Focus on Arts and Ecology

August 29, 2024 

The newly elected head of the body that regulates deep sea mining has pledged to reform the organisation, which has faced major criticism in recent weeks.

Leticia Carvalho was elected as the next secretary-general of the International Seabed Authority at a meeting earlier this month.

Before the meeting, media reports detailed a sometimes-vicious fight for the role between Carvalho and the incumbent, Michael Lodge.

Having won that battle, Carvalho said: “For me it became quite clear that the primary issue is the governance of the ISA itself. There is a need for me, quite clearly, to rebuild trust. I don’t want to criticise anyone or any individual specifically, but I think the reality of the facts is that there is a lot of transparency and accountability to be put in place.”

She takes charge next year and will also have to contend with major campaigns by NGOs and some governments for deep sea mining to be halted.

Those calls have only grown stronger after researchers reported a finding that has genuinely astonished many marine watchers: large amounts of oxygen are being produced in the deep sea, possibly by the very polymetallic nodules miners hope to harvest.

(Sources: Dialogue Earth)

August 29, 2024 

The Chinese research vessel Deep Sea No. 1 set off from Qingdao in eastern China early this month, carrying the manned submersible Jiaolong and headed for a deep-sea scientific expedition in the western Pacific Ocean, a China News Service report says.

The expedition involves international scientists for the first time and aims to study the biodiversity and environment of typical deep-sea habitats. Jiaolong, a China-developed submersible that can reach 7,000 metres below the sea surface, allows scientists to probe the environment and ecosystems of seamounts and the animals living on them.

The vessel arrived in the first operation area in the Western Pacific Ocean on 17 August, according to a CCTV report. The day after, Jiaolong made its 300th dive since its first deployment in 2009, a milestone celebrated in several Chinese media outlets.

A Colombian scientist then joined Chinese submariners for another dive to investigate organisms on the seamount ridges and collect samples of vulnerable species, seabed sediments, rocks, and seawater.

The National Deep-Sea Center’s deputy director, Xu Xuewei, told China News Service that the expedition would enhance scientific understanding of the deep-sea biodiversity and ecosystem in the surveyed areas. The knowledge gained would feed into a scientific project called Digital Deep-Sea Typical Habitats (Digital DEPTH), he added.

Digital DEPTH is a China-led research programme under the UN Ocean Decade framework. It focuses on four types of deep-sea habitats that are vulnerable to human activities and global changes – seamounts, mid-ocean ridges, continental slopes and abyssal plains.

The programme aims to improve scientists’ ability to observe, simulate and map these typical deep-sea habitats, and to help foster a balance between deep-sea protection and sustainable development. This is especially important as China and other nations explore the nascent potential of deep sea mining.

(Sources: Dialogue Earth)

The small Caribbean island is struggling to deal with environmental and economic damage from algae inundation. 

By Julian Reingold, August 28, 2024

Sargassum inundates Barbados in the summer, covering beaches, docks and coral reefs.

Emerging from the sea a light orange colour, the seaweed turns brown once it dries out. But the most distinctive thing is the smell. A smell of rotting eggs hangs in the air. The decomposing algae is producing toxic gases, including ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, both of which pose a threat to human health.

Portuguese navigators gave the Sargasso Sea its name in the 15th century. Now a new “Sargassum Sea” has emerged between West Africa and north-eastern Brazil. Dubbed the “Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt”, in 2011 the expanding zone reached Barbados in the Eastern Caribbean and has inundated the region between May and September ever since.

Scientists have suggested the root cause of the sargassum expansion is discharge of nutrients and pollutants from mighty rivers in the Amazon region and warmer seas driven by climate change. Researchers from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hypothesise that it may be fuelled by an extremely strong and long-lasting shift in the North Atlantic Oscillation in 2010. This may have shifted and strengthened prevailing winds, so they now blow sargassum from its eponymous sea and towards the Caribbean.

The sargassum blooms continue to cause problems for Barbadian fishing, tourism, and the government officials tasked with solving the vast seasonal piles of rotting weed.

A big problem for a small island state

Barbados is the first land encountered by the currents that drag sargassum from the Atlantic Ocean into the Caribbean. The island’s triangular shape exposes almost half of its shores – famed exemplars of paradise tourism, with white sands and turquoise waters – to sargassum inundation.

