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  • IMF Green Fund will raise $100bn a year.

    The managing director of the International Monetary Fund has announced that his staff are working on a ‘Green Fund’ that has the potential to raise $100bn per year by 2020.

    During a speech in Nairobi, Kenya, which focused on Africa’s need to rebuild following the global economic crisis, Dominique Strauss-Kahn said the fund would help with climate change adaptation and mitigation in developing countries.

    Mr Strauss-Kahn called upon the international community to marshal the resources needed to help low-income countries to tackle climate change – an issue he called “the shock to end all shocks.”
    “Without action, Africa will suffer more from drought, flooding, food shortages, and disease, possibly provoking further instability and conflict,” he said.

    “[While] some may rightly argue that climate change is not in the mandate of the IMF…the amount of resources needed has clear macroeconomic implications, sustainable growth in developing countries will require large-scale, long-term investments for climate change adaptation and mitigation.”

    He emphasised that while the IMF did not intend to manage such a fund, it aimed to offer something that “can make a significant contribution to the global debate and for consideration by the international community.”

    He acknowledged that launching such a scheme would entail a major political effort but he also said that the “potential pay-off is enormous–for Africa and the world.”

    Nicholas Stern, author of what is perhaps the most influential report on the economics of climate change, welcomed MR Strauss-Kahn’s speech.

    Lord Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science, said: “The ‘Green Fund’ is a creative and constructive idea which shows that the International Monetary Fund recognises clearly the very serious risks that climate change creates for future global economic growth and development.

    “Both the risks and the necessary response have major macroeconomic implications. As serious as the current economic crisis is, climate change poses an even more profound and fundamental threat to the world if we do not tackle it; as Mr Strauss-Kahn said: “This could well be the shock to end all shocks”.

    “As the world attempts in this decade to manage the build-up of debt in many countries and global saving-investment imbalances, we must at the same time embark on a path of radical reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, and with this new idea, the IMF is rising to a huge and urgent challenge.

    “The two great challenges facing the world this century are managing climate change and overcoming poverty. If we fail on one, we will fail on the other.

    “Developing countries need significant financial support for their plans to make the transition to low-carbon economic development, and to help them adapt to those impacts of climate change that cannot now be avoided. All countries of the world must both reduce emissions and adapt, but Africa will be hit earliest and hardest.

    “A ‘Green Fund’ could raise resources for developing countries quickly and effectively; speed is of the essence as there are great dangers in delay as concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to rise in the atmosphere.”

    Sam Bond

  • Train project goes off the rails

     

    Uncertainty has dogged the monoline insurers backing the project in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Financial Guaranty Insurance and Syncora have been forced to work on restructuring plans.

    Moody’s said the rail consortium’s financial profile would be weaker due to higher long-term funding costs related to uncertainty over the monoline insurance market.

    It pointed out Reliance Rail’s original financial forecasts were based on the availability of AAA-wrapped debt. ”This raises considerable uncertainty which is not consistent with the ratings remaining at investment-grade levels,” it said.

    Reliance Rail, which is 49 per cent owned by the maker of Sydney’s Millennium trains, Downer EDI, sought to allay fears about the project’s financial stability. Shares in Downer closed down 20c at $7.88.

    The consortium chief executive, Terry Kearney, said there were ”plans in place to manage its commercial arrangements should the position of its financial guarantors change”.

    But in a veiled warning, the Transport Minister, David Campbell, said Reliance Rail and Downer had obligations under the contract ”and the government expects these to be met”. The first train is due to enter service late this year. Downer last week dismissed suggestions that changes to its senior management were a sign the contract faced difficulties.

    The head of rail, Guy Wannop, was shifted from the project and responsibility for it has been handed to Downer’s former chief financial officer, Peter Reichler.

    Moody’s raised concerns about the project early last year when it discovered it was running five months late due to a slower-than-expected design approval process.

    Reliance Rail outsourced carriage building to Changchun Railway Vehicle Company in China, which has little experience supplying a developed country. Its carriages run in Iran, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and North Korea.

