Climate change is a justice issue – these 6 charts show why

November 7, 2021 / activist360 / Leave a comment

By, Sonja Klinsky, The Conversation (CC BY-ND 4.0).

Climate change has hit home around the world in 2021 with record heat waves, droughts, wildfires and extreme storms. Often, the people suffering most from the effects of climate change are those who have done the least to cause it.

To reduce climate change and protect those who are most vulnerable, it’s important to understand where emissions come from, who climate change is harming and how both of these patterns intersect with other forms of injustice.

I study the justice dilemmas presented by climate change and climate policies, and have been involved in international climate negotiations as an observer since 2009. Here are six charts that help explain the challenges.

Where emissions come from

One common way to think about a country’s responsibility for climate change is to look at its greenhouse gas emissions per capita, or per person.

For example, China is currently the single largest greenhouse gas emitter by country. However, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the U.S., Australia and Canada all have more than twice the per capita emissions of China. And they each have more than 100 times the per capita emissions of several countries in Africa.

Annual carbon dioxide emissions produced per capita

These differences are very important from a justice perspective.

The majority of greenhouse gas emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels to power industries, stores, homes and schools and produce goods and services, including food, transportation and infrastructure, to name just a few.

As a country’s emissions get higher, they are less tied to essentials for human well-being. Measures of human well-being increase very rapidly with relatively small increases in emissions, but then level off. That means high-emitting countries could reduce their emissions significantly without reducing the well-being of their populations, while lower-income, lower-emitting countries cannot.

How rising emissions intersect with human development

Low-income countries have been arguing for years that, in a context in which global emissions must be dramatically reduced in the next half-century, it would be unjust to require them to cut essential investments in areas that richer countries already have invested in, such as access to electricity, education and basic health care, while those in richer countries continue to enjoy lifestyles with high consumption of energy and consumer goods.

Responsibility for decades of emissions

Looking at current emissions alone misses another important aspect of climate injustice: Greenhouse gas emissions accumulate over time.

Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and this accumulation drives climate change. Carbon dioxide traps heat, warming the planet. Some countries and regions bear vastly more responsibility for cumulative emissions than others.

For instance, the United States has emitted over a quarter of all greenhouse gases since the 1750s, while the entire continent of Africa has emitted only about 3%.

Who has contributed most to global CO2 emissions? — *Cumulative emissions, 1751-2017, by country. Hannah Ritchie/Our World in Data, CC by the author Hannah Ritchie.*

People today continue to benefit from wealth and infrastructure that was generated with energy linked to these emissions decades ago.

Emissions differences within countries

The benefits of fossil fuels have been uneven within countries, as well.

From this perspective, thinking about climate justice requires attention to patterns of wealth. A study by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Oxfam found that 5% of the world’s population was responsible for 36% of the greenhouse gases from 1990-2015. The poorest half of the population was responsible for less than 6%.

Who bears responsibility for carbon emissions growth? — *Share of emissions growth by wealth rank. Stockholm Environment Institute and Oxfam, CC BY-ND.*

These patterns are directly connected to the lack of access to energy by the poorest half of the world’s population and the high consumption of the wealthiest through things like luxury air travel, second homes and personal transportation. They also show how actions by a few high emitters could reduce a region’s climate impact.

Similarly, over one-third of global carbon emissions from fossil fuels and cement over the past half-century can be directly traced to 20 companies, primarily producers of oil and gas. This draws attention to the need to develop policies capable of holding large corporations accountable for their role in climate change.

20 companies account for one-third of emissions

Who will be harmed by climate change?

Understanding where emissions come from is only part of the climate justice dilemma. Poor countries and regions often also face greater risks from climate change.

Some small island countries, such as Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands, face threats to their very survival as sea levels rise. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Arctic and mountain regions face much more rapid climate change than other parts of the world. In parts of Africa, changes in temperature and precipitation are contributing to food security concerns.

Many of these countries and communities bear little responsibility for the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. At the same time, they have the fewest resources available to protect themselves.

