Dec
6

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Auckland must prepare for climate change – scientist

Category: Auckland Tags: ,

Aucklanders need to prepare for the wide-ranging impacts that climate change will have on their city, a leading scientist says.

Independent climate scientist Dr Jim Salinger, author of the book Living In a Warmer World, will explain what climate change will mean for New Zealand’s largest city in a public lecture at AUT University tomorrow evening.

Dr Salinger believed there was not enough awareness of what several degrees of warming — and potentially more than a metre of sea level rise — within this century could mean for Aucklanders, as well as all Kiwis.

“In my personal view, people who live on the coast are not aware — but when their homes become uninsurable, they’ll be very aware.”

According to present projections, the mean temperature in New Zealand could be 2C higher by the end of the century — and even between 3C and 4C higher if no action is taken to curb the world’s carbon emissions.

Within the same period, sea level was expected to rise between 50cm and 120cm, leaving populations to adapt by either abandoning coasts and islands, changing infrastructure and coastal zones, or protecting areas with barriers or dykes.

Already, temperatures in Auckland had warmed by 1C over the last 100 years, while sea level rise from 1899 to 2014 was in the order of 18 cm, Dr Salinger said.

A report on sea level rise by Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Jan Wright said the impact of even a small rise in sea level would be significant and very costly for some landowners.

Storms occurring on top of a higher sea level would affect public infrastructure such as roads, railways and stormwater systems, as well as private homes and other buildings.

Climate change was also expected to result in more large storms compounding the effects of sea level rise.

The major coastal floods that Auckland experienced in 1936 and 2011 — the latter flooding downtown shops, homes and roads — would occur about once every decade, according to Niwa projections.

If climate change continued unabated, that frequency could increase to each year.

“Just think about what happened in April this year, where there was flooding on the northwestern motorway and Tamaki Drive. That would become commonplace,” Dr Salinger said.

“We really have to be thinking now about how we plan cities — including where people are and what they’ll need to do — because these sorts of things take a while to implement.”

In another impact Dr Salinger will address, Auckland would feel the effect of climate change on Pacific nations, which he considered New Zealand’s “front yard”.

He said the risk of displacement and relocation from Pacific islands was a reality, and building capacity for an influx of new residents in Auckland now should be a priority.

Auckland Pacific communities would also need to be strong to accommodate migrants and assist those remaining in the islands.

Dr Salinger noted how New Zealand’s 20,000-strong Niuean population, mainly in Auckland, raised funds and provided volunteers to help in Niue in the wake of the devastating Cyclone Heta in 2004.

Industries would also see change.

Hayward kiwifruit production may become uneconomic in Auckland over the next 50 years, due to a lack of winter chilling, while sub-tropical crops such as avocados and citrus would benefit from a trend towards warmer average conditions.

Some tropical fruit crops could presently be grown in localised micro-climates in Auckland, but it was likely that opportunities for these crops would increase, he said.

A warmer climate might change where wine production could be based around the region, but would also bring more pest and disease pressure.

Rising ocean temperatures and ocean acidification was also altering marine life, moving fisheries southward, threatening shell fisheries, and changing life cycles.

But Dr Salinger said climate warming was just one of several pressures on fisheries, and reducing fishing pressure could only help the situation.

His talk, part of the Auckland Conservations series, will be held from 5.30pm tomorrow, December 4, at the Sir Paul Reeves Building lecture theatre, Governor Fitzroy Pl.

– NZ Herald

Nov
21

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Unite or drown: Campaign against climate change

Category: International Tags:

Low-lying island nations are regarded as some of the most vulnerable to rising seas blamed on man-made climate change. Photo / Thinkstock
Low-lying island nations are regarded as some of the most vulnerable to rising seas blamed on man-made climate change. Photo / Thinkstock

The president of the Seychelles has urged the planet’s small island nations to unite for an unprecedented campaign against climate change or else drown.

The rallying call came at the start of a two-day summit of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), a coalition of small island and low-lying coastal countries, to prepare for global climate talks to take place in Lima, Peru in December.

“Too often the world has chosen to ignore us. Too often we are treated as bystanders,” said Seychelles President James Michel, whose Indian Ocean island nation is hosting the meeting.

“Let us be heard on every beach and every roadside. Let us be heard in Beijing, in Delhi, in Johannesburg, in London, in Moscow, in New York, in Paris, in Rio. Let us be heard in every village, in every town, in every city of the world. Let us be heard on the airwaves,” he said.

“We cannot accept that climate change be treated as an inevitability. We cannot accept that any island be lost to sea level rise. We cannot accept that our islands be submerged by the rising oceans.”

