Airplane Carbon Emissions May Cause Trade War

Story first appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek.

The global aviation industry group warned Tuesday that governments might be moving toward a trade war over Europe's carbon charges on airlines and appealed for a negotiated settlement.

China, India, Russia and 26 other governments that oppose the charges issued a joint declaration in February that cited possible retaliatory steps such as imposing charges on European airlines.

The last thing that anyone wants as an industry is a trade war. The problem is that the way things stand right now, there is a distinct possibillity of something like that happening.

The European Trading System requires airlines that fly to and from Europe to buy permits for all the carbon they emit en route. The charges took effect Jan. 1 but airlines will not be required to pay until next year.

China and India have prohibited their airlines from cooperating and Beijing has blocked purchases of European aircraft by its carriers in protest. European courts have rejected legal challenges by U.S. airlines, supported by governments including China and India.

Talks on a global system to regulate airline emissions have begun in the International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. body. The European Union has said it would be willing to reconsider its system if an agreement is reached.

Aviation accounts for 3 percent of total carbon emissions but is the fastest-growing source.

EU officials have defended the charges as in line with Europe's efforts to be a leader in curbing climate change. Environmentalists welcomed the program, one of the most far-reaching measures adopted by any government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Other governments object that Europe should not be imposing charges on what airlines do outside Europe.

The conflict adds to uncertainty for an aviation industry that is being squeezed by high fuel prices and a weak global economy.

The industry can't afford to be caught in the middle of a trade war over the EU's extraterritorial application of its emissions trading system.

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Rio+20 Conference Ad Tells Us What We Want

To promote next June's Rio+20 conference and the need for sustainable development, the United Nations launched a campaign engaging people in a global conversation on the kind of communities they would like to live in twenty years from now.

Geoengineering Effects Rainfall

Story first appeared in Reuters.

Large-scale engineering projects aimed at fighting global warming could radically reduce rainfall in Europe and North America, a team of scientists from four European countries have warned.

Geoengineering projects are controversial, even though they are largely theoretical at this point. They range from mimicking the effects of large volcanic eruptions by releasing sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, to deploying giant mirrors in space to deflect the sun's rays.

Proponents say they could be a rapid response to rising global temperatures but environmentalists argue they are a distraction from the need to reduce man-made carbon emissions.

Critics also point to a lack of solid research into unintended consequences and the absence of any international governance structure for such projects, whose effects could transcend national borders.

A small geoengineering experiment in the UK was recently abandoned due to a dispute over attempts by some of the team involved to patent the technology.

In this new study scientists from Germany, Norway, France and the UK used four different computer models that mimic the earth's climate to see how they responded to increased levels of carbon dioxide coupled with reduced radiation from the sun.

Their scenario assumed a world with four times the carbon dioxide concentration of the preindustrial world, which the lead author says is at the upper end, but in the range of what is considered possible at the end of this century.

They found that global rainfall was reduced by about 5 percent on average using all four models.

Climate engineering cannot be seen as a substitute for a policy pathway of mitigating climate change through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Under the scenario studied, rainfall diminished by about 15 percent, or about 100 millimeters per year, compared to pre-industrial levels, in large areas of North America and northern Eurasia.

Over central South America, all the models showed a decrease in rainfall that reached more than 20 percent in parts of the Amazon region.

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Can We Change Our Ways?

Story first appeared in The Washington Post.

As thousands of people prepare to convene in Brazil this month for the Rio+20 Earth Summit, scientists and environmentalists alike are sending a sharp message: The planet is in dire straits.

On Wednesday, the United Nations Environment Program issued a report showing that the world has made significant progress on only four of the 90 most important environmental objectives agreed on through the U.N. process. Gains have come in eliminating ozone-depleting substances, phasing out lead in gasoline, increasing access to water supplies and encouraging research into marine pollutants. In most other categories — including protecting plant and animal species, curbing marine pollution and conserving water supplies — humanity is falling short.

If current trends continue, if current patterns of production and consumption of natural resources prevail and cannot be reversed and ‘decoupled,’ then governments will preside over unprecedented levels of damage and degradation.

The journal Nature published a series of articles Wednesday on the precarious state of the planet, including a study that warns that the world could be approaching a tipping point at which human activities cause a “planetary-scale critical transition” to a different environment.

Twenty years ago, the Rio Earth Summit produced three major treaties intended to head off these kinds of dire outcomes, including the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity. Although the global community has failed to achieve the goals set out by those accords, the meeting was seen as a critical moment at which environmental concerns took center stage in global policymaking.

But even the most prominent proponents of the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, which will take place June 20-22 in Rio de Janeiro, do not expect this gathering to produce a significant global agreement.

As things currently stand, we are facing two likely scenarios — an agreement so weak it is meaningless, or complete collapse. Neither of these options would give the world what it needs.

We do need these moments to sit back and reflect on where we are, and where we’re going. Pledges by world leaders at these meetings often fail to materialize later on. They don’t translate into action in the way that we would hope.

