Archive for category: GRIST

When governments make decisions, economic considerations often trump everything else —  human well-being, social connections, the health of the environment. According to a new report from the United Nations, this imbalance is driving the global biodiversity crisis and the human suffering associated with it.

“Despite the diversity of nature’s values,” the report says, “most policymaking approaches have prioritized a narrow set of values at the expense of both nature and society, as well as future generations.” It calls for elected officials to take into account a much broader array of values that prioritize sustainability and human thriving.

The far-reaching assessment comes from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES. The group of 82 experts periodically collates research and makes recommendations to stem the accelerating loss of nature, much like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does for global warming.

The IPBES’s latest report, written over four years, represents a unique attempt to evaluate the varied lenses through which humans view the natural world. Many of these so-called “values of nature” exist outside standard economics, like nature’s well-established psychological benefits. But the report finds that these values have been overshadowed by a shallow set of profit-and-loss considerations: “market-based instrumental values of nature,” as the report puts it, citing nature’s capacity to produce massive quantities of food as an example. Nearly three-quarters of all the studies that IPBES reviewed, published between 2010 and 2020, focused on these market-based values.

Ignoring nature’s broader benefits has helped plunge the world into a  biodiversity crisis, the report says. More than 1 million species of plants and animals are at risk of extinction, and deforestation caused the annual loss of nearly 250 million acres of forests each year between 2015 and 2020. A separate report released last week by the IPBES suggests that these losses could have profound consequences for people, as wild species support the lives and livelihoods of more than half of the world’s population.   

Although the most recent report doesn’t focus on any one country, snubbing nature’s nonmonetary benefits has stymied U.S. environmental action, too. When the Congressional Budget Office began providing cost-focused analyses on legislation for the environment, poverty, and health in the 1970s, it eroded the moral justification for such efforts. By the 1990s, this approach had opened the door to fossil fuel industry-funded research that made environmental action look prohibitively expensive. 

To change the paradigm, the IPBES authors recommend four broad ways of considering our relationship with the natural world: “living from,” “living with,” “living in,” and “living as” nature. These frameworks encourage decision-makers to take into account not only what nature can provide to humans, but also the way it fosters a sense of identity and spiritual fulfillment. “Living with nature” also recognizes that other species have a right to thrive, regardless of any “value” they provide to humans.

“Shifting decision-making towards the multiple values of nature is a really important part of the system-wide transformative change needed to address the global biodiversity crisis,” said Patricia Balvanera, a professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a  co-chair of the assessment, in a statement. “This entails redefining ‘development’ and ‘good quality of life’ and recognizing the multiple ways people relate to each other and to the natural world.”

One illustrative example comes from South American Indigenous communities, whose notion of Buen Vivir — “good living” — has informed rights-of-nature movements to protect rivers, forests, and wild species from development. Just this March, legislation in Panama recognized nature’s legal right to “exist, persist, and regenerate its life cycles” and to “be restored” after people have damaged it

The report comes amid growing recognition of the need to prioritize varied worldviews. Last year, a report commissioned by the U.K. Treasury found that an excessive focus on yardsticks like economic growth is putting the world at “extreme risk” of ecological breakdown. Separately, U.N. climate scientists have begun to incorporate Indigenous perspectives into their influential assessment reports, recognizing the role that Indigenous people can play in the global effort to ramp down greenhouse gas emissions.

For the IPBES report, the authors drew from more than 13,000 references, including scientific papers as well as from Indigenous people and local communities. “Recognizing and respecting the worldviews, values, and traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples and local communities allows policies to be more inclusive, which also translates into better outcomes for people and nature,” said Brigitte Baptiste, a biologist at Universidad Ean in Colombia who co-chaired the assessment, in a statement. The report calls for increased “citizen engagement” to help people articulate and realize more values than monetary ones.

The group’s findings come ahead of the next meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty, scheduled to take place in Montreal, Canada, in December. There, negotiators from 193 countries will set the next decade of nature goals that they can bring back to their governments. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nature is in crisis. A UN report says short-sighted economics is to blame. on Jul 12, 2022.

It’s looking to be a hot summer for just about everyone in the United States. And there’s not much hope for rain to ease the heat. That’s according to the latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate scientists, released Thursday. 