Low-lying island nations, some of which are little more than one metre above sea level, are regarded as some of the most vulnerable to rising seas blamed on man-made climate change.

Some small states in the Pacific such as Kiribati have already begun examining options for their people if climate change forces them from their homeland.

“Climate change is the greatest threat of our time,” Michel said, saying that on the face of it the alliance appeared powerless.

“We do not have the economic means to build sophisticated defences We do not have the latest technology to better adapt to the problem… nor do we have the economic might to apply sanctions on those most guilty of causing the problem,” he said.

“But we have something that is invaluable, something that is powerful: we are the conscience of these negotiations. We stand as the defenders of the moral rights of every citizen of our planet.”

UN climate talks will take place in Lima next month to pave the way to a December 2015 pact in Paris to limit warming to two degrees Celsius. Under the lowest of four emissions scenarios given by UN experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global average temperatures over this century are likely to rise by 0.3-1.7 degrees Celsius, leading to a sea level rise of between 26-55 centimetres.

Under the highest scenario, warming would be 2.6-4.8 Celsius, causing a sea-level rise of 45-82 centimetres.

– AFP

Sep
25

By

How compact cities help curb climate change

Category: International Tags: ,

Barcelona, pictured, has a similar population as Atlanta, but is much smaller in size and emits much less carbon. Photo / Thinkstock

Atlanta and Barcelona are roughly equal in population, but they are not equal in size. The two metropolitan areas, which each contain around 5 million people, look about like this graphic from a bird’s eye view.

And, as you can see in the graphic from the World Resources Institute, carbon emissions from public and private transportation combined are dramatically different, counted in tons of carbon dioxide per person.

Read also:
• Streets fill around world as climate-change activists march for cause
• UN says carbon levels at record high

These two characteristics – the literal footprint of a city and the carbon footprint of its transportation – are intimately linked.

The more spread-out an urban area, the more likely its residents are to run even the most routine errands by car, producing vehicle emissions.

The more compact it is, the less distance residents need to travel every day, and the easier – and cheaper – it is to build public transit.

These two cities illustrate a big piece of the climate change picture that gets much less attention than coal plants or hybrid cars: As the world urbanises at break-neck speed, the way we design growing cities will heavily determine the environmental impact of the people who live there. And decisions we make today about where and how to invest in transportation will lock in those impacts for decades.

If the world’s cities develop like sprawling Atlanta, the area of urbanised land on the planet could triple from 2000 to 2030, according to the World Resources Institute report. The number of cars could double to 2 billion, as could the amount of land used globally per household. The problems that would then arise would be both environmental and economic.

We’d have to spend a lot more money paving roads and extending utilities to people who live farther apart than in close quarters. Houston, the institute points to as an example, spends about 14 per cent of its GDP on transportation. Compact, bike-happy Copenhagen devotes about 4 per cent.


Atlanta is more spread-out than Barcelona, so its residents are more likely to run errands by car, producing vehicle emissions. Photo / Thinkstock

The alternative to Atlanta doesn’t have to look like Manhattan (Barcelona is nowhere near as dense as that). And it would be hypocritical of Americans who already enjoy extensive road infrastructure, ubiquitous cars and spacious homes to now lecture the developing world that it can’t have the same.

The fundamental issue here, though, isn’t about forcing everyone into high-rises or out of their cars and onto bicycles. It’s about planning for the growth to come instead of simply letting it happen haphazardly.

Invariably, the latter leads to sprawl, congestion, wasted productivity and higher infrastructure costs. But if we plan now to accommodate millions more global city-dwellers in more compact cities, with better transit infrastructure, we can rein in the massive costs – for the environment and local economies – associated with unchecked, infinite urban development.

Do this in the world’s 724 largest cities, the institute says, and we might curb greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5 billion tons a year by 2030. If we built denser, more connected cities, the report adds, we could save $15 trillion in infrastructure investments over the next 15 years.

To put this in further perspective, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and UC Davis recently modeled what might happen if global cities heavily shifted away from constructing new roads and parking garages and subsidising gas consumption, and focused instead on expanding public transit and non-motorised transportation (inherent in this shift is the idea that we’d have to build more compactly).

Do that on a massive scale, Michael Replogle and Lewis Fulton concluded, and we could save $100 trillion in public and private capital and transportation operating costs by 2050. We could reduce emissions from urban passenger transport by 40 per cent.

Change the ways we get around, and how much we travel, and an alternative future come 2050 would look very different than if we continue with business as usual.

