eris

joined 1 year ago
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[–] eris@lemm.ee 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I expect that we're getting dangerously close to the point where natural feedback loops begin to outpace human contributions to global warming.

[–] eris@lemm.ee 2 points 7 months ago

I'm guessing it's largely coming from wetland changes. I think I saw a few related studies earlier in the year.

 

Signs that progress was lacking were clear from the outset of the meeting, with nearly all countries missing a deadline to submit official plans on how they will achieve the ambitious biodiversity targets set two years ago at COP15, including protecting 30 per cent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030. A few more of these plans trickled in during the two weeks of the summit, including those from large countries like India and Argentina, but most countries’ strategies are still missing.

Going into COP16, it was clear the world is not on track to hit those targets. Since 2020, the area of the planet’s land and oceans under formal protections has increased just 0.5 per cent, according to a UN report released during the summit. That is a rate far too slow to protect 30 per cent of the planet by the end of the decade.

[...]

Many lower-income countries said their failure to develop and submit plans by the deadline, let alone to begin carrying them out, was due to a dearth of financial resources. COP16 did see higher-income countries make pledges – totalling about $400 million – to help these efforts, but funds remain billions short of the $20 billion annual goal promised by 2025.

[...]

Although COP16’s failure to move the needle on finance disappointed observers, the meeting did manage one key agreement: a deal on how to collect revenue from products developed using the planet’s genetic data. Before the meeting was suspended, countries agreed to urge pharmaceutical and other biotech companies that use such “digital sequence information” to contribute 0.1 per cent of revenue or 1 per cent of profits to a “Cali Fund”. This fund will be used to protect the biodiversity that is the source of such genetic data.

Submitter's note: It seems this voluntary tax is expected to support primarily indigenous populations. But without funding for biodiversity protection plans, habitat destruction will continue largely unabated. The voluntary tax itself would be woefully insufficient for empowering local populations to protect their ecosystems or their traditional lifestyles.

[...] UN estimates suggest the fund could raise up to a billion dollars a year for biodiversity. “It might raise some, but at nowhere near the scale or speed required,” says Pierre du Plessis, a long-time negotiator for the African Union.

[...]

[T]he overall mood was dour. “A real shame of COP16 is that [debates on] digital sequence information sucked up the last drops of energy and time,” says Amber Scholz at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ in Germany.

One reason for the apparent lack of urgency is that the world treats climate change and biodiversity loss as two separate issues. The annual global climate summits are better attended and receive far more attention than the biodiversity negotiation – only six heads of state attended COP16, compared with the 154 who went to last year’s climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. That is a problem when the two issues are intertwined: climate change is one of the main threats to biodiversity, and the most biodiverse ecosystems are often also the best at storing carbon.

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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by eris@lemm.ee to c/collapse@lemm.ee
 

Abstract


Recent reports from climate scientists stress the urgency to implement more ambitious and stringent climate policies to stay below the 1.5 °C Paris Agreement target. These policies should simultaneously aim to ensure distributional justice throughout the process. A neglected yet potentially effective policy instrument in this context is rationing. However, the political feasibility of rationing, like any climate policy instrument, hinges to a large extent on the general public being sufficiently motivated to accept it. This study reports the first cross-country analysis of the public acceptability of rationing as a climate policy instrument by surveying 8654 individuals across five countries—Brazil, Germany, India, South Africa, and the US—on five continents. By comparing the public acceptability of rationing fossil fuels and high climate-impact foods with consumption taxes on these goods, the results reveal that the acceptability of fossil fuel rationing is on par with that of taxation, while food taxation is preferred over rationing across the countries. Respondents in low-and middle-income countries and those expressing a greater concern for climate change express the most favourable attitudes to rationing. As political leaders keep struggling to formulate effective and fair climate policies, these findings encourage a serious political and scientific dialogue about rationing as a means to address climate change and other sustainability-related challenges.


Related:

 

Researchers from Japan and Thailand investigating microplastics in coral have found that all three parts of the coral anatomy—surface mucus, tissue, and skeleton—contain microplastics. The findings were made possible thanks to a new microplastic detection technique developed by the team and applied to coral for the first time.

These findings may also explain the "missing plastic problem" that has puzzled scientists, where about 70% of the plastic litter that has entered the oceans cannot be found. The team hypothesizes that coral may be acting as a "sink" for microplastics by absorbing it from the oceans. Their findings were published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

[...]

As for types of microplastics, the team found that nylon, polyacetylene, and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) were the three most prevalent, accounting for 20.11%, 14.37%, and 9.77%, respectively, of the identified samples.

 

Dr. Hansen has published a new communiqué.

If you appreciate his work, you may consider supporting CSAS.

(It's a little worrisome that research of this importance relies on private donations, isn't it?)

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