The countries most vulnerable amid climate change

Climate impacts – such as droughts, floods or storms – affect people differently depending on their wealth and access to resources and on their involvement in decision making. Processes that marginalize people, such as racial injustice and colonialism, mean that some people in a country or community are more likely than others to be able to protect themselves from climate harms.

Strategies for a just climate agreement

All of these justice issues are central to negotiations at the United Nations’ Glasgow climate conference and beyond.

Many discussions will focus on who should reduce emissions and how poor countries’ reductions should be supported. Investing in renewable energy, for example, can avoid future emissions, but low-income countries need financial help.

Wealthy countries have been slow to meet their commitment to provide US$100 billion a year to help developing countries adapt to the changing climate, and the costs of adaptation continue to rise.

Some leaders are also asking hard questions about what to do in the face of losses that cannot be undone. How should the global community support people losing their homelands and ways of life?

Some of the most important issues from a justice perspective must be dealt with locally and within countries. Systemic racism cannot be dealt with at the international level. Creating local and national plans for protecting the most vulnerable people, and laws and other tools to hold corporations accountable, will also need to happen within countries.

These discussions will continue long after the Glasgow conference ends.

Sonja Klinsky, Associate Professor and Senior Global Futures Scientist, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This story is part of The Conversation’s coverage of COP26, the Glasgow climate conference, by experts from around the world.

Amid a rising tide of climate news and stories, The Conversation is here to clear the air and make sure you get information you can trust. Read more of The Conversation’s U.S. and global coverage.

Climate Heat Melts Arctic Snows and Dries Forests

October 13, 2020 / activist360 / Leave a comment

Fires now blaze under Arctic snows, where once even the wettest rainforests burned. Climate change delivers unlikely outcomes.

*Boggy tundra in the western Arctic lets peat layers build up in the soil. Image: By Western Arctic National Parklands, via Wikimedia Commons*

October 12, 2020 by Tim Radford, Climate News Network (CC BY-ND 4.0)

LONDON, 12 October, 2020 − The northern polar region isn’t just warming: it’s also smoking, as the rising heat thaws the Arctic snows. Researchers have identified a new class of fire hazard.

High above the Arctic Circle, fires that flared a year ago continued to smoulder under the snow through the winter to flare up again − two months earlier than usual, and on a scale not seen before.

And if the notion of fire and ice seems a surprise, prepare for the idea of a blazing rainforest. In a second and separate study, researchers exploring the climate lessons from the deep past 90 million years ago have found that, if the atmosphere is rich enough in oxygen, then even the wettest foliage can ignite and burn, to consume perhaps up to 40% of the world’s forest.

Scientists from the US report in Nature Geoscience that they have identified an unexpected threat from “zombie fires” which, despite heavy snowmelt, they say “can smoulder in carbon-rich peat below the surface for months or years, often only detectable through smoke released at the surface, and can even occur through cold winter months.”

The climate change we are causing now, it’s not something where if we don’t fix it, only our grandkids will have to deal with it. The impacts are really long-lasting”
—Garrett Boudinot, then at the University of Boulder Colorado and now with the Colorado Wildlife Council

They warn that in the fast-changing climate of the highest northern latitudes, the evidence from last year and this suggest that extreme temperatures and drier conditions mean there is a lot more surface fuel in the Arctic to catch fire and melt the Arctic snows.

Dwarf shrubs, sedges, mosses and grasses are invading the tundra, to join the surface peat, and even the bogs, fens and marches of the tundra are now burning. In all, 50% of the detected fires above 65° North − many in the Russian Arctic − happened on permafrost: that is, on ever-icy soils.

“It’s not just the amount of burned area that is alarming,” said Merritt Turetsky of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and one of the authors. “There are other trends we noticed in the satellite data that tell us how the Arctic fire regime is changing and what this spells for our climate future.”

