environment and ecology – Page 197

People get ready

Britain needs to step up its efforts to prepare for unavoidable climate change, according to How well prepared is the UK for climate change? the first report of the Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change— the body established by the UK’s 2008 Climate Change Act to advise government on all aspects of climate-related policy. Committee chairman Lord John Krebs summarises the thrust of the report like this:

In brief, our headline finding is that whilst the UK has started to build capacity for adaptation through advice and information to a range of public and private sector organisations, there is little evidence that this is translating into tangible action on the ground in a systematic way.

The report identifies five key areas in which early action is required.

From the executive summary:

Taking a strategic approach to land use planning – for example to (i) ensure that new buildings and infrastructure are sited in areas that minimise exposure to flood risk, do not increase flood risk to others, and do not create a legacy of flood defence or water supply costs; (ii) manage competing pressures on land – urban, natural and agricultural – in response to a changing climate; and (iii) enhance green space where effective in the design of towns and cities to help manage surface water drainage and cope with rising temperatures and heatwaves.

Providing national infrastructure (energy, water, transport, waste and communications) – for example to ensure it can cope with rising temperatures; it is resilient to potential increases in certain extreme weather events, such as storms, floods and droughts; and it takes account of changing patterns of consumer demand in areas such as energy and water use, travel and consumption.

Designing and renovating buildings – for example to ensure they can cope with rising temperatures and floods and minimise water use through appropriate use of construction materials and through better design.

Managing natural resources sustainably – for example by using water more efficiently; improving and extending ecological networks so that species can adapt and move as the climate changes; and making space for water along rivers and the coast.

Effective emergency planning – for example by making better use of probabilistic weather forecasts to anticipate extreme weather events more effectively; creating plans that reduce impact on and ensure continuation of care for the most vulnerable groups in society during heatwaves and floods; and developing business continuity plans based on high-quality climate risk information so that businesses can cope better with disruptions to their supply chains during floods and damage to assets from severe weather.

The report’s emphasis on flooding as a major climate change impact is understandable, given the UK’s recent history. Coping with increased flooding is a key challenge for the country given the amount of development that has taken place on vulnerable floodplains. If you are at all interested in how we might plan to adapt to climate change — both the unavoidable change, the climate commitment — and the further changes we hope to avoid by mitigating carbon emissions, then this report is well worth reading. Many of the points it makes are relevant in the New Zealand context. One thing that’s worth picking out (from section 2.4, p25):

Adaptation is context specific. Unlike mitigation, where every unit of carbon has the same cost regardless of where it is emitted, the “optimal” adaptation response is context specific, depending on who is adapting, where in the country, and how they weigh up other factors in their decisions. This makes it difficult to determine in advance what successful adaptation will look like.

And there’s the rub. There’s plenty of politics in deciding how to cut carbon emissions — there’s a whole lot more in coping with unavoidable climate change. At least Britain has a body charged with looking at the big picture and advising government — something that’s sadly lacking in New Zealand. [See also BBC, Guardian]

[Al Green]

Shelter from the storm

Towards the end of a recent Yale Environment 360 interview, following a technical discussion of hurricane formation in a changing climate, scientist Kerry Emanuelis asked a question. Given the likely increase in intensity and power of storms and sea level rises, what needs to be done now in the US to start planning for this? His answer caught my attention and set me thinking about New Zealand. Here’s what he had to say about his country:

“…we need to stop subsidizing people to live in dangerous places. The United States is one of the few places in the world that does that, and it does it heavily. So we are basically paying people to move to places where they’re at risk. And, it doesn’t make any sense…”

It’s an indirect form of subsidy whereby people living in safer places are paying perhaps 10 percent too much premium on insurance policies whereas those living in dangerous coastal regions are paying far less than the risk warrants.

He points to the irony of a so-called free market economy capping the premiums insurance companies are allowed to charge. Unsurprisingly it’s wealth and political connections which achieve regulation from legislators setting a cap. The insurance companies need premium income, so they are quietly permitted to overcharge people living inland.

