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Companies Promise Climate Action | Earth Wise

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A growing number of major corporations are making promises on climate and the promises are getting more ambitious and for faster action.  More companies are disclosing their carbon emissions and more of those companies have emissions reduction targets. 

There has also been an acceleration in the rate at which companies set so-called science-based targets, which are specific, measurable carbon reduction goals that align the company with the Paris Agreement.  Among the hundreds of companies with such targets are Coca-Cola, Nike, Best Buy, Walmart, and Hilton Hotels.  According to one analysis, the number of Fortune 500 companies with concrete, ambitious carbon targets quadrupled in the past four year to 23%.

Environmental advocates have been pressuring companies for decades, but companies seem to be far more proactive now despite the fact that the U.S. government has largely dropped the ball on climate issues.

The reasons include the fact that the effects of climate change are becoming clearer to companies.  Wildfires, rising sea levels, droughts and other aspects of the crisis both make headlines and affect business operations.

Meanwhile, solar and wind energy have gotten significantly cheaper, making it more attractive for companies to shift away from fossil fuels.

At the same time, investors are increasingly asking companies to act on climate issues.  Consumers, employees, and the general public are increasingly demanding action and even children are adding to the pressure to act.

Making these commitments is one thing; following through on them and sticking to them is another.  There are real concerns that there is a great deal of green-washing going on among companies trying to project a favorable image.  In any case, if companies really want to lead on climate, they need to put their money where their mouths are.

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Better Late Than Never? Big Companies Scramble To Make Lofty Climate Promises

Photo, posted June 22, 2016, courtesy of Mike Mozart via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Climate Change And El Niño

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The term El Niño refers to a large-scale ocean-atmosphere climate interaction linked to a periodic warming in sea surface temperature across the central and east-central equatorial Pacific Ocean.  Amazingly, the phenomenon was originally recognized by fishermen off the coast of South America in the 1600s, with the appearance of unusually warm water in the Pacific Ocean.

According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, climate change is increasing the frequency of extreme El Niño events, leading to intensifying droughts, worsening floods, and shifting hurricane patterns.

The study, led by scientists in China and the US, looked at data from 33 El Niños dating back to 1901.  Since the 1970s, El Niños have been forming farther to the west in the Pacific Ocean, where temperatures are warmer.  Strong El Niños can cause severe drought in dry climates such as Australia and India, intense flooding in wetter climates such as the US Pacific Northwest and Peru, and more hurricanes to form in the Pacific and fewer in the Atlantic.

Before 1978, 12 out of 14 El Niños formed east of the International Dateline.  Since 1978, all 11 have formed in the central or western Pacific Ocean a shift of hundreds of miles.  There have been three so-called super El Niños since the shift – in 1982, 1997, and 2015.  These have set new average temperature records and triggered catastrophic natural disasters.

With rising global temperatures, El Niños are likely to continue to intensify, with major impacts on human societies around the world.

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Climate Change is Making El Niños More Intense, Study Finds

Photo, posted January 20, 2016, courtesy of Los Angeles District via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Intense Rainfall And Crops

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The warming of the planet does not necessarily imply local weather will be warmer or drier than average.  While heatwaves and droughts are increasingly common events in many places, so are intense rain events.

A new study led by scientists at the University of Illinois has found that intense rainfall is as damaging to the U.S. agricultural sector as heatwaves and excessive droughts.

The study examined more than three decades of crop insurance, climate, soil, and corn yield data.  Researchers found that since 1981, corn yields in the U.S. Midwest were reduced by as much as 34% during years with excessive rainfall.  Years with drought and heatwaves experienced yield losses of up to 37%.

Intense rain events can physically damage crops, delay planting and harvesting, restrict root growth, and cause oxygen deficiency and nutrient loss.  The study estimated that between 1989 and 2016, excessive rainfall caused $10 billion in agricultural losses. However, excessive rainfall can have either negative or positive impact on crop yield and the effects can vary regionally.

Parts of the Midwest have already experienced a 42% increase in the heaviest precipitation events since 1958.  Climate change models predict that much of this region will experience even more frequent and intense precipitation events in the coming decade.

According to the study, excessive rainfall is the major cause of crop damage currently in the U.S. for corn, and also has broad impacts for other staple crops such as soybeans and wheat. The authors suggest that as rainfall becomes more extreme, reforms will be needed in the U.S. crop insurance industry in order to better meet planting challenges faced by farmers. 

