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Jeremy Jackson: How we wrecked the ocean
Jeremy Jackson, Ted Talks
About this talk
In this bracing talk, coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson lays out the shocking state of the ocean today: overfished, overheated, polluted, with indicators that things will get much worse. Astonishing photos and stats make the case.
About Jeremy Jackson
A leader in the study of the ecology and evolution of marine organisms, Jeremy Jackson is known for his deep understanding of geological time. Full bio and more links…
(April 2010)
Nature loss ‘to damage economies’
Richard Black, BBCnews
The Earth’s ongoing nature losses may soon begin to hit national economies, a major UN report has warned.
The third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) says that some ecosystems may soon reach “tipping points” where they rapidly become less useful to humanity.
Such tipping points could include rapid dieback of forest, algal takeover of watercourses and mass coral reef death.
Last month, scientists confirmed that governments would not meet their target of curbing biodiversity loss by 2010.
Continue reading the main story
Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity
Achim Steiner
UN Environment Programme
“The news is not good,” said Ahmed Djoglaf, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
“We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history – extinction rates may be up to 1,000 times higher than the historical background rate.”
The global abundance of vertebrates – the group that includes mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians and fish – fell by about one-third between 1970 and 2006, the UN says.
Seeing red
The 2010 target of significantly curbing the global rate of biodiversity loss was agreed at the Johannesburg summit in 2002.
It has been clear for a while that it would not be met.
WHAT IS BIODIVERSITY?
Continue reading the main story
UN defines biodiversity as “the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems”
Considered to provide value to humanity in four ways:
Provisioning – providing timber, fish, etc
Regulating – disposing of pollutants, regulating rainfall
Cultural – sacred sites, tourism, enjoyment of countryside
Supporting – maintaining soils and plant growth
But GBO-3 concludes that none of the 21 subsidiary targets set at the same time are being met either, at least not on a global basis.
These include measures such as curbing the rate of habitat loss and degradation, protecting at least 10% of the Earth’s ecological regions, controlling the spread of invasive species and making sure that international trade does not take any species towards extinction.
No government submitting reports to the convention on biodiversity group claims to have completely met the 2010 target.
…An ongoing project known as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) is attempting to quantify the monetary value of various services that nature provides for us.
These services include purifying water and air, protecting coasts from storms and maintaining wildlife for ecotourism.
The rationale is that when such services disappear or are degraded, they have to be replaced out of society’s coffers…
(10 May 2010)
The link to the report is here. -KS
US climate bill or not, the world is on track
Daniela Vincenti-Mitchener, EurActive
You have just arrived from the US. Are we going to have a US climate bill? Why, despite the sense of urgency following the Deepwater oil spill and with the health bill out of the way, are US lawmakers still dragging their feet on legislation?
There is a great deal of uncertainty. But what I am impressed with is what the Obama administration is doing independently of Congress.
For example, in spring 2009 the administration pushed for rather ambitious fuel efficiency standards for new cars sold in the US. That is one major advance.
Another is solving the legislative backlog. Throughout the Bush years, when Congress passed new appliance efficiency standards, the Department of Energy never translated the legislation into regulation.
So, there was actually a backlog of legislation passed even before the Obama administration took over. And one of the first things Obama did was to issue an executive order that the Department of Energy [must] begin to deal with the backlog.
The third thing: the US government is setting its own carbon reduction goal, as I recall, of 40% by 2020. This is for government agencies. The US government owns or leases roughly 500,000 buildings, the government auto fleet is probably over 600,000 vehicles: that’s going to improve efficiency there.
What percentage of the total economy does that represent?
I don’t have that figure. But these are examples of things happening. There are other things happening.
Last year, the US automobile fleet decreased by four million vehicles: that is because new car sales were 10 million but 14 million were scrapped. So we had four million fewer vehicles.
It now looks like that the US auto fleet is going to continue to shrink in the next 10 years, because sales are going to be exceeded by the number of cars scrapped, through 2020. That is because we had very heavy sales between 1994 through 2007: sales ranging from 15-17 million a year. But probably we are not going to have new car sales of much more than 12 million a year.
Isn’t that due to the economic crisis?
Last year, the big drop was partly due to that. But there is something else happening in the US. We are becoming largely an urban population. 80% of Americans live in cities and in cities the demand for cars is much less than in rural areas.
In Washington D.C,, 62% of households, I think, own a motor vehicle. As we urbanise, urban transport is improving and it is improving in most major cities in the United States.
In Washington D.C., for example, we are extending the subway all the way up to Dulles Airport, which is not just the airport, but large parts of Virginia that will have access to public transportation that we did not have before. Similar projects are happening all over the country.
Another thing that economists have missed in forecasting the future of auto sales is the attitude of young people towards cars. That is changing partly because many have been raised in cities, but partly because of changing behaviour.
When I was a teenager in southern New Jersey, for everyone in my class getting a driver’s licence and a car was a right of passage. Everyone did. Socialising depended on the car.
But today young people socialise over the Internet and mobile phones, and cars are not such a big part of teenage socialisation.
In the US, the number of teenage drivers peaked in 1979 at 12 million. It is now down to 10 million and it will probably continue to decline…
…You were saying that domestically the US is moving in the right direction to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but the idea behind the energy and climate bill was also to put a price on carbon and develop a cap-and-trade market to create a global level-playing field. There is a sense that if we don’t have that bill, international negotiations will be at risk. What is your view on this?
My sense is that international climate negotiations have become obsolete and we have not realised it yet. A couple of reasons: when you have a huge number of delegations, no-one wants to come back home appearing to have conceded more than someone else – so it becomes very political.
In this vein, if you look at countries’ delegations they are mostly composed of diplomats and lawyers, not scientists and visionaries. No meteorologists are on these teams, but there should be.
The other problem is that it took years to negotiate for Copenhagen, and we still did not get it. Now we hope for Mexico. But even if we have a meaningful agreement it will take years to get it ratified. And we don’t have much time and we have to move fast.
The reason I mentioned the green movement in the United States is because that is affecting carbon emissions and it is entirely independent from Washington.
In terms of emissions we should look at what has happened over the last two years. Coal usage has dropped 11%, partly because of the recession, but not entirely. During the same two year period we brought 191 new wind farms online, generating 17,000 megawatts of generating capacity.
This has nothing to do with climate legislation, it is happening for other reasons. If we can get a good climate bill, then great. If we don’t get one, it is not the end of the world, because we will still be closing coal-fired power plants and we are still going to be building wind farms…
(10 May 2010)
After the crash – a new direction for climate policy
Mike Hulme, BBCnews
Does the failure of December’s UN climate conference mean the world needs a completely new approach to tackling climate change? It does, a group of academics is arguing this week – and one of them, Mike Hulme, explains why, and what it is that they are recommending.
The gap between the pre-Copenhagen rhetoric of “what must be done to stop climate change” and the reality of the Copenhagen Accord outcome was spectacular.
No agreement of much consequence was reached, and the very efficacy of multilateral climate diplomacy through large set-piece conferences was called into question.
During these same months that the multilateral policy orthodoxy unravelled, the limits were revealed of trying to use science to tame the acrimonious politics of climate change.
Climate change has been represented as a conventional environmental “problem” that is capable of being “solved.”
It is neither of these. Yet this framing has locked the world into the rigid agenda that brought us to the dead end of Kyoto, with no evidence of any discernable acceleration of decarbonisation whatsoever.
So how do we extricate ourselves?
A small group of independent scholars and analysts, including myself, has published The Hartwell Paper, an attempt to offer a radically different way of framing the issues raised by climate change, and hence a different set of approaches for tackling them…
(11 May 2010)