‘Cloud of commitments’
The global economic crisis has made this year’s summit especially difficult. The fact that we have an economic recession in Europe and economic problems everywhere is not helping very much.

At this point, many of the groups most invested in environmental action are working on what is refered to as “a cloud of commitments” — concrete pledges by businesses, governments and civil society groups that could help shift the environmental trajectory, and can be monitored in real time on the Internet.

Last month, for example, 10 African leaders vowed at a summit organized by Conservation International in Botswana to pursue a more sustainable path of development that would preserve what they called “natural capital,” the environmental resources their countries possess.

On Tuesday, the World Bank issued a report outlining how it will work to foster economic development that conserves natural resources and limits pollution even as it provides transportation, energy and food to a growing population. The U.N. Secretary General has unveiled an initiative called “Sustainable Energy for All,” which is likely to become a focus of discussions at Rio along with a push to eliminate fossil-fuel subsidies. The proposal aims to double energy efficiency and double renewable sources in the global energy mix by 2030 while providing reliable lighting and heating to the more than 1.3 billion who still lack it.

Many are looking to the business community to take the lead at this point, by integrating environmental concerns into their everyday operations. Ceres, a group of investors, companies and nonprofit groups, recently conducted a survey of 600 major U.S. companies and found that just a quarter of them had incorporated sustainability into the way their firms were governed, and only a third had targets with a specific date for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, it noted that Coca-Cola was on track to improve its water efficiency this year by 20 percent compared with 2004, and Intel has cut its greenhouse gas emissions 8 percent two years after tying employee and executive compensation to meeting the firm’s environmental targets.

Companies are getting it, that climate, water depletion and natural resource scarcity are business risks, not off-balance-sheet risks.

In the meantime, however, researchers continue to publish sobering findings. The UNEP report noted that indoor air pollution from fine particles — emitted from cookstoves and other sources — causes nearly 2 million premature deaths a year, including 900,000 deaths in children younger than 5.

The world missed its U.N. target for achieving a significant cut in the loss of species by 2010, it added.

In some ways, global connectivity and rising incomes are helping fuel these problems. One paper Nature published Wednesday, authored by six researchers from Australia, Japan and Italy, found that 30 percent of the threats facing species worldwide stem from international trade, whether it is palm oil production or mining.

The most daunting assessment may have come from a team of 22 scientists from five nations that warned that humans have radically changed 43 percent of the Earth’s surface from its natural state, far outpacing the 30 percent change that helped trigger the last planetary-scale environmental shift roughly 11,000 years ago, when glaciers advanced and then retreated.

The paper’s lead author, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley, said that although it is impossible to predict an exact moment when this change could occur, what we’re trying to convey is that these planetary tipping points actually do happen.

If development keeps up at its current pace, he added, humans will have transformed 50 percent of the world’s land by 2025, and the consequences could be dramatic.

People don’t do so well with rapid change because we base our whole economic system and food production and way of life expecting what is natural now is going to be natural going into the future. many policymakers have not grasped how interconnected their communities now are. People tend to think on a very local scale, and that’s what we actually need to get away from, both scientifically and politically. We have to realize in some sense, there is no local scale anymore.

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International Trade Takes Toll on Endangered Species

Story first appeared in Reuters.

Nearly a third of animal species under threat in developing nations can be linked to global trade of manufactured goods and commodities such as sugar, coffee and cocoa, researchers said on Wednesday.

Policies aimed at curbing threats to species should take into account not only local producers who degrade the land but also foreign consumers who benefit from products at the expense of the habitat, said a study led by the University of Sydney. Excluding invasive species, the study found that 30 percent of species threats are due to international trade.

For example, the spider monkey is endangered and threatened by habitat loss linked to coffee and cocoa plantations in Mexico and Central America, which export their products abroad.

The United States, the European Union and Japan are the main destinations for commodities associated with species threats, while Indonesia and Malaysia are among the biggest exporters, the study found.

To combat biodiversity loss, policies aimed at producers, traders and consumers must be implemented in parallel.

Biodiversity has decreased by an average of 28 percent globally since 1970 and the world would have to be 50 percent bigger to have enough land and forests to provide for current levels of consumption and carbon emissions, conservation group WWF said last month.

TRADE LINKS
The researchers quantified the links to trade after comparing 25,000 animal species threat records from the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, the world's main authority on the conservation status of species, with more than 15,000 commodities produced in 187 countries.

For instance, German imports are linked to 395 species threats and Malaysian exports to 276 species threats.

The study found that this is the first time, that the important role of international trade and foreign consumption as a driver of threats to species has been comprehensively quantified. Many endangered species, however, suffer several threats.

The round whipray, a species of stingray, is under threat in Indonesia owing to chemical pollution and loss of its native mangrove habitat to shrimp farming, logging and coastal development.

