Countries hit by ecological damage and conflict are trapped in a vicious cycle where one problem reinforces the other. And climate change is expected to make things worse.

Ecological threats will lead to widespread conflict and mass migration unless significant efforts are made to limit the damage, a global think-tank report published on Thursday found.   

It comes ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, where world leaders are hoping to agree on concrete measures to tackle climate change.  

For its second Ecological Threat Report, the Institute for Economics and Peace  (IEP) assessed 178 independent states and territories to find those most prone to ecological-threat-related conflict.  

It looked at food risk, water risk, rapid population growth, temperature anomalies and natural disasters, and combined this data with national measures of socioeconomic resilience — such as well-functioning governments, strong business environments and acceptance of other people's rights among others — to produce the 2021 Ecological Threat Report.  

"We're trying to better understand how strong the relationship is between ecological damage and conflict. And it has turned out to be much stronger than what we were expecting," Founder & Executive Chairman Steve Killelea told DW. "Ecological damage and conflict are intimately connected, and I mean intimately connected."

Their research found that regions menaced by conflict and ecological damage — such as natural disasters, resource scarcity and temperature anomalies — fall into a sort of feedback loop, where each issue reinforces the other.  

"Resources get degraded, you fight over them, conflict then weakens all the social infrastructure and systems, and it also destroys the resources further, which now creates more conflict," Killelea said. "You've then also got the different ethnic or religious groups and old animosities from past conflicts, so it's easy to fall back in along those lines again."

One region that is falling into this loop is the Sahel — at the southern frontier of the Sahara Desert — where systemic problems, such as civil unrest, weak institutions, corruption, high population growth and lack of adequate food and water, are feeding into each other.  

The IEP research found that these issues increased the likelihood of conflict, and facilitated the rise of many Islamist insurgencies in the region. 

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/conflict-being-driven-by-ecological-damage-report-finds/a-59426714

IN REGARD TO ECO-ANGST, ecologists should demand the end of turning our forests into pulp... Newspapers are part of the pulp fiction, a battle-space between information and disinformation... This can be observed in the bias between the Murdoch media and some other media such as The Sydney Morning Herald, while the ABC tries to hold on to the median-strip, but leans to the right. The Murdoch media does not think the ABC is leaning right far enough. 

This cartoon today or yesterday or whenever:

ABC

Depending on whether a politician is deemed by the ABC and other leftist outlets to be naughty or nice, that politician’s religious views will be presented as frightening, laudable or of no particular consequence.

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Gus:

Meanwhile in regard to SAVING trees, we found this amusing article about this site (now yourdemocracy.net), when Margo Kingston decided to go "news-paperless" in 2005. The article was posted by Tim Blair on 09/23/2005 at 10:24 AM and republished in 2017:

Jack Smit, called upon last night to launch Margo Kingston’s TypePad blog, foresees a modest level of success:

Margo’s move to Webdiary was in itself already something to take note of, and her separation and independence of Fairfax is something which I imagine will still be discussed in journalism courses in 50 years time, if we still run them in Australia.

Let’s fast forward to that time, 50 years from now.

A child asks: “Dad, what is a newspaper?” Dad obligingly answers, and says: “Well, you remember the trees that were chopped up for paper long ago as you learnt at school? When that still happened, many of the beautiful Australian trees were chopped up to make real cheap paper, and every day all the news that now comes in on your school palm top and on mummy’s laptop, was printed on fat bundles of that cheap paper. That’s what newspapers were until the government stopped doing that and gave people big fines for wasting paper.”

The child then asks: “When did that paper wasting stop?” And Dad goes: “Well, there was this woman journalist, and she started the first newspaper without using paper in Australia. And soon every person who had a computer got the summary of the articles on their PC every morning in their newsreader program, while the sales of printed newspapers kept going down and down until all the big fat companies around the world went broke. Remember the little photo you can click on to read all the news on your school palmtop? That’s the picture of the woman who started all this. She was called Margo Kingston.”

UPDATE. Margo receives some helpful promotion from Stephen Bennetts in The Australian:

In Australia, engaging with civil society may involve membership of a local parent-teacher association, the Australian Conservation Foundation, a refugee rights group or participating in Margo Kingston’s web diary, Your Democracy.

Unhelpfully, Margo abandoned Your Democracy not long after writing this:

I have employed my brother Hamish for a year to get the website going. I hope that at the end of that year, our site will be such that people will want to “subscribe” to allow it to continue and grow, although the site will remain open to all.

I want the site to develop through a transparent process with maximum reader involvement. So if you’re on our mailing list be prepared to be asked lots of questions, and there’ll be a section on the site for reader’s ideas, complaints and queries. I take full responsibility for the site’s content, and will make the final decision, after advice from the yourdemocracy board, when there’s a major disagreement.

