Steam emits from a crude oil refinery in Kochi, Kerala state, India, on Aug. 26, 2022.
| Photo Credit: Ap

A team of European carbon removal specialists launched an initiative on Tuesday to help Indian businesses develop projects that suck carbon dioxide out the atmosphere and mitigate global warming.

The Amsterdam-based group, called remove, has raised more than 220 million euros ($238 million) to support carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects throughout Europe, and will now accept applications from Indian start-ups.

Successful applicants will gain access to remove’s network of experts and international buyers, and could be eligible for additional funding.

“We have now found the model that works,” said Marian Krueger, remove’s co-founder. “We believe this is a global problem and there is tremendous potential in other geographies beyond Europe.”

CDR refers to a wide range of interventions that sequester CO2 that has already been emitted. It includes reforestation and filters that extract carbon directly from the air.

Indian projects are expected to focus on biochar – charcoal produced from burning organic matter – as well as “enhanced weathering”, where materials like basalt are spread across land to absorb CO2.

Around 7-9 billion metric tons of CO2 need to be removed annually to keep temperature rises below the key 1.5 degree Celsius threshold, up from 2 billion tons currently, researchers have said.

The value of the CDR market could rise from $2.27 billion in 2023 to around $100 billion by 2030 if barriers to growth are addressed, a consultancy also said last month.

CDR projects are more expensive than conventional CO2 reduction, and their viability will depend on carbon markets. Demand for CDR credits is currently limited to a few dozen mainly philanthropic buyers on the voluntary market, including the U.S. federal government, Microsoft and Google.

“We all know we will need carbon removal down the line – the pot of gold at the end is very big, but right now … it really is a matter of survival until we finally hit the point where the market finally materialises,” said Krueger.

The European Union is currently exploring options to include CDR credits in its emissions trading system.

“We are going to need this to become far more mainstream than it currently is,” said Steve Smith, a CDR expert at Oxford University.

“I think that is going to have to involve governments stepping in to create the conditions for it to become mainstream.”

Smoke from a fire rises into the air in the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland, in Corumba, Mato Grosso do Sul state, Brazil, June 12, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The scorched carcasses of monkeys, snakes and caimans dot the charred expanses of the once-green Brazilian Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetlands.

As night falls, an amber tower of smoke lights the sky. There is no rest for the fire or the animals trying to flee.

“The fire is on a very large scale, there is no time for them to escape,” said Delcio Rodrigues, head of the ClimaInfo Institute. “Sometimes they don’t even have anywhere to escape.”

The El Nino weather pattern, supercharged by climate change, has dried the area’s rivers and disrupted its usual seasonal flooding, leaving the ecosystem vulnerable to fires.

This year is threatening to overtake 2020 as the Pantanal’s worst year for wildfires on record, when the blazes killed an estimated 17 million vertebrates, according to a study published in Scientific Reports.

The UNESCO World Heritage Site, which covers an area more than twice the size of Portugal, is home to the world’s largest jaguar species as well as species like the endangered tapir and giant anteaters.

Experts are warning of risks those populations as the region heads into the riskiest season for wildfires, usually peaking in September.

“Climate change plus the fires, they end up completely changing the environment. In the long term, there’s a reduction of biodiversity and loss of habitat,” said Rodrigues.

“Wild animals have nowhere to go.”

Men fish in a small lake located in front of a coal-burning power station located on the outskirts of Beijing September 23, 2009. Chinese President Hu Jintao on Tuesday promised to put a “notable” brake on the country’s rapidly rising carbon emissions, but dashed hopes he would unveil a hard target to kickstart stalled climate talks.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

China aims to reduce carbon dioxide emission by about 130 million metric tons in key areas in 2024 and 2025, according to its 2024-2025 carbon reduction action plan released by the government on Wednesday.

It also aims to reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by about 2.5% and 3.9% respectively in 2024.

