Purpose of the articles posted in the blog is to share knowledge and occurring events for ecology and biodiversity conservation and protection whereas biology will be human’s security. Remember, these are meant to be conversation starters, not mere broadcasts :) so I kindly request and would vastly prefer that you share your comments and thoughts on the blog-version of this Focus on Arts and Ecology (all its past + present + future).

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We're running out of time to save our soil

Dear Jon,

The United Nations estimates that the equivalent of one soccer field of soil is lost to erosion every five seconds. By 2050, around 90% of the Earth's soil could be degraded. Landslides, a drastic decline in global food production, and desertification are some of the catastrophic results of allowing our topsoil to erode.

But it doesn't have to be this way. During our two-part online event series, The Dirt on Soil, we'll hear how simple measures in addressing soil erosion can also have a positive impact on climate issues. And we'll learn exactly what individuals and communities can do to prevent erosion and regenerate healthy soil in their own yards and bioregions.

REGISTER FOR FREE

We've already lost 33% of the Earth's topsoil—we really can't afford to lose any more. We hope these free events will inspire you to learn more about holistic land management and to take action in your own communities.

See you soon,





Clara Winter
Marketing & Communications Associate

If you'd like to connect with others interested in and working on rebuilding and protecting soil, join our new Facebook group.

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Rishi Sunak’s UK windfall tax has un-greened a green idea

The Chancellor’s levy on energy companies will create more problems for the climate. 

By India Bourke, May 27, 2022

Getty Images

Only the Tory party, with its love of unleashed big business, could have turned a solution to the climate crisis into an extension of the problem. For that is exactly what Chancellor Rishi Sunak‘s announcement yesterday (26 May) of a UK windfall tax on oil and gas companies appears to have done – breaking a historic Cop26 pledge not to incentivise further extraction.

Calls for such a tax have built momentum over recent months, as the war in Ukraine has pushed up energy prices – and profits – around the world. A proposal put forward by Labour carried the support of the Greens, SNP and Liberal Democrats, as well as some Conservative backbenchers (in addition to 63 per cent of the UK population, according to a new poll for the Green Alliance, an NGO). “A windfall tax on the obscene profits of energy giants” would put money “directly into the pockets of those who are struggling the most”, Green MP Caroline Lucas has advised.

Yet the tax actually announced by Sunak falls far short of the hoped-for green solution to the cost-of-living crisis. At best, it is a sticking plaster on a gaping wound. At worst, it will also pour petrol over the wound.

Referred to by Sunak as a “temporary targeted energy profits levy”, the tax will raise the existing rate on the sector from 40 per cent to 65 per cent of profits, for as long as energy prices stay abnormally high. But, crucially, it will also provide tax relief to companies that invest in further “UK extraction” – ie, more fossil fuels. There will be no tax relief for investment in renewables.

This means that, at a time when the International Energy Agency has warned that the exploitation of new oil and gas fields must stop immediately if the world is to stay within a safe limit of warming, the UK government has instead seen fit to support further extraction.

“It would be utterly scandalous if this windfall tax not only allows, but in fact incentivises, investment in yet more climate-wrecking fossil fuels as opposed to renewables,” Lucas said in a statement immediately responding to the Chancellor’s announcement, and later confirming that this was the case.

The tax is also hamstrung by its lack of ambition. “By only skimming the top 25 per cent off oil and gas company profits, Sunak has missed a huge opportunity to tackle the root cause of the cost-of-living crisis and the climate crisis together,” said Ami McCarthy, a political campaigner for Greenpeace UK. “Taxing the full profits at 70 per cent would have more than doubled the cash available,” she noted.

So what would a truly green response from Sunak have looked like? 

Experts and campaigners agree that improved home insulation is a golden snitch of an answer to the combined climate and cost-of-living challenges. Yet, as Lucas noted, support for local authority-led retrofitting was “shamefully absent” from the Chancellor’s proposals; while for Jess Ralston, senior analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), the lack of such a home insulation plan was a “glaring omission” that will keep consumers shackled to high energy bills for years to come.