Barbados is among the most densely populated countries in the world, with most of its population residing in coastal areas. Like many tropical, small-island developing states, its economy is highly dependent on coastal tourism. About 30% of its pre-Covid GDP depended on it, and 28% of the workforce were employed in the sector as of 2022.

Hotels send staff to clean the beaches in the morning, but the weed may be piled high again by the next day. Tractors are needed to pull sargassum away from tourist spots. Keeping one kilometre of beach free of sargassum can cost more than USD 100,000 per year, with one estimate going as high as USD 1 million.

There is some benefit for fishers. Their targets are attracted to the sargassum patches and congregate below. However, the large shoreside deposits complicate boat launches and sailing.

Dialogue Earth consulted Karima Degia, a Barbados and Eastern Caribbean prevention, recovery and resilience programme manager for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Degia, who previously worked with the government on coastal engineering and resilience, says sargassum is an unwelcome addition to a list of national problems. Climate change is threatening Barbados on multiple fronts, leading to more intense storms, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, and salt intrusion into fresh water supplies.

 “Hurricanes and sargassum have become concurrent hazards,” says Degia.

A coral catastrophe

The Caribbean has been dealing with this so-called “brown tide” for several years, but little research has been undertaken. Micaela Small is a Barbadian marine biologist doing a PhD at the University of Southampton in the UK. She is examining the effects of these smothering waves of sargassum on the south-eastern coral reefs of Barbados.

“When you have large influxes of sargassum in the near-shore reefs, it decomposes, causing a sargassum brown tide, reducing the oxygen and increasing nutrients,” says Small. “The water turns brown, and the health of corals is affected, as it requires pristine water to thrive.”

This, she explains, can bleach the native coral species of Barbados, such as Porites astreoides and Pseudodiploria strigose, as the coral expel their symbiotic algae and thereby lose their colour and become vulnerable to death. This has been happening at the tourist hotspot Brownes Beach.

The sargassum tides also block sunlight from reaching the corals and seagrasses and smother the roots of mangroves. The coral struggles while the algae thrives, threatening an ecosystem crucial to both fishing and tourism.

“We are still trying to find the best way to manage sargassum. In the meantime, we must keep monitoring the influxes with satellite forecasts,” says Small.

Seeking circular solutions

Some are trying to harness the brown tide to help the economy.

Chef Michael Hinds owns a restaurant on the west coast of Barbados and has recently received permission to restore an abandoned fish market in Skeetes Bay to the east of the island. Hinds’ first goal is to renovate the market and install an inland fish farm to produce Caribbean red snapper, a key feature of the island’s cuisine.

The remote beach at Skeetes Bay is regularly flooded with sargassum. Hinds’ current main concern is that the unsightly and smelly sargassum blooms will put off future customers.

The ‘farm to table’ approach aims to integrate tourism, hospitality and seaweed repurposing through decarbonisation initiatives and a partnership with Seafields. This UK start-up wants to use sargassum as a raw material for bio-plastics and fuels and fertiliser, and is planning to collect sargassum offshore, freeing the bay from algae and making it suitable for fish-farm development.

“When thinking about expansion into the sea in the coming years, sargassum would then also be a concern if not handled”, says Mikaela Hinds, who’s working alongside her father on this project as the sustainability consultant.

Another project, Rum & Sargassum, is mixing sargassum and wastewater from rum distilleries in Barbados to produce methane gas. Its founder Legena Henry says over a thousand dump trucks would be needed to clear the island’s beaches on some days.

The bigger picture

Barbados needs more than local-level projects to deal with problems like sargassum blooms, say experts. Major investment is necessary for the country to develop resilience to environmental changes.

The Bridgetown Initiative Agenda, launched in 2022 by the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, is one attempt to fund climate-change mitigation efforts in lower-income countries.

Pep Bardouille is director of the Bridgetown Initiative Unit for Barbados, and an adviser on climate resilience to Mottley.

“While sargassum is a resource that could potentially be used for biofuels or fertilisers and as an input into innovative products, its arrival is so unpredictable, you cannot count on it as an asset. It’s just a major challenge to the tourism industry.”