“…it’s a very unfair system. It’s a net transfer of wealth from poor to rich, and the worst aspect of it is it promotes huge coastal development. And, therefore, huge damages when even ordinary storms make landfall in the United States.”

He compares this with the east coast of Taiwan, which is battered regularly by storms. There are a handful of fortresses built by wealthy people to withstand a category 5. Otherwise people build holiday plywood sea shanties which are easily replaced when they get blown away.

The subsidies provided in the US are not limited to manipulation of premiums. Emanuel adds federal flood insurance, which pays for storm surge damage, and federal disaster relief. Yet storm damage to coastal properties is predictable disaster and risk is knowingly undertaken.

The interviewer asks what is going to happen as the century rolls on in places like Miami and the South Florida coast where development is intense and only a few feet above sea level on the beach.

“I think we know what’s going to happen. There will eventually be a hurricane there, and it will do far too much damage for the state to cover. You know, the state basically has become the insurer of property in Florida. Everybody knows that a relatively small hurricane will bankrupt the [state hurricane insurance] plan, and they will all go with hat in hand to the federal government. So the rest of us will bail them out. And so we have the situation of hard-working people in factory jobs and farmers subsidizing the landowners of Palm Beach. It’s crazy.”

I found myself thinking of what Christchurch mayor Bob Parker had to say after the earthquake when questioned as to why the City Council had permitted building on sites vulnerable to liquefaction. It was a mixed picture. Some of the building was done in the past when the phenomenon was not understood. Some more recently was done with foundations adequate to the danger. But what struck me was the fact that there were cases where the Council did not want building to go ahead but developers won out by going as far as court and winning.

It’s hopefully a reminder to us all that regulations relating to development and building should be made as tough as they need to be. The financial costs of the damage done by the earthquake will be borne by the whole New Zealand community, and few of us would want it to be any other way. But it’s permissible to reflect that the cost and the heartbreak may have been somewhat less in newly developed areas if more stringent regulations had been in place and not vulnerable to challenge from developers.

This is an important issue for future climate change impacts in New Zealand. Coastal development is one obvious area where appropriate standards set in place now can save great expense later as the sea level rises. Local government bodies have responsibilities to avoid or manage coastal hazard risk, and the Ministry for the Environment provides guidance in the task as it relates to climate change. The document Coastal hazards and climate change: A guidance manual for local government in New Zealand is available here. It contains much useful material. It recommends a precautionary approach to new development and to changes to existing development, based on the avoidance of risk. It promotes the need to secure and promote natural coastal margins. I wrote about it in more detail here last year.

There is also a revised New Zealand Coastal Policy Statement under consideration, which includes reference to the impacts of climate change on coastal hazards. However this appears to be stalled as controversy has developed over the report of a Board of Enquiry which considered submissions on the draft document and has recommended changes to it.

It is clear that, for the present at least, much responsibility devolves on local government bodies and it’s not too difficult to imagine the pressures that they will come under. Risky new development projects will be promoted vigorously. Expensive protection will be sought for areas already developed and threatened by sea level rise and accompanying storm surge damage. It will require strong planning measures and savvy councils to ensure that the future problems from climate change facing coastal developments are not permitted to grow bigger than they already will be. One wonders whether guidance to local bodies will be sufficient. National level prohibitions may need to be brought into play, for which we would need national politicians who understand the seriousness of the risks ahead.

The impacts of climate change on New Zealand coasts may not reach the level of seriousness which confronts the US, but we would be wise to prevent the investment of financial capital and human expectations in development which will prove unsafe in the course of the century.

[Mr Zimmerman]

The Weather of the Future

Heidi Cullen takes readers forty years forward in her survey of what is likely to happen in several areas of the world if we continue to burn fossil fuels. Her book is The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet. It is a highly effective communication to the lay person of what climate science predicts for the specific areas she has chosen to explore. Cullen, a climatologist, works as a senior research scientist for Climate Central, an organisation set up in 2008 to act as a central authoritative source for climate change information.

