BBC News

November 2, 2021
Brazil - where stretches of the Amazon rainforest have been cut down - was among the signatories on Tuesday.

The pledge includes almost £14bn ($19.2bn) of public and private funds.

Experts welcomed the move, but warned a previous deal in 2014 had "failed to slow deforestation at all" and commitments needed to be delivered on.

Felling trees contributes to climate change because it depletes forests that absorb vast amounts of the warming gas CO2.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is hosting the global meeting in Glasgow, said "more leaders than ever before" - a total of 110 - had made the "landmark" commitment.

"We have to stop the devastating loss of our forests," he said - and "end the role of humanity as nature's conqueror, and instead become nature's custodian".

The two-week summit in Glasgow is seen as crucial if climate change is to be brought under control.

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Associated Press

November 2, 2021
World leaders promised to protect Earth’s forests, cut methane emissions and help South Africa wean itself off coal at the U.N. climate summit Tuesday — part of a flurry of deals intended to avert catastrophic global warming.

Britain hailed the commitment by more than 100 countries to end deforestation in the coming decade as the first big achievement of the conference in the Scottish city of Glasgow, known as COP26 — but experts noted such promises have been made and broken before.

More than 120 world leaders were heading home after two days in which they received stark warnings about the state of the Earth from Johnson, naturalist David Attenborough, Queen Elizabeth II and — most powerfully — the people of countries and regions already facing climate upheaval.

Johnson said at a news conference that it was important to “guard against false hope,” but added that he was “cautiously optimistic” about the outcome of the talks. The conference aims to keep the world on track to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels — the goal set at the Paris climate conference six years ago.

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New York Times

November 2, 2021
In a sweeping accord aimed at protecting the world’s forests, which are crucial to absorbing carbon dioxide and slowing the rise in global warming, leaders of more than 100 countries gathered in Glasgow vowed on Tuesday to end deforestation by 2030.

President Biden said the United States would contribute billions to the global effort to protect the ecosystems that are vital for cleaning the air we breathe and the water we drink, and keeping the Earth’s climate in balance.

The pact — which also includes countries such as Brazil, Russia and China — encompasses about 85 percent of the world’s forests, officials said. It is one of the first major accords to emerge from the United Nations climate summit known as COP26, which is seen as a crucial moment in efforts to address climate change.
“These great teeming ecosystems — these cathedrals of nature,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said in announcing the agreement, “are the lungs of our planet.”

President Biden said he would work with Congress to deploy up to $9 billion to the global effort through 2030. Additionally, governments committed $12 billion through 2025, and private companies pledged $7 billion to protect and restore forests in a variety of ways, including $1.7 billion for Indigenous peoples. More than 30 financial institutions also vowed to stop investing in companies responsible for deforestation.

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New York Times

November 2, 2021
Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans on the planet, and who started his financial empire by selling books online, pledged $2 billion to restoring natural habitats and transforming food systems at the climate summit in Glasgow on Tuesday.

Speaking at a conference where President Biden and other leaders announced a global pact to end deforestation by 2030, Mr. Bezos said that private industry must play a central role in the campaign.

“Amazon aims to power all its operations by renewable energies by 2025,” he said, restating his goal for the company to be carbon-neutral by 2040.

That will be a sizable challenge.

Amazon said, for example, that the company’s emissions from indirect sources had increased 15 percent last year over 2019. The company has pointed out that when its emissions are measured relative to its booming sales, its carbon footprint has been decreasing. But some climate experts say this calculation, called carbon intensity, obscures that the company is still generating an increasing amount of carbon.

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Ford Foundation

November 1, 2021
The UK, Norway, Germany, the US, and the Netherlands, in partnership with 17 funders, pledged today to invest US$1.7 billion to help Indigenous and local communities protect the biodiverse tropical forests that are vital to protecting the planet from climate change, biodiversity loss, and pandemic risk, according to an announcement made today at a high-level World Leaders Summit at COP26.

“We are demonstrating our commitment today by announcing an initial, collective pledge of $1.7 billion of financing, from 2021 to 2025, to support the advancement of Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ forest tenure rights and greater recognition and rewards for their role as guardians of forests and nature,” says a statement released today by the donors. “We call on other donors to significantly increase their support to this important agenda.”

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Bloomberg

November 1, 2021
One hundred countries, representing 85% of the world’s forests, have given themselves nine years to halt and reverse deforestation, in a major new commitment at global climate change talks on Tuesday.

Brazil, Russia, Canada, Colombia and Indonesia will be among the nations committing to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030 at the third day of COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, in an initiative spearheaded by the conference host, the U.K.

The inclusion of Brazil, home to the world’s largest tropical rainforest, is crucial to the initiative and comes amid a turnaround in the country’s ambitions to reduce emissions and tackle deforestation. Across the world as a whole, an area of forest the size of 27 soccer pitches is lost every minute, according to the U.K.

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The Guardian

October 28, 2021
Nearly two years after the first reported case of Covid-19, the world is still facing the repercussions. At the same time, the extent of our planetary emergency – of climate crisis, biodiversity loss and inequality – has become evident. As we rebuild our societies and economies, we are faced with a unique opportunity to build a nature-positive future that we must not let slip away. It is time for all of us to chart a planetary response to our planetary crisis – a response that puts nature at the centre.

