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SENG Vic News January 2017

Forest loss worst in North America and Australia, with 63% of sites under increased pressure from infrastructure, agriculture and settlements

More than 100 of the world’s most precious natural assets are being severely damaged by encroaching human activities, according to a study examining direct human footprints and forest losses.

Natural world heritage sites are are identified by Unesco and include 229 sites around the world that are considered to have “outstanding universal values” that transcend national boundaries.

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The Prime Minister’s refugee-friendly branding has veiled Canada’s fortress policies that are in urgent need of overhaul

It was a tweet heard around the world: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s rejoinder to Donald Trump’s repugnant Muslim travel ban that has sparked outrage around the world. “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” Trudeau tweeted on Saturday. “Diversity is our strength. #WelcometoCanada.”

While Trump has immediately stoked reactionary chaos, Trudeau has always struck the progressive posture. With fuzzy memes and messaging and photo-ops of him hugging refugees – and his predictably popular latest tweet – Canada’s Liberal party has painted themselves as a welcoming government in a sea of rising intolerance. Praise from the international political and media class has flowed.

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Money collected as an alternative to prosecutions will go to projects that help wildlife, says Environment Agency

More than £1.5m will go to projects that help wildlife and the environment as companies pay for breaking green laws, the Environment Agency has said.

Businesses are paying between £1,500 and £375,000 in “enforcement undertakings” as an alternative to prosecutions for breaking environmental laws by polluting rivers, breaching permit conditions or avoiding recycling. The money on the new list of enforcement undertakings from 26 companies – including six paying six-figure sums – totals £1,535,992.

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More than half of Liberal voters also oppose plan to loan Indian company $1bn to build a rail line between proposed Carmichael coalmine and Abbot Point

Three-quarters of Australians, including most Liberal voters, oppose the government giving a $1bn loan to Adani to build a rail line between its proposed Carmichael coalmine and the Abbot Point shipping terminal.

The government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund (Naif) granted Adani “conditional approval” for a $1bn loan in December last year.

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MATERIAL SCIENCE: An everyday cooking oil has been used to make graphene in a lab - a development scientists said could significantly reduce the cost and complexity of making the super-substance on a commercial scale.

Operator says it has seen what may be fuel debris beneath badly damaged No 2 reactor, destroyed six years ago in triple meltdown

Hopes have been raised for a breakthrough in the decommissioning of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after its operator said it may have discovered melted fuel beneath a reactor, almost six years after the plant suffered a triple meltdown.

Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said on Monday that a remote camera appeared to have found the debris beneath the badly damaged No 2 reactor, where radiation levels remain dangerously high. Locating the fuel is the first step towards removing it.

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The rise of renewable energy is one reason the world is shifting away from coal. Wind turbine image from www.shutterstock.com

Last year we found that the growth in global fossil fuel emissions have stalled over the past three years. But does this mean we are on track to keep global warming below 2℃, as agreed under the 2015 Paris Agreement?

In our study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change today, we looked at how global and national energy sectors are progressing towards global climate targets.

We found that we can still keep global warming below 2℃ largely thanks to increasing use of clean energy, a global decline in coal use, improvements in energy efficiency, and a consequent stalling of emissions from fossil fuels over the past three years.

Nations need to accelerate deployment of existing technologies to lock in and build on the gains of the last three years. More challenging, is the needed investment to develop new technologies and behaviours necessary to get to net-zero global emissions by mid-century.

World moving away from fossil fuels

We looked at several key measures, including carbon emissions from fossil fuels, the carbon intensity of the energy system (how much carbon is produced for each unit of energy) and the amount of carbon emitted to produce one dollar of wealth.

The world share of energy from fossil fuels is starting to decline. There has been no growth in coal consumption and strong growth in energy from wind, biomass, solar and hydro power. The emerging trend is therefore towards lower carbon emissions from energy production.

Energy efficiency has also improved globally in recent years, reversing the trends of the 2000s. These improvements are reducing the amount of carbon emissions to produce new wealth.