A bumblebee flies between poppy flowers near the buildings of the banking district in Frankfurt, Germany, Friday, May 24, 2024. The Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union, or NABU, invited people to spend an hour counting the insects they see in a 10-meter radius (33-foot) radius and report what they see to NABU. The Citizen-Science-Projekts named “ insect summer” is set from May 31 to June 9 and Aug. 2 to Aug. 11, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

In a strip of greenery between Berlin’s Natural History Museum and a busy street, bumble bees move swiftly between flowers while a ladybug makes its way along a leaf full of aphids and bugs crawl about.

Gardens, balconies, verges, fields, woods and patches of wilderness across Germany will be the scene of this year’s “insect summer,” now in its seventh year, organized by the country’s Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union, or NABU. The environmental group has invited people to spend an hour counting the insects they see in a 10-meter (33-foot) radius.

“We have seen that a few insects that normally occur only in the south might be spreading further north,” including the violet carpenter bee, says Laura Breitkreuz, an expert on biodiversity and entomology at NABU, describing that as a sign of advancing climate change and warmer temperatures.

Over time, people appear to recognize more insects — a key goal of the citizen science project, which doesn’t aim to deliver precise scientific monitoring but can give researchers information on trends and unexpected insights.

Insects are an essential building block of ecosystems, crucial to pollination, food chains and to keeping the soil productive. But from bees to butterflies, insect populations have been in decline in recent decades — a drop often blamed on human causes such as the use of damaging chemicals, destruction of natural habitats and climate change.

Breitkreuz points to people’s lack of knowledge of “what is crawling around outside their door” as one contributing factor. “It’s very important for us to show people how important, great and interesting insects are,” she says.

Organizers have prepared a form and a mobile app to help people identify and report their firebug and lacewing sightings during this year’s two insect-counting events. Those are set from May 31 to June 9 and Aug. 2-11, giving insect-counters a chance to see what’s flying and crawling in different seasons. No equipment is needed to join in.

A view of the site of a landslide in Yambali village, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea, May 27, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

A devastating landslide struck several remote villages in the mountainous Enga province in Papua New Guinea late last week.

While it is too early for official confirmation, estimates place the death toll between 690 and 2,000 people, with thousands more missing. That only a few bodies have been recovered serves as a tragic reminder of the destructive power of these events.

The ongoing search and rescue operations have proven challenging. As often with landslides, secondary slides and rock falls are hampering efforts in the search zone. There’s also a lack of access to heavy digging machinery, and roads need to be cleared or repaired for assistance and equipment to arrive.

Even more critically, it is difficult to locate potential survivors, as landslides carry away buildings and their occupants in an unpredictable manner. What causes these devastating events and why are they so sudden and unpredictable?

What causes landslides?

Landslides happen when the pull from gravity exceeds the strength of the geomaterial forming the slope of a hill or mountain. Geomaterials can be as varied as rocks, sand, silt and clays.

Then, part of this slope starts sliding downhill. Depending on where the slope fails, the material sliding down can be just a few cubic metres or a few million cubic metres in volume.

Why do slopes fail? Most natural landslides are triggered by earthquakes or rainfall, or a combination of both.

Earthquakes shake the ground, stress it and weaken it over time. Rainwater can seep through the ground and soak it – the ground is often porous like a sponge – and add weight to the slope. This is why PNG is so prone to landslides, as it sits on an active fault and is subjected to heavy rainfalls.

Another adverse effect of water is erosion: the constant action of waves undercuts coastal slopes, causing them to fail. Groundwater can also dissolve rocks within slopes.

Humans can (and do) cause landslides in several ways, too. For example, deforestation has a negative impact on slope stability, as tree roots naturally reinforce the ground and drain water out. Also, mine blasts produce small earthquake-like ground vibrations that shake slopes nearby.

Why can’t we predict landslides?

It’s very difficult to predict and mitigate landslide risk effectively. The Enga landslide and the thousands of deadly and costly landslides occurring every year worldwide suggest so. Even in Australia – the flattest continent in the world – home insurance policies don’t tend to cover landslide risk for a simple reason: this risk is difficult to estimate.

So what would it take to warn people of a coming landslide? You would need a prediction for earthquakes and rainfall, in addition to a perfect knowledge of the slope-forming geomaterial.