Before moving to the selected areas for closer examination she offers some lucid general introductory chapters, including a very useful explanation of the use of modelling in climate prediction. In response to the question of when the weather will start to reflect predictions about the climate she answers that it already has in extreme weather events. If greenhouse gases continue to rise, the way weather affects life on Earth will be far worse than anything we’ve ever seen before. ”Can we rally around this forty-year forecast for the good of the world, or will we wait until the levees break before we decide to act?”

The first area Cullen surveys is the Sahel region of Africa. She talks with climatologists who work on understanding the rainfall patterns and outlook for the region. The picture is complex, but there is no doubt that the region is going to get warmer. All the models agree on that. They show some variation on the expected amount of rainfall, but it seems likely that the rainy season will start later and become shorter, with storms that will possibly become more intense. Pockets of resilience offer some hope from farmers who have turned to tree planting with considerable benefits to their crops and welcome extra income from the trees. But as Cullen takes her projections forward she remarks that there is only so much the trees can do against the increasing reality of climate change. Socially, climate change will become a threat multiplier as conflict spreads across the African continent in lockstep with temperature.

The next selected area is the Great Barrier Reef. Cullen talks with Joanie Kleypas, a marine ecologist and geologist who uses climate models to study the health of coral reefs. “I work on coral reefs, for God’s sake. The entire coral science community is depressed.” The chapter provides very clear accounts of the bleaching effect of warming oceans (“Bleached corals aren’t dead; they’re just starving.”) and the deleterious effect on coral growth from ocean acidification. The speed of both warming and acidification is likely to quickly outpace the conditions under which coral reefs have adapted and flourished through past changes. They are unlikely to be able to adapt fast enough. It’s not a good outlook. Cullen allows herself a detour to point to other and more dramatic effects of climate change that Australia is set to encounter – ferocious wildfires, pervasive drought, and unbreathable air. The lucky country looks anything but in coming decades.

The US is a leading per capita contributor to global emissions. It has not yet accepted the level of responsibility it carries. Other places, far less responsible and much poorer, are bearing the early consequences of global warming. But that doesn’t mean the US will remain exempt from any serious consequences, and it was good to see Cullen turning to her own country for two of her chapters, and driving home that message. One of the places she selects is Central Valley, California. The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is a focus of her attention here. It’s the hub of California’s water supply system. The Hollywood-style dream is that the Delta will be able to supply enough clean fresh water to help cities and crops increase “forever”, all without harm to the natural environment, she notes dryly. She speaks with a multidisciplinary team studying the Delta, which in reality has far more in common with New Orleans than with Hollywood. The details of the problems and threats are canvassed and the extreme vulnerability of California to coming water shortage exposed. Her other US focus is New York city. Here it will be energy blackouts which threaten as the average temperature increases over coming decades. The power grid is unsuited to climate extremes. The other major area not ready for what lies ahead is flood protection. However planning is going on in New York to develop resilience to what the changed climate will deliver, and also to mitigate the city’s emissions. Cullen imagines a time four years from now in which, following damage from a storm, a co-ordinated plan is finally adopted by an alarmed population and New York becomes a city obsessed with adapting to climate change. It clearly needs to.

Her other chapters look at more obviously and immediately vulnerable places. In the Arctic she examines the current experience of the Inuit in an area of Canada and in Greenland. Change is well under way as sea ice diminishes and permafrost melts. It brings with it not only the physical challenges to the Inuit ways but also severe cultural threats. In Greenland as the ice melts there’s the promise of wealth from resource extraction, and the ambiguities that come with it. Bangladesh is skilled in adaptation to change and experienced in flood management, but by 2050 with almost 25 per cent of the country under water as a result of rising seas and increasing tropical cyclones, accompanied by the slow and deadly seepage of saline water into wells and fields, Bangladesh will be in serious trouble. Millions of villagers will have to move to the city, and many are likely to cross illegally into India hoping to find work.