Even more specifically, the campaigns director at think tank E3G, Ed Matthew, said the Chancellor should have announced £1.4bn more for energy efficiency support for vulnerable, low-income households over the next two years – funding it has already pledged in its manifesto, but has not yet delivered. “At end of the day a tax which takes money from fossil fuel companies, gives it to households who then have to give it back to fossil fuel companies is going wrong somewhere,” he said.

A truly green windfall tax would also have been accompanied by “green strings”, said the Green Alliance’s head of economy, Sam Alvis. “Ideally, the Chancellor would have limited the investment allowance to certain categories of investment, for example, in offshore wind or green hydrogen.”

In multiple ways, therefore, a policy that should have been the definition of an easy win – for people, planet and government – will likely prove to be anything but.

(Sources: The New Statesman)

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Palm oil industry seeks delay to deforestation law

The trade association representing EU chocolate associations and leading brands such as Mars, Cadbury, Ferrero and Nestle signed a statement against a key measure in the regulations. 

By Zach Boren, May 24, 2022

Trucks loaded with palm oil bunches drive through the haze on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Photo: Ulet Ifansasti / Greenpeace

Trade groups representing the palm oil industry are urging the EU to postpone the commodity’s compliance with a key component of its groundbreaking new deforestation law.

In a statement for policymakers circulated last week, eight leading industry associations suggested the law’s application on palm oil products should be delayed until 2030, partly to avoid the impacts of global supply chain disruptions such as “the current war in Ukraine and its effects on global food security.”

Among the groups that signed the statement is Caobisco – the association of chocolate, biscuits and confectionery industries of Europe – which counts among its members Mars, Nestle, Ferrero and Mondelez, which produces Cadbury chocolate.

If the current draft is implemented, the EU law would require traders of several commodities grown in deforestation hotspots (including palm oil) to demonstrate their product was not produced on deforested land before it can be placed on the European market.

Palm oil is associated with 10.5 million hectares of deforestation from 2001-15, making it the second biggest driver of deforestation behind cattle. 

This latest effort to weaken the proposed deforestation law follows an attempt by leading soya groups, which lobbied the European Commission whilst at COP26, Unearthed revealed earlier this year.

Industry claims

The palm oil statement says that national traceability systems in key producing countries like Indonesia and Malaysia are inadequate and so will undermine compliance by smallholder farmers, and calls for a feasibility assessment to be taken before the regulations come into force.

It goes on to argue that the regulations be “adapted to the specificities of different commodities, taking into account the current difficulties of the supply chains” and says tracing palm oil to mill rather than plantation should be acceptable for the EU.

Traceability to mill together with its 50-kilometre radius monitoring of its supply base should be enhanced over time by 2030, with a view to achieve traceability to plantation,” it reads.

“The EU should work with producing countries to remove the obstacles faced by smallholders and only require of them traceability to plantation once these obstacles have been satisfactorily removed.”

Muriel Korter, the director general of CAOBISCO, disputed Unearthed‘s characterisation of the statement, saying: “Our industry is certainly not seeking exemption from deforestation law, and have in fact welcomed the objective of the European Commission proposal for a Regulation on deforestation-free products.  As outlined in the joint statement, traceability is possible in palm oil too, and the industry has been engaging through different initiatives/programmes to enhance traceability in the palm oil sector over the last years and have already reached high levels of traceability for palm oil.”

“The 2030 date is more to allow smallholders to reach that level of traceability that plantations/estates already (can) achieve today. The joint statement calls for the development of palm oil specific guidelines that could (for example) include an action plan for enhanced traceability and transparency of the supply chain over time – horizon 2030.

“The Deforestation Regulation Proposal offers the possibility for gradual and continuous improvement towards deforestation-free products and more sustainable supply chains. Traceability requirements should take into account commodity specificities while ensuring a level playing field for the eradication of deforestation.”

Smallholders response

The industry claims appear to contradict a statement issued by the smallholder farmers they claim to represent.

In March the Union of Oil Palm Smallholders in Indonesia (SPKS) released an open letter in support of the EU’s deforestation proposal, and, responding to the industry’s statement, told Unearthed: “We SPKS do believe in the smallholders capacity and ability (actually traceability is not hard to implement for smallholders, and it is not as expensive as the industry/company explanation). What we can do right now is to help and facilitate the smallholder so they are not left behind, and just only become the ‘object’ of big industry/company.”