From all these changes, global fossil fuel emissions have not grown over the past three years. Remarkably, this has occurred while the global economy has continued to grow.

As the global economy grows, it is using less energy to produce each unit of wealth as economies become more efficient and shift towards services.

These promising results show that, globally, we are broadly in the right starting position to keep warming below 2℃.

But modelling suggests that stringent climate policy will only slightly accelerate this historical trend of improvements in energy intensity. And to keep warming below 2℃ will require deep and sustained reductions in the carbon intensity of how energy is produced.

China leading the charge

We also looked at the countries that will have the greatest global impact.

The slowdown in global emissions in the past three years is due in large part to the reduced growth in coal consumption in China. Fossil fuel emissions in China grew at 10% per year over most of the 2000s, but have not grown since 2013. This signals a possible peak in emissions more than a decade earlier than predicted.

China is showing a significant decline in the share of fossil fuels in its energy sector. This has been driven by the decline in coal and the growth of renewable energies. The carbon intensity of fossil fuels has also been falling, for instance by burning coal more efficiently.

The United States has also reduced emissions in the last decade, with significant declines in coal consumption, particularly in the last few years. These declines have several causes, including a weaker economy in the last decade and continued improvements in energy efficiency, which have led to lower energy demand.

Emissions in the US have further declined due to a decline in carbon intensity of fossil fuels driven by the shift from coal to natural gas and the growth in renewables.

Emissions have declined in the European Union for several decades, most notably in the past 10 years as a weaker economy, along with continual improvements in energy efficiency, has led to declines in emissions. These declines are speeding up with the growing share of renewables in the energy sector.

India has sustained an emissions growth of 5-6% per year and is expected to continue growing, with little change in the underlying drivers of emissions growth.

Australia’s fossil fuel emissions have been stable or declining since 2009 as a result of the combined decline in the energy intensity of the economy and the carbon intensity of energy. However, fossil fuel emissions have grown since 2015.

The devil is in the detail

There is one big “but” in our analysis. We found that current fossil fuel trends are consistent with keeping warming below 2℃ because the future climate scenarios we use – assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – allow for relatively large amounts of fossil fuels use in the future.

These scenarios assume that large amounts of the carbon emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels will be removed using carbon capture and storage (CCS).

CCS is also widely used together with bioenergy to produce a technology that in effect removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In this process, plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, burning these plants produces bioenergy, and the resulting CO₂ emissions are captured and stored underground. The plants grow again and the cycle is repeated.

Most scenarios rely on large-scale deployment of CCS, in the order of thousands of CCS facilities by 2030, to keep warming under 2℃. At present, just a few tens of facilities are being planned. There is also a lack of commitment to CCS in most pledges under the Paris Agreement for 2030.

Although many of the current indicators are consistent with limiting warming to 2℃, there is now an urgent need for deployment of CCS to avoid the divergence from those pathways. That is unless technological alternatives can be deployed to cover the mitigation gap that is quickly emerging.

Many emissions scenarios also include removing large amounts of CO₂ from the atmosphere. Although bioenergy with CCS is the preferred technology in those scenarios, there is an equally urgent need to invest in the research and development of alternative negative emission technologies, potentially with a smaller environmental footprint.

Turning the slowdown into a decline

It is significant that emissions growth has slowed in the last three years. This is necessary to move onto an emission pathway consistent with keeping global average temperatures below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels.

The short-term challenge is to lock in this slowdown from declining coal use, switching coal for gas, and the increasing share of clean energy. This will reduce the risk of emissions rebounding if the global economy grows more strongly in the short term.

However, our research shows that for emissions to move onto a downward trend at the required speed will require emission reductions in a broader range of sectors and more rapid deployment of existing low-carbon technologies.

Ultimately, reaching zero emissions this century will require a rapid program of research and development to support a wide range of low-carbon technologies, including systems to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Pep Canadell receives funding from the National Environmental Science Program of the Australian Department of the Environment.

Corinne Le Quéré is affiliated with the UK Committee on Climate Change.