Your Democracy—which Margo hoped would become an Australian version of MoveOn.org—now staggers along in the hands of a few unreadable dead-enders. Hamish hasn’t posted anything since July [2005]; Margo gave up in May [2005].

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Gus: emphasis re the "few unreadable dead-enders" above added...

Of course this was written back in 2005, about 16 years ago... As we're not breaking the sound barrier on readership, we have to delude ourselves with the concept of "Q ratings"... — that is to say we are read by intelligent people... Koff koff... At present this site is going through a slow metamorphose due to new parameters of security on the internet, because the ether is full of nasty people... Thus you might find that from page 35 onwards, the images have disappeared. We're working on restoring them but it's one at a time, and since we started, there are more than 15,000 of them! As well, a yourdemocracy app for your smartphone could be in development.

According to our wonky statistic, this site has be read by over 150,000 unique readers, the cartoons have thus been seen by more than 1.5 million people. Amish has posted a lot of things since the snarky article above was written... And we're getting old. I mean there is only one old kook left manning the place... But the mind is sharp despite the osteoporosis...

AND WE STILL DEMAND, AS WE ALL SHOULD:

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Average figures for the country, regional, or class emissions of greenhouse gases can be deceiving because some people and groups have much larger carbon footprints than others. In this policy brief, we focus on the super-rich, the billionaires whose fortunes have increased by over US$1 trillion during the COVID-19 pandemic. We ask what effect these super-emitters have on the everyday behavior of average citizens and address emissions as a commons-management issue. Our research indicates that billionaires have carbon footprints that can be thousands of times higher than those of average citizens, even in the richest countries.

Research shows that wealthy countries and the wealthy classes in each country produce far more than their share of greenhouse-gas emissions (e.g., Hurth and Wells 2007; Kenner 2019). Several recent studies have focused on carbon inequalitycomparing different countries, and the wealthiest classes in each one (e.g., Jorgenson et al. 2016; Ummel 2014). For instance, Chancel and Piketty (2015) estimate that on a global basis each of the richest 1% is emitting close to 100 times more than the members of the poorest 10%.

But what about super-wealthy individuals, the 2,095 billionaires on the Forbes list, who symbolize material wealth, the power and influence it brings, and ideal lifestyles of luxury and privilege? They stand out among the 300,000 or so “ultra high net worth individuals” who each hold more than US$30 million in assets (Wealth-X 2018), owning together US$31.5 trillion in assets, an estimated 11% of the world’s total monetary wealth. In the United States, the richest three Americans have as much wealth as the poorer half of the country’s population and, in 2017, 44 people inherited fortunes of more than US$1 billion (Otto et al. 2019). East Asia has recently seen the fastest growth in the ultra-rich category.

As in the United States in the late nineteenth century, we are now entering a time of increased scrutiny of the legitimacy of wealth, and there have been calls for eliminating the entire class of billionaires (Manjoo 2019). An article on HuffPostasks, “Should billionaires even exist?” (Peck 2019) and argues that it is inherently immoral to amass so much wealth in a world with so many poor people (see also Darby 2018). Some academics have begun to talk about a maximum wage or limiting income to a relatively moderate range or “corridor” (see Gough 2017; Fuchs and Di Giulo 2016; Princen 2005; Sahakian and Lorek 2018). Rather than celebrating the hard work, inventiveness, or philanthropy of the moneyed elite, these critics are more likely to scrutinize how extreme wealth affects our shared biosphere and the well-being of the majority of humans.

But classes and global comparisons are abstract categories, and it is hard for most people to visualize a billion dollars. Perhaps familiar individuals can be much more powerful representatives of inequality, a focus for moral criticism and public approbation. The composition of the Earth’s atmosphere is an equally abstruse concept. The carbon footprint has proven a useful and common way of measuring and comparing the environmental impact of individuals, households, classes, and nations. Instead of money and property or business earnings, it focuses on spending and consumption. At a time when climate denialists seek to divert attention away from social and political action by emphasizing individual responsibility (Levantesi and Corsi 2020; Byskov 2019), the overconsumption of the super-rich demonstrates the limitations of an individual approach – they clearly have no incentive to moderate and take responsibility for their own consumption. Too often, billionaires are cast as capitalist heroes who prosper through their own skill and enterprise, though many have actually inherited great wealth, and their success depends on the work of others, social networks, and serendipity.

