For many Muslims breaking fast in mosques around the world this Ramadan, something will be missing: plastics.

The communal experience of iftars – the after-sunset meal that brings people of the faith together during the holy month – often necessitates the use of utensils designed for mass events, such as plastic knives and forks, along with bottles of water.

But to encourage Muslims to be more mindful of the impact of Ramadan on the environment, mosques are increasingly dispensing of single-use items, with some banning the use of plastics altogether.

As a historian of Islam, I see this “greening” of Ramadan as entirely in keeping with the traditions of the faith, and in particular the observance of Ramadan.

The month – during which observant Muslims must abstain from even a sip of water or food from sun up to sun down – is a time for members of the faith to focus on purifying themselves as individuals against excess and materialism.

But in recent years, Muslim communities around the world have used the period to rally around themes of social awareness. And this includes understanding the perils of wastefulness and embracing the link between Ramadan and environmental consciousness.

The ban on plastics – a move encouraged by the Muslim Council of Britain as a way for Muslims “to be mindful of [God’s] creation and care for the environment” – is just one example.

“Green Ramadan,” Digital, Dream/ Dreamland 3, 2024.

Many other mosques and centers are discouraging large or extravagant evening meals altogether. The fear is such communal events generate food waste and overconsumption and often rely on nonbiodegradable materials for cutlery, plates and serving platters.

Quranic environmentalism

While the move toward environmental consciousness has gained traction in Muslim communities in recent years, the links between Islam and sustainability can be found in the faith’s foundational texts.

Scholars have long emphasized principles outlined in the Quran that highlight conservation, reverence for living creatures and the diversity of living things as a reminder of God’s creation.

The Quran repeatedly emphasizes the idea of “mizan,” a kind of cosmic and natural balance, and the role of humans as stewards and khalifa, or “viceregents,” on Earth – terms that also carry an environmental interpretation.

Recently, Islamic environmental activists have highlighted the numerous hadith – sayings of the Prophet Muhammad that provide guidance to followers of the faith – that emphasize that Muslims should avoid excess, respect resources and living things, and consume in moderation.

Although present from the outset of the faith, Islam’s ties to environmentalism received major visibility with the works of Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Chicago in 1966. The lectures and a subsequent book, “Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man,” warned that humans had broken their relationship with nature and thus placed themselves in grave ecological danger.

Nasr blamed modern and Western science for being materialistic, utilitarian and inhuman, claiming it had destroyed traditional views of nature. Nasr argued that Islamic philosophy, metaphysics, scientific tradition, arts and literature emphasize the spiritual significance of nature. But he noted that numerous contemporary factors, such as mass rural-to-urban migration and poor and autocratic leadership, had prevented the Muslim world from realizing and implementing the Islamic view of the natural environment.

Scholars and activists expanded on Nasr’s work through the 1980s and 1990s, among them Fazlun Khalid, one of the world’s leading voices on Islam and environmentalism. In 1994, Khalid founded the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, an organization dedicated to the maintenance of the planet as a healthy habitat for all living beings. Khalid and other Muslim environmentalists suggest that Islam’s nearly 2 billion adherents can participate in the tasks of environmental sustainability and equity not through Western models and ideologies but from within their own traditions.

Partnering with the United Nations Environment Program, Khalid and other leading scholars crafted Al-Mizan, a worldwide project for Muslim leaders interested in Muslims’ religious commitments to nature. “The ethos of Islam is that it integrates belief with a code of conduct which pays heed to the essence of the natural world,” Khalid wrote in “Signs on the Earth: Islam, Modernity, and the Climate Crisis.”

Going beyond an eco-Ramadan

Environmental crises disproportionately affect the world’s poorest populations, and academics have highlighted
the particular vulnerabilities of Muslim communities around the world, such as the victims of devastating floods in Pakistan in 2022.

By highlighting Islamic principles, policies and community approaches, academics have shown how Islam can represent a model for environmental stewardship.

This push for environmental consciousness extends beyond Ramadan. In recent years, Muslims have tried to introduce green practices into the shrine cities in Iraq during pilgrimage seasons in Ashura and Arbaeen.

This has included awareness campaigns encouraging the 20 million pilgrims who visit Arbaeen annually to reduce the tons of trash they leave every year that clog up Iraq’s waterways. Quoting from Shiite scholarship and drawing on testimonials from community leaders, the Green Pilgrim movement suggests carrying cloth bags and reusable water bottles, turning down plastic cutlery, and hosting eco-friendly stalls along the walk.