Under our feet, geomaterials may include multiple, entangled layers of various kinds of rocks and particulate materials, such as sand, silt and clays. Their strength varies from a factor of one to 1,000, and their spatial distribution dictates where the slope is likely to fail.

To accurately assess the stability of the slope, a three-dimensional mapping of these materials and their strengths is needed. No sensor can provide this information, so geologists and geotechnical engineers must deal with partial information obtained at a few selected locations and extrapolate this data to the rest of the slope.

The weakest link of the chain – such as an existing fracture in a rock mass – is easily missed. This is an inevitable source of uncertainty when trying to predict how much material might slip.

We do know that the larger the volume of a landslide, the farther its runout distance. But it’s hard to gauge the exact size of a landslide, making predictions of runout distances and safe zones uncertain.

The question of “when will a landslide will occur” is also uncertain. Mechanical analysis enables us to estimate the vulnerability of a slope in a particular scenario, including earthquake magnitude and distribution of groundwater. But predicting if and when these triggers will happen is as “easy” as predicting the weather and seismic activity – a difficult task.

Unfortunately, all the money in the world can’t buy accurate landslide predictions – especially in remote parts of the world.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The largest field of pyramids in Egypt – consisting of 31 pyramids built over a millennium, including the famous Great Pyramid at Giza – lies along a narrow strip of land in the desert several kilometres west of the Nile River.

The Nile was at the heart of ancient Egyptian civilisation, and the location of so many pyramids some distance away from the river has until now not been fully explained.

In a new study published in Communications Earth & Environment, we addressed this puzzle. When the pyramids were built they sat next to a now-vanished branch of the Nile, which likely provided transport for workers and their materials.

A changing river

Like other rivers, the Nile adjusts and changes over time in response to climate change, floods and droughts. People and places also move with the river. In the past, civilisations fell and rose on its ebb and flow.

The Nile has not always looked or functioned the way it does now. By reading the landscape in Egypt, traces of the former river and its branches can be found hidden just beneath the land surface.

Now obscured by areas of cultivation and urban settlements, buried by centuries of mud from the modern river, the old channels and their stories have largely been lost to time. Once a mosaic of waterways and wetlands, the Nile is ready to share its secrets again.

Many scholars have discussed and sought answers to the mysteries of the Nile. Previous research has documented evidence for the existence of parts of ancient waterways or wetlands, particularly near the Giza pyramids.

Upstream near Luxor, Nile migration patterns have been investigated, and downstream abandoned channels have been discovered in the Nile Delta. Yet until now we did not have a comprehensive map and understanding of the waterways that fed the extensive pyramid chain from Lisht to Giza in the past.

The Ahramat Branch

Using satellite imagery, high-resolution digital elevation data and historical maps, we identified and traced the long path of a previously unknown channel of the Nile. What we have called the Ahramat Branch once flowed along the Western Desert margin of the Nile floodplain, close to the ancient pyramids.

Many of the pyramids, built during the Old Kingdom (roughly 2700–2200 BCE) and the Middle Kingdom (2050–1650 BCE), have causeways that lead to the branch. Many of these paths terminate in temples that may have acted as river docks in the past.

This suggests the Ahramat Branch was active during multiple phases of pyramid construction and was probably used as a transportation waterway for workmen and building materials to the sites.

Some pyramids have longer or differently angled causeways than others, indicating the builders adapted their construction approaches to the changing riverscape and local conditions at the desert margin.

Other pyramids were connected to inlets associated with tributaries of the Ahramat Branch on the edge of the Western Desert. In all, analysis of the ground elevation of 31 pyramids and their proximity to the floodplain helped explain the position and relative water level of the Ahramat Branch during the time between the Old Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period (roughly 2649–1540 BCE).

Digging deep

Once we had mapped the Ahramat Branch, we surveyed the landscape and its shape, and took deep core samples of soil and sediment to study the structure and sedimentology of the former river. We also worked with archaeologists, scientists and members of local communities to gather more context for our work.

The path of the defunct waterway lies between 2.5 and 10.25 kilometres west of the modern Nile river.