The value of Cullen’s book is that by focusing on specific places, and by talking with scientists who are devoting full attention to the problems climate change poses for those places, she brings the reader close up to inescapable realities. The details are spelt out. Moreover she does this by a lively narrative of her discussions with the scientists closely involved. Her book is not a dry account of scientific papers but a picture of the people working to understand, predict and prepare for what is in waiting for the populations in the areas she discusses. It’s a reminder too of the number and variety of people who now work on climate change-related issues.

The book recognises the adaptation capabilities being shown by some of the populations already affected by climate changes. It is with some reluctance that it acknowledges the possibility of defeat if high emission levels continue. They don’t need to continue, of course, but that is in the hands of policy makers. Cullen in conclusion examines two words in use in the science. One is unequivocal, used to describe the warming of the climate system. The other is irreversible, used to describe uncertain but all too possible eventualities. She uses the cutting down of the last tree on Easter Island, as imagined so vividly by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse, as an analogy for irreversibility. Unfortunately as yet the two words are not powerful enough in policy circles to shift the forecast for the future.

[More at: Fishpond (NZ), Amazon.com, Book Depository (UK, free shipping worldwide).]

Monday miscellany

I‘m going to be away from my desk for a few days this week, so here’s a few interesting things to read and reflect on. First up: Wellington’s hosting this year’s New Zealand Soil Carbon Conference at Te Papa from Wednesday to Friday. Keynote speakers are Tim Flannery and Christine Jones, and topics to be covered include:

The science behind climate change and soil carbon
The on-farm benefits of biological farming
How research can support innovative farmers
An overview of the new biological economy and market opportunities
Practical tips to build soil carbon, humus and soil biology
Future directions for NZ agriculture and extension services

Full programme here — Friday’s a field trip day. Sounds very worthwhile. If any HT readers are attending (or if the conference organisers are reading this), I’d be very happy to carry a report on events.

Adding to the long list of material debunking standard sceptic & crank claims about climate change, Deutsche Bank’s Climate Change Advisors (DBCCA) have produced a nicely referenced document (PDF), prepared for them by the Earth Centre at Columbia University. Here’s a sample from the executive summary:

Claim: Human society and natural systems have adapted to past climate change.

Response: Past climate changes have often been accompanied by migration, war, and disease. The growing human population will inevitably make environmental change more disruptive in the future, even in the face of increased technological prowess.

A couple of items from Nature News: in Collapse of the ice titans, NN interviews Richard Bates, recently returned from a summer sail along Greenland’s NW coast on the Gambo (more on that voyage at Jason Box’s Meltfactor.org blog) about the melt season at the Petermann and Humboldt glaciers. Ocean conveyor-belt model stirred up looks at a new paper in Nature Geoscience that finds greater than expected variability in the great ocean current network known as the Thermohaline Circulation (THC). Understanding the short term changes in THC flows will be important in attempts to model short term and regional climate change.

The Arctic sea ice looks to be fast approaching its summer minimum, heading for somewhere between 2008 and 2009 — making it the third lowest in the record. Best place to keep up with events is (as it has been all NH summer) Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice blog. The two boats (Northern Passage, Peter 1) attempting to circumnavigate the Arctic Ocean in a single season are both now heading for the southern route of the NW Passage. In the southern Beaufort Sea the Norwegian team are reporting high sea temperatures:

We are still surprised and worried about the high water temperature. At the moment we are registering around 7 to 8 degrees Celsius, which according to the experts is far higher than normal.

Also of interest for sea ice aficionados: a new paper in Quaternary Science Reviews looks at what we know of the history of Arctic sea ice. Coverage at Climate Central and Science Daily but here’s Climate Central talking to the NSIDC’s Mark Serreze:

“They’re telling us that there was maybe no ice during the Arctic summers 7,000 years ago, and also ice-free summers during the last interglacial 125,000 years ago.” Those were due to natural factors, most notably the changes in Earth’s orientation to the Sun that brought more sunlight to the Arctic in summer. This time, says the paper, there is no known natural explanation, and climate skeptics who claim the ice is rebounding after the 2007 low, he says, “are grasping at straws.”