Aida Greenbury, the group’s senior advisor on deforestation and sustainability, added: “What’s really appalling with the industry statement is that they proposed to delay full traceability until 2030, meaning a high risk of palm oil from deforestation being mixed into palm oil entering EU.

“The smallholders are being used to hide the industry’s irresponsible practices, including the lack in transparency in the supposed to be ‘no-deforestation’ supply chain. SPKS has clearly shown that it is straight forward to do traceability from the plot of land or plantation. There’s no excuse to delay.”

Siobhan Pearce, forests campaigner with the Environmental Investigations Agency, told Unearthed: “Numerous palm oil companies already have traceability to plantation commitments and have achieved traceability to plantation for their own mills, including tracing smallholders.

“Smallholder groups in both Indonesia and Cote d’Ivoire have stated they can comply with the traceability requirements and that traceability to plantation would actually help smallholders to get fair payments and identify where there are illegal practices that need addressing, for example. What is needed is support and clear provisions that assist smallholders, not a weakening of or a delay to the requirements.”

(Sources: Unearth)

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‘Mind-Blowing’ Lost City With a Cosmic Link Discovered in the Amazon

A sprawling society with pyramids, moats, and “forest islands” thrived from 500 to 1400 A.D. in the Bolivian Amazon. 

By Becky Ferreira27 May 2022

SCREENSHOTS FROM A 3D ANIMATION OF THE COTOCA SITE. IMAGE: H. PRÜMERS / DAI

The ruins of a vast ancient civilization that has remained hidden under the densely forested landscape of the Bolivian Amazon for centuries has now been mapped out in unprecedented detail by lasers shot from a helicopter, reports a new study. 

The immense settlements stretch across some 80 square miles of the Llanos de Mojos region of Bolivia and include pyramids, causeways, canals, ramparts, elevated “forest islands,” and buildings arranged in ways that hint at cosmological worldview. The structures were built by the Casarabe culture, an Indigenous population that flourished from 500 to 1400 A.D. and came to inhabit some 1,700 square miles of the Amazon rainforest. The find is “mind blowing,” according to one member of the research team.

While field expeditions and Indigenous knowledge have previously shed light on this region’s lost settlements, a remote-sensing technique called Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) has now exposed the enormous extent and tantalizing complexity of this civilization.  

Scientists led by Heiko Prümers, an archaeologist at German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, used LIDAR to probe the remains of two large settlements called Cotoca and Landívar, along with 24 smaller sites, including 15 that were previously unknown to modern researchers. The results “indicate that the Casarabe-culture settlement pattern represents a type of tropical low-density urbanism that has not previously been described in Amazonia” and that “put to rest arguments that western Amazonia was sparsely populated in pre-Hispanic times,” according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.

“The architectural layout of large settlement sites of the Casarabe culture indicates that the inhabitants of this region created a new social and public landscape through monumentality,” Prümers and his colleagues said in the study. “We propose that the Casarabe-culture settlement system is a singular form of tropical agrarian low-density urbanism—to our knowledge, the first known case for the entire tropical lowlands of South America.”


LIDAR scanners work by shooting laser pulses at ground targets from aerial vehicles and recording the time it takes for the signal to bounce back. In this way, the method can generate minute details about topography that are beyond the range of other instruments. LIDAR is a particularly popular tool for the archaeologists working at sites that are blanketed in dense vegetation, because they can expose details about past settlement that are difficult to spot or even access on the ground. 

While some of the buried structures at Llanos de Mojos were known, the new LIDAR data revealed a sprawling network of settlements linked by raised causeways that extend for miles across the verdant terrain and in which water was managed by a huge system of canals and reservoirs. 

The two large settlements, Cotoca and Landívar, were protected by concentric defensive structures that include moats and ramparts. Numerous signs of civic and ceremonial life are embedded in more densely populated areas, such as 70-foot-tall conical pyramids and earthen buildings that curiously take the shape of the letter U. 

“The scale and elaboration of civic-ceremonial architecture are key aspects of the large settlement sites,” Prümers and his colleagues said in the paper. “The orientation of the buildings that constitute the civic-ceremonial centers of the two large settlement sites is very uniform towards the north-northwest. This probably reflects a cosmological world view, which is also present in the orientation of extended burials of the Casarabe culture.”