Muslim-owned businesses and nonprofits are joining these wider efforts. Melanie Elturk, the founder of the successful hijab brand Haute Hijab, regularly ties together faith, fashion, commerce and environmentalism by highlighting the brand’s focus on sustainability and environmental impact. The Washington, D.C., nonprofit Green Muslims pioneered the first “leftar” – a play on the word “iftar” – using leftovers and reusable containers.

These efforts are but a few of the diverse ways that Muslim communities are addressing environmental impact. The greening of Ramadan fits into a broader conversation about how often communities can tackle climate change within their own frameworks.

But Islamic environmentalism is more than just the dispensing of plastic forks and water bottles – it taps into a worldview ingrained in the faith from the outset, and can continue to guide adherents as they navigate environmentalism, a space where they may otherwise be marginalized.

Noorzehra Zaidi, Assistant Professor of HIstory, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

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

As I began this piece on trees in forests, woods and parks, a friend asked, why in January in New England?  Why didn’t I wait until the deciduous trees were a palette of new spring green crowning the stark brown trunks and branches of winter?  The next day, January 7, nature provided the answer: a 10” snowstorm.  Trees after a winter snowstorm – their upstretched dark deciduous branches shouldered with snow and their downreaching evergreen branches pillowed with snow – are a feast for the eyes.

  “A forest is a sacred place…The medicines available in the forest are the second most valuable gift that nature offers us; the oxygen available there is the first.”  These are the words of Irish born and educated in the ancient Celtic culture of spiritual and physical respect for trees, Diana Beresford Kroeger.  This brilliant botanist went on to receive advanced degrees, culminating in a doctorate in medical biochemistry.  She affirmed that simply walking in a pine forest is a balm for the body and soul, elevating our mood, thanks to their chemical gift of pinenes aerosols released by pine trees and absorbed by our bodies. 

The healing potential of nature even stretches to those hospitalized. Patients recovering from surgery heal more quickly and need fewer pain killers if they have a hospital room with a window that looks out onto nature.  Similarly, studies of students in classrooms with a view of nature have found that they both enjoyed learning and learned more than students without a view of nature.

Suzanne Simard worked for Canada’s minister of forests doing research on the most efficient ways to re-grow forests that had been clearcut by the logging industry.  Loving forests since a child growing up in rural British Columbia, she grasped immediately that clear-cutting whole areas of a forest and applying herbicide to kill any competitor plant or tree before replanting monoculture tree seedlings was a “war on the forest.” In testing her insight, she found that clearcutting and planting single species seedling trees made no difference to speeding up the growth of the desired tree plantation and in some cases, reduced tree survival in the monoculture wood lots. 

“Healing Forest,” Digital, Dream / Mystical, 2024.

In pursuing a doctorate and subsequent years of research, Simard documented that biodiverse forests are the healthiest of forests, with trees communicating with other trees of their own species and other species by an underground fungal network linking their roots with each other. Through this network, known as the wood wide web, trees provide chemical food and medicine to keep each other as healthy as possible.  Her work has shown that “the fungal networks between roots of diverse trees carry the same chemicals as neurotransmitters in our brain,” strongly suggesting, she says, that trees have intelligence.  She has learned from Aboriginal people that “they view trees as their people, just as they view the wolves and the bears and the salmon as their relations.”  We need that back, she asserts. 

Trees teach us lessons of community and cooperation through all the seasons, writes German forester Peter Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees.  He deems forests as “superorganisms,” sharing food with their own species and even nourishing their competitors.  Together they create an ecosystem that enables them to live much longer as a community than a single living tree alone, a life lesson for us humans.  Moreover, “sick trees are supported by healthy ones nearby…until they recover; and even a dead trunk is indispensable for the cycle of lifesaving as a cradle for its young.”

Trees are essential for life on earth; the older they are, the more essential they are.  They remove carbon dioxide from the air, store carbon in their tissue and soil, give back oxygen into the atmosphere and slow global temperature increases. They offer cooling shade in hardscape urban neighborhoods, buffer cold winter winds, attract birds and wildlife, purify our air, prevent soil erosion during rainstorms and filter rainwater falling through their soil.  