Our research suggests the branch ran for about 64 kilometres, was between two and eight metres deep, and between 200 and 700 metres wide. This is similar to the width of the river today.

At one of the sites we examined, near the town of Jirzah, the Ahramat Branch has a symmetrical channel shape. It has also been filled in with muddy and sandy sediment different to other surrounding deposits and the underlying bedrock. This indicates that the old channel has been slowly buried by fine sediment deposited by floods, as the main flow diverted towards the path of the modern river.

What happened to the Ahramat Branch?

Over time, the Ahramat Branch moved eastward and eventually water stopped flowing along it. We don’t know exactly why. Perhaps the Ahramat Branch and its daughter, the modern river, were active together for a time.

The river may have gradually moved to the lower-lying floodplain, towards the current location of the Nile. It is also possible that tectonic activity tilted the whole floodplain to the northeast.

A third possibility is that an increase in windblown sand may have filled up the river’s channel. Increases in sand deposition are most likely related to periods of desertification in the Sahara desert in North Africa.

The movement and diminishing of the Ahramat Branch might also be explained by an overall reduction in water flow due to reduced rainfall and greater aridity in the region, particularly during the end of the Old Kingdom.

This research shows that a multidisciplinary approach to river science is needed to gain a better understanding of dynamic river landscapes. If we want to understand and protect the rivers we have today – and the environmentally and culturally significant sites to which they are inextricably tied – we need a greater appreciation of the interconnected factors that affect rivers and how they can be managed.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Last month, the leaders of the G7 declared their commitment to achieving net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest. Closer to home, the Albanese government recently introduced legislation to establish a Net Zero Economy Authority, promising it will catalyse investment in clean energy technologies in the push to reach net zero.

Pledges to achieve net zero emissions over the coming decades have proliferated since the United Nation’s 2021 Glasgow climate summit, as governments declare their commitments to meeting the Paris Agreement goal of holding global warming under 1.5°C. But what exactly is “net zero”, and where did this concept come from?

Stabilising greenhouse gases

In the early 1990s, scientists and governments were negotiating the key article of the UN’s 1992 climate change framework: “the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [human-caused] interference with the climate system”. How to achieve that stabilisation – let alone define “dangerous” climate change – has occupied climate scientists and negotiators ever since.

From the outset, scientists and governments recognised reducing greenhouse gas emissions was only one side of the equation. Finding ways to compensate or offset emissions would also be necessary.

The subsequent negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol backed the role of forests in the global carbon cycle as carbon sinks.

It also provided the means for well-forested developing countries to participate in the emerging carbon offset market, and to play their part in reaching the carbon accounting goal of “carbon neutrality”. Under those terms, the industrialised countries subject to the Kyoto Protocol could pay developing countries to offset their own emissions as a form of low-cost mitigation.

The Kyoto Protocol was unable to curtail soaring global greenhouse gas emissions, and a successor agreement appeared uncertain. As a result, interest turned in the late 2000s to the possibility of using highly controversial geoengineering techniques to remove greenhouse gas emissions. These proposals included sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky so the atmosphere would trap less heat, or reflecting sunlight away from the planet to reduce heat absorption. The focus on carbon sinks, whether through forests or direct air capture, would appear again in the idea of net zero.

Temperature targets

By this point, policymakers and advocates were shifting away from emissions reductions goals (such as Australia’s unusual first Kyoto target to limit emissions to 108% of 1990 emissions by 2012).

Instead, temperature targets became more popular, such as limiting warming to no more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels. The European Union had already adopted the 2°C threshold in 1996 and argued successfully for its relevance as a long-term objective for climate action.

What changed was scientists now had better ways of tracking how long carbon dioxide emissions would stay in the atmosphere, allowing better projections of our carbon budget.

These findings allowed the IPCC’s 2014 report to clearly state limiting warming to below 2°C would require “near zero emissions of carbon dioxide and other long-lived greenhouse gases by the end of the century”.

