Tag: mitigation

A challenge to the dream of reason

This article by David Schlosberg, professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney was first published earlier today at The Conversation. It’s an excellent and forthright overview of the challenges we will face in coming to terms with the reality of climate change.

When thinking of the challenges we face in responding to climate change, it is time to admit that our political focus has been fairly narrow: limiting emissions and moving beyond carbon-based energy systems. For 30 years, prevention has been the stated goal of most political efforts, from UNFCCC negotiations to the recent carbon tax.

For anyone paying attention, it is clear that such efforts have not been enough. And now we have entered a new era in the human relationship with climate change, with a variety of broad and different challenges.

The first of our current challenges is to admit that we will not stop climate change. Prevention is no longer an option. The natural systems that regulate climate on the planet are already changing, and ecosystems that support us are shifting under our feet.

We will be a climate-challenged society for the foreseeable future, immersed in a long age of adaptation. What we might have to adapt to, what an adapted society might look like, and how we design a strategy to get there are all open questions.

One of the hopeful signs is that, even if many national governments are not preventing climate change, there is a growing concern for adaptation at the local level.

Climate change challenges the whole enlightenment project – the dream that reason leads us to uncover truths, and those truths lead to human progress and improvement.

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Not a pretty picture: recent science summarised

A valuable review, Climate Science 2009-2010, has just been published by the World Resources Institute. It’s a summary of major peer-reviewed research in climate change science and technology during those two years. Aimed at policymakers, the NGO community, and the media, it offers succinct summaries of the findings of a wide array of scientific papers, a short discussion of the implications of each paper, and brief overviews along the way of where the research is pointing.

It’s 48 pages in length, not a quick read but tailored for easy comprehension for anyone with a general lay understanding of climate science.  A sample list of some of the findings is provided at the start, but the full survey is well worth reading through. The range of papers is a reminder of how much scientific work is being done and how the full picture is built from many studies and a great variety of detailed investigations. The review is restrained in its drawing of implications from the studies, often pointing to the need for further investigation and certainly not hyping any of the results. Nevertheless it’s apparent that the recent research continues to reveal grim prospects for humanity as emissions continue to rise.

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Not good news

My reading this morning didn’t incline me to optimism. I don’t actually need reminding, but in case I did two items underlined that we remain very much on course for a 3 to 4 degree global temperature rise by the end of the century.  A new report published by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency describes a 45 percent increase in global CO2 emissions between 1990 and 2010, reaching an all-time annual high in 2010. Continue reading “Not good news”

Adapting to climate change in Vietnam and the Philippines

I stumbled across a documentary programme on BBC World during the weekend, Nature Inc. It visited two Asian regions where the impacts of climate change are being experienced and described the active local measures under way to cope with them. It’s the sort of programme we ought to be seeing a great deal more of as the evidence of climate change effects accumulate around the world. The narrator presumably felt obliged to mention in passing that sceptics dispute the impacts of climate change identified by the local people, but that kind of disputing will surely wither in the face of the realities such populations are facing. Facing with energy and purpose in the two cases covered by the short documentary.

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Heart of the city

We tend to become riveted on the efforts of national governments to address greenhouse gas reductions, so far with dismal results. But as a valuable new study reminds us, city administrations can play a significant role in mitigation and with more immediate effect. Cities and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Moving Forward is to be published in the journal Environment and Urbanization in April and has been made available online in advance. The lead author is Daniel Hoornweg, lead urban specialist on Cities and Climate Change at the World Bank.

A large share of global greenhouse gas emissions is attributable to cities. But the study points to cities’ ability to respond to climate change at a local and proximate level; cities usually offer more immediate and effective communication between the public and the decision makers than national governments. Cities, say the authors, are credible laboratories of social change, with sufficient scale to bring about meaningful changes. The potential co-benefits of mitigation and adaptation are largest in cities.

The study proposes a path forward for cities which clearly measure and communicate their emissions. They can identify and tackle the largest issues first. They can get help from citizens, other cities and national governments. The study recognises the pragmatism with which cities have been able to tackle other issues such as waste management and water supply, seeing that as a likely indicator of the way they can address climate change.

Cities vary greatly in their per capita levels of greenhouse gas emissions, and the study includes many interesting analyses and comparisons. It is surprising – and encouraging – to see how much work has been done on the measurement of a large number of cities’ per capita emissions. The study refers to 100 for which peer-reviewed studies are available, discussing some of them in closer detail. In most countries per capita greenhouse gas emissions are lower in cities than the country-wide average, but there are often considerable differences between cities within the same country. For example, the per capita emission level in the USA is 23.59 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) per annum. The average level of emissions for New York residents is considerably less at 10.5 tCO2e, yet Denver’s approaches the national average at 21.5 tCO2e. The difference between the two cities is mainly attributable to New York’s greater density and much lower reliance on the automobile for commuting. A review of Denver’s emissions which includes the embodied emissions of material such as food and concrete coming into the city has emissions rising to 25.3 tCO2e per capita, which is above the national average.

Chinese cities are atypical in that, generally, their GHG emissions are, on average, much higher than per capita national averages. For example, Shanghai’s emissions are 12.6 tCO2e per capita, while national emissions are 3.4 tCO2e per capita. This reflects the high reliance on fossil fuels for electricity production, a significant industrial base within many cities and a relatively poor and large rural population, and hence a lower average per capita value for national emissions.

The study offers interesting material relating to Toronto where researchers have broken down the city into districts. Wealthy neighbourhoods and distant sprawling suburbs had significantly higher emissions, dramatically so by comparison with a dense inner-city neighbourhood with good access to public transportation.

Greenhouse gas inventories are obviously important in giving city government bodies reliable information to work with, to share with their citizens and to determine where best to direct mitigation efforts. The study considers that while the making of inventories is still an evolving process it is robust enough already to be operated by all cities, at least by those with more than a million inhabitants. I thought of Mayor Len Brown’s plans for emission reductions in Auckland over the next fifteen years when I read this, and realised that this important pre-requisite should be within that city’s reach.

A striking feature in the study for me was the table which lists the policy tools available for city-level action on climate change.  Transport figures heavily in the policy goals.  Land use zoning can be used to reduce trip lengths, to encourage transit-oriented development zones and to introduce traffic calming to discourage driving. The quality and linkages of public transport can be improved and its services expanded. Employee transport plans can be facilitated. Driving and parking restrictions can be applied, and softened somewhat for fuel-efficient vehicles. The city fleet can be made up of fuel-efficient vehicles. All these are mitigation measures, some of them regulatory, some service provisions. Unfortunately in New Zealand at present those relating to public transport would come up against the Minister of Transport’s benighted determination to put public transport on short rations and spend the money on new roads, but at least in the case of Auckland there are signs of steel in the new Mayor’s public transport intentions.

Next on the list are policy tools relating to building efficiency. Zoning regulations can promote multi-family and connected residential housing. Energy efficiency requirements can be part of building codes. Public and private retro-fitting programmes can be co-ordinated.

The increase of the local share of renewable and captured energy generation can be obtained by building codes requiring a minimum share of renewable energy, by district heating and cooling projects and by waste-to-energy programmes.

Adaptation appears on the list with measures to reduce vulnerability to flooding and increased storm events and to extreme heat. Tree-planting programmes and green roof requirements figure here.

City officials and elected representatives don’t have to scratch their heads and wonder where they can start in the battle to reduce emissions or adapt to the climate change impacts which can’t be avoided. Nor do they have to join the “after you” brigade of international governmental negotiators. They can get under way immediately, either to lower their emissions substantially or, if they are already low to keep them that way as the city grows or becomes more prosperous. Cities can also work co-operatively in their endeavours. Some of the largest are already doing so. The study remarks on the C40 organisation, a group of large cities committed to tackling climate change, currently chaired by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York. Relative to the world’s top nations they are collectively a very big player and anything they prove able to achieve must be significant in global terms.

As we watch what looks like the sad spectacle of implosion in the US attempts to tackle climate change at the national level one is wary of sounding enthusiastic about mitigation prospects, but this paper is nevertheless a positive reminder that not everything depends on a handful of anti-science Republican congressmen. Cities can carry hopes which their countries currently largely deny.

[Nick Lowe]