India may take longer to reach its targets, and expectations should be realistic. However, growth still remains impressive, and even with a delay, India is on track to meeting its Paris commitments.
Dr. Rahul Tongia is a Fellow with Brookings India, where he leads the energy and sustainability group.
84 per cent of respondents said the overall state of the Great Barrier reef was declining.
A NEW report has found Australians’ concern about the state of the country’s environment is rising, with protecting the Great Barrier Reef the top concern.
The Backyard Barometer shows we’re concerned about our forests, beaches, oceans and wildlife, and overwhelmingly support more action to protect natural habitats.
“It has been encouraging to see such a strong sense of ownership among Australians when it comes to their ‘big backyard’ with issues such as the Great Barrier Reef, climate change, plastic pollution and tree clearing already front of mind,” Dermot O’Gorman, ceo of WWF Australia said.
Great Barrier Reef top environmental issue
Protecting the Great Barrier Reef is the top issue for Australians, with 94 per cent of respondents saying its protection is “important”.
However, 84 per cent said the overall state of the Reef was “declining” or “getting worse” compared to 10 years ago. Almost half of respondents (44 per cent) said the Reef was in “terminal decline”, with cloral bleaching and climate change seen as the top two threats.
Why our Great Barrier Reef is our best asset.
Wildlife, trees prominent
Protecting Australia’s endangered animals, forests and trees ranked second, with 93 per cent saying their protection is important.
According to the report, Australian’s most want to see koalas protected, followed by whales and bilbies.
The report confirmed spending time in the “great outdoors” was part of the Australian way of life. In the past two years, three out of four Australians have visited a national part or nature reserve.
But 82 per cent said they were concerned the younger generation would grow up with less access to nature and wildlife.
89 per cent of respondents agreed there should be investment in restoring the environment, and 81 per cent said we should grow more trees than we cut down.
Aussies taking action
The report found recycling and composting has increased, with 86 per cent of respondents saying they regularly recycle or compost.
“Australians aren’t just thinking about the environment, they are taking matters into their own hands by recycling and composting,” Mr O’Gorman said.
“Looking ahead, switching to renewable energy and installing solar are the top two environmental actions Australians are likely to take in the near future.”
However one Queensland council has banned glass from recycling bins in a bid to cut contamination rates.
In the global fight against climate change, one tool is proving increasingly popular: litigation.
From California to the Philippines, activists, governments and concerned citizens are suing the biggest polluters and national governments over the effects of climate change at a break-neck pace.
“The courts are our last, best hope at this moment of irreversible harm to our planet and life on it,” said Julia Olson, an attorney for Our Children’s Trust, a legal challenge center in the U.S. that is involved in climate change litigation across 13 countries, including the U.S., Pakistan and Uganda.
The wave of activity is about channeling the fervor of a social movement to drive change via the legal system. The arguments vary based on both culture and the law. In the U.S., home to more cases than anywhere else in the world, many recent suits involve plaintiffs seeking to protect climate-change rules passed under former President Barack Obama. In Europe, it’s largely governments being hammered over pollution-reduction plans that fall short of EU targets.
“The political branches of government have had decades to stop destroying our climate system; now only court-ordered mandates will stop the destruction our governments are perpetuating, and increasingly supporting,” said Olson, whose primary dispute is on behalf of a group of American teenagers suing the federal government to end U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Both the Obama and Trump administrations have sought to end the case and been rebuffed.
California is quickly becoming ground zero for climate cases in the U.S., where eight cities and counties are suing oil companies to recover the cost of infrastructure needed to protect against rising sea levels. Cases by San Francisco and Oakland face a motion to dismiss the lawsuit today in a California federal court, where Chevron Corp., BP Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhilips and Royal Dutch Shell Plc will argue that remedies and penalties for climate change are a matter for lawmakers, not a single judge.
The topic came up twice during BP’s annual meeting on Monday. Chief Executive Officer Bob Dudley declined to disclose certain climate targets, or even answer some questions from activist investors, and cited the risk of legal action.
“You want to get us to make statements here in front of you that you can document that will lead to a class action,” Dudley said in response to one question from the Union of Concerned Scientists about pending U.S. litigation against energy companies. Such legal actions are “a business model in the United States,” he said.