While most of these monuments appear in more densely populated ruins, the scanned region may also have contained countless small hamlets that are too subtle to be detected by LIDAR, the team noted. Taken together, the new findings offer a captivating look at a society that thrived in this forested region for centuries, building massive agricultural and aquacultural infrastructure that sustained a rich social and ritual life.  

“The scale, monumentality, labor involved in the construction of the civic-ceremonial architecture and water-management infrastructure, and the spatial extent of settlement dispersal compare favorably to Andean cultures and are of a scale far beyond the sophisticated, interconnected settlements of southern Amazonia, which lack monumental civic-ceremonial architecture,” the researchers said in the study. 

“As such, the data contribute to the discussion of the global wealth of early urban diversity, and will help to redefine the categories used for past and present Amazonian societies,” he concluded.

(Sources: Vice)

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The Energy/Food Crisis Is Far Worse than Most Americans Realize

By Richard HeinbergMay 23, 2022


Everyone who owns a gasoline-burning car has noticed that fuel prices have shot up in recent weeks. And most of us have read headlines about high energy prices driving inflation. But very few Americans have any inkling just how profound the current energy crisis already is, and is about to become.

This lack of awareness is partly due to economists, and those who depend on economists’ readings of the tea leaves of daily data (a group that, sadly, includes nearly all politicians and news purveyors). Recently I heard an NPR staff commentator confidently state: “The only way to get gasoline prices under control is to get inflation under control.” Anyone who understands recent events and how economies work will immediately realize that the statement is ass backwards. Energy prices are rising for specific physical reasons, most of which are widely reported. Those higher prices show up in economic statistics as inflation, a phenomenon that economists equate to a malevolent miasma that occasionally drifts into the economy from a mysterious alternate dimension. “Ah,” say the economists, “but we have a magic spell to drive the miasma away—higher interest rates!” The Fed’s assumption that raising interest rates will somehow reduce current high energy costs is comparable to medieval physicians’ belief that leech bloodletting would cure diseases like tuberculosis.

Of course, the goal of raising interest rates is to cool demand, which theoretically should help lower prices. But if prices for a particular commodity are rising due to physical shortage caused by novel circumstances or events rather than increasing demand, then higher interest rates may offer little relief while bringing serious unintended consequences of their own (see 1970s, “stagflation”). The comparison with leeches still stands.

There’s already enough bloodletting going on in the world. What we need now is sound thinking based in physical reality. Let’s start with symptoms and identify clear, understandable causes. Then we’ll explore the current extent of the energy crisis and its deeper societal implications, especially with regard to food. Finally, we’ll look at the energy crisis in the context of a broader, longer-term view of our economic system and see what things our leaders could do that might actually improve the prospects of ordinary citizens and future generations.

Why Prices Are Up

What’s making energy more expensive? Simple: physical scarcity resulting from pandemic, war, and depletion. Let’s unpack each of these causes.

The economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are old news, but they keep reverberating. A persistent worker shortage, which you may have noticed at local restaurants, is also impacting energy companies and shipping firms. Further, the crash in oil demand early in the pandemic (when few people were driving to work) led to production cutbacks in the petroleum industry, notably in the US—where fracking companies had been giddily burning through investor cash for years. Now demand has recovered but investors are wary, and so companies are slow to drill wells likely to prove unprofitable. Raising interest rates—which will make it more expensive for oil companies to borrow money to fund operations—certainly won’t increase the flow of oil and gas.

The energy impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are likewise straightforward and widely reported. Western oil companies have pulled out of Russia, making an ongoing decline in future Russian crude production virtually certain. The European Union has proposed a ban on oil imports from Russia, though time will tell if it can reach the consensus needed from members states, many of which are heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas. Russian production is already down by nearly 1 million barrels per day, and exports have reportedly fallen by about 4 million barrels per day. This is a substantial chunk of the world’s 100-million-barrel-per-day liquid fuel demand.