And finally: the British government starts planning to adapt to inevitable warming (but offers no new money). Plus ça change…

The answer, my friend…

Some encouraging facts and figures are provided in an interview with the CEO of the European Wind Energy Association, Christian Kjaer, by Yale Environment 360. For the past two years 40 per cent of all new electricity generating capacity in Europe came from wind turbines. (Add solar and other renewables and that rises to 63 per cent.) From Spain to Sweden so many new turbines are being erected that Europe is on target to produce 15 per cent of its electricity from wind by 2020 and 50 per cent by 2050.

Kjaer puts the emergence of wind as Europe’s leading form of green energy down to a combination of government policies, entrepreneurial vision, and public support. Carrots and sticks are involved. The European Union provides tax credits, financial incentives, and priority access for renewable energy to the electricity grid to encourage the growth of wind, solar and other forms or renewables. The stick is the requirement that member states set renewable energy targets or face the possibility of being sued.

The result is that increasingly as plants fired by coal and natural gas reach the end of their lives they are being replaced by wind and solar power. The economic benefits of the transition are clear, with nearly 200,000 people currently employed in European wind power, rising to an estimated 450,000 by 2020. Kjaer has no doubt that green energy is an engine of job creation.

He thinks the early start that Europe gained in wind power, particularly in Spain and Germany and Denmark, gives them an advantage in the new industry and means they are reaping commercial benefits in terms of wind turbine manufacturing and activity further down the supply line. The high quality manufacturing sector, strongly supported by governments, should see Europe retaining an edge over the intensifying competition from Asian countries. “The winners of tomorrow’s energy wars,” he says, “are going to be those who understand how to develop new technology, deploy new technology and get the benefits of exporting that technology to the rest of the world.”

He speaks of the need for Europe to make a serious effort in terms of changing the way they operate their grids, and to move more quickly to develop an offshore grid for utilizing the offshore wind energy. Politicians need to give attention to optimizing and expanding the grid infrastructure to accommodate a larger amount of variable wind power in the system, and also other renewables.

“One of the main reasons for the strong political support for a supergrid is also that we want to create an internal [European] market for electricity, which of course, in the end, should give consumers the most affordable electricity. That’s the whole idea about the internal market, is that it would create the free movement over borders of goods, services, and in this case electricity at the lowest cost. And in order to create an internal market for electricity you need the infrastructure, just as you need roads to move goods around the European Union.”

Concerning policies required for a robust industry Kjaer speaks first of stable long-term frameworks for investing in renewables. Stable frameworks help the European industry by contrast with the US where the framework is unable to be predicted more than one or two years ahead. This means the US is not reaping the job creation benefits of wind energy; a lot of manufacturing has to be imported since no one’s going to invest in a factory in the United States if they don’t know how the market looks beyond the next two years.

As an aside, a news item today reported US steelworkers complaining that in the manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels China is breaking WTO rules by an array of subsidies, tax credits, cut-rate loans, and other policies that give Chinese companies a strong competitive advantage over foreign firms. If Kjaer is right they might do better to complain of their own government’s failure to support green energy development ahead of the fossil fuel industry which is still favoured by extensive subsidies.

To return to Europe. Kjaer identifies three elements in the stable framework Europe is providing for renewable energy. Financial support such as tax credit is one. Access to the grid is another:

“And what European legislation does, it mandated all 27 member states to give priority access to wind energy, which means that if you have a wind farm and a gas plant, and they’re planned projects, the wind energy should be connected first. And also, if you have plants operating on the system, electricity from the renewables plant gets fed into the grid first.”

The third element is more straightforward administrative procedures. Kjaer spoke of hopes of streamlining what in some European countries are extremely tortuous permission processes.

Asked about public opposition to the expansion of wind turbines, he acknowledged it was an issue, more so in some countries than others. Onshore turbines in the UK are particularly difficult.

“But it’s my feeling that the concern from locals is biggest in the beginning of a new market taking off. So the first thousand megawatts are much more difficult to install than the next thousand megawatts. Because people get used to them, they understand that they don’t make noise anymore — the turbines twenty years ago made quite a lot of noise, today you can’t hear them, almost, if you’re more than two hundred meters away.”