The climate lawsuits aren’t all about cleaning up the environment. Last year, 27 percent of U.S. climate-related cases—largely those brought by companies—opposed protections, according to the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, which keeps a database on climate-change cases. Among those: a dispute filed by ExxonMobil against the states of Massachusetts and New York that called for the end of an investigation into Exxon’s knowledge and disclosure of climate change-related risks. The case was thrown out in March by a federal judge in New York.
City of New York v. BP
United States
New York City
The case: In January, New York City sued five of the world’s biggest oil companies, arguing the companies are financially liable for damage caused by climate change to the city and its population. New York followed eight California cities and counties who filed similar cases in the previous year.
Latest: The oil companies filed a motion to dismiss the suit, arguing that the case should be heard under federal law and that federal law doesn’t have the authority to rule on issues that focus on global economy and national security. A dismissal hearing will take place in June.
More cases are using human rights arguments, in which plaintiffs make the case that climate change has threatened or taken away populations’ basic rights to shelter, health, food, water and even life. From Ugandan children who sued their government for failing to protect them from climate change to hundreds of elderly Swiss women who sued the country for failure to shield them from climate change’s effects, human rights cases are a small but growing approach to this type of litigation.
Human rights suits
The Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines
Philippines
The case: While not technically a legal fight, The Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines’ inquiry is probing whether 47 major fossil fuel companies can be held culpable for accelerating climate change and how climate change impacts have affected basic human rights of Filipinos.
Latest: In March, scientists and lawyers gave evidence in the first public hearings. Several more hearings in Europe and the U.S. are planned in the months ahead.
Some cases may not focus on climate change itself but center on factors that lead to climate change, like air pollution. These lawsuits often involve an NGO or an individual taking a city or district to court to claim that the air quality laws are being breached, forcing authorities to take action.
The strategy has paid off particularly well in the U.K. and Germany, where suits have forced significant government policy changes. Germany is leading the way. Currently 28 German cities are subject to cases over illegal levels of pollution. On May 17, The European Commission said it was taking six countries—Germany, France, U.K., Italy, Hungary and Romania—to the European Court of Justice over their failure to tackle air pollution.
Suits addressing causes of climate change
DUH v Land Baden-Württemberg
Germany
The case: The Deutsche Umwelthilfe, or DUH, an environmental group, sued municipalities across Germany, pressuring them to enforce EU air pollution limits they’ve exceeded for years. Regional courts in Stuttgart and Dusseldorf ruled in favor of banning diesel cars in 2017 as the best and quickest way to cut emissions in busy city centers.
Latest: In February, Germany’s top administrative court upheld the original decisions, paving the way for bans on diesel cars. The landmark ruling could speed up the process of removing the worst-polluting cars from the country’s roads.
Governments fighting climate change litigation reflect a power struggle. Courts could force adjustments to the political platforms that got some of these officials elected. In the U.S., the Trump administration has said a victory for those cities demanding damages would undermine the government’s “strong economic and national security interests in promoting the development of fossil fuels,” while possibly threatening its position on the Paris climate accord.
That’s the official argument to dismiss the cases. But for attorneys committed to defending the environment in court, that’s the very point.
“It’s a legitimate method of seeking to not only draw attention to the issue of climate change but really hold governments to account because it’s already causing harm to people around the world,” said Sophie Marjanac, a lawyer at the activist law firm ClientEarth, which is behind several European pollution suits. These cases “hold elected officials to account, especially when those officials are breaching fundamental human rights.”
We, the Wangan and Jagalingou people, are the TRADITIONAL OWNERS of the land in Queensland’s Galilee Basin. Coal company Adani wants to use our ancestral lands for their Carmichael coal mine.
We do hereby firmly REJECT a Land Use Agreement with Adani for the Carmichael mine on our traditional lands.
We DO NOT consent to the Carmichael mine on our ancestral lands.
We DO NOT accept Adani’s “offers” to sign away our land and our rights and interests in it. We will not take their “shut up” money.
We will PROTECT and DEFEND our Country and our connection to it.
We call on Adani to IMMEDIATELY WITHDRAW from this damaging project on our land.
We are gravely concerned about the push by Adani and the Queensland Government to open up the Carmichael Mine on our traditional lands. Our traditional lands are an interconnected and living whole; a vital cultural landscape. It is central to us as a People, and to the maintenance of our identity, laws and consequent rights.