Without trees, we could not survive, whereas they have and could live without us.  Older than we so-called homo sapiens (“wise men”) by a thousand times, they are wiser than many humans: they do not wage war with each other nor destroy their own habitat.  They know not genocide nor ecocide.  They are our ancestral model for cooperative, non-violent and sustainable communities.

I write this to honor and thank the multitude of forest protectors across our country and for those working to restore nature to their towns and cities.

And you don’t have to wait for the distant future to see the impact of such accelerated heating.  Just look at current global data. Comparing 2023 to 2022, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported a worldwide rise of 60% in the number of deaths from landslides, 278% from wildfires, and 340% from storms. Worse yet, those of our fellow humans suffering the most from the impact of human-induced climate change aren’t the ones causing it. More than half of the deaths reported by OCHA occurred in low- to lower-middle-income countries, and 45% of those killed lived in countries that produce less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Imagine that for (in)justice!

Putting an end to global warming should be an overwhelming moral imperative for every nation on this planet. But climate-change stories, extreme as they may be, almost never lead the news, nor does dealing with the phenomenon seem to be at the top of any leader’s list of national priorities. How about last month’s COP28 global climate summit in Dubai? It produced an agreement that committed the world’s nations to doing… well, essentially nothing.

With the news cycle stuck in a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of sudden, compelling crises and unending wars, world powers seem almost willfully blind to the possibility that the global environment (and with it, civilization itself) is spinning out of control — and not in some distant future but right now.

Long Emergencies

With the recent COP28 agreement, the rich nations have at least finally acknowledged that fossil fuels are indeed a problem. Still, they continue to reject a planned, systematic phase-out of oil, natural gas, and coal on an ambitiously expedited timetable (as laid out in proposals for a global Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty).

Governments, it seems, always have on hand some other dire emergency that supposedly justifies setting climate change aside. Perhaps the closest the rich countries have ever come to seriously tackling the subject of greenhouse gas emissions, which might be thought of as a long emergency, was in the various  U.S., European, and global Green New Deals of 2018-2019. But those inadequate proposals were soon eclipsed by the Covid-19 pandemic and a still-surging rise of far-right extremists who consider global warming a completely off-the-charts subject. Then, in 2022–2023, just as interest in climate was rising again thanks to scary new reports from the world’s climate-science community, the Russian invasion of Ukraine elbowed global warming out of our field of vision, while a stunning war-related spike in fossil-fuel prices killed off any immediate interest in reducing carbon emissions.

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Then, last fall, the genocide in Gaza began. In November, TomDispatch’s Tom Engelhardt wrote that “while the nightmare in the Middle East is being covered daily in a dramatic fashion across the mainstream media, the burning of the planet is, at best, a distinctly secondary, or tertiary, or… well, you can fill in the possible numbers from there… reality.” He certainly wasn’t suggesting, nor am I, that the Palestinians are getting too much attention. On the contrary, they need even more of it, but the climate crisis simply can’t be lost in the shuffle.

A Side-Trip to India: No Eye-Catching Crisis in Sight? Just Conjure One Up

Such failures of attention are, of course, hardly confined to the United States. Similar shortsightedness can be seen right now in India, where my family and I are spending January with relatives in Mumbai. Here, too, politicians are making a ruckus about immediate, in-your-face issues — some real, others concocted — while ignoring the more slowly developing but far more consequential threat of climatic breakdown.  

In recent years, India has endured a string of cataclysmic droughts, floods, heat waves, and other disasters, along with a chronic but climate-related plague of urban air pollution. In this Mumbai dry season, we’re living in the midst of a dense off-white “fog,” inhaling a toxic brew of dust, motor-vehicle exhaust, factory emissions, and clouds of fine particulate matter created by the construction and demolition of buildings. Overhead, the cloudless daytime sky is a dull, depthless white. Blue patches rarely appear and not a star is visible at night.

Such in-your-face bad air quality is impossible to ignore, but the Indian public is also alarmed by the odorless, invisible carbon-dioxide emissions that underlie the increasing pace of climate chaos on the subcontinent. There is, in fact, a massive constituency-in-waiting here for climate action. A 2022 poll indicated that 81% of voters were worried about human-induced climate change. Fully 50% were “very worried,” and a similar share said that they had been personally harmed by greenhouse warming.