We, therefore, set out to calculate the carbon footprints of well-known billionaires, as a way to visualize and concretize the impact of consumption on the environment and the huge imbalance between different groups of people. Billionaires do more than accumulate wealth; the ways they spend it on private airplanes, luxurious yachts, and multiple palatial dwellings have an outsized effect on the commons. In this study, we calculated billionaires’ emissions related to their wealthy lifestyles, the part of their carbon footprint that is directly associated with their consumption and travel.

In reality, billionaires are indirectly accountable for much higher carbon emissions, such as the ones associated with their business ventures. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, for example, self-reported emissions of 51.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent in 2019 (Amazon 2021). Each billionaire is also an investor in diverse industries, and many are CEOs and/or owners of hedge funds, large corporations, sports teams, media networks, and other enterprises. Given this diversity, it was impossible to account for the corporate greenhouse-gas emissions that could be attributed to our sample, though Kenner (2015, 2019) has investigated high-emission industries and their shareholders. In many cases, billionaires use shell companies, foundations, estates, offshore ownership, and accounting tricks that make it very difficult to apportion industrial emissions.

We also lacked reliable data on billionaires’ personal consumption of food, clothing, and household items, and on the consumption of their families, servants, and entourages. The Internet is full of accounts of lavish celebrations and entertainment, which may involve flying hundreds of people for long distances and extravagant spending on luxury products that may have dramatic effects on the well-being of distant workers and the natural environment. The billionaires also portray a glamorous lifestyle that is admired and emulated around the world, and it is important to emphasize that we all bear some of the costs.

It would be extremely difficult to include the lifecycle emissions of their possessions, the manufacture and disposal of yachts, aircraft, and dwellings. Measuring the “sunk carbon” in dwellings and yachts requires a level of detail about these possessions that we do not have, and studies show it varies considerably over time and between regions for housing (Goldstein, Gounaridis, and Newell 2020). Wooden dwellings may be seen as forms of carbon storage or sequestration, while bricks and concrete are carbon-intensive. In any case, buildings and yachts can have long lifetimes, which reduces their emissions on an annual basis (Green Ration Book 2010).

It is important to remember that the carbon footprints presented in this study are therefore only a small portion of reality, the tip of the iceberg. It is evident that privacy laws and the limitations of public data protect the super-rich and help hide a considerable amount of their consumption. Nevertheless, we think our calculations are illustrative and reflect on fundamental issues of climate justice by contributing to ongoing debates over who is responsible for climate change.

There is no single correct way to calculate carbon emissions for individuals, even those relatively frugal people with few needs and wants, much less the super-rich. Some individual carbon footprints are measured by dividing total national emissions by the number of individuals or households. Other calculators look in detail at the impact of each daily behavior like commuting, cooking, washing, heating, and cooling. Another method uses the average or individually measured energy use of appliances; heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems; and vehicles and travel and then converts these measures into emissions based on the carbon intensity of regional or national energy production. None of the existing personal carbon calculators are oriented toward the lifestyles of the exceptionally rich, who have multiple luxurious dwellings and often travel using private aircraft and yachts. We had to develop our own methods for estimating their carbon footprints using simplifying assumptions based on averages where available and, in each case, we have made a deliberate effort to choose the most conservative estimates possible to make sure we were not unfairly inflating anyone’s carbon footprint.

Most billionaires keep their possessions and consumption private and often hidden by vesting ownership in family members or trusts. The super-rich in the Middle East and Asia are particularly secretive, and we were not able to audit anyone in these regions. This is not in any way a representative sample of billionaires – our subjects are highly visible and predominantly from the United States and Western Europe where the super-rich sometimes display their possessions and practices in public, while others are covered by the press or are revealed in litigation or tax records. We combed through 82 databases of public records to trace houses, vehicles, aircraft, and yachts, and were able to compile dossiers for twenty prominent billionaires (see Table 1).1 This is not by any means a random sample, but it does clearly represent the range and causes of the emissions from billionaires’ personal possessions.

Read more:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15487733.2021.1949847

Thirty per cent of tree species are at risk of extinction, an issue of vital importance to city dwellers. Disasters are linked and compound each other and share human-induced root causes. Summer night-time temperatures rising. Angus Taylor touting ‘positive energy’.

The world has approximately 60,000 species of trees, of which 20 per cent are directly used by humans for food, fuel, timber, medicines and horticulture. Unfortunately, 17,500 tree species (30 per cent) are at risk of extinction, 440 of which are on the brink with fewer than 50 individuals in the wild. 142 have already gone extinct. High on the danger list are magnolias, oaks, maples and ebonies. Islands, that often contain species found nowhere else, have the highest proportions of threatened species. St Helena, Madagascar and Mauritius, where 60–70 per cent are threatened, are particularly vulnerable.