If the Carmichael mine were to proceed it would tear thejj heart out of the land. The scale of this mine means it would have devastating impacts on our native title, ancestral lands and waters, our totemic plants and animals, and our environmental and cultural heritage. It would pollute and drain billions of litres of groundwater, and obliterate important springs systems. It would potentially wipe out threatened and endangered species. It would literally leave a huge black hole, monumental in proportions, where there were once our homelands. These effects are irreversible. Our land will be “disappeared”.
Nor would the direct impacts be limited to our lands – they would have cascading effects on the neighbouring lands and waters of other Traditional Owners and other landholders in the region. And the mine would cause damage to climate, unleashing a mass of carbon into the atmosphere and propelling dangerous global warming.
We could not in all conscience consent to such wholesale destruction. Nor could we allow such a project to contribute to the dire unfolding effects of climate change that pose such great risks to all peoples.
We know that many other people who care deeply about conserving natural places, vital water resources, the great fauna and flora of central Queensland, and a health planet share our concerns about this mine.
On the White House lawn in June 2017, President Donald Trump announced that “we’re getting out,” referring to his plan to pull the U.S. out of the historic Paris climate agreement — a deal he considers bad for the American economy.
But new research suggests that Trump is sorely mistaken.
The climate agreement, which is intended to limit the severity of climate change, will likely be a substantial benefit to most of the world’s economies, argue researchers in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Not placing limits on climate-warming carbon emissions, however, would be costly for nearly everyone.
The plan — which was even signed by North Korea — hopes to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, back in the 1800s when the atmosphere had substantially less carbon pollution.
Until now, there’s been an inadequate understanding of how nations might fare economically from collectively meeting these climate goals.
To figure that out, researchers combed through both temperature and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data from 165 countries between 1960 and 2010, finding that 90 percent of the global population will likely benefit from meeting the ambitious Paris carbon target of limiting warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).
Higher than average temperatures, they found, can drain economic productivity.
Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning are now the highest they’ve been in hundreds of thousands of years.
Image: nasa/Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record
“As temperature’s warm, output level falls,” Marshall Burke, lead author of the study, said in call with reporters.
It’s particularly important that scientists get some sense of how economies will respond in a warming world, in part, because the Earth’s climate is already changing.
The planet may soon breach the 1-degree Celsius benchmark above pre-industrial levels, although some scientists think it already has.
It’s unknown exactly how climate change will affect each and every country in the coming decades, said Burke, but he emphasized that “the benefits of meeting the stringent targets vastly outweigh the costs.”
And it appears humanity has underestimated how large the magnitude of these costs — which include pummeling storms, declines in crop yields, and the spread of disease — truly is.
“As we further grasp the consequences of disrupting the fundamental environment on which modern civilization depends, projections of these costs continue to climb,” Sarah Green, an environmental chemist at Michigan Technical University who was not involved in the study, said over email.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that in 2017 the U.S. “experienced a historic year of weather and climate disasters,” with 16 separate billion-dollar disasters.
The world’s three largest economies — the U.S., Japan, and China — are all expected to benefit from meeting the 1.5 Celsius carbon target, although the researchers found the poorest nations in the world, which are generally also the hottest, serve to benefit the most.
Overall, this means avoiding the nearly unfathomable losses of income associated with a warming climate. For example, if the world were to warm to between 2.5 and 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the researchers project that global economic output would fall between 15 and 25 percent, which amounts to tens of trillions of dollars.
Some of this loss is caused by the direct impact of heat on our bodies.
The dead bodies of heatwave victims at the Edhi Foundation morgue in Karachi, Pakistan on May 22, 2018.
Image: IMRAN ALI/AFP/Getty Images
“Humans function really well when the temperature is mild,” said Marshall. He notes that heat makes us less productive, affecting labor output, cognitive abilities, and the fact that “people are more violent went you crank up the temperature.”
Transforming massive, complicated economies to meet the 1.5 or 2 degree Celsius targets certainly won’t be a simple, nor cheap, task.
Tearing down fossil fuel burning-power plants while constructing renewable energy infrastructure has a massive price tag, perhaps costing nations a considerable chunk the all the money they bring in each year, known more formally as Gross Domestic product, or GDP. (U.S. GDP in 2017 was over $19 trillion.)
If a country wanted to cut emissions in an extreme way, it would need to spend the equivalent of a few percentage points of GDP, David Victor, a professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego who had no involvement in the study, said in an interview.