By this time, London-based environmental lawyer and climate negotiator Farhana Yamin had also set her sights on net zero by 2050. For Yamin, translating the 1.5°C ambition into climate negotiations meant focusing on net zero: “In your lifetime, emissions have to go to zero. That’s a message people understand.”

The concept of net zero offered a simple metric to assess mitigation efforts and hold parties legally accountable – an instrument she and colleagues proposed for the negotiation of a new legally binding agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

By late 2014, net zero had gained traction, appearing for the first time at a UN climate conference, the UN’s Emissions Gap Report, and in a speech by World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim that stressed “we must achieve zero net emissions of greenhouse gases before 2100”.

Zero in Paris

These efforts culminated in the 2015 Paris Agreement, which in addition to its well-known temperature targets of 1.5°C and 2°C, also added a complementary goal: To undertake rapid [emissions] reductions … so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removal by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.

This is what “net zero” means – a “balance” between carbon emissions and carbon sinks. It was subsequently enshrined in the IPCC’s Special Report on the importance of keeping warming under 1.5°C, in which 195 member states agreed to get to net zero emissions by 2050.

Slogan for greenwashing?

So, what’s next for net zero? Countries such as India have questioned what it means for fairness and equity between developing and developed nations, Instead, they favour the well-established approach of “common but differentiated responsibility” to mitigation. This justifies India’s aim to reach net zero emissions by 2070, as developed nations should lead the way and provide developing countries with funds and technologies necessary to support their mitigation ambitions.

The UN, by contrast, has warned the flexibility of net zero as a concept could make it a mere slogan for greenwashing by corporations and other non-state entities rather than a concrete objective.

As the chair of the UN’s High Level Experts group put it: It’s not just advertising, bogus net-zero claims drive up the cost that ultimately everyone would pay. Including people not in this room, through huge impacts, climate migration and their very lives.

Given the chasm between pledges and practice documented in the 2023 UN Emissions Gap Report, there is a very real likelihood we will shoot past the temperature limits of the Paris Agreement.

Fossil fuel treaty

Net zero isn’t the only approach to tackle climate change. Other concepts are growing in popularity.

For instance, optimists say the temperature “overshoot” we’re on track for could be tackled with a “drawdown” of carbon emissions if we use “carbon dioxide removal” or “negative emissions technologies” such as carbon capture and storage, soil carbon sequestration, and mass tree planting and reforestation.

But beware: the IPCC’s Special Report cautioned that while some of these options might be technologically possible, they have not been tested on a large scale.

Can these untested technologies be relied on to halt and reverse the chaos likely to be unleashed by dangerous levels of global heating?

What does overshoot mean for the low-lying island nations who rallied around “1.5°C to stay alive”?

Momentum has been building for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty since 2022, when Vanuatu called on the UN General Assembly to phase out the use of fossil fuels.

Such a treaty, Vanuatu President Nikenike Vurobaravu said, would “enable a global just transition for every worker, community and nation with fossil fuel dependence”.

At the Dubai climate conference late last year, held in the wake of the International Energy Agency’s revised Net Zero Roadmap, the negotiations culminated in a first for the UNFCCC – an explicit statement endorsing: transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.

Will net zero become more than hot air? That remains to be seen. While the science behind the concept is broadly sound, the politics of achieving net zero are a work in progress.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the point where they are zeroed out by carbon sinks by 2050 requires just and credible planning. We must prioritise the phase-out of fossil fuels sooner rather than later.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Last month, the leaders of the G7 declared their commitment to achieving net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest. Closer to home, the Albanese government recently introduced legislation to establish a Net Zero Economy Authority, promising it will catalyse investment in clean energy technologies in the push to reach net zero.

Pledges to achieve net zero emissions over the coming decades have proliferated since the United Nation’s 2021 Glasgow climate summit, as governments declare their commitments to meeting the Paris Agreement goal of holding global warming under 1.5°C. But what exactly is “net zero”, and where did this concept come from?

Stabilising greenhouse gases

In the early 1990s, scientists and governments were negotiating the key article of the UN’s 1992 climate change framework: “the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [human-caused] interference with the climate system”. How to achieve that stabilisation – let alone define “dangerous” climate change – has occupied climate scientists and negotiators ever since.