Looming back of every other aspect of the oil supply story is depletion. If there’s a shortage of oil, why not just open the spigots in other nations to make up the shortfall? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. OPEC’s tired old wells are about half depleted following decades of continuous extraction. Increasing the rate of pumping at this point would damage reservoirs, reducing the amount ultimately recoverable. The owners and managers of those oilfields are understandably reluctant to jeopardize their patrimony—and they’re relishing the higher prices their product is selling for. So, OPEC has barely nudged its output in response to shortages brought on by the war.

The other potential source of increased supply is the US, whose tight oil extraction rates have soared in recent years. But most of the geological formations that have been the source of this bonanza (such as the Bakken in North Dakota) are already in irreversible decline due to depletion. The world as a whole saw its peak output of conventional petroleum in 2016, following a long plateau that began in 2005. Oil importers, therefore, are largely out of options for replacing those lost Russian barrels.

There are some other factors complicating the current fuel supply system. I’ve focused on oil, simply because it’s the most globally traded of fuels and delivers the most energy to society. But supplies of natural gas are also being hammered as a result of the war, with prices already at record levels and poised to soar even higher. The “normal” price for natural gas in the US is about $2.50 per million BTUs; today gas is selling at three times that level, with other nations seeing gas trade at over $15. I’ll discuss some consequences of that below.

Further wrinkles have to do with diesel fuel, which is essential for trucking and hence global supply chains; and jet fuel (kerosene), which powers global aviation. Diesel and kerosene are made up of relatively long molecular hydrocarbon chains, but the light tight oil that the US has brought to market in recent years from fracking contains mostly short-chain molecules. Gradually, as world conventional oil production has plateaued and started to decline, with US light tight oil providing the main source of growth, diesel and kerosene output have stalled and sputtered. Diesel and kerosene prices have risen to unprecedented levels, and there are clear and persistent signs of worldwide shortage.

How Bad Is It?

Energy is essential for everything we do. It’s not just a part of the economy; in a real, physical sense it is the economy. Therefore, whenever there’s an energy crisis, it can quickly become an everything crisis.

The links between energy and the economy are perhaps at their most transparent when it comes to diesel fuel. Trucks, freight trains, and tractors burn diesel. Therefore, when diesel gets scarce, supply chains start to seize up and food prices climb.

Shipping costs were already soaring before the Russia-Ukraine war. Now, diesel shortages are erupting in South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Europe. Passenger trains in India have been idled. Thousands of buses, trucks, and cars in Cameroon have been stranded for weeks without fuel. In Sri Lanka, high energy and food prices have just helped bring down a government.


At the start of May, inventories of diesel on the US east coast plunged to the lowest seasonal level since government records began more three decades ago. Wholesale and retail diesel prices hit all-time highs.

Among the millions of trucks that run on diesel are Amazon.com’s roughly 70,000 delivery vans and semi-trucks. That company just announced a disappointing quarter and outlook due largely to higher costs for trucking packages to customers.

Most of us don’t really care much whether Amazon turns a profit. But Jeff Bezos’s current woes are echoed throughout industry after industry. Even companies whose business model doesn’t include physical delivery of goods still depend on other companies that burn diesel. That’s partly why global stock markets have recently seen massive sell-offs. But the market has yet to fully internalize the nearly existential risk posed by declining energy.

The signs of energy crisis are everywhere. In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, airlines recently threatened to cancel virtually all flights in response to surging kerosene prices. US retail gasoline prices just hit a new record. And Europe is preparing for the likelihood of severe natural gas shortages next winter.

Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, speaking at the World Utilities Congress in Abu Dhabi in early May, said, “The world needs to wake up. The world is running out of energy capacity at all levels. It is a reality.” One may question the motives of the Saudi minister: a so-called “NOPEC” bill making its way through the US Congress would make it possible to sue the OPEC cartel for price fixing, so the Saudis might like to heighten the perception that they are providing the world with an increasingly scarce good. Nevertheless, the prince’s statement is clear, direct, and supported by abundant evidence.

Food and Energy

If tractor fuel is getting more expensive, you might think that would put pressure on food prices—and you’d be right. But that’s only one reason the cost of food is skyrocketing.