From June to August, unusually hot temperatures are expected across all 50 states, particularly the Southwest and Northeast. Much of the country is also expected to have a dry summer. 

“Typically La Niña favors warmer than normal conditions over much of the West,” said NOAA meteorologist Johnna Infanti, referring to the climate pattern currently influencing weather in the U.S. It involves cooler sea surface temperatures and strong east-to-west winds in the Pacific Ocean, and it affects weather around the globe. 

NOAA’s forecast offers little relief to the West, an area gripped by a 22-year-long megadrought, estimated to be the worst in 1,200 years. Scientists noted that California just had its driest January to April on record, with 3.25 inches of rain. That same period was the third-driest yet for Nevada and Utah. While forecasters expect these conditions to persist, the drought also appears poised to crawl east, with most of Iowa and eastern Texas likely to develop drought conditions this summer. 

Extended drought has states worried, since it ratchets up their wildfire risk. Fires have already scorched New Mexico this month, weeks before the fire season peaks in June. Scott Overpeck, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, told the Guardian, “We have been seeing the writing on the wall, in the sense that we know with the drought conditions that it is going to be a rough season.” 

Prospects for a hot, dry summer also have the people who operate electric grids concerned. This week, the North American Electric Reliability Corp., known as NERC, which monitors the grid across the U.S. and Canada, issued a sober assessment for the season, underscoring the challenges of keeping the power running against the backdrop of extreme weather driven by climate change. As temperatures spike, demand for electricity soars as people turn on their air conditioning. But with drought crippling hydropower generation, there’s less available power to meet demand. 

That means an unreliable grid. When there isn’t enough power, operators set off outages, rolling blackouts, to avoid long-term damage to the grid. About two-thirds of the U.S. is vulnerable to a shaky supply this summer, according to the NERC assessment. During extreme events, like the Pacific Northwest’s heat wave last year, when temperatures set new records for three days straight, that can be lethal. Washington state alone estimates that 100 people died from the heat wave alone last summer, making it the deadliest weather-related event in state history.

The highest risks are in the upper Midwest and southern states directly east of the Mississippi River. There, NERC’s report said, retiring power plants, climbing demand, and low winds strain the power supply. Plus, an important transmission line running from Illinois to Arkansas that was damaged by a tornado last December is still out of service. Elsewhere, drought in Missouri River Basin states hampers the gas, coal, and nuclear plants that use river water to stay cool. 

The East Coast will likely get an early taste of summer heat this weekend: A heat wave bringing the hottest temperatures since last August is expected to bake states from North Carolina to Maine. If that’s not enough to worry about, the grid watchdog identified two more hurdles this summer: supply chain woes that slow major transmission projects and the possibility of Russian cyberattacks. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Summer forecast: Extreme heat with a chance of rolling blackouts on May 20, 2022.

Nations have moved too slowly to curb climate change, and now must take swift and aggressive steps if they hope to avoid the worst impacts of global warming, the world’s top scientists warned on Monday. Greenhouse gas emissions must peak within the next three years, and in the next eight, the world must push fossil fuels aside, rapidly scaling up the use of clean energy like wind and solar. It is only through these “rapid and deep” emissions reductions, they said, that the world can get on track to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and avoid 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming. 

A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC — a United Nations body of leading climate experts from around the world — highlights key strategies countries can use to drive down greenhouse gas emissions and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. There is no time to lose, the report authors said. Although emissions are rising more slowly than they have in previous years, humanity has lost precious time to drive down climate pollution, and even with the most ambitious policies, there is now only a 38 percent chance that the world will stave off a 1.5-degree C rise in temperature. This is a significant decrease from 2018, when the panel predicted a 55 percent chance of staying below that threshold.

“We are at a crossroads,” IPCC chair Hoesung Lee, an economist at Korea University in Seoul, South Korea, told reporters. “We have the tools and know-how to limit warming and secure a livable future.” 

The new report is the final installment in a three-part assessment from the IPCC. The body’s previous reports detailed both the current and future catastrophic impacts from climate change and warned that time is running out to adapt to them. This week’s report focuses on mitigation — what we can do to halt climate change. 