From the outset, scientists and governments recognised reducing greenhouse gas emissions was only one side of the equation. Finding ways to compensate or offset emissions would also be necessary.

The subsequent negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol backed the role of forests in the global carbon cycle as carbon sinks.

It also provided the means for well-forested developing countries to participate in the emerging carbon offset market, and to play their part in reaching the carbon accounting goal of “carbon neutrality”. Under those terms, the industrialised countries subject to the Kyoto Protocol could pay developing countries to offset their own emissions as a form of low-cost mitigation.

The Kyoto Protocol was unable to curtail soaring global greenhouse gas emissions, and a successor agreement appeared uncertain. As a result, interest turned in the late 2000s to the possibility of using highly controversial geoengineering techniques to remove greenhouse gas emissions. These proposals included sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky so the atmosphere would trap less heat, or reflecting sunlight away from the planet to reduce heat absorption. The focus on carbon sinks, whether through forests or direct air capture, would appear again in the idea of net zero.

Temperature targets

By this point, policymakers and advocates were shifting away from emissions reductions goals (such as Australia’s unusual first Kyoto target to limit emissions to 108% of 1990 emissions by 2012).

Instead, temperature targets became more popular, such as limiting warming to no more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels. The European Union had already adopted the 2°C threshold in 1996 and argued successfully for its relevance as a long-term objective for climate action.

What changed was scientists now had better ways of tracking how long carbon dioxide emissions would stay in the atmosphere, allowing better projections of our carbon budget.

These findings allowed the IPCC’s 2014 report to clearly state limiting warming to below 2°C would require “near zero emissions of carbon dioxide and other long-lived greenhouse gases by the end of the century”.

By this time, London-based environmental lawyer and climate negotiator Farhana Yamin had also set her sights on net zero by 2050. For Yamin, translating the 1.5°C ambition into climate negotiations meant focusing on net zero: “In your lifetime, emissions have to go to zero. That’s a message people understand.”

The concept of net zero offered a simple metric to assess mitigation efforts and hold parties legally accountable – an instrument she and colleagues proposed for the negotiation of a new legally binding agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

By late 2014, net zero had gained traction, appearing for the first time at a UN climate conference, the UN’s Emissions Gap Report, and in a speech by World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim that stressed “we must achieve zero net emissions of greenhouse gases before 2100”.

Zero in Paris

These efforts culminated in the 2015 Paris Agreement, which in addition to its well-known temperature targets of 1.5°C and 2°C, also added a complementary goal: To undertake rapid [emissions] reductions … so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removal by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.

This is what “net zero” means – a “balance” between carbon emissions and carbon sinks. It was subsequently enshrined in the IPCC’s Special Report on the importance of keeping warming under 1.5°C, in which 195 member states agreed to get to net zero emissions by 2050.

Slogan for greenwashing?

So, what’s next for net zero? Countries such as India have questioned what it means for fairness and equity between developing and developed nations, Instead, they favour the well-established approach of “common but differentiated responsibility” to mitigation. This justifies India’s aim to reach net zero emissions by 2070, as developed nations should lead the way and provide developing countries with funds and technologies necessary to support their mitigation ambitions.

The UN, by contrast, has warned the flexibility of net zero as a concept could make it a mere slogan for greenwashing by corporations and other non-state entities rather than a concrete objective.

As the chair of the UN’s High Level Experts group put it: It’s not just advertising, bogus net-zero claims drive up the cost that ultimately everyone would pay. Including people not in this room, through huge impacts, climate migration and their very lives.

Given the chasm between pledges and practice documented in the 2023 UN Emissions Gap Report, there is a very real likelihood we will shoot past the temperature limits of the Paris Agreement.

Fossil fuel treaty

Net zero isn’t the only approach to tackle climate change. Other concepts are growing in popularity.

For instance, optimists say the temperature “overshoot” we’re on track for could be tackled with a “drawdown” of carbon emissions if we use “carbon dioxide removal” or “negative emissions technologies” such as carbon capture and storage, soil carbon sequestration, and mass tree planting and reforestation.