  • Humans driving extinction faster than species can evolve, say experts

     

    However until recently it has been hoped that the rate at which new species were evolving could keep pace with the loss of diversity of life.

    Speaking in advance of two reports next week on the state of wildlife in Britain and Europe, Simon Stuart, chair of the Species Survival Commission for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature – the body which officially declares species threatened and extinct – said that point had now “almost certainly” been crossed.

    “Measuring the rate at which new species evolve is difficult, but there’s no question that the current extinction rates are faster than that; I think it’s inevitable,” said Stuart.

    The IUCN created shock waves with its major assessment of the world’s biodiversity in 2004, which calculated that the rate of extinction had reached 100-1,000 times that suggested by the fossil records before humans.

    No formal calculations have been published since, but conservationists agree the rate of loss has increased since then, and Stuart said it was possible that the dramatic predictions of experts like the renowned Harvard biologist E O Wilson, that the rate of loss could reach 10,000 times the background rate in two decades, could be correct.

    “All the evidence is he’s right,” said Stuart. “Some people claim it already is that … things can only have deteriorated because of the drivers of the losses, such as habitat loss and climate change, all getting worse. But we haven’t measured extinction rates again since 2004 and because our current estimates contain a tenfold range there has to be a very big deterioration or improvement to pick up a change.”

    Extinction is part of the constant evolution of life, and only 2-4% of the species that have ever lived on Earth are thought to be alive today. However fossil records suggest that for most of the planet’s 3.5bn year history the steady rate of loss of species is thought to be about one in every million species each year.

    Only 869 extinctions have been formally recorded since 1500, however, because scientists have only “described” nearly 2m of an estimated 5-30m species around the world, and only assessed the conservation status of 3% of those, the global rate of extinction is extrapolated from the rate of loss among species which are known. In this way the IUCN calculated in 2004 that the rate of loss had risen to 100-1,000 per millions species annually – a situation comparable to the five previous “mass extinctions” – the last of which was when the dinosaurs were wiped out about 65m years ago.

    Critics, including The Skeptical Environmentalist author, Bjørn Lomborg, have argued that because such figures rely on so many estimates of the number of underlying species and the past rate of extinctions based on fossil records of marine animals, the huge margins for error make these figures too unreliable to form the basis of expensive conservation actions.

    However Stuart said that the IUCN figure was likely to be an underestimate of the problem, because scientists are very reluctant to declare species extinct even when they have sometimes not been seen for decades, and because few of the world’s plants, fungi and invertebrates have yet been formally recorded and assessed.

    The calculated increase in the extinction rate should also be compared to another study of thresholds of resilience for the natural world by Swedish scientists, who warned that anything over 10 times the background rate of extinction – 10 species in every million per year – was above the limit that could be tolerated if the world was to be safe for humans, said Stuart.

    “No one’s claiming it’s as small as 10 times,” he said. “There are uncertainties all the way down; the only thing we’re certain about is the extent is way beyond what’s natural and it’s getting worse.”

    Many more species are “discovered” every year around the world, than are recorded extinct, but these “new” plants and animals are existing species found by humans for the first time, not newly evolved species.

    In addition to extinctions, the IUCN has listed 208 species as “possibly extinct”, some of which have not been seen for decades. Nearly 17,300 species are considered under threat, some in such small populations that only successful conservation action can stop them from becoming extinct in future. This includes one-in-five mammals assessed, one-in-eight birds, one-in-three amphibians, and one-in-four corals.

    Later this year the Convention on Biological Diversity is expected to formally declare that the pledge by world leaders in 2002 to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010 has not been met, and to agree new, stronger targets.

    Despite the worsening problem, and the increasing threat of climate change, experts stress that understanding of the problems which drive plants and animals to extinction has improved greatly, and that targeted conservation can be successful in saving species from likely extinction in the wild.

    This year has been declared the International Year of Biodiversity and it is also hoped that a major UN report this summer, on the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity, will encourage governments to devote more funds to conservation.