Our shared global experience with Covid-19 has underlined the interconnectedness of our different systems. The science is clear: climate, biodiversity and human health are fully interdependent. Yet, within discussions around post-Covid recovery, nature is not yet recognised enough as an essential piece in the puzzle of a resilient future for all.

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The Guardian

October 14, 2021
The calls for biodiversity and the climate crisis to be tackled in tandem are growing. “It is clear that we cannot solve [the global biodiversity and climate crises] in isolation – we either solve both or we solve neither,” says Sveinung Rotevatn, Norway’s climate and environment minister, with the launch in June of a report produced by the world’s leading biodiversity and climate experts. Zoological Society of London senior research fellow Dr Nathalie Pettorelli, who led a study on the subject published in the Journal of Applied Ecology in September, says: “The level of interconnectedness between the climate change and biodiversity crises is high and should not be underestimated. This is not just about climate change impacting biodiversity; it is also about the loss of biodiversity deepening the climate crisis.”

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The New York Times

October 4, 2021
The world lost about 14 percent of its coral reefs in the decade after 2009, mainly because of climate change, according to a sweeping international report on the state of the world’s corals.

The report, issued late Monday, underscores the catastrophic consequences of global warming while also offering some hope that some coral reefs can be saved if humans move quickly to rein in greenhouse gases.

“Coral reefs are the canary in the coal mine telling us how quickly it can go wrong,” said David Obura, one of the report’s editors and chairman of the coral specialist group for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The 14 percent decline, he said, was cause for deep concern. “In finance, we worry about half-percent declines and half-percent changes in employment and interest rates.”

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The Straits Times

September 29, 2021
Nature is not, and cannot be, a passive victim of economic development, Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat said on Wednesday (Sept 29).

Not only does nature help make city life more liveable, it can also contribute to mankind's fight against climate change, he said, urging delegates gathered at the Ecosperity Week sustainability conference to take a fresh perspective on the natural environment.

The three-day conference is convened by Singapore's Temasek investment company for policymakers, investors, non-government groups and businesses, and is being held in a hybrid format with some attendees gathered at Marina Bay Sands. Wednesday marks the second day of the conference.

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E&E News Greenwire

September 24, 2021
Americans have been draining wetlands for farming and development since Colonial times.

But climate change may reverse that tide — from destruction to restoration.

Federal scientists are studying whether heat-trapping carbon dioxide can be sucked out of the atmosphere and sequestered in restored salt marshes, sea grass beds and mangrove swamps. And those wetlands can in turn protect communities along the coast from rising seas and fierce, frequent climate-driven storms.

“The concept that’s forming is that what we need to do is massive-scale ecosystem restoration as soon as possible to begin absorbing as much carbon dioxide as we can and diminish the amount of overshoot that we have in atmospheric greenhouse gases this century,” said Kevin Kroeger, a research chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center.

Across the Lower 48 states, wetlands hold at least 3.2 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent, by one estimate — roughly half the country’s net total greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.

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NBC News

September 13, 2021
Without immediate action to combat climate change, rising sea levels, water scarcity and declining crop productivity could force 216 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050, the World Bank said in a new report on Monday.

The report, Groundswell 2.0, modeled the impacts of climate change on six regions, concluding that climate migration “hotspots” will emerge as soon as 2030 and intensify by 2050, hitting the poorest parts of the world hardest.

Sub-Saharan Africa alone would account for 86 million of the internal migrants, with 19 million more in North Africa, the report showed, while 40 million migrants were expected in South Asia and 49 million in East Asia and the Pacific.

Such movements will put significant stress on both sending and receiving areas, straining cities and urban centers and jeopardizing development gains, the report said.

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The New York Times

August 9, 2021
Nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded.

Humans have already heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, largely by burning coal, oil and gas for energy. And the consequences can be felt across the globe: This summer alone, blistering heat waves have killed hundreds of people in the United States and Canada, floods have devastated Germany and China, and wildfires have raged out of control in Siberia, Turkey and Greece.

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National Geographic

August 9, 2021
Climate change has already touched every corner of the planet and will continue to reshape the human experience for centuries to come, its impacts intensifying as warming grows, scientists warn.

The 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) the planet has warmed since the preindustrial period has pushed Earth toward irreversible change, some of which is unavoidable. But decisive action to cut emissions quickly and thoroughly—keeping total temperature rise as low as possible—can greatly reduce the risks of crossing further dangerous thresholds that would put the planet even more at risk, according to a massive new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released Monday.

“In order to stabilize climate, we have to stop emitting immediately, full stop,” says Charles Koven, one of the report authors and a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

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BirdLife International

July 30, 2021
It has been hard not to be deeply affected by the events of the past few weeks: catastrophic floods in Germany, China and India killing hundreds of people; forest fires in Siberia and North America; and drought and famine in Southern Madagascar. We know these extreme weather events have been triggered by the climate crisis, and it acutely demonstrates that we are now living with the consequences of our collective failure to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.

The effects on human lives and livelihoods are horrendous, and there are very serious impacts on wildlife as well. It was appalling, for example, to see the video taken by a volunteer of Turkish BirdLife partner, Doğa Derneği, of thousands of dead baby flamingos near Lake Tuz (Salt Lake) in Anatolia, Turkey. This unbearable scene was the result of a major water shortage in the region. Lower rainfall and unsustainable irrigation practices going back to the 1960s had caused a drought. The situation will only get worse, unless more sustainable water and agriculture practices are introduced at pace.

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