As in the U.S., 2024 is an election year here. So given the above polling numbers, you’d think that boosting climate mitigation and adaptation would be a great way to garner votes. But climate efforts by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Hindu-nationalist BJP party continue to be, at best, sporadic and desultory. Instead, they’re pursuing what they see as a far more reliable way of revving up their voter base ahead of the election: announce the inauguration of a new Hindu temple.

How in the world would that work, you ask? Well, we’re not talking about just any temple. This one, currently under construction, sits on a site once occupied by a famed mosque, the former Babri Masjid in the northern city of Ayodhya. That hallowed, five-century-old Muslim place of worship was demolished in 1992 by BJP-backed fanatics. Religious fervor over the demolition sparked violence across the country, leaving more than 2,000 people dead.

For three decades, the destruction of the mosque and its planned replacement with a temple dedicated to the god Ram have been a toxic current running just beneath the surface of Indian politics, occasionally erupting in conflict. So, to gin up their Hindu-supremacist base and ensure victory in this spring’s elections, BJP leaders rushed to organize a ceremony consecrating the temple on January 22nd — months before construction will even be completed.

The outpouring of right-wing religious nationalism triggered by that event has had the side effect of ensuring that global warming will remain out of the political headlines for months, if not longer.  

It’s Not All in Your Mind

An institutional preoccupation with acute “red-meat” issues (to the detriment of addressing long-term emergencies like climate change) reflects all too human predilections that fit well with studies psychologists have done on how our brains react to crises.

Harvard Professor Daniel Gilbert, for instance, is known for his hypothesis regarding the kinds of threats we humans respond most strongly to, those he’s termed the “four I’s” — “intentional, immoral, imminent, and instantaneous.” Those adjectives, he’s found, catch the kinds of emergencies that stimulate our quickest and most intense responses. In a 2019 interview with NPR, Gilbert elaborated on how, particularly when it comes to climate, such a response system can translate into a failure of political action. To most people, the potential devastation of climate catastrophe still seems all too far in the future. And although climatic hazards like ever more devastating hurricanes and floods come close to being instantaneous, the heating of the atmosphere that underlies their increasing virulence has, until recently, progressed very slowly. Humans have a great ability to adapt psychologically to gradual change, but with global warming, that power doesn’t serve us well. After all, if this year feels more or less like last year, is there really anything to respond to? 

Two other characteristics of climate change, related to two of Gilbert’s I’s, separate it from many other emergencies, both short and long. For one thing, governments tend to respond most decisively to human enemies acting all too intentionally, but climate change, as he told NPR, “doesn’t seem like it’s a person at all, so we just kind of ho and hum.” Nor does it seem immoral. “As a social creature,” he observes, “we are deeply concerned with morality, the rules by which people treat each other.” Even though the overheating of this planet is indeed being caused by human activity, he points out, climate change “is meteorological. It doesn’t present itself as an affront to our sense of decency” — at least until people around you are being killed by a heat wave.

In addition, in a capitalist economy, the short term is more or less the whole ball game. Corporations are as committed to maximizing stock values for their stockholders, quarter by quarter, as politicians are committed to maximizing themselves for voters. Any politician who dares declare that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is a more urgent matter than cutting the price of gasoline will hear a giant sucking sound as voters and campaign donors vanish into thin air.

Clinical psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon is executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund and author of Facing the Climate Emergency. In that book, she argues that curbing climate chaos will require Americans to shift collectively into “emergency mode.” That state, she observes, is “markedly different from ‘normal’ functioning [and] characterized by an extreme focus of attention and resources on working productively to solve the emergency.” In “normal mode,” as Salamon points out, with no urgent threat in sight, response time isn’t critical. In emergency mode, where there’s a dire threat to life, health, property, or the environment, a quick, effective response is essential — and dealing with the threat must take priority over all other matters.

When it comes to fast, far-reaching action, emergency mode, she adds, shouldn’t just be for short-term problems. In fact, according to Salamon, what climate action truly requires is shifting into what she calls “long emergency mode,” in which tight focus on a single problem is no longer tolerable. Climate change is now caught in traffic with too many other immediate emergencies, none of which can be set aside for years or decades, but none of which threaten the very existence of life as we’ve known it on this planet.