Power workers inspect solar panels at a power station in China’s Jiangsu Province. Costfoto / Future Publishing via Getty Images

The authors’ top recommendation: Immediately move away from fossil fuels and replace them with renewable technologies. According to the panel’s calculations, the climate pollution associated with existing and planned fossil fuel infrastructure is already enough to launch the planet past 1.5 degrees C and potentially past 2 degrees C of warming. New fossil fuel infrastructure is incompatible with international climate goals, and up to $4 trillion of fossil fuels and related infrastructure will likely have to be abandoned by 2050 in order to keep within safe temperature limits. Coal use must virtually end, the report added, while oil and gas use must fall by 60 and 45 percent, respectively. 

“Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement to reporters. “Such investments will soon be stranded assets, a blot on the landscape, and a blight on investment portfolios.”  

Political barriers — rather than scientific, monetary, or technological ones — are currently holding the world back from urgent climate targets, the report stressed. Although some countries’ policies have helped avoid significant carbon emissions, world governments are still disproportionately investing in fossil fuels rather than renewable energy. Existing capital and technology are sufficient to keep climate goals within reach, the authors said, and could be leveraged to effect “major transitions” toward wind, solar, and other renewable technologies — many of which have become much cheaper since the IPCC’s fifth assessment report was released in 2014. Some countries have already made the switch to energy systems that are mostly powered with renewables, and there are a number of systemic solutions — smart grids, energy storage, green hydrogen — that can help others make similar progress. 

Other strategies covered in the report include electrifying vehicles, locking in agricultural carbon, and upping the efficiency of cities and buildings, which are hotspots for greenhouse gas emissions. Cities should support public transit, walking, and biking, and enhance carbon storage with trees, green spaces, and nature-based building materials. Growing cities must plan ahead, the authors said, keeping housing and employment centers close together. 

Climeworks carbon capture factory in Iceland.
Halldor Kolbeins/AFP via Getty Images

Since the IPCC’s last major assessment eight years ago, there’s much more information on carbon capture and removal technologies — ways to suck carbon out of the air and store it in rocks, plants, or in underwater reservoirs. According to the scientists, these tools — in addition to slashing our emissions — will be “unavoidable” in the race to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, especially for hard-to-decarbonize sectors such as heavy industry. Some nature-based carbon removal methods such as reforestation and improved forest management, the report noted, are already widely practiced and can have important co-benefits for biodiversity and local communities. 

However, the report also notes that many carbon sequestration technologies have failed to scale as quickly as projected in previous assessments, in contrast to the rapid rise in wind, solar, and batteries. Meanwhile, carbon removal has vocal opponents across the environmental movement. Many feel it represents a “distraction” from critical efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, allowing the world to go on polluting as it waits for technology that does not yet exist at scale. 

Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, acknowledged that while carbon removal comes with significant drawbacks, decades of climate inaction may have closed the door on other options. “Because we have failed to rein in global warming emissions to date, the choices available to us are no longer ideal,” she said in a statement. “In addition to deep, absolute cuts in heat-trapping emissions, some amount of these emissions will also need to be removed from the atmosphere if nations are to limit planetary warming to 1.5 degrees or even 2 degrees Celsius.” 

With immediate action, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C is still within reach. However, the models that the authors assessed say we likely can’t avoid overshoot, which describes a scenario in which the world doesn’t entirely steer clear of a 1.5-degree C rise. Instead, global temperatures would blow past that limit before eventually creeping back down — in response to emissions reductions and carbon removal — and stabilizing somewhere around 1.3 degrees C (2.3 degrees F) by the end of the century. 

Monday’s report was the slowest to be approved in the IPCC’s 34-year-long history: For 16 days, scientists and government delegates combed through the 64-page summary for policymakers. The final sprint involved 40 hours of line-by-line negotiations. 

The precise deliberations are a testament to the high stakes surrounding the report, which likely represents the IPCC’s last chance to publish a mitigation roadmap before warming beyond 1.5 degrees C is locked in. Along with a synthesis report that the IPCC will release this fall, the analysis released Monday will inform negotiations at the next global climate conference, COP27, in November in Egypt. There, world leaders will assess progress toward international climate goals as they face increasing pressure to “close the gap” between their climate rhetoric and action. 