Wildfires are on the increase now, in a world in which climate change has delivered hotter and drier conditions for many regions. Unexpectedly, according to a second study in Nature Geoscience, fossilized evidence in rocks in Utah has delivered evidence of massive and sustained forest fires, in the form of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons preserved in black shales laid down in the Cretaceous.

Huge absorption rate

Researchers pieced together a story of dramatic climate change 94 million years ago, when carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, and land and sea plants began to absorb it from the atmosphere on a massive scale. Microbial respiration stepped up too, and parts of the ocean became increasingly low in oxygen.

During 100,000 years of this, so much carbon had been buried in the ground or the oceans that – with the release of molecular oxygen, the O2 in CO2 − atmospheric oxygen levels began to increase. And with that, the scientists say, so did the probability of forest fires, even in wet forest ecosystems. Altogether, perhaps 30% to 40% of the planet’s forests were consumed by fire over 100 millennia.

“One of the consequences of having more oxygen in the atmosphere is that it’s easier to burn fires. It’s the same reason you blow on embers to stoke a fire,” said Garrett Boudinot, then at the University of Boulder Colorado and now with the Colorado Wildlife Council, who led the research.

“This finding highlights the prolonged impacts of climate change. The climate change we are causing now, it’s not something where if we don’t fix it, only our grandkids will have to deal with it. The history of climate change in Earth history tells us that the impacts are really long-lasting.” − Climate News Network

Arctic heating races ahead of worst-case estimates

September 2, 2020 / activist360 / Leave a comment

Arctic heating is happening far faster than anybody had anticipated. And the ice record suggests this has happened before.

September 2, 2020 by Tim Radford, Climate News Network (CC BY-ND 4.0)

*Svalbard, in whose waters temperatures have risen at 1.5°C every decade for the last 40 years. Image: By Vince Gx on Unsplash*

LONDON, 2 September, 2020 – An international team of scientists brings bad news about Arctic heating: the polar ocean is warming not only faster than anybody predicted, it is getting hotter at a rate faster than even the worst case climate scenario predictions have so far foreseen.

Such dramatic rises in Arctic temperatures have been recorded before, but only during the last Ice Age. Evidence from the Greenland ice cores suggests that temperatures rose by 10°C or even 12°C, over a period of between 40 years and a century, between 120,000 years and 11,000 years ago.

“We have been clearly underestimating the rate of temperature increases in the atmosphere nearest to the sea level, which has ultimately caused sea ice to disappear faster than we had anticipated,” said Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen, a physicist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, one of 16 scientists who report in the journal Nature Climate Change on a new analysis of 40 years of data from the Arctic region.

They found that, on average, the Arctic has been warming at the rate of 1°C per decade for the last four decades. Around Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, temperatures rose even faster, at 1.5°C every 10 years.

We have been clearly underestimating the rate of temperature increases in the atmosphere nearest to the sea level, which has ultimately caused sea ice to disappear faster than we had anticipated.”
—Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen, Physicist, University of Copenhagen

During the last two centuries, as atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide climbed from an average of around 285 parts per million to more than 400ppm, so the global average temperature of the planet rose: by a fraction more than 1°C.

The latest study is a reminder that temperatures in the Arctic are rising far faster than that. And the news is hardly a shock: within the past few weeks, separate teams of researchers, reporting to other journals, have warned that Greenland – the biggest single reservoir of ice in the northern hemisphere – is melting faster than ever; more alarmingly, its icecap is losing mass at a rate that suggests the loss could become irreversible.

Researchers have also confirmed that the average planetary temperature continues to rise inexorably, that the Arctic Ocean could be free of ice in summer as early as 2035, and that the climate scientists’ “worst case” scenarios are no longer to be regarded as a warning of what could happen: the evidence is that what is happening now already matches the climate forecaster’s worst case. The latest finding implicitly and explicitly supports this flurry of ominous observation.

“We have looked at the climate models analysed and assessed by the UN Climate Panel,” said Professor Christensen. “Only those models based on the worst case scenario, with the highest carbon dioxide emissions, come close to what our temperature measurements show over the past 40 years, from 1979 to today.” – Climate News Network