The greatest threats to trees and the percentage of trees affected are displayed in the figure above. Climate change is a small but growing threat as extreme weather events, rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, sea level rise and the  increasing risk of fires take their toll. The vandals don’t regard the loss of a few tree species as much of a problem, conveniently forgetting or being ignorant of the central place of trees in most natural ecosystems, the stability they provide to the land, the habitat they furnish for millions of species of animals, plants and microorganisms, and the storage they provide for 50% per cent of the world’s terrestrial carbon. Botanic Gardens Conservation International have five recommendations:

• Extend protected area coverage for threatened tree species
• Ensure all globally threatened tree species are conserved in botanic gardens and seed banks
• Increase the availability of government and corporate funding for preservation
• Expand tree planting schemes and target threatened and native species
• Increase global collaboration to tackle tree extinction.

You can explore Australia’s 3214 native tree species here and the status of your favourite tree here.

Deforestation is very much an issue for city dwellers. Deforestation contributes 8 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions which cities experience in multiple ways. Rising sea levels and extreme weather events wreak havoc. City residents experience the harmful health effects of bushfire smoke. Urban water sources are polluted with sediments from cleared forest lands. Increasing proximity between cities and forests contributes to the emergence of new infectious diseases. Cities4Forests, a network of cities dedicated to protecting and restoring forests locally and globally, have launched the ‘Call to Action on Forests & Climate’, urging governments and companies to improve their policies and investments to support forest conservation, restoration and sustainable management. They suggest four ways for cities to enhance forest conservation:

1. grow urban forests — and ensure that the benefits are equitably shared across the city;
2. protect upstream forests for water security — downstream communities paying upstream communities to protect nature;
3. take political action for forests — mayors and city authorities can use their political, cultural and economic power to influence regional and national government policies;
4. use purchasing power to halt deforestation — most deforestation is driven by the desire to produce and sell commodities, the vast majority of which are bought in cities. Cities and their residents can change what they purchase to support sustainable agriculture and local livelihoods.

‘Nobody is an island. We are all interconnected. Our actions have consequences – for all of us’. So begins the summary of an illuminating analysis of 10, at first glance quite different, disastrous events that have occurred during 2020 and 2021: Amazon wildfires, Arctic heatwaves, the Beirut explosion, floods in Vietnam, Chinese Paddlefish extinction, COVID-19, Cyclone Amphan on the India-Bangladesh border, the desert locust outbreak in the Horn of Africa, bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef and the Texas cold wave. The report describes how events far apart in time or space can be connected (for instance the Arctic heatwave and the Texas cold wave), how they co-occur to compound their disastrous effects (for instance Cyclone Amphan during the Covid epidemic) and how individual behaviours are related to environmental destruction (for instance the high demand for meat fuelling deforestation and wildfires in the Amazon).

The most important aspect of the analysis, however, is the demonstration that disasters share a few common anthropogenic root causes, principally greenhouse gas emissions, insufficient disaster risk management (each related to seven of the 10 disasters), undervaluing environmental costs and benefits in decision-making, particularly related to loss of biodiversity (6/10), insufficient national and international cooperation (5/10), prioritising individual profits over social concerns (4/10), and globally increasing demand for food, energy and materials (4/10). All of these are currently on an upward trajectory.

The authors’ suggestions for doing better include:

• stop looking at disasters in isolation;
• pay simultaneous attention to the multiple root causes of interconnected disasters rather focusing on one root cause or one disaster at a time;
• adopt early, no-regret, pre-emptive strategies and be conscious of avoiding negative impacts;
• recognise and tackle trade-offs to create the most sustainable solutions;
• look for integrated solutions with multiple benefits across different dimensions;
• encourage international, national and individual action.

I think it’s widely known that the main danger to human health during heatwaves is not the high maximum temperature during the day but the high minimum temperature during the night. It’s very important for the body to have a chance to cool down. The dangers of global warming are nicely illustrated in the two graphs below which display the minimum night-time temperatures (oF) in summer in Phoenix, Arizona in the 1960s and (so far) in the 2020s. The most common minimum in the ‘60s was 74.1oF but by the early ‘20s this has increased by almost 10 degrees to 83.8oF. In the ‘60s 5 per cent of night-time minimums were abnormally hot but five decades later half of all nights were abnormally hot. (Nights are considered abnormally cold or hot based on the 5th and 95th percentiles of the 1960s temperature distribution.) In the hyperlink these two graphs are the beginning and end of an animation that nicely displays the change between the 1960s and the 2020s.

Read more: https://johnmenadue.com/sunday-environmental-round-up-25/

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assangez