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Intense Rainfall Is As Damaging to Crops As Heatwaves and Drought, and Climate Change Is Making It Worse

Photo, posted October 2, 2013, courtesy of the United Soybean Board via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

The Price of Chocolate

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The Ivory Coast has lost more than 80% of its forests in the last 50 years, mainly as a result of cocoa production.

The Ivory Coast is a West African country the size of New Mexico and it produces more than a third of the world’s cocoa.  But around 40% of the country’s cocoa crop – supplying more than a tenth of the world’s chocolate bars – is grown illegally in the country’s national parks and 230 supposedly protected government-owned forests. 

Over the decades, as many as one million landless people from drought-stricken places like Mali and Burkina Faso moved into national parks and protected forests and started farming cocoa.  The Marahoue National Park alone has 30,000 illegal inhabitants.

Most cocoa is grown in monocultures of what is known as the full-sun system, which requires the removal of all surrounding trees.  As a result, many allegedly protected areas have been completely converted into farms.  Most of the cocoa in the Ivory Coast is grown on small farms, typically plots of 7 to 10 acres.  The farmers are caught in an exploitative and corrupt system of cocoa trading and land appropriation, and most earn less than a dollar a day.  Meanwhile, government agencies charged with protecting the forests are more interested in collecting bribes than safeguarding woodlands.

The Ivory Coast government is unveiling a plan to actually remove protection from most of its remaining forests and hand them over to the world’s chocolate traders.    The claim is that this will protect other forests by improving cocoa productivity in already deforested areas.  Needless to say, conservation groups are dubious that the new plan will positively impact an already terrible situation.

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The Real Price of a Chocolate Bar: West Africa’s Rainforests

Photo, posted April 17, 2015, courtesy of Tom Coady via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Climate Change And Infertility

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Many of us are all too familiar with the effects of climate change.  Our changing climate, as a result of our actions, is leading to rising global temperatures, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, wildfires, more weather extremes like floods and droughts. But a lesser known effect of climate change could lead to frightening consequences: infertility.

According to researchers at the University of Liverpool, rising temperatures could make some species sterile and lead them to succumb to the effects of climate change far earlier than currently thought. Their work was recently published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and it was produced in collaboration with scientists from the University of Leeds, University of Melbourne, and Stockholm University.

Biologists and conservationists are trying to predict where species will be lost due to climate change so that suitable reserves can be established in other locations.  But the problem is that most data on when temperature will make an area unlivable for a species is based on its ‘critical thermal limit’ or CTL.  This is the temperature at which a species would collapse, stop moving, or die. 

The authors of the article fear that the impact of climate change on species survival is being underestimated.  Because rather than zeroing in on lethal temperatures, the scientists argue the focus should be on the temperatures at which organisms can no longer breed.  Extensive plant and animal data suggest organisms lose fertility at a lower temperature than their CTL.

The scientists have proposed a new fertility-based metric to gauge how organisms function as temperatures climb: Thermal Fertility Limit or TFL.  Understanding when a species will cease to reproduce will certainly help conservation measures. 

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Climate change and infertility — a ticking time bomb?

Photo, posted August 11, 2013, courtesy of Mike Lewinski via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Indonesian Deforestation

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Deforestation is defined as the intentional destruction of trees and other vegetation without reforesting or allowing the forest to regenerate itself. 

In Indonesia, industrial agriculture, primarily for the production of palm oil, is a major driver of deforestation.  But, according to researchers at Duke University, its impact has diminished  proportionately in recent years as other natural and human causes have emerged. Their peer-reviewed findings were recently published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

According to the study’s lead author, large-scale plantations were responsible for more than half of Indonesia’s deforestation in the late 2000s, peaking between 2008-2010 when an average of 1.5 million acres of forest was lost annually.  The expansion of the massive plantations was responsible for 57% of the forest loss. Between 2014-2016, an average of more than 2 million acres of forest was lost annually, but plantation expansion only accounted for 25% of this figure.  While the overall rate of deforestation continued to grow, other factors were responsible for most of it.

Conversions of forests to grasslands rose sharply in 2015 and 2016 when El Nino caused severe droughts and forest fires. Small-scale farming, often overshadowed by industrial agriculture, was also found to play a bigger role, accounting for 25% of all forest loss. 