    Professor Norman MacLeod, keeper of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum in London, cautioned that when fossil experts find evidence of a great extinction it can appear in a layer of rock covering perhaps 10,000 years, so they cannot say for sure if there was a sudden crisis or a build up of abnormally high extinction rates over centuries or millennia.

    For this reason, the “mathematical artefacts” of extinction estimates were not sufficient to be certain about the current state of extinction, said MacLeod.

    “If things aren’t falling dead at your feel that doesn’t mean you’re not in the middle of a big extinction event,” he said. “By the same token if the extinctions are and remain relatively modest then the changes, [even] aggregated over many years, are still going to end up a relatively modest extinction event.”

    Species on the brink of being declared extinct

    The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists 208 species as “possibly extinct”, more than half of which are amphibians. They are defined as species which are “on the balance of evidence likely to be extinct, but for which there is a small chance that they may still be extant”.

    Kouprey (or Grey ox; Bos sauveli)

    What: Wild cattle with horns that live in small herds

    Domain: Mostly Cambodia; also Laos, Vietnam, Thailand

    Population: No first-hand sightings since 1969

    Main threats: hunting for meat and trade, livestock diseases and habitat destruction

    Webbed-footed coqui (or stream coqui; Eleutherodactylus karlschmidti)

    What: Large black frog living in mountain streams

    Domain: East and west Puerto Rico

    Population: Not seen since 1976

    Main threats: Disease (chytridiomycosis), climate change and invasive predators

    Golden coqui frog (Eleutherodactylus jasperi)

    What: Small orange frog living in forest or open rocky areas

    Domain: Sierra de Cayey, Puerto Rico

    Population: No sightings since 1981

    Main threats: Unknown but suspected habitat destruction, climate change, disease (chytridiomycosis) and invasive predators

    Spix’s macaw (or little blue macaw; Cyanopsitta spixii)

    What: Bright blue birds with long tails and grey/white heads

    Domain: Brazil

    Population: The last known wild bird disappeared in 2000; there are 78 in captivity

    Main threats: Destruction of the birds’ favoured Tabebuia caraiba trees for nesting, and trapping

    Café marron (Ramosmania rodriguesii)

    What: White flowering shrub related to the coffee plant family

    Domain: Island of Rodrigues, Republic of Mauritius

    Population: A single wild plant is known

    Main threats: Habitat loss, introduced grazing animals and alien plants

    Source: IUCN and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. To mark the International Year of Biodiversity, the IUCN is running a daily profile of a threatened species throughout 2010. See iucn.org.

  • EU exporting ‘one third. of CO2 emissions to poorer contries

    EU exporting ‘one-third’ of CO2 emissions to poorer countries

    Ecologist

    9th March, 2010

    Study shows industrialised countries are ‘outsourcing’ carbon emissions to countries like China, one quarter of whose CO2 emissions are from exports

    European countries are ‘outsourcing’ almost a third of their carbon dioxide emissions to less industrialised countries, according to a new study.

    Researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science found that a significant proportion of the carbon emissions associated with the consumption of goods and services in industrialised countries are actually emitted outside their borders.

    Underestimating

    This ‘outsourcing’ of carbon emissions means countries like the UK, which annually imports goods responsible for more than 250 million tonnes of CO2, are underestimating their real carbon footprint.

    In the case of Switzerland, outsourced emissions actually exceeded the amount of carbon dioxide emitted inside the country in the global trade data from 2004 used by the researchers.

    ‘Just like the electricity that you use in your home probably causes CO2 emissions at a coal-burning power plant somewhere else, we found that the products imported by the developed countries of western Europe, Japan, and the United States cause substantial emissions in other countries, especially China,’ said lead author Steven Davis, from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology.

    Outsourced emissions

    Fellow author Ken Caldeira said countries should be measuring the carbon dioxide emissions not only inside their borders but also the amount released during the ‘production of the things that we consume’.

    ‘One implication of emissions outsourcing is that a lot of the consumer products that we think of as being relatively carbon-free may in fact be associated with significant carbon dioxide emissions,’ said Caldeira.

