This is how Japanese youth view climate change today

November 27, 2022 / activist360

By Naoko Kutty, World Economic Forum

Pressure to act on the climate crisis is building among Japanese youth.
They are beginning to exert influence domestically and at international forums like COP27.
Japan’s younger generation must be fully integrated into climate policy-making decisions.
Read the blog in Japanese here.

As the world becomes increasingly aware of climate change, there is growing interest in sustainability, especially among the younger generation who will live to face the challenges in the next part of the 21st century. A survey of 6,800 consumers aged 15-69 in Japan about attitudes toward sustainability found that many consumers of all generations are open to paying a premium for sustainable products. What is noteworthy, however, is the flexibility on price. Generation Z have the highest tolerance for paying more, with 20% that would consider paying double – which is 2.5 to 10 times more than other generations.

Japanese about attitudes paying a premium for sustainable products.

Japanese youth mobilizing

Youth activism to demand more concrete action on climate change from the government and business is also gaining momentum. Youth Climate Conference Japan, which provides a forum for young people to talk about the climate crisis, has exchanged views with the government, major political parties, Japan Business Foundation, and has made the voices of young people visible in the form of policy proposals such as the regulation of plastic packaging and compulsory emissions labelling on food by 2025. The fact that the new generation will be the most affected by climate change, yet policy decision-makers are much older, creates a huge gap in society’s ability to address the crisis, according to one of the steering members of Youth Climate Conference Japan.

In addition, Global Climate Action, in which young people from around the world appealed for stronger measures against global warming, was organized around Japan to coincide with the UN General Assembly in September, with about 400 young people participating in demonstrations in the streets. At this protest, the first youth climate one in three years due to the spread of COVID-19, young people expressed their urgent desire to address the climate crisis, saying: “It is now or never to stop climate change” and “We can reshape our future.” One university student who is part of the Fridays For Future‘s movement in Japan, which was inspired to take action by Greta Thunberg’s school strike in Sweden, said she hopes the Japanese government will take more concrete action against its stance of maintaining coal-fired power production.

Next-generation leaders at COP27

With young people around the world speaking out against climate change more than ever before, global youth are taking a seat at COP27 in Egypt for the first time ever. Designed to amplify children and youth voices within global climate policy-making, the COP27 Children and Youth Pavilion in Egypt is positioned front and centre in the Blue Zone and is entirely led by young people.

Japanese high school and university students also participated in COP27. Suzuka Nakamura and Daiki Yamamoto, who have also been involved in Fridays For Future, are making a film at the conference, saying: “We now want to not only appeal, but also listen to people from various standpoints and send out messages.” The two students, who have continued to raise their voices on the streets and in the National Diet, admit that: “We feel weighed down by the fact that we were expected to play a role in solving climate change simply because we are young.” Their new project, entitled record 1.5, is a documentary that will chronicle the voices and actions of young people, environmental activists and local people from around the world gathering at COP27. Through these recordings, they hope to share the sense of urgency that those affected by climate change victims have for creating a foundation for dialogue toward essential solutions.

Involving children and youth in decision-making

As our planet faces a critical situation due to climate change, the world needs to take seriously the fact that young people are speaking out and taking action to challenge adults’ response to climate change.

Japan is on the path to carbon neutrality, with an interim goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 46% compared to 2013 levels by 2030. According to the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, 797 local governments and more than 200 companies have declared their commitment to net zero emissions by 2050, and the public and private sectors are working together to achieve this goal. As the voices of children and youth are incorporated into these efforts, change will accelerate. Given that young people are powerful agents of change, it is hoped that a system will soon be in place to enable their participation in all decision-making processes related to climate change.

Ants – with their wise farming practices and efficient navigation techniques – could inspire solutions for some human problems

November 20, 2022 / activist360

By Scott Solomon, The Conversation

King Solomon may have gained some of his famed wisdom from an unlikely source – ants.

According to a Jewish legend, Solomon conversed with a clever ant queen that confronted his pride, making quite an impression on the Israelite king. In the biblical book of Proverbs (6:6-8), Solomon shares this advice with his son: “Look to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise. Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.”

While I can’t claim any familial connection to King Solomon, despite sharing his name, I’ve long admired the wisdom of ants and have spent over 20 years studying their ecology, evolution and behaviors. While the notion that ants may offer lessons for humans has certainly been around for a while, there may be new wisdom to gain from what scientists have learned about their biology.

Ants have evolved highly complex social organizations.

Lessons from ant agriculture

As a researcher, I’m especially intrigued by fungus-growing ants, a group of 248 species that cultivate fungi as their main source of food. They include 79 species of leafcutter ants, which grow their fungal gardens with freshly cut leaves they carry into their enormous underground nests. I’ve excavated hundreds of leafcutter ant nests from Texas to Argentina as part of the scientific effort to understand how these ants coevolved with their fungal crops.