– Washington Post

Sep
24

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Climate change summit: Talk, pledges, but no commitment

Category: International Tags: , Leave a Comment

 

United Stated President Barack Obama addresses the Climate Summit, at United Nations headquarters. Photo / AP
United Stated President Barack Obama addresses the Climate Summit, at United Nations headquarters. Photo / AP

In the first international test for his climate-change strategy, President Barack Obama pressed world leaders Tuesday to follow the United States’ lead on the issue, even as a United Nations summit revealed the many obstacles that still stand in the way of wider agreements to reduce heat-trapping pollution.

“The United States has made ambitious investments in clean energy and ambitious reductions in our carbon emissions,” Obama said. “Today I call on all countries to join us, not next year or the year after that, but right now. Because no nation can meet this global threat alone.”

But none of the pledges made at Tuesday’s one-day meeting was binding. The largest-ever gathering of world leaders to discuss climate was designed to lay the groundwork for a new global climate-change treaty.

It also revealed the sharp differences that divide countries on matters such as deforestation, carbon pollution and methane leaks from oil and gas production:

– Brazil, home to the Amazon rainforest, said it would not sign a pledge to halt deforestation by 2030.

– The United States decided not to join 73 countries in supporting a price on carbon, which Congress has indicated it would reject.

– And minutes after Obama said “nobody gets a pass,” Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli insisted the world treat developing nations, including China, differently than developed nations, allowing them to release more heat-trapping pollution.

China, the No. 1 carbon-polluting nation, signed on in support of pricing carbon and vowed to stop the rise of carbon-dioxide emissions as soon as possible.

“Today we must set the world on a new course,” said United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, who added that pricing carbon was critical. “Climate change is the defining issue of our age. It is defining our present. Our response will define our future.”

In some ways, the summit, which was part of the annual UN General Assembly, answered that call.

The European Union said its member nations next month were set to approve a plan that would cut greenhouse gases back to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The EU also called for using renewable energy for 27 percent of the bloc’s power needs and increasing energy efficiency by 30 percent.

The United States will not release its new emissions targets until early next year.
“There were not that many surprises,” said Connie Hedegaard, the top climate official for the European Commission, referring to Obama’s speech.

Hedegaard said the first-ever limits on carbon from power plants, proposed by Obama back in June, were “a good signal to send, but after today we will still have to wait until first quarter of 2015 to see how ambitious the United States will be.”

By 2020, China will reduce its emissions per gross domestic product by 45 percent from 2005 levels, Zhang said. But because economic growth in China has more than tripled since 2005, that means Chinese carbon pollution can continue to soar. Still, outside environmentalists hailed the country’s promises because they went beyond any of China’s previous statements.

More than 150 countries set the first-ever deadline to end deforestation by 2030, but that goal was thrown into doubt when Brazil said it would not join. Forests are important because they absorb the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. The United States, Canada and the entire European Union signed onto a declaration to halve forest loss by 2020 and eliminate deforestation entirely by 2030.

If the forest goal is met, the UN says it would be the equivalent of taking every car in the world off the road. A group of companies, countries and nonprofits also pledged to restore more than 1 million square miles of forest worldwide by 2030. Norway promised to spend $350 million to protect forests in Peru and another $100 million in Liberia.

World leaders pledged to spend at least $5 billion making the world more sustainable. France promised $1 billion. Korea pledged $100 million. Others, like Chile, pledged cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

A 2009 agreement called the Copenhagen Accord called for developed countries to contribute $10 billion a year in 2010 and scale it up to $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries cut emissions and adapt to a changing climate.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro chastised “polluting powers” for causing an “evil of such planetary dimensions” and then trying to barter their way out of their responsibilities.

Seychelles President James Michel called small island nations like his “victims of this pollution” and said it was up to the countries that burn the most coal, oil and gas to do the most.

“If they don’t do something, the Earth will not survive, and that will be the end of us all,” Michel said in an interview before the start of the summit.

Ban, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, former US Vice President Al Gore and scientist Rajendra K Pachauri warned that time was short. By 2020, Ban said, the world must reduce greenhouse gases to prevent an escalating level of warming. Five years ago, leaders pledged to keep world temperatures from increasing by another 3.6 degrees Celsius.

Pachauri, who headed a Nobel Prize-winning panel of scientists that studied the issue, and Ban told world leaders the effects of global warming are already here, pointing to a UN building that flooded during the devastating Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

Pachauri said it will get worse with droughts, storms and food and water shortages. He foresaw even more violent climate-driven conflicts.

And, Pachauri said, “a steady rise in our death toll, especially among the world’s poorest. How on Earth can we leave our children with a world like this?”
– AP