Nitrogen fertilizer, made from natural gas, is seeing unprecedented price hikes, largely as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war. In response, farmers everywhere are preparing to test the limits of how little fertilizer they can apply without threatening yields. Forecasts are bleak. For West Africa, reduced fertilizer use is projected to shrink this year’s rice and corn harvest by a third. Costa Rica could see coffee output falling as much as 15 percent next year if farmers reduce their fertilizer application by one-third.

For many years, organic and ecological agriculture advocates have argued that the world could produce just as much food without resorting to fossil fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides. But their alternative methods require knowledge and time for transition. Going cold turkey on fertilizer without planning and preparation will almost certainly lead to sharply lower yields over the short term. In response, the EU is now delaying rules intended to reduce farming’s environmental impacts, including curbs on pesticide use. It also aims to put four million hectares of fallow land into cultivation.

Food security is being threatened by problems with distribution chains for all the inputs into agricultural system—from spare parts to packaging to cooking fuel. Once again, as with energy prices, there are several mutually interacting causes, including lingering effects of the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war. The latter has led to the loss of wheat shipments from Ukraine and Russia, which together are responsible for nearly 30 percent of world supplies. Recently, Russia has rained missiles on Odesa, a major port for grain shipments, further disrupting global food distribution.

Altogether, foods exported from Russia and Ukraine normally account for more than 10 percent of all calories traded globally. The two countries also export a significant portion of the world’s vegetable oils used in cooking and preparing food. As a result of the conflict, there are now shortages of sunflower oil in Europe, and supermarkets in the UK are limiting purchases of cooking oil.

Low-income countries that were already destabilized by economic havoc from the pandemic are seeing further shocks now from higher food prices. Egypt is considering raising the price of subsidized bread for the first time in four decades, even though the subsidy is widely credited with keeping social unrest at bay.

In the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war, dozens of countries—including Hungary, Indonesia, Moldova, and Serbia—have thrown up trade barriers to protect domestic supplies of grains, fruits, vegetables, cooking oils, and nuts. While these barriers are intended to protect domestic food supplies, their collective result is to put more pressure on global prices.

Of course, all of this added food insecurity comes as our weather becomes weirder year by year. China’s wheat harvest this season is uncertain due to extreme rains in recent months, and, with global wheat prices already up 80 percent, a lot is at stake not just for the world’s most populous nation, but also for integrated global wheat markets. Meanwhile, Somalia, which imports nearly all its wheat from Ukraine and Russia, is suffering its worst drought in years.

In sum, experts are warning of the worst global food crisis since WWII. It is a crisis that will have its severest impacts on the poorest countries, and poor people in relatively wealthy countries, especially those already experiencing food insecurity. There will also likely be compounding social and political consequences, as pointed out in a new report by risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft, which notes that middle-income countries such as Brazil and Egypt will be particularly at risk for rising civil unrest.

Why the Big Picture Is Essential

Most news articles treat diesel, gasoline, and food price hikes as transitory phenomena. After all, historically whenever prices have gone up, they’ve later settled back down. Temporary shortages inspire innovation and trigger investment. It’s the magic of the market. So, once the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war are in our rear-view mirror, we can all surely get back to normal.

Missing from those articles is a systemic understanding of our current crisis. The big picture of our energy situation is perhaps best captured by a study published seven years ago, “Human Domination of the Biosphere: Rapid Discharge of the Earth-Space Battery Foretells the Future of Humankind.” Lead author John Schramski, an associate professor in the University of Georgia’s College of Engineering, likened Earth to a battery that has been charged slowly over billions of years. “The sun’s energy is stored in plants and fossil fuels,” says Schramski, “but humans are draining energy much faster than it can be replenished”—mostly by deforestation and the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. Once that battery is discharged, there is nothing humans can do within a relevant timescale to maintain the energy flows that currently support complex industrial civilization and a population measured in billions.

No doubt there will be some temporary work-arounds. Solar and wind energy sources could substitute for fossil fuels in some applications, though material limits would prevent a full-scale replacement. But there really is no solution to our energy crisis, if by “solution” we mean a return to how energy markets have functioned during the past few decades. We are victims of systemic dependency on depleting fuels and minerals, and an economic model founded on unsustainable growth.