Much like human farmers, each species of fungus-growing ant is very particular about the type of crops they cultivate. Most varieties descend from a type of fungus that the ancestors of fungus-growing ants began growing some 55 million to 65 million years ago. Some of these fungi became domesticated and are now unable to survive on their own without their insect farmers, much like some human crops such as maize.

Ants started farming tens of millions of years before humans.

Ant farmers face many of the same challenges human farmers do, including the threat of pests. A parasite called Escovopsis can devastate ant gardens, causing the ants to starve. Likewise in human agriculture, pest outbreaks have contributed to disasters like the Irish Potato Famine, the 1970 corn blight and the current threat to bananas.

Since the 1950s, human agriculture has become industrialized and relies on monoculture, or growing large amounts of the same variety of crop in a single place. Yet monoculture makes crops more vulnerable to pests because it is easier to destroy an entire field of genetically identical plants than a more diverse one.

Industrial agriculture has looked to chemical pesticides as a partial solution, turning agricultural pest management into a billion-dollar industry. The trouble with this approach is that pests can evolve new ways to get around pesticides faster than researchers can develop more effective chemicals. It’s an arms race – and the pests have the upper hand.

Ants also grow their crops in monoculture and at a similar scale – after all, a leafcutter ant nest can be home to 5 million ants, all of which feed on the fungi in their underground gardens. They, too, use a pesticide to control Escovopsis and other pests.

Yet, their approach to pesticide use differs from humans’ in one important way. Ant pesticides are produced by bacteria they allow to grow in their nests, and in some cases even on their bodies. Keeping bacteria as a living culture allows the microbes to adapt in real time to evolutionary changes in the pests. In the arms race between pests and farmers, farming ants have discovered that live bacteria can serve as pharmaceutical factories that can keep up with ever-changing pests.

Whereas recent developments in agricultural pest management have focused on genetically engineering crop plants to produce their own pesticides, the lesson from 55 million years of ant agriculture is to leverage living microorganisms to make useful products. Researchers are currently experimenting with applying live bacteria to crop plants to determine if they are effective at producing pesticides that can evolve in real time along with pests.

Improving transportation

Ants can also offer practical lessons in the realm of transportation.

Ants are notoriously good at quickly locating food, whether it’s a dead insect on a forest floor or some crumbs in your kitchen. They do this by leaving a trail of pheromones – chemicals with a distinctive smell ants use to guide their nest mates to food. The shortest route to a destination will accumulate the most pheromone because more ants will have traveled back and forth along it in a given amount of time.

In the 1990s, computer scientists developed a class of algorithms modeled after ant behavior that are very effective at finding the shortest path between two or more locations. Like with real ants, the shortest route to a destination will accumulate the most virtual pheromone because more virtual ants will have traveled along it in a given amount of time. Engineers have used this simple but effective approach to design telecommunication networks and map delivery routes.

Not only are ants good at finding the shortest route from their nests to a source of food, thousands of ants are capable of traveling along these routes without causing traffic jams. I recently began collaborating with physicist Oscar Andrey Herrera-Sancho to study how leafcutter ants maintain such a steady flow along their foraging paths without the slowdowns typical of crowded human sidewalks and highways.

We are using cameras to track how each individual ant responds to artificial obstacles placed on their foraging trails. Our hope is that by getting a better understanding of the rules ants use to respond to both obstacles and the movement of other ants, we can develop algorithms that can eventually help program self-driving cars that never get stuck in traffic.

Look to the ant

To be fair, there are plenty of ways ants are far from perfect role models. After all, some ant species are known for indiscriminate killing, and others for enslaving babies.

But the fact is that ants remind us of ourselves – or the way we might like to imagine ourselves – in many ways. They live in complex societies with division of labor. They cooperate to raise their young. And they accomplish remarkable engineering feats – like building structures with air funnels that can house millions – all without blueprints or a leader. Did I mention their societies are run entirely by females?

There is still a lot to learn about ants. For example, researchers still don’t fully understand how an ant larva develops into either a queen – a female with wings that can live for 20 years and lay millions of eggs – or a worker – a wingless, often sterile female that lives for less than a year and performs all the other jobs in the colony. What’s more, scientists are constantly discovering new species – 167 new ant species were described in 2021 alone, bringing the total to more than 15,980.

By considering ants and their many fascinating ways, there’s plenty of wisdom to be gained.

Fossil fuel emissions still increasing

November 13, 2022 / activist360

‘This year we see yet another rise in global fossil CO2 emissions, when we need a rapid decline.’