The Bridgetown Initiative 3.0 document, published in late May, suggests the rules of the game must change. It says the World Bank and finance providers must think beyond gross national income per capita as the criterion for determining eligibility for concessional financing; they must consider climate vulnerability, natural capital and biodiversity conservation.

In the meantime, the sargassum keeps coming, endangering biodiversity and coastal livelihoods. Barbados and other Caribbean countries have no choice but to dedicate efforts and resources to a problem they did not create.

Julian Reingold

The compensation fund could help fishers from small island and coastal states, but many challenges remain. 

By Daniel Cressey, July 25, 2024

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been pledged to compensate for “loss and damage” caused by climate change. Hundreds of billions more will be needed.

When the pledges were made by various governments last year, they were widely celebrated. But some experts fear the much-hailed fund being set up to deliver this climate finance faces significant hurdles if it is to address damage wrought on oceans and some of the world’s poorest people.

Changes brought about by climate change are already being seen in increased sea temperatures, mass coral bleaching and ocean acidification. 

But while governments have channelled increasing sums of money towards dealing with climate change in recent years, ocean issues have often missed out. “Unfortunately, the ocean is largely viewed as either being out of sight and out of mind, or too big to fail,” says Karen Sack, executive director of the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA), which works to incentivise investment in coastal and ocean environmental projects.

Loss and damage, the third pillar of climate finance

As it becomes clearer how much damage climate change is already doing and could yet do, calls have grown for richer countries responsible for the bulk of historical greenhouse gas emissions to provide money to poorer ones in the form of climate finance.

So far, this money has gone largely towards climate change “mitigation”, meaning action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – such as shutting down coal-fired power stations – or to remove them from the atmosphere. It has also gone towards “adaptation”: actions to cope with a climate-changed world, like building stronger sea walls.

A “third pillar” of payments, for loss and damage incurred due to climate change, has proven more controversial.

At the most recent global climate talks, COP28 in Dubai, the establishment of a Loss and Damage Fund was finally agreed after years of discussion. Some USD 700 million was pledged to the nascent fund, which the World Bank was given an initial four-year stint in charge of.

The problem of fleeing fish

It is thought that around 600 million people depend to some extent on fisheries and aquaculture for their livelihoods. In the highly calibrated language that characterises reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there is “medium confidence” that climate change will drive changes in fish populations that “affect income, livelihoods, and food security of marine resource-dependent communities”.

One team, which modelled where 779 commercially important fish species are likely to exist in 2100, found tropical nations would lose the most, with “few if any stocks replacing” the departures, although the results are heavily dependent on future greenhouse gas emissions.

But claiming for a loss of fish may not be simple.

Michelle Tigchelaar is a climate scientist who works for WorldFish, an NGO focussing on sustainable fisheries and aquaculture in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. She fears it will be challenging to separate changes due to climate change from other pressures on fish stocks, such as overfishing and pollution.

“So far, most of the loss and damage reporting has focused on extreme weather events – storms, flooding, heatwaves – that are constrained in space and time,” she says. “For fisheries, the losses and damages resulting from climate change – such as shifting of fish stocks and degrading coral reefs – may be slower to develop, making it more difficult to calculate a single claim.”

Another problem is that current data on fish catches is patchy, especially for inland fisheries and those catches that are eaten by fishers or traded outside of commercial markets. “What isn’t measured can’t be compensated, putting arguably the most vulnerable small-scale fishers out of reach of loss-and-damage mechanisms,” Tigchelaar warns.

Climate problems will be felt especially keenly in coastal least-developed countries (LDCs) and small island developing states (SIDS). They are also likely to fall particularly heavily on women in these countries who often have precarious jobs in fisheries and related industries, “so the Loss and Damage Fund will be fundamental to their future”, says ORRAA’s Sack.

Small islands, big problems

The fund has been instructed to ringfence an as-yet-undetermined proportion of its money for SIDS and coastal LDCs. But such countries may be poorly placed to make claims.

“Developing countries, in particular SIDS and LDCs, often lack historical data or the institutions, expertise and financial resources that would support ‘attribution studies’ for particular climate hazards,” explains Adelle Thomas, senior director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental non-profit.