Indonesia has experienced some of the highest rates of deforestation.  Its forests absorb and store vast amounts of climate-warming carbon dioxide, help prevent erosion and flooding, and provide habitat to thousands of species.  Understanding the varied causes of Indonesian deforestation should help conservationists and policymakers better address the problem.

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Palm oil not the only driver of forest loss in Indonesia

Photo, posted March 26, 2018, courtesy of Achmad Rabin Taim via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Droughts And Hydropower

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Recent droughts in several western states have led to well-publicized problems including wildfires, loss of trees, and damage to crops.  A lesser-known impact of drought conditions has been increases in emissions of carbon dioxide and harmful air pollutants from power generation.

When hydropower runs low in a drought, western states tend to ramp up power generation – and therefore emissions – from fossil fuels.   According to a new study from Stanford University, droughts caused about 10 percent of the average annual carbon dioxide emissions from power generation in California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington between 2001 and 2015.

Water is used in electricity generation both directly for hydroelectric power and indirectly for cooling in thermoelectric power plants.  When water for hydropower comes up short because of drought conditions, natural gas or coal-fired power plants are brought online to pick up the slack.

These drought-induced shifts in energy sources led to an estimated 100 million tons of carbon dioxide across 11 western states between 2001 and 2015.  That is the equivalent of adding 1.4 million vehicles to the region’s roadways.  California, whose legislature has mandated that the state be carbon-free by 2045, contributed about half of this total.  Washington, which is considering a similar mandate, contributed nearly a quarter of the total.

Western states in recent years have suffered intense droughts that scientists expect to become more common as global warming continues to intensify.   The new study indicates that in regions where clean, reliable hydropower has been an important part of the energy mix, it will be increasingly necessary to provide clean backup energy sources in order to meet emission reduction targets.

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Droughts boost emissions as hydropower dries up

Photo, posted March 7, 2016, courtesy of Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Using Less Water

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In recent times, there has been a downward trend in water use in the United States.  It has been driven by increasingly efficient use of critical water resources in the face of persistent droughts in various parts of the country and awareness of the importance of conserving this resource.

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Saving Wheat

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Rising temperatures, drought, pests and diseases are moving north into the U.S. heartland and are increasingly posing a threat to the wheat crop.  An insect called the Hessian fly is reducing crop yields by 10% a year in the Midwest.  Average temperatures in the Midwest have risen by 2 degrees since 2000, and periods of time between rainfalls is lengthening.  Conditions in some areas of the Midwest are getting to be more like those in the Middle East.

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Extreme Weather Increasing

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It sure seems like extreme weather is increasingly common:  floods, droughts, extreme rainfall, powerful snowstorms, hurricanes and so on.  But we tend to focus on recent events and often give them undue emphasis.  So, it is reasonable to ask whether extreme weather really is more common these days.

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Lawnmower Pollution

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Over 50 million Americans mow their lawns each week, which uses 800 million gallons of gas per year and produces tons of air pollutants.  Garden equipment engines were completely unregulated with respect to emissions until the late 1990s and still emit high levels of carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, and nitrogen oxides.  In fact, gas mowers and their relatives like leaf blowers and edgers produce 5% of the air pollution in this country.

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Climate Change And Hurricanes

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No single weather event can be attributed to climate change.   Storms, floods and droughts have always happened and some of them have always been severe.   However, two centuries of people burning fossil fuels has altered temperatures just enough that some of the storms we have seen in recent times have been much worse than they otherwise would have been.

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Dangerous Diseases From The Past

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Climate change is poised to transform life on Earth as we know it.  The higher temperatures, the rising seas, the more frequent floods and droughts, among the countless other consequences associated with climate change, threaten to do irreversible damage to the world in the coming decades.

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Floating Solar

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Installing solar arrays on the surface of bodies of water is an idea that is catching on around the world.  Such installations are especially attractive in places like Japan, where land resources are scarce.  In the UK, there are a couple of these so-called “floatovoltaic” projects underway – one outside of London and one near Manchester.

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Half A Degree

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The average global temperature is one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels.   There has long been a goal to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees above those levels.  But the Paris climate conference has set a more ambitious goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.   What difference would that half a degree make?

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Climate Change And The Global Food System

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One of the most troubling aspects of global climate change is its potential impact on the production, distribution and quality of food.   A report issued at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference focused on identifying climate change impacts on global food security.  Food security is the ability of people to obtain and use sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food.  Even without the impact of climate change, food security is a challenge because of increasing population, poverty, and changing eating habits.

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