By Brendan Montague, The Ecologist (Creative Commons 4.0)

Global carbon emissions in 2022 remain at record levels – with no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed to limit warming to 1.5°C, according to the Global Carbon Project science team.

If current emissions levels persist, there is now a 50% chance that global warming of 1.5°C will be exceeded in nine years.

The new report projects total global CO₂ emissions of 40.6 billion tonnes (GtCO₂) in 2022. This is fuelled by fossil CO2 emissions which are projected to rise 1.0% compared to 2021, reaching 36.6 GtCO₂ – slightly above the 2019 pre-COVID-19 levels. Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to be 3.9 GtCO₂ in 2022.

Schematic representation of the global carbon cycle — Global Carbon Budget 2022 — Schematic representation of the overall perturbation of the global carbon cycle caused by anthropogenic activities averaged globally for the decade 2012–2021. See legends for the corresponding arrows and units. The uncertainty in the atmospheric CO2 growth rate is very small (±0.02 GtC yr−1) and is neglected for the figure. The anthropogenic perturbation occurs on top of an active carbon cycle, with fluxes and stocks represented in the background and taken from Canadell et al. (2021) for all numbers, except for the carbon stocks in coasts, which are from a literature review of coastal marine sediments (Price and Warren, 2016). (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License)

Atmospheric

Projected emissions from coal and oil are above their 2021 levels, with oil being the largest contributor to total emissions growth. The growth in oil emissions can be largely explained by the delayed rebound of international aviation following COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

The 2022 picture among major emitters is mixed: emissions are projected to fall in China (0.9%) and the EU (0.8%), and increase in the USA (1.5%) and India (6%), with a 1.7% rise in the rest of the world combined.

The remaining carbon budget for a 50% likelihood to limit global warming to 1.5°C has reduced to 380 GtCO2 (exceeded after nine years if emissions remain at 2022 levels) and 1230 GtCO2 to limit to 2°C (30 years at 2022 emissions levels).

To reach zero CO₂ emissions by 2050 would now require a decrease of about 1.4 GtCO₂ each year, comparable to the observed fall in 2020 emissions resulting from COVID-19 lockdowns, highlighting the scale of the action required.

Land and ocean, which absorb and store carbon, continue to take up around half of the CO₂ emissions. The ocean and land CO₂ sinks are still increasing in response to the atmospheric CO₂ increase, although climate change reduced this growth by an estimated 4% (ocean sink) and 17% (land sink) over the 2012-2021 decade.

Meaningful

This year’s carbon budget shows that the long-term rate of increasing fossil emissions has slowed. The average rise peaked at +3% per year during the 2000s, while growth in the last decade has been about +0.5% per year.

The research team – including the University of Exeter, the University of East Anglia (UEA), CICERO and Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich – welcomed this slow-down, but said it was “far from the emissions decrease we need”.

The findings come as world leaders meet at COP27 in Egypt to discuss the climate crisis.

“This year we see yet another rise in global fossil CO2 emissions, when we need a rapid decline,” said Professor Pierre Friedlingstein, of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, who led the study.

We are at a turning point and must not allow world events to distract us from the urgent and sustained need to cut our emissions.
—Professor Corinne Le Quéré, Royal Society Research Professor at UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences

“There are some positive signs, but leaders meeting at COP27 will have to take meaningful action if we are to have any chance of limiting global warming close to 1.5°C. The Global Carbon Budget numbers monitor the progress on climate action and right now we are not seeing the action required.”

Emissions

Professor Corinne Le Quéré, Royal Society Research Professor at UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences, said: “Our findings reveal turbulence in emissions patterns this year resulting from the pandemic and global energy crises.

“If governments respond by turbocharging clean energy investments and planting, not cutting, trees, global emissions could rapidly start to fall.

“We are at a turning point and must not allow world events to distract us from the urgent and sustained need to cut our emissions to stabilise the global climate and reduce cascading risks.”

Land-use changes, especially deforestation, are a significant source of CO₂ emissions (about a tenth of the amount from fossil emissions). Indonesia, Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo contribute 58% of global land-use change emissions.

Transparent

Carbon removal via reforestation or new forests counterbalances half of the deforestation emissions, and the researchers say that stopping deforestation and increasing efforts to restore and expand forests constitutes a large opportunity to reduce emissions and increase removals in forests.

The Global Carbon Budget report projects that atmospheric CO₂ concentrations will reach an average of 417.2 parts per million in 2022, more than 50% above pre-industrial levels.

The projection of 40.6 GtCO₂ total emissions in 2022 is close to the 40.9 GtCO₂ in 2019, which is the highest annual total ever.

The Global Carbon Budget report, produced by an international team of more than 100 scientists, examines both carbon sources and sinks. It provides an annual, peer-reviewed update, building on established methodologies in a fully transparent manner.