Lee, the IPCC chair, called the panel’s reports the “backbone” of the upcoming climate deliberations, while Guterres called for climate promises to be turned into action even before the conference begins. “It’s time to stop burning our planet,” he said, “and start investing in the abundant renewable energy all around us.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘We are at a crossroads’: New IPCC report says it’s fossil fuels or our future on Apr 4, 2022.

Northeast Ohio’s Cuyahoga River bisects the city of Cleveland, winding its way past parks, railyards, and downtown breweries before emptying out into Lake Erie. The waterway has come a long way since 1969, when the river’s polluted waters caught fire and brought national attention to the nascent environmental movement. Today, people fish in the river, stroll along its banks, and enjoy paddleboarding festivals. But several dozen times a year, heavy rains flood the waterway with raw sewage. 

Like many older cities in the Midwest and Northeast, Cleveland’s sewer and stormwater systems are combined, and too often can’t handle the volume of water coursing through them after a heavy storm. The city is a little over halfway through an effort to upgrade this network, building tunnels to store extra wastewater deep underground. But there’s a problem, experts warn: The designs are based on decades-old rainfall estimates that do not reflect current – let alone future – climate risk. 

That worries Derek Schafer, executive director of the West Creek Conservancy, a local nonprofit that aims to protect Cleveland’s watershed. “Flooding is natural,” Schafer told Grist. But now, “with a changing climate system, we have higher volumes at quicker intervals, so our systems become even more quickly inundated.”

Today, combined sewer systems like Cleveland’s are found in more than 700 communities around the country. In 2004, the last year for which federal data is available, they collectively released 850 billion gallons of raw sewage into rivers, streams, and lakes — closing beaches, polluting drinking water sources, and contributing to harmful algae blooms. The Midwest is home to 43 percent of these systems, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA.

As of 2004, more than 700 communities around the U.S. had combined sewer systems, where wastewater and stormwater flow through the same pipes. Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Grist

Spilling large amounts of sewage into waterways is a direct violation of the Clean Water Act. And many cities, from Detroit to Chicago, have been forced to sign consent decrees with the EPA, requiring them to reduce the number of overflows by upgrading water infrastructure and capacity. This process, however, can take decades from planning, funding, and permitting to completion, said Becky Hammer, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council who focuses on federal clean water policy. That means the rainfall estimates that dozens of cities use to design their billion-dollar projects are already obsolete by the time they’re finished. The government’s own rainfall estimates are also outdated — it last released figures for Ohio, for example, in 2004 — making planning difficult even if updates were required.

Youngstown, Ohio finalized a $160 million long-term control plan for sewage overflows in 2015 based on rainfall data from the early 1980s. It’s currently in the second phase of its plan, which involves constructing a “wet-weather facility” to store and treat excess sewage and stormwater during periods of heavy rain. Indianapolis is halfway through a $2 billion tunnel project that was designed more than 20 years ago, using precipitation estimates from 1996 to 2000. Chicago is in the final stage of a nearly $4 billion effort to construct 109 miles of tunnels and three reservoirs that was designed in 1972, then updated based on modeling conducted in 2012. 

Now, climate change is setting these infrastructure projects even further behind. In the decades since cities’ plans were first approved, storms in the Midwest have grown more frequent and intense. Total annual precipitation in the Great Lakes region has increased by 14 percent, according to research from scientists at the University of Michigan, and the amount of rainfall from the heaviest storms has grown by 35 percent. 

A man tries to unplug a sewer drain in a suburb of Chicago following heavy rains in July 2017.
Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

The EPA doesn’t instruct cities to consider climate change projections in their proposals, despite a report from the agency finding that “many systems could experience increases in the frequency of [sewage overflow] events beyond their design capacity.” A provision that would have required projects receiving federal funding to conduct climate change assessments was struck from the bipartisan infrastructure bill before its passage last year, Hammer said.

“There are thousands of people [with] sewage and floodwater either backing up into their homes, or running off streets into their basements, damaging property and threatening their health,” Joel Brammeier, president of the nonprofit Alliance for the Great Lakes, told Grist. It is a “failure to modernize our water infrastructure to deal with the reality that people are facing across the Midwest.” 

The issue is gaining new urgency with an infusion of federal funding from November’s bipartisan infrastructure bill expected to hit state coffers in the coming months. Though cities haven’t yet figured out exactly how they’re going to use the funding or how much they’ll receive, the package includes $55 billion for water, wastewater, and stormwater management over five years. Biden’s proposed Build Back Better bill, which is currently stalled in the Senate, also includes $400 million per year directly to deal with combined sewer systems. 