Once we understand that, then it’s possible to chart a course of adaptation that minimizes suffering and destruction. Instead of prioritizing growth, we must aim for rapid reduction in overall energy usage, with an emphasis on equity—both equity between the rich and poor within nations and globally. As I’ve written elsewhere, efforts should center on rationing increasingly scarce resources and developing local cooperative organizations of all kinds. Learn to work with nature and heal ecosystems.

Crises make incumbent politicians look bad. But denying or politicizing problems that result from our own prior mistakes just makes those problems worse. Here’s some free advice for policy makers and members of the Fourth Estate: take the long view, even if it’s scary. And tell the truth, even if it means losing an election or Twitter followers. 

Photo by Boris Dunand on Unsplash

(Sources: Post Carbon Institute)

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Women in rural Bangladesh pay more for rising cost of climate disasters

Poor households headed by women spend a higher share of their budgets on protecting their families from worsening floods, storms and other impacts of global warming.

By Md. Tahmid Zami18 May 2022

A flood-affected woman uses liquid petroleum gas to cook a meal inside her flooded house in Jamalpur, Bangladesh, July 18, 2020. REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain

Rural families in Bangladesh are using a large chunk of their budgets to protect themselves from climate change, especially households headed by women who are allocating up to 30% of their spending for that purpose, researchers said on Wednesday.

The high share of spending by female-led households - many based in the flood-prone north - is double the average of 15% because women have lower incomes than men, said a study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

Often men from Bangladesh's northwest regions migrate on a seasonal basis to work elsewhere, leaving women to run the home.

Common measures taken by rural families to adapt to climate change and reduce risks include raising the plinth of their houses above flood-water levels, planting trees and making shelters to keep livestock safe.

Low-lying Bangladesh is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of rising global temperatures, including more severe monsoon flooding, fiercer storms and higher sea levels.

"While men spend a greater amount for climate adaptation in absolute terms, women have to spend a larger share of their smaller average income," said Paul Steele, IIED's chief economist and one of the study authors.

For the study, IIED, Kingston University London and the U.N. Development Programme in Bangladesh surveyed 3,094 rural households in 10 districts to analyse how gender and socio-economic factors shaped spending to protect households from disasters like storms, floods, drought, salinity and heat.

The researchers found that 43% of households were exposed to floods, 41% to storms and 83% were affected by longer-term stresses like drought or salinity.

Each household spent nearly 7,500 taka ($88) a year on preventive measures in 2021, which would add up to about $1.7 billion among the wider rural population, the study said.

The findings show that the Bangladesh government and donor nations need to provide more financial support to poor households dealing directly with climate change, including those headed by women who are shouldering the burden, Steele said.

An earlier 2019 study by IIED found that Bangladeshi families in rural areas were spending 12 times more each year than the foreign aid the country had received to prepare for and cope with the effects of climate change.

More data is needed to track households' climate-related spending in Bangladesh and other nations on a regular basis, Steele said, adding that research could be extended to include the losses suffered by urban households.

Dwijen Mallick, a climate expert at the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, said climate change is pushing a steady flow of migrants into cities, where they often lack the knowledge and resources to protect themselves from threats.

"It is important to quantify the loss and damage borne by poor urban households due to localised climate change impacts to make a case for compensation," he said.

Mahfuza Mala, a climate expert and member of Naripokkho, a women's activist group, said the IIED study demonstrated how efforts to deal with climate change play out differently between men and women.

“Just as women’s care work is often unpaid and unrecognised, their role in adaptation also sometimes goes unheeded,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The study found that female-headed households spend 2 percentage points more of their overall budgets on coping with floods compared to their male-headed counterparts, and 3 percentage points more for other hazards like extreme heat.

But when it comes to storms, female-headed households spend a huge 30 percentage points more, although there are fewer such households in the storm-prone southwest region, where Cyclone Amphan affected millions of households in 2020.

Social norms often require women to act as providers of food, water and other essentials, even though they have less capacity to adapt to climate pressures, the IIED study noted.

Mala said the positive side of women playing a greater role in preparing for, and responding to, floods or storms could be that it allows them to assume a more active role in society.

(Sources: Thomson Reuters Foundation)

(Reporting by Md. Tahmid Zami; editing by Megan Rowling. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org/climate)

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COVID-hit China urged to move U.N. summit to save global nature deal

About 195 countries were set to finalise an accord to safeguard plants, animals and ecosystems at the U.N. talks, known as COP15, which had been due to start late last month in the Chinese city of Kunming. 