Attribution studies calculate the extent to which changes in Earth’s weather and environment are down to anthropogenic climate change. Data for such studies is scarce in some of the developing countries likely to be hit hardest by rising temperatures. “If attribution is a requirement for loss and damage payment, then this would be particularly unjust, as these countries who have contributed the least to climate change and lack the resources for attribution science, would then be ineligible for support,” Thomas says.

Much will depend on how the fund decides to allocate its resources.

Michai Robertson is a research fellow at the ODI think-tank and a former negotiator on climate finance for the Alliance of Small Island States, a negotiating bloc. He says what counts as success for funding must be carefully considered if smaller countries are to access their fair share.

“There’s always the attractiveness of saying you’ve helped X million [or] billion people; you’ve addressed X dollars or pounds in losses, and it’s in the billions,” he says. “But the thing is, those types of metrics disadvantage smaller and least developed countries, because they’re not the places where they have huge … populations or those huge economies.”

Small island states also face the loss of things that are less tangible than buildings and fish. In some cases, their cultural heritage and even their very existence is at risk due to rising sea levels. This opens up the issue of “non-economic loss and damage”.

Funding for such damage could support, for example, building museums commemorating culture lost to rising sea levels. “Before the Loss and Damage Fund, you couldn’t go to the World Bank with a project like this,” says Robertson. “You couldn’t go to the Green Climate Fund; you’d be laughed out of the room.”

Precedence for ocean fears

Untangling where climate finance has gone, and what it has been spent on, is complicated. But some who work on ocean issues feel that money has often had a terrestrial bias.

A 2022 paper from the Asian Development Bank Institute, a Tokyo-based think-tank, identified that public finance for ocean conservation and climate action had grown from USD 579 million in 2013 to just over USD 3.5 billion in 2019. This is compared to nearly USD 130 billion in wider climate finance for developed countries between 2013 and 2018.

John Virdin, one of the paper’s authors, is director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Program at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability in the US. He says estimates of how much global aid and public finance goes to ocean-related projects are patchy, but that it has been suggested they are “an order of magnitude” below what is probably needed to achieve ocean conservation targets such as Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14.

“Some scholars have called this the ocean finance gap,” he says.

Less than 2% of money from the Green Climate Fund – the largest of the climate funds run under the auspices of the UN climate convention – went to ocean projects, according to a 2021 estimate.

Another relevant fund is the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The fund channels money to projects that support five environmental conventions, including the UN climate convention. In 2007, it came in for criticism from some quarters because it explicitly weighted its Global Benefits Index for Biodiversity – which helps determine the destination of funding – 80% for terrestrial and 20% for marine. 

The GEF Secretariat says the index is just one part of the equations that go into resource allocation. “One of the challenges of developing such a system is that few datasets are global and consistently applied, so there are few options to choose from and even less in the marine realm,” a spokesperson tells Dialogue Earth.

They add that the index was updated in 2016 when there were “significant improvements in the marine data available” and that currently, the weighting is 75% for terrestrial and 25% for marine biodiversity. 

The future of loss and damage

The fund established at COP28 made progress this month at the second ever meeting of its board, choosing the Philippines as the board’s host country and giving it the official name, the “Fund for responding to Loss and Damage”.

But it also faces general headwinds. 

Experts who spoke to Dialogue Earth flagged significant concerns over the amount of money so far promised. This has languished at under USD 1 billion since COP28, while estimates of annual need run to triple-figure billions per year. Unless more money is forthcoming, those running the fund will face tough choices when they must pick between competing claims.

Nevertheless, several experts said they were pleased that headway was being made on the fund, and praised the nascent board.

“You can see this either as a glass half full or a glass half empty,” says Tigchelaar. “For a long time, this was just an idea. Now it is reality.

“That said, progress on operationalising and funding the Loss and Damage Fund has been embarrassingly slow. I expect this to be a long-drawn-out fight over who pays for what, how much, and under what conditions.”

And of course, who they pay for damage to the ocean, and how much is paid.

August 29, 2024 

Flooding has affected the Taklamakan Desert in the Tarim Basin, north-west China, with videos on social media showing submerged roads.