    Both researchers said industrialised countries like the UK and US must admit this fact when it comes to international agreements on cutting emissions.

    ‘Where CO2 emissions occur doesn’t matter to the climate system. Effective policy must have global scope. To the extent that constraints on developing countries’ emissions are the major impediment to effective international climate policy, allocating responsibility for some portion of these emissions to final consumers elsewhere may represent an opportunity for compromise,’ they said.

    Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Professor Edgar Hertwich and colleague Glen Peters have produced a website, ‘The Carbon footprint of nations‘ where you can check on the carbon footprint of individual country’s imports and exports.

    Useful links
    Full study on ‘outsourcing’ of CO2
    Carbon Footprint of Nations website

  • Is Arctic methane on the move?

     

    [Note: Edited Toyota velocities to reflect relative radiative forcings of anthropogenic CO2 and methane. David]

    For some background on methane hydrates we can refer you here. This weeks’ Science paper is by Shakhova et al, a follow on to a 2005 GRL paper. The observation in 2005 was elevated concentrations of methane in ocean waters on the Siberian shelf, presumably driven by outgassing from the sediments and driving excess methane to the atmosphere. The new paper adds observations of methane spikes in the air over the water, confirming the methane’s escape from the water column, instead of it being oxidized to CO2 in the water, for example. The new data enable the methane flux from this region to the atmosphere to be quantified, and they find that this region rivals the methane flux from the whole rest of the ocean.

    What’s missing from these studies themselves is evidence that the Siberian shelf degassing is new, a climate feedback, rather than simply nature-as-usual, driven by the retreat of submerged permafrost left over from the last ice age. However, other recent papers speak to this question.

    Westbrook et al 2009, published stunning sonar images of bubble plumes rising from sediments off Spitzbergen, Norway. The bubbles are rising from a line on the sea floor that corresponds to the boundary of methane hydrate stability, a boundary that would retreat in a warming water column. A modeling study by Reagan and Moridis 2009 supports the idea that the observed bubbles could be in response to observed warming of the water column driven by anthropogenic warming.

    Another recent paper, from Dlugokencky et al. 2009, describes an uptick in the methane concentration in the air in 2007, and tries to figure out where it’s coming from. The atmospheric methane concentration rose from the preanthropogenic until about the year 1993, at which point it rather abruptly plateaued. Methane is a transient gas in the atmosphere, so it ought to plateau if the emission flux is steady, but the shape of the concentration curve suggested some sudden decrease in the emission rate, stemming from the collapse of economic activity in the former Soviet bloc, or by drying of wetlands, or any of several other proposed and unresolved explanations. (Maybe the legislature in South Dakota should pass a law that methane is driven by astrology!) A previous uptick in the methane concentration in 1998 could be explained in terms of the effect of el Nino on wetlands, but the uptick in 2007 is not so simple to explain. The concentration held steady in 2008, meaning at least that interannual variability is important in the methane cycle, and making it hard to say if the long-term average emission rate is rising in a way that would be consistent with a new carbon feedback.

    Anyway, so far it is at most a very small feedback. The Siberian Margin might rival the whole rest of the world ocean as a methane source, but the ocean source overall is much smaller than the land source. Most of the methane in the atmosphere comes from wetlands, natural and artificial associated with rice agriculture. The ocean is small potatoes, and there is enough uncertainty in the methane budget to accommodate adjustments in the sources without too much overturning of apple carts.

    Could this be the first modest sprout of what will grow into a huge carbon feedback in the future? It is possible, but two things should be kept in mind. One is that there’s no reason to fixate on methane in particular. Methane is a transient gas in the atmosphere, while CO2 essentially accumulates in the atmosphere / ocean carbon cycle, so in the end the climate forcing from the accumulating CO2 that methane oxidizes into may be as important as the transient concentration of methane itself. The other thing to remember is that there’s no reason to fixate on methane hydrates in particular, as opposed to the carbon stored in peats in Arctic permafrosts for example. Peats take time to degrade but hydrate also takes time to melt, limited by heat transport. They don’t generally explode instantaneously.