“That’s a lot of money,” said Victor. “That’s the amount of money you spend on a war.”
But, he notes, politicians nearly always emphasize the costs of energy transformation, often ignoring the economic benefits illustrated in this study.
Simply put, it costs money to make money.
And even if nations don’t meet the 1.5 Celsius target, these benefits can still be momentous.
“It’s not an all or nothing game,” Kate Larsen, the former White House Council on Environmental Quality Deputy Director for Energy and Climate Change under the Obama Administration, said in an interview.
“There’s a spectrum of impacts that go from pretty bad to only minor,” she said. “There will still be impacts if we meet the Paris goals, but we would have avoided some of the most damaging consequences.”
But not meeting the Paris goals, either the more stringent 1.5 degree or 2 degree Celsius targets, will likely hit nations in the place they care about most: their wallets.
“Temperature affects the fundamental building blocks of economies,” said Marshall.
Renato “Ka Rene” Bornilla, the president of Block 456 Homeowners Association in Barangay Nangka, Marikina, and a labor union organizer of the Workers for People’s Liberation, was restless on the night of May 10, his eyes red and sad.
He was obviously in pain, but insisted that we take his statement as a witness for the human rights and climate change investigation by the Commission on Human Rights.
In his native tongue, he recalled what he and his family went through during and after Tropical Storm “Ondoy” in 2009. “When I got home, it was as if heaven and earth fell upon me. Every little thing I saved up for was destroyed!”
Then, reflecting on the role that fossil-fuel and carbon-producing companies have in the climate change that, according to scientists, is bringing about more extreme storms like Ondoy, Bornilla said: “There are other sources of energy, but all these companies want is profit. If the environment is destroyed, it isn’t they who are affected since they’re safe inside their rich, gated subdivisions. The vulnerable ones are us, the poor.”
Bornilla also asked his wife, neighbors and friends to recount their experiences when Ondoy brought extreme rainfall and inundated their entire village in a matter of hours.
The following night, Bornilla passed away from a respiratory disease. But his words have become part of an important, novel investigation that can change not only the Philippines, but the world.
The Philippine Commission on Human Rights is investigating the responsibility of carbon-producing companies in inflicting possible harm on people’s basic human rights with their business practices. This is the world’s first national human rights investigation of its kind, triggered in 2015 by a petition from 14 environmental, human rights, consumers’ welfare and other people’s organizations, along with 18 Filipino farmers, fisherfolk, human rights advocates, typhoon survivors, artists and concerned citizens.
The rights of Filipino citizens to life, food, shelter, clean water and sanitation, livelihood, self-determination and development are heavily affected by climate change, especially in poor and vulnerable communities. In the first public hearing last March, witnesses from the transport sector and the farming, fishing and indigenous communities testified how their lives have been changed by global warming and environmental destruction, including losing loved ones, friends and neighbors, family and cultural traditions, education and opportunities for a better life.
Their testimonies showed that climate change is a concern not just of governments, scientists, businesses and advocates, but also, and more urgently, of those in the economic front lines—farmers, fishermen and common folk.
The unabated extraction and sale of coal, oil and gas releases massive carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere, altering nature’s processes. Seas rise as the planet’s temperature rises, leading to hotter days and nights, more destructive typhoons and other weather patterns, and scarcer crops and fish. The future becomes uncertain for many.
CHR is holding its second public hearing on the issue this week. The petitioners will present evidence and information to show that certain identified companies continue to engage in harmful business practices, and may have also actively undermined climate change science and action by obscuring the truth about it.
Despite their capacity and resources to prevent, remedy and address the harm being wrought on the environment, these corporations have failed to do what is right and just. In demanding that these corporations and their home countries reform their practices and cut their carbon emissions, the petitioners are asking that they align their business models with climate change science and the global commitment to phase out fossil fuels.
This investigation is already changing the dynamics in the Philippines. It is educating the public on climate change and its relation to basic human rights. It is moving people to action, while also calling fossil-fuel companies to account. The CHR’s probe may yet change the Philippines and the world.
The statements of petitioners’ witnesses and resource persons this week are dedicated to Ka Rene Bornilla. His voice will not fade away.
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Lawyer Zelda dT Soriano is the legal and political advisor of Greenpeace Southeast Asia.
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