Cleveland started the overhaul of its water infrastructure system in 1994 under the federal Combined Sewer Overflow Control Policy, and work got underway after signing a consent decree with the EPA in 2010. The $3 billion initiative, known as Project Clean Lake, was designed using rainfall data from the early 1990s. The project’s seven new tunnels — three of which are complete, with another operational next year and three others in the construction and design phases — are built to capture most of the runoff from the “largest-volume storm” in a “typical year,” which would dump 2.3 inches of rain in 16 hours, said Doug Lopata, a program manager for the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District. 

Since Cleveland began planning Project Clean Lake, however, climate impacts have gotten worse. In September 2020, Cleveland received nearly four inches of rainfall in 24 hours, the third-highest total for a single day in the city. Half of the top ten rainfall days in the city have occurred since 2000, with more than 3.5 inches of rain falling in a day in 2005, 2014, and twice in 2011. Looking ahead, more intense rainfall in the 21st century “may amplify the risk of erosion, sewage overflow, interference with transportation, and flood damage” in the Great Lakes region, Michigan researchers found. 

A sign warns of a combined sewer overflow, a point where sewage and rainwater discharge into the Olentangy River in Columbus, Ohio. Diana Kruzman/Grist

Despite these changes, Lopata said the sewer district isn’t planning to change the structure or design of Project Clean Lake, which aims to capture 98 percent of the water that would otherwise result in sewage overflows. Lopata believes that goal will still be achieved, even as climate change stresses the system. And even if sewage overflows aren’t eliminated entirely, he said, they’ll be reduced enough to keep the sewer system in compliance with the EPA. However, Lopata also said the district is monitoring rainfall data from the past decade and conducting an internal study to learn more about how the “typical year” has changed. 

Anticipating greater and more frequent rainfall doesn’t just mean building bigger tunnels to accommodate it, though. Brammeier said cities will have to implement more of what’s known as “green infrastructure” — restoring wetlands that can absorb water and removing impervious surfaces like asphalt to reduce the amount of water that ends up in combined sewer systems in the first place. That’s going to require “a new way of thinking about doing water infrastructure at a large scale,” Brammeier said. 

“You can’t build a tunnel big enough to stop the impacts of climate change,” Brammeier said. “You’ve got to think about how we’re going to make our water [infrastructure] more resilient in a more integrated way than we’ve thought about it in the past.”

Some cities are waking up to that message. Project Clean Lake includes $42 million in green infrastructure investments, and Detroit developed a 15-year green infrastructure plan to replace a tunnel project that was canceled in 2009. Milwaukee, which completed its own “deep tunnel” in 1993, now aims to eliminate sewer overflows entirely by 2035, capturing 50 million gallons of runoff with green infrastructure alone. 

Chicago’s Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP) to deal with combined sewer overflows involves building three large reservoirs to hold extra wastewater during storms.
Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago

While these improvements are progress, they’re likely not enough to prepare for what’s ahead, Brammeier said, and that even agencies that invest in resilient infrastructure now will need money to maintain it. Detroit’s calculations for how much rainwater the system will capture are based on data only up to 2013, and the plan states that “climate change is ignored” in this modeling. Milwaukee, which commissioned a report examining the sewer system’s vulnerability to climate change in 2014, has yet to implement many of its recommendations, according to a 2019 assessment. The city acknowledged that “continued increases in rainfall intensities and amounts” due to climate change would make it difficult to meet its rainwater-capture goal consistently.

Without significant federal aid, the costs of dealing with sewage-laced flooding are passed on to ratepayers, many of whom can’t afford to pay higher water bills in the first place. The price of water in cities like Cleveland and Chicago has more than doubled over the last decade, according to an investigation by APM Reports. Despite these increases, though, low-income communities still experience the worst consequences of aging infrastructure, Hammer said — including flooded basements from backed-up sewers. That makes funding for climate resilience in these communities all the more urgent. 

“The estimates for the nationwide need for wastewater and stormwater projects is in the hundreds of billions,” Hammer said. “So we are not done.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cities are investing billions in new sewage systems. They’re already obsolete. on Mar 8, 2022.