    For methane to be a game-changer in the future of Earth’s climate, it would have to degas to the atmosphere catastrophically, on a time scale that is faster than the decadal lifetime of methane in the air. So far no one has seen or proposed a mechanism to make that happen.

    References

    Dlugokencky et al., Observational constraints on recent increases in the atmospheric CH4 burden. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L18803, doi:10.1029/2009GL039780, 2009

    Reagan, M. and G. Moridis, Large-scale simulation of methane hydrate dissociation along the West Spitsbergen Margin, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L23612, doi:10.1029/2009GL041332, 2009

    Shakhova et al., Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, Science 237: 1246-1250, 2010

    Shakhova et al., The distribution of methane on the Siberian Arctic shelves: Implications for the marine methane cycle, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 32, L09601, doi:10.1029/2005GL022751, 2005

    Westbrook, G., et al, Escape of methane gas from the seabed along the West Spitsbergen continental margin, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L15608, doi:10.1029/2009GL039191, 2009

  • China and India join Copenhagen accord

     

    The action falls short of full “association” and highlights the gulf between the US – the strongest backer of the accord – and the other key nations on how to deliver a global deal to combat climate change.

    Since Copenhagen, there has been confusion over how a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved. All observers, including the UN’s top climate official, Yvo de Boer, are now clear that no such deal will be signed in 2010, with a meeting in South Africa in December 2011 now seen as the earliest date.

    At the heart of the disagreement is whether a new global treaty, like the existing Kyoto protocol, must be agreed unanimously by all 192 members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and be a continuation of Kyoto, which enshrines bindings carbon cuts on industrialised nations but not on developing ones.

    In a letter to de Boer, Trigg Valley, the director of the US office of global climate change, did move back from earlier suggestions that the US wanted to ditch the UN process, seen as cumbersome by some, and negotiate climate change in a smaller group like the G20 or Major Economies Forum. But he has proposed to set aside some of the existing UN texts, which had been laboriously negotiated over several years, and replace them with passages from the Copenhagen accord.

    In the letter from India, Rajani Ranjan Rashmi, environment and forests minister, states baldly the unacceptability of this approach: “The accord is not a new track of negotiations or a template for outcomes.”

    China‘s submissions are also unequivocal. The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, strongly backs the UN process and its consensus-based approach to reaching agreement. “It is neither viable nor acceptable to start a new negotiation process outside the [UNFCCC] and the [Kyoto] protocol”, he said.

    The US now appears isolated as China, India and many other countries, firmly support the idea of continuing with the two existing UN negotiating tracks to try to achieve a consensus.

    The battle of the texts was fought for much of last year with the US backed by Britain and the rest of Europe. Today, the European Commission’s first formal statement since Copenhagen offered some support for the US: “The political guidance in the Copenhagen Accord – which was not formally adopted as a UN decision – needs to be integrated into the UN negotiating texts that contain the basis of the future global climate agreement.”

    But some rich country governments now accept privately that they had “crossed a red line” and failed to recognise that developing countries had not been prepared to abandon the Kyoto protocol without a new legal agreement in place to ensure developed countries reduced emissions.

    “The US wants to appear to be leading the world on climate change but it is in a very, very difficult position,” said Tom Burke, founder of the consultancy E3G, citing the difficulty President Obama faces in getting a climate change bill through a reluctant senate.

    In an recent interview with the Guardian, Yvo de Boer,, played down talk of radical change to the way to the UN process demands unanimous decisions, which some, including Gordon Brown, blamed for a lack of progress in climate talks. He said a major stumbling block to an agreement remained mistrust between the developing and developed countries over the finance needed to help countries adapt to the impacts of global warming.

    Rich countries had offered “recycled contributions from the past” he said, while the build-up to the Copenhagen summit had focused too much on the issue of binding emission reduction targets. De Boer has announced he will step down from the UNFCCC in July. Yesterday, the South African tourism minister, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, was nominated by President Jacob Zuma as a candidate. But other candidates, including from India and possibly Indonesia, are expected to make the private shortlist from which the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, will make his choice.