The inundations were triggered by high temperatures, snowmelt, and heavy rainfall since July, according to the Ministry of Water Resources. These conditions caused Tarim River tributaries to overflow, prompting the Xinjiang Water Resources Department to activate a flood emergency response.

Since mid-August, temperatures have exceeded 40C in some parts of the desert, which is China’s driest. Rapid snowmelt in the surrounding mountains increased flow from tributaries into the Tarim River, Lü Xinsheng, chief forecaster at the Xinjiang Meteorological Observatory, told China Meteorological News Agency.

Additionally, rainfall in July was 27% above average. And between 17 and 27 August, rainfall in the area of the Tarim River was four times higher than usual.

This isn't the first time the area has faced flooding. In August 2022, the appearance of a lake in the southern Taklamakan Desert sparked discussions in China, with some netizens wrongly speculating that climate change might be transforming the desert into an oasis.

North-west China is highly sensitive to climate change, with warming and increased precipitation becoming particularly evident in the last two decades.

From 2001 to 2022, average temperatures in Xinjiang rose by 1C compared to 1961-2000, and average precipitation increased 16.1%. This warming has also accelerated glacier melt, with the glacial area in Xinjiang shrinking by 11.7% over the past 60 years.

“Warming and increased precipitation cannot alter the landscape of arid deserts in north-west China,” Chen Yaning, of the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, told China Newsweek.

However, Chen continued: “Climate-induced changes in glaciers and water cycles will intensify uncertainties in water resource supply, increasing hydrological volatility.”

“Glacier retreat will directly impact the region's future water security,” he added.

(Sources: Dialogue Earth)

It will be tough to ensure the “fuel-switch” changes are genuinely low-carbon, economic and sustained, writes economist Zhang Shuwei.

 

By Zhang Shuwei, August 19, 2024

A worker checks processed material at a biomass-fuel producing company in Qingtongxia, north-west China. Biomass is to be blended with coal in Chinese power plants to reduce coal’s carbon intensity (Image: Yang Zhisen / Imago / Alamy)

One obvious response to the climate crisis – no matter where in the world you are – is a rapid decarbonisation of the energy sector. This involves a push for carbon neutrality by 2050 and then onwards to negative emissions. That aligns with the global warming limits enshrined in the Paris Agreement, which is accepted by most countries.

For some sectors – buildings, chemicals, cement and steel – cuts are still difficult and technical roadmaps need to be worked out from scratch. But for others, cuts will be no more expensive and might even boost profits.

Take renewables and electric vehicles (EVs) as examples. The cost of electricity from wind and solar PV is now half or less that of electricity from coal or gas power. And in April, the International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol said “the combination of solar PV and batteries is today competitive with new coal plants in India”. He predicted the same for China “in the next few years”. Meanwhile, EVs currently compete with traditional vehicles on price, range and performance, thanks to Tesla, China’s low-cost mass manufacturing, and further innovation. EVs account for over 50% of all new car annual sales in Norway and Sweden. The same milestone was reached in China during the first half of April. In India, EVs are even the cheaper option in some circumstances.

From a purely economic perspective, green solutions with price advantages will win a larger market share, and this could result in emissions mitigation. But things are a bit more complicated in the real world. Two attempts to switch to lower-carbon fuels illustrate this. In China, coal power plants are set to blend variable amounts of biomass or fashion green ammonia into their fuel. In Germany, internal combustion engine cars may end up being powered by synthetic fuels.

Similar forces are at work in both cases. As we will see, rather than waiting to be phased out, established and well-organised industries are influencing policy in an attempt to slow the transition.

Alternative fuels for Chinese coal power stations

In mid-July, the National Development and Reform Commission published a fuel-switch action plan for China’s coal power fleet up to 2027. To reduce the carbon intensity of power generation, plants will be allowed to burn alternatives to coal, such as biomass and green ammonia. Meanwhile, carbon capture and sequestration technology will be installed.

The action plan’s first batch of changes should be underway in 2025. Carbon emissions at participating power plants are expected to fall by about 20% per kilowatt hour from 2023 levels. By 2027, the anticipated reduction in setup and operating costs will enable the plan to be implemented more widely. Emissions per kilowatt hour are expected to have fallen again – approximately 50% from 2023 levels – and match those of gas-fired power.