But beware: the IPCC’s Special Report cautioned that while some of these options might be technologically possible, they have not been tested on a large scale.

Can these untested technologies be relied on to halt and reverse the chaos likely to be unleashed by dangerous levels of global heating?

What does overshoot mean for the low-lying island nations who rallied around “1.5°C to stay alive”?

Momentum has been building for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty since 2022, when Vanuatu called on the UN General Assembly to phase out the use of fossil fuels.

Such a treaty, Vanuatu President Nikenike Vurobaravu said, would “enable a global just transition for every worker, community and nation with fossil fuel dependence”.

At the Dubai climate conference late last year, held in the wake of the International Energy Agency’s revised Net Zero Roadmap, the negotiations culminated in a first for the UNFCCC – an explicit statement endorsing: transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.

Will net zero become more than hot air? That remains to be seen. While the science behind the concept is broadly sound, the politics of achieving net zero are a work in progress.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the point where they are zeroed out by carbon sinks by 2050 requires just and credible planning. We must prioritise the phase-out of fossil fuels sooner rather than later.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Smoke from burning vegetation rises in a rainforest in Yanomami Indigenous land, Roraima state, Brazil, March 2, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has experienced its largest blazes on record in the first four months of the year, with the environmental workers union on Monday placing partial blame on lower government spending on firefighting.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has staked his international reputation on protecting the Amazon rainforest and restoring Brazil as a leader on climate policy.

The Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, is vital to curbing catastrophic global warming because of the vast amount of greenhouse gas it absorbs.

A record drought in the Amazon rainforest region, driven by the El Nino climate phenomenon and global warming, has helped contribute to dry conditions fueling fires this year.

More than 12,000 square kilometers (4,633 square miles) of the Brazil’s Amazon rainforest burned between January and April, the most in over two decades of data, according to Brazil’s space research agency Inpe. That’s an area larger than Qatar, or nearly the size of the U.S. state of Connecticut.

Fires in the Amazon generally do not occur naturally but are ignited by people, often seeking to clear land for agriculture.

Firefighting budget cuts are also partially to blame, environmental workers union Ascema said in a statement. They complained that this year’s budget for environmental agency Ibama to fight fires is 24% lower than 2023.

In a statement, Brazil’s environment ministry said that the Amazon fund, which draws on donations from foreign governments, put 405 million reais ($79.4 million) toward firefighting at the state level under Lula’s current administration, which began in 2023.

The federal government sent about 380 firefighters to Roraima, the northern Amazon state that was hit the hardest by the fires, which were intensified by drought, the ministry said.

It did not respond to questions on cuts to Ibama’s firefighting budget. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ibama agents have suspended field work since January amid tense negotiations with the federal government for better pay and working conditions.

Ascema has rejected the latest government offer and demanded larger salary rises after more than a decade of paltry increases and dwindling staff.

While the area burned is a record for the first four months of the year, it pales in comparison to blazes in the peak dry season from August to November, when an area that size can burn in a single month.

“The government needs to understand that without total engagement from environmental workers, the situation foreseen for this year is unprecedented catastrophe,” said Ascema President Cleberson Zavaski.

“Prevention efforts, such as raising awareness about ignitions, creating firebreaks in strategic areas, and conducting prescribed burns, depend on employing people with stable conditions,” said Manoela Machado, a fire researcher at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “These measures will influence the severity of the fire crisis when the dry conditions allow fires to spread.”

An area is uncovered by the lowering of the water level from the Magdalena river, the longest and most important river in Colombia, due to the lack of rain, in the city of Honda, January 14, 2016. While flooding and intense rain wreak havoc on several countries in Latin America, El Nino brings other harmful effects to Colombia with severe drought.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Japan’s weather bureau said on Friday there was a 90% chance that the El Nino phenomenon will dissipate by the end of May, while there was a 60% chance of the La Nina phenomenon occurring in the months up until November.

El Nino is a warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific. La Nina is characterised by unusually cold ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific region and is linked to floods and drought.