Given that, Salamon urges that climate-emergency mode radiate through our society as quickly as possible, which won’t happen if politicians, corporations, and even some climate-movement figures continue soft-pedaling the message. It won’t happen if the public continues to get the impression that future technological breakthroughs and the magic of markets will ensure the inevitability of the reduction and then elimination of carbon emissions with little disruption of everyday life.

No Time for Happy Talk

Spurring a grassroots takedown of the corporate and political resistance to genuine climate action requires articulating a vision of a better world that awaits us beyond the fossil-fuel era, but more than that is needed. It must become far clearer that our growing global emergency is deeply linked to an ongoing business-as-usual attitude and that a staggering amount of work and sacrifice is actually required. In contrast, happy talk like the current mischaracterization of the COP28 agreement as an “unprecedented” climate “breakthrough” will prompt people to strike ecological catastrophe off their list of urgent concerns.

To be complacent about climate is not just to be shockingly oblivious but to endorse future human suffering on an almost inconceivable scale.  At COP28, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, spoke in stark terms about the moral imperatives of stopping the horror in Gaza now and preventing almost unimaginable future horrors triggered by ecological breakdown. In doing so, he offered a vision of a climate-change-devastated future that should stun us all:

“Are these events disconnected, is my question, or are we seeing here a mirror of what is going to happen in the future? The genocides and the barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the south because of the climate crisis… Most victims of climate change, [who] will be counted in their billions, will be in those countries that do not emit CO₂ or emit very little. Without the transfer of wealth from the north to the south, the climate victims will increasingly have less drinking water in their homes and they will have to migrate north… The exodus will be of billions… There will be pushback against the exodus, with violence, with barbaric acts committed. This is what is happening in Gaza. This is a rehearsal for the future.”

President Petro was describing just a few of the likely catastrophic interactions and feedbacks that, amid other crises, climate change will bring to this planet in what’s coming to be known as the “global polycrisis.” If governments continue to focus on “solving” only the most immediate, seemingly most tractable emergencies (often making matters worse in the process), we’re in trouble deep. The time has passed for societies to grapple only with the individual crises in the 24-hour news cycle. It’s time to shift into polycrisis mode. All of us will then have to deal with the sprawling web of connections among this planet’s emergencies, immediate and long-term, especially the future devastating overheating of our world, as one big problem that must be solved — or else.

Copyright 2024 Stan Cox

Via Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – Since their inception in the 1940s, the so-called forever chemicals have woven themselves into the fabric of our modern world. But recently, they’ve been appearing in alarming news headlines about their damaging effects on our health.

PFAS have, in fact, come under intense scrutiny due to new research showing their persistent nature in the environment and potential health impacts.

So what are they and are they an issue in the UK and Ireland?

Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) are man-made chemicals, numbering approximately 4,700 variants. What makes them different is their formidable carbon-fluorine (C-F) bonds, renowned among scientists as the mightiest in chemistry.

Image by Baroco Ferison from Pixabay

This stability makes them an important ingredient in many products. PFAS, in various forms, have played pivotal roles in creating oil- and grease-resistant food packaging, non-stick cookware, water- and stain-resistant textiles, and fire-fighting foams, to name a few. Their versatility has propelled them into our daily lives.

The strength of their carbon-fluorine bonds is also what makes them resist breakdown by natural processes. Their longevity, often measured in centuries, has earned them the moniker of “legacy compounds”.

Forever chemicals

Their presence has been detected in worrying concentrations in drinking water, soil, air and even in Arctic ice. Recent scientific investigations have unveiled a concerning connection between PFAS exposure and damage to health, both in humans and animals.

These effects include an increased risk of cancer, liver damage, compromised immune function, developmental disorders and hormonal disruption.

The adverse health effects can be traced to their persistence within the human body. Unlike many substances that are metabolised and eliminated over time, PFAS accumulate in bodily tissues and fluids without breaking down.

This accumulation creates a perpetual, self-sustaining cycle: PFAS contamination permeates rivers, soil and the food chain. These chemicals find their way into the bodies of humans and animals, where they continue to accumulate over time.

The mounting evidence of PFAS-related health risks has triggered global concern. Organisations such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants have set their sights on imposing stricter regulations on PFAS use within the European Union.

There is still a lot we don’t know about the long-term health consequences of PFAS exposure, but the increasing global concern is indisputable.