Asked whether 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2050 was possible Kjaer explained why he thinks it is:

“Almost two-thirds of our new capacity is from renewables. That figure was about 20 per cent in the year 2000. So in nine years we’ve gone from 20 per cent to 62 — by 2020 of course we can get to 100 per cent of new capacity. And if we can get in 2020 to a situation where all new capacity is renewables, then we will, by definition almost, have 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2050 because all the other power plants will be taken off [line].”

Infrastructure is the absolute key:

“ – we need to build an infrastructure that is different. But, again, our infrastructure in Europe is aging – we haven’t been building power lines since the ‘60s or ‘70s. It needs to be replaced anyway. So we need to make sure that the infrastructure is changed in a way that it accommodates 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2050.”

While I was preparing this post a newsletter coincidentally arrived from the New Zealand Wind Energy Association, welcoming the Government’s continued commitment to its target of 90 per cent renewable electricity by 2025 in the draft New Zealand Energy Strategy and affirming the part that wind generation is able to play.

“In New Zealand, wind generation has increased 10-fold since 2003, helping lift total renewable generation to recent highs of over 70%. With four wind farms currently under construction, together with other new and planned renewable projects, New Zealand is making progress towards the 90% target and the rewards that it brings to the economy and the environment.”

It points to the economic advantage of globally competitive electricity prices that will accrue to New Zealand in the development of its ample renewable energy resources.

“Electricity prices have increased significantly in recent years on the back of rising natural gas prices. Increasing use of renewables such as wind energy, which has no fuel or carbon emissions costs, is helping to check these rising prices.”

There’s a note of understandable exasperation in a section of the newsletter addressing the misinformation barrier which it says is bizarrely making it easier to obtain resource consent for new thermal generation than for renewable generation.

Such misinformation as this:

“In the last few months we’ve seen claims that a proposed wind farm won’t generate the amount of electricity that the developer estimates because wind generation varies with the wind. Such claims overlook that developers’ calculations already take the variable nature of wind generation into account. Developers usually identify both the installed generating capacity of the project in megawatts (or MW) and the total amount of electricity that they expect the project to generate in a year in gigawatt-hours (GWh). This estimate of generation takes into account the wind conditions at the site and that varying wind conditions affect generation.”

The newsletter points out that wind is proving itself in New Zealand on its own merits. (I would add, in spite of the unfair advantages enjoyed by fossil fuels which are only just beginning to have a modest price put on them.) Unlike other countries, New Zealand wind farms are not subsidised. A wind farm will be built here only when it can generate electricity at a cost that is competitive with other forms of generation.

The NZ wind resource is very strong by comparison with other parts of the world where wind farms are being installed. Our wind farms generate almost twice as much electricity per installed megawatt of capacity as the international average.

In response to the claim that new thermal generation is required as back up for new wind farms the newsletter responds that our existing hydro base is sufficient to balance about 2000MW of wind capacity without adding significantly to the price of electricity. Current wind energy capacity sits just under 500MW, so there’s obviously some distance to go before back up becomes a serious concern.

It’s the view of the newsletter that the considerable range of research and practical experience available regarding wind energy after more than 10 years operation in NZ and more than 20 years overseas reveals that many of the claims commonly heard in denigration of wind energy do not stand up to scrutiny.

So, this evidence from Europe and New Zealand, along with that from the US and from China among others, demonstrates that in spite of all its detractors wind generation is advancing rapidly. It’s heartening to see that there are governments prepared to offer the financial and policy support that it needs. Some point sneeringly to that and utter the dirty word ‘subsidies’. In a market place which doesn’t price the environmental costs of fossil fuels there is currently no other way of putting renewables on an equal footing. In any case the imperative to phase out emissions means that we must pay what it costs to do so, just as, for example, we are preparing to pay the costs of repairing the earthquake damage in Canterbury. There are some expenditures which can’t be avoided. Would that our Draft Energy Strategy would recognise that.