This plan has the potential to cut carbon intensity, but its costs and feasibility at large scale beg the question: is the approach cheaper and more scalable than the alternatives, like simply replacing coal power with renewables?

A reliable biomass supply chain will be needed to produce, transport and store the new fuel. The cost of that supply chain will grow exponentially with distance. Moreover, fuel procurement has been an ongoing problem for biomass power plants in China. Geological sequestration (injecting CO2 into rock formations deep underground) is a particularly promising carbon-removal technology, but deployment remains limited. It is also unclear how this action plan’s full costs will be met, or how much of a difference this will actually make to China’s 1,200-gigawatt coal sector.

Outcomes will of course depend on the particular facilities and technologies chosen. Currently, funds are to be sourced from special, very long government bonds or similar. A way to allocate the financial burden between the government, power companies and customers will be developed, along with periodic policy support. The action plan says a methodology for calculating emissions cuts will be created and power generated with biomass or green ammonia will be treated separately. Grid dispatch systems will be adjusted to prioritise facilities with significantly lower emissions – defying the economic logic that cheaper sources of power are used first.

There is another practical issue. How to verify what the power plants are burning? For plant managers, it would be understandably tempting to report the burning of cleaner fuels while using coal. Monitoring this remains hard. It was once an open secret that “biomass” power plants only burned biomass sometimes. At other times, they shovelled in coal, while still getting preferential on-grid prices for their power.

Germany sticks with the internal combustion engine

Retaining fossil-fuel facilities is not a problem in itself. The question is, how can those facilities become low-carbon and economically viable? Let’s look at a case in Germany.

In early 2023, the EU was discussing a ban on the sale of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars from 2035. A car lasts about 15 years, so to hit carbon neutrality by 2050, you need to start taking new ICE cars off the road from 2035. At the last minute, Germany blocked the deal to demand a loophole be left open. It wanted an exemption for ICE cars running solely on synthetic fuels, also known as electrofuels or e-fuels.

E-fuels are made by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen with electricity. Carbon dioxide is then combined with the hydrogen to produce diesel, jet fuel or fuel oil. ICE vehicles running on e-fuels could therefore avoid being phased out. This attractive prospect could be part of a zero-carbon transportation solution. But there are countless practical issues.

Manufacturing e-fuels requires obtaining hydrogen via electrolysis of water and setting up fuel supply chains. Both are cutting-edge innovations in need of research, development and testing. Making the switch for cars would be a complex process. The better choice would be to start this process in energy-intensive industries and the power sector.

Also, the problems seen with the use of biomass or green ammonia in China’s coal power plants reoccur here. How to build the logistics infrastructure from production to transportation to final user? How to kick-start the market and help it grow? And who should pay the inevitable start-up costs?

Moreover, ICEs are inherently inefficient. A car run on e-fuel may be five times less efficient than an EV. How can that be competitive? And how can we ensure those cars never run on petrol or diesel again? Will there need to be different nozzles for e-fuel cars? A separate supply chain for zero-carbon fuels? Whatever happens, it feels as though some are unwilling to replace the internal combustion engine.

Beyond tech and economics

Whether it’s power plants in China or cars in Germany, switching fuels doesn’t seem to make sense.

In both cases, the change would allow a lot of existing infrastructure to be retained. This is an important factor. Both industries have huge logistical networks and assets set up; significant social, economic and political influence; and perhaps even a sense of pride in their mission. There are 35,000 people working on engine development at BMW alone. They take great pride in their engines, which rely on thousands of components seamlessly working together. It must be hard to imagine that being lost to “creative destruction”.

With coal power plants, the aim is to avoid the social costs of rapidly shutting down existing assets. But the current approach ignores market mechanisms and risks slowing the energy transition.

While technological advances are important for the transition, we also need effective measures to overcome resistance from business and ensure our goals are met. For coal plants and cars, fuel switches look like positive steps towards combatting climate change and achieving low-carbon targets. But in practice, they are accompanied by many technical, economic, political and market complications and variables.

Zhang Shuwei