In the UK and Ireland, PFAS contamination infiltrates everyday consumer products and industrial processes. In 2019, the UK Environment Agency’s screening consistently identified PFAS in surface water samples, with PFOA and PFOS found at 96% of the sites they surveyed.

The presence of heightened PFAS concentrations signifies that none of England’s rivers meet the “good chemical” status criteria established by the Water Framework Directive. The Chief Scientist’s Group report identified military and civilian airfields, landfills and wastewater treatment facilities as the likely sources of PFAS contamination.

A pressing issue in Europe and the UK is the absence of standardised regulations regarding these forever chemicals. Only two of the most prevalent PFAS variants, PFOA and PFOS, are currently monitored in the UK.

The Environment Agency’s 2021 report underscored gaps in the environmental monitoring of PFAS in British waters.

These gaps include a lack of toxicology information about how PFAS are released throughout the life cycle of consumer products and drinking water, for instance recycling and waste disposal practices. This makes it difficult to properly assess the risks forever chemicals may pose.

The solution

It’s important to acknowledge that certain PFAS play a crucial role in drug formulations and medical uses.

But the lack of research, testing, and public awareness surrounding these compounds has allowed this issue to persist for too long, mostly due to the useful properties of forever chemicals.

The intricacies associated with PFAS mean we need a holistic approach involving research to discover new chemical compounds that do not harm the environment and human health.

While the solution is complex, it is undoubtedly achievable. We need stringent regulations, more research and a global effort to eliminate PFAS. The pay off is worth it – a safer and healthier future for both our planet and its inhabitants.

Eadaoin Carthy, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Dublin City University and Abrar Abdelsalam, Research Assistant in Biomedical Engineering, Dublin City University

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

(The Conversation) – Just over a year since US President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law, it’s becoming clear this strangely named piece of legislation could have a powerful impact in spurring the global transition to net zero emissions by 2050.

But the vast amount of investment unleashed by the IRA has raised tensions with some of the United States’ closest allies, and creates risks, as well as opportunities, for Australia’s transition to clean energy sources.

In his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden promised to commit the US to net zero by 2050, and to spend US$2 trillion to get there – the biggest investment in manufacturing since World War II. Biden is delivering on those promises.

The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included about $100 billion for electric vehicles and for speeding the electricity grid’s transition to clean energy sources.

The IRA changes the landscape

Passage of the IRA, in August 2022, ensured a swathe of green technologies would benefit from tax credits, loans, customer rebates and other incentives.

The original announcement estimated that uncapped subsidies over ten years would be US$369 billion, but Goldman Sachs Research now estimates that total subsidies could reach US$1.2 trillion and attract US$3 trillion investment by industry. That’s trillion, not billion.

Already, 272 new or expanded clean energy manufacturing projects in the US, including 91 in batteries, 65 in electric vehicles and 84 in wind and solar power, have been announced. These projects are estimated to create 170,000 jobs, predominantly in Republican-led states.

The IRA is all carrot, no stick. It contains no carbon taxes or emissions trading schemes. Instead, tax credits for capital expenditure and production costs encourage companies to invest in solar, wind, hydrogen, batteries, electric vehicles and other zero emissions technologies.

This approach is shifting the debate on the best way to reach net zero emissions. To free-market economists who ask why government should invest in private sector industries, the answer is that the green energy transition is not natural. Renewable energy would never have advanced without Germany subsidising solar and Denmark subsidising wind.

Subsidies and mandates are also crucial in explaining why, last year, Chinese vehicle manufacturers produced 64% of the global total of 10.5 million electric vehicle sales, and deployed about half of the global capacity additions in solar and wind power.

Industrial policy to protect the climate

The IRA is America’s response. More than climate policy, it is industrial policy, replete with made-in-America provisions. Companies are more likely to obtain tax credits if they employ unionised labour, train apprentices and set up shop in states that are transitioning out of fossil fuels.

Consumers will earn a $7,500 federal tax credit on an electric car only if that car is assembled and at least half the battery made in America. Similarly, wind and solar projects will earn tax credits only if half of their manufactured components are made in America.

These policies were made with China in mind. Both main US parties agree the US must reduce its dependence on sourcing minerals and products from China, and move towards a new form of “strategic economic nationalism”.

Yet while America’s strongest allies are also alarmed by the challenge from China, they are disturbed by aspects of the IRA. They fear that to benefit from its subsidies, their own clean energy companies might pack up shop