The authors say their findings highlight the urgency for improved regulation, as well as widespread use of supply-chain certification and consumer product labeling.

Widespread environmentally-friendly certification labels or those showing the product's carbon footprint are a must.

Border taxes should also be considered for implicated products.

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New Mexico Wildfires Tests Forest Management

Story first appeared in USA Today.

A wall of smoke advances across a vast swath of rugged country in southwestern New Mexico where the nation's wilderness movement was born nearly a century ago.

From the air, the smoke stretches as far as the eye can see. On the ground, firefighters talk about the steep canyons that keep them from directly attacking what has become the largest wildfire in New Mexico's recorded history and the largest currently burning in the country.
Sure, things might look bad. But to land managers and scientists, the record-setting blaze represents a true test of decades of work aimed at returning fire to its natural role on the landscape — a test that comes as many Western states grapple with overgrown forests, worsening drought and a growing prospect for more megafires.

The Whitewater-Baldy fire has destroyed a dozen cabins while marching across more than 354 square miles of the Gila National Forest. A pair of lightning-sparked fires grew together to form the massive blaze.

Unlike last year's megafires in New Mexico and Arizona, this blaze is burning in territory that has been frequently blackened under the watchful eye of the Gila's fire managers.

Starting in the early 1970s, the Gila has been leading the way when it comes to implementing such an active fire management strategy. Instead of immediately dousing flames in the wilderness, forest managers have let them burn as long as conditions are favorable.

The question that the Whitewater-Baldy fire is expected to answer is whether that strategy will pay off with more natural, less intense fires.

Experts feel that there's a great opportunity here to study a fire like this. The opportunity exists to look at how this fire has behaved differently in terms of vegetation mortality, effects on wildlife and fish habitat and water quality. We can study how it burned in the wilderness relative to areas with other types of fire management strategies and other types of ignition patterns.

So far, the word from the fire lines is that the majority of the 227,000-acre blaze has burned with low to moderate intensity, not the kind of near-nuclear strength that was exhibited last year with the Las Conchas blaze in northern New Mexico. In that case, entire mountainsides were vaporized, leaving nothing behind but the white ashy skeletons of what used to be trees.

And as for those unburned pockets within the fire's boundaries, experts believe many of those spots have experienced low-intensity fire numerous times over the last century to make them more resilient.

Previously burned areas have also helped slow the flames on the fire's eastern flank.

The fact that this is wilderness and the wilderness of the Gila has seen a lot of fires, fire management teams are comfortable with allowing it to burn. What they do is monitor it and help steer it around to keep some of the impacts lower than they would otherwise be on their own.

The rugged terrain has forced firefighters to attack the flames indirectly by starving the fire of fuels along its perimeter.
The smoke also has prevented direct attack from the air. Several helicopters and small planes are helping ground crews with backburn operations.

While a burn severity map has yet to be released, members of the incident management team are estimating that only 20% of the fire has burned at high intensity.

Last week, the fire made a 60,000-acre run in one day, scorching mixed conifer at high elevations as the flames were pushed by gusts of up to 60 mph.That kind of fire can be devastating, experts said.

With fire behavior ranging from active to extreme, it will be some time before the scientists can get on the ground to see how the Gila has fared. Until then, they are working on gathering the decades of research done on the Gila, which is home to the world's first designated wilderness. It was the father of the wilderness movement, forester and conservationist, who pushed for the formation of the Gila Wilderness in 1924.

Tree ring data that dates back to the 1500s tells of the forest's fire history and the age of its trees. The perimeters of the Gila's fires along with information about their severity and vegetation mortality for the last century have also been compiled by the U.S. Forest Service.

There's also more ecological data from the federal Joint Fire Science program that can be used for comparisons.

It might not look like it on TV right now, but there haven't been any fatalities or dramatic housing loss like we see in Southern California or it burning so dramatically close to communities like last year's Las Conchas fire.

Experts agree that the Gila will see changes regardless of the severity of the fire. In the worst spots, aspens and other shrubs are expected to take over.

When the fire is punching multi-thousand-acre holes in areas of ponderosa pine and drier mixed conifer types with no seed sources surviving, it's very difficult for those conifers to be re-established.

Fire managers are also expecting flooding. As the Las Conchas fire showed, steep denuded areas resulted in walls of water washing down canyons during the rainy season.

Residents in Glenwood are already worried about the prospect of flooding, and federal wildlife managers are concerned about what sediment and ash in the waterways could mean for the native Gila trout.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is also monitoring two packs of endangered Mexican gray wolves that are situated to the north and east of the fire. Last year, wolves in Arizona were able to escape the massive Wallow fire with their pups, but it's unclear how mobile the packs in New Mexico are since their pups are much younger.

The fire is about 15% contained, which much of that being on the fire's northern and northwestern flanks.

On Saturday, the more than 1,200 firefighters who are battling the fire continued to build lines to corral the flames before more threatening winds and dry conditions developed.

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