By Michael Taylor20 May 2022

Butterflies perch on flowers at the Bantimurung Nature Preservation, which houses more than 100 species of butterflies, in Maros district of Indonesia's South Sulawesi province June 14, 2007. Picture taken June 14, 2007. REUTERS/Ahmed Tawil

  • With 'zero-COVID' goal, China delays biodiversity summit

  • Some campaigners urge host nation to agree to move meeting

  • Global pact would set out 10-year plan to halt nature loss

A global deal to protect nature could be jeopardised by China's decision this week to seek a further postponement of U.N. talks due to a COVID-19 outbreak, environmentalists said, with many calling for the summit to be switched to another country.

About 195 nations were set to finalise an accord to safeguard plants, animals and ecosystems at the U.N. summit, known as COP15, which had been due to start late last month in the Chinese city of Kunming.

But with many cities in lockdown under China's "zero-COVID" strategy, the country proposed that the talks - already delayed four times - be postponed until 2023, scuppering U.N. hopes for the meeting to be held in the third quarter, green groups said.

"The global biodiversity crisis is an existential threat to our planet (and) the loss of habitats and species do not wait," Li Shuo, a policy advisor at Greenpeace China, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by email.

"COP15 has to happen in 2022," said Li, an observer of the talks, urging all countries involved to find a solution.

Chinese officials working on COP15 and a spokesperson for the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, which is supporting the negotiations, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Improving conservation and management of natural areas, such as parks, oceans, forests and wildernesses, is seen as crucial to safeguarding the ecosystems on which humans depend and limiting global warming to internationally agreed targets.

But forests are still being cut down - often to produce commodities such as palm oil and beef - destroying biodiversity and threatening climate goals, as trees absorb about a third of planet-warming emissions produced worldwide.

The COP15 talks have been bogged down by difficulties of meeting face to face during the coronavirus pandemic, with the first in-person talks in two years on the agreement and ways to put it into practice taking place in Geneva in March.

A central pillar of the planned nature pact is to conserve at least 30% of the planet's land and oceans by 2030.

AGREE TO SWITCH

Georgina Chandler, an international policy expert at the Britain-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said further COP15 delays would risk momentum being lost, calling for a date to be set in the third quarter of this year.

"We cannot galvanise public or political support for an ambitious outcome if we don't know when the COP will happen," Chandler said.

"It is hindering our ability as a community to work together towards this critical global moment," she added.

Hosting a major U.N. environment conference for the first time in China was seen by green groups as an important step for the country towards playing a more prominent role both domestically and internationally on biodiversity.

In an effort to give the talks a boost, China launched a multimillion-dollar biodiversity fund late last year to support nature protection in developing countries.

Financing for poorer nations to help them meet the goals of a nature deal has long been a sticking point for the talks.

But geopolitical tensions and diplomatic pride may now be hindering attempts to persuade China to agree to switch the talks to somewhere less-impacted by COVID-19, analysts said.

COP15 could still take place in 2022, but not until the fourth quarter, said Susan Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

"The best outcome would be to have COP15 in 2022, and for China to recognise it can't be in China due to COVID," Lieberman said.

CHINA CRITICAL

The latest delay means countries will have less time to meet 2030 targets and could ultimately lead them to curtail their ambitions, said Linda Krueger, director of biodiversity at The Nature Conservancy, a U.S.-based green group.

There are now less than eight years left to make good on promises set out in the planned 10-year deal, said Fred Kumah, a vice president at the African Wildlife Foundation, but he said it was important for China to go ahead with hosting the talks.

"China's role in addressing global biodiversity loss is critical to say the least," he said, urging Beijing to set a new date for the meeting.

"Most of the world is now living with COVID-19, so China needs to go forward with the meeting in a manner that assures participants of their security by way of health," he added.

"The world needs to encourage China to take up their global role and responsibility in this respect."

(Sources: Thomson Reuters Foundation)

(Reporting by Michael Taylor @MickSTaylor in Kuala Lumpur; Editing by Helen Popper. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org)

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