Glen Peters receives funding from the Research Council of Norway.

Climate-change denier Myron Ebell says he expects Trump to withdraw the US from the global climate change agreement

The environmental movement is “the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world”, according to an adviser to the US president Donald Trump’s administration.

Myron Ebell, who has denied the dangers of climate change for many years and led Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) until the president’s recent inauguration, also said he fully expected Trump to keep his promise to withdraw the US from the global agreement to fight global warming.

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Trafficking of endangered snakes as pets or for their skins is having a negative impact on breeding patterns and size of species

Kenya has banned the export of various snake species, including the African rock python, to zoos and pet shops around the world after reports of animal abuse and snakes being sold on the black market for their meat and skins.

The trafficking of the endangered snakes by cartels is also having a negative impact on the environment, said authorities.

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Removing invasive exotic plants from natural areas can act as a boost for wildlife, a study suggests.

Researchers have discovered the earliest known ancestor of humans - along with a vast range of other species.

Juniper threatened by fungus-like disease is first species to be fully collected in Kew’s Royal Botanic Gardens tree seed project

The future of gin is safe, according to horticultural experts who have collected juniper seeds from across the country to help conserve the declining tree species.

Juniper berries, which take two years to mature slowly on the plant, help give gin its distinctive flavour, but the native UK species is in decline.

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The Amazon rainforest is the world’s largest, but in the last 40 years at least 20% of it has been destroyed. The Amazon basin covers nine countries in South America, with 60% of it in Brazil, and for a decade local photographer Rodrigo Baleia has documented the beauty and destruction of the region from above

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The discovery of the 600 mile-long reef in 2016 stunned scientists but oil companies are planning to drill in the area

The first images have been released of a unique coral reef that stunned scientists when discovered in 2016 at the mouth of the Amazon.

The 600 mile-long reef is expected to reveal new species as scientists explore it further, but oil companies are planning to drill in the area. The photographs were captured from a submarine launched to a depth of 220 metres from the Greenpeace ship Esperanza. Campaigners say drilling must be prevented to protect the reef.

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The research is clear – humans are responsible for all the global warming since 1950

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report – which summarizes the latest and greatest climate science research – was quite clear that humans are responsible for global warming:

It is extremely likely [95 percent confidence] more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together … The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period … The contribution from natural forcings is likely to be in the range of −0.1°C to 0.1°C, and from internal variability is likely to be in the range of −0.1°C to 0.1°C.

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Roger Gower’s brother says he wants something good to come from tragedy after pilot was shot dead in Tanzania

The family of a British pilot who was shot dead by elephant poachers in Tanzania have said they want to “make some good come from tragedy” as they spearhead an appeal to raise £1m to help tackle the African ivory trade.

Roger Gower, 37, was tracking criminals who had killed three elephants near the Serengeti national park when a poacher opened fire with an AK-47 rifle on 29 January last year.

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Thorpe Wood, Peterborough This wood was here long before the city grew up around it. If it were lost its space would be instantly absorbed

Here’s a strange little peace in a tightened noose of noise. If you stumbled on it by footbridge, housing estate passage or nondescript pull-in, it would be a surprising find: an ancient worked wood caught in an outer eddy of the city. Thorpe Wood was here long before Peterborough grew up around it, before the city began to squeeze, before what little was left was mercifully protected.

The morning’s snowfall has gone. In spring there might be bluebells here, wild garlic, wood anemone, the “pock” of woodpecker, smells, shade. But in January life has descended to waist height and is thick with hardy, sharp things. At eye-level, winter’s transparency makes the wood a weave of disorderly trunks. The rafters are empty and naked, and it’s here the trees spread, contrast, throw flamboyant shapes against the sky.

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Australian researchers hope an antibody found in sharks may help treat an incurable lung disease.

In the face of an increasingly divided Turnbull government, Victoria’s Labor government has upped the ante on climate action, pledging to cut state emissions by up to 20 per cent within three years on the road to zero net emissions by 2050.