climate-change

Preemptively React to Disasters to Save Lives

- Adam Clare

It might sound odd, but if we react to disasters before they happen we can save lives. The Food Security Climate Resilience Facility wants developed nations to release support for impending disasters before they happen. How do we know when disasters will happen when they seem so unpredictable? We can’t foresee all disasters but some are predictable like those caused by climate change.

If we make sure that we have resources to help people suffering from climate change before they get too badly impacted then we can have a better, more efficient, response.

WFP’s Food Security Climate Resilience Facility (FoodSECuRE) will shift the humanitarian model from a reactive system to one that looks forward and saves more lives, time and money. Both FoodSECuRE and a Red Cross project in Uganda – one in a range of Red Cross-Red Crescent forecast-based financing pilot projects – have been activated in recent weeks to meet climate-related disasters, the dramatic predictions of El Niño and extreme weather.

An anticipatory response not only protects people’s lives: new WFP research shows it also saves money. A 2015 FoodSECuRE analysis in Sudan and Niger shows that using a forecast-based system would lower the cost of the humanitarian response by 50 percent.

FoodSECuRE unlocks funds before disasters, but also ensures that funds are available between cycles of disasters, because only through reliable, multi-year funding will vulnerable people build their resilience to the effects of climate change.

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Simple Ways to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions

- Adam Clare

We have the technology today to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 12 gigatonnes! This is based off of looking at only 17 possible climate change solutions. The world can be saved from catastrophic climate change if we want to dave. Let’s hope that these solutions are being considered at COP21.

A new report by European think-tank Sitra, supported by a group of 11 world-leading institutions, has found that the world could cut annual greenhouse gas emissions by about 12 gigatonnes in 2030, using only established and proven climate solutions. No new inventions are required, nor vast amounts of capital.

The Sitra report took 17 climate solutions that have already proven successful in 36 countries, and asked what would happen if these were scaled up internationally, using realistic projections through 2030. The findings indicate that that the solutions could go a long way towards closing the “emissions gap”, the extra emissions reductions required to limit global average warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius, as calculated by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)[

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Improve Your Soil to Fight Climate Change

- Adam Clare

Suburbanization and poor land policy have done incredible damage to soil and food systems. It turns out that the damage down to the soil itself is a contributing factor to the increased speed in human-created climate change. So to slow down the rate of climate change we can improve our soil and you can do so locally or on a large scale.

“We need to focus on the carbon dioxide supply into the atmosphere, but we really need to focus on the demand side as well,” says Larry Kopald, co-founder of The Carbon Underground, a nonprofit that’s advocates for soil carbon storage. “We have to put the CO2 back into a sink where it’s demanded and where it is useful, and improve the reabsorption of the carbon that is already out there.”

Constant plowing causes erosion, allowing soil content to flow into waterways or be blown away. And climate change itself exacerbates soil carbon loss, recent research has shown.

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Economic Discussion of Climate Change Gets Real

- Adam Clare

We’ve already seen climate refugees and climate wars, yet the business world has been rather slow to react. Many businesses operate with the denial of the economic effects of climate change. Today the head of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has warned the financial world that climate change is the biggest challenge we will collectively face. And we have to do so now!

It’s really good to finally see bankers, economists, and corporate entities catch up to the knowledge put forth by hundreds of organizations from the last millennium.

The U.K. central bank’s Governor Mark Carney, who also chairs the Financial Stability Board, as well as the Group of 20 advanced and developing nations’ task force on financial regulation, said climate change could undermine stability in three ways–by causing banks and insurers direct losses from extreme weather, by creating future liabilities for financial firms and their clients from those seeking compensation for climate-related losses and by the unexpected costs of shifting toward a low-carbon economy.

“The combination of the weight of scientific evidence and the dynamics of the financial system suggest that, in the fullness of time, climate change will threaten financial resilience and longer-term prosperity,” Mr. Carney would say in a speech to insurers in London, according to a text of his remarks.

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MIT Encourages Solar Energy to Power the Future

- Adam Clare
Solar roof
Solar roof

Now that climate change has reached the point that it is happening regardless if we stop all human produced carbon output we desperately need to change how we generate electricity. MIT has concluded that a mass adaptation of solar energy is the best route to go. They argue that by installing solar panels far nearly everywhere we can generate more than we need to power the planet.

Solar electricity generation is one of “very few low-carbon energy technologies” with the potential to grow to very large scale, the study said. “As a consequence, massive expansion of global solar-generating capacity to multi-terawatt scale is a very likely and essential component of a workable strategy to mitigate climate change risk.”

The research strongly recommends that a large fraction of federal resources available for solar R&D focus on environmentally benign, emerging thin-film technologies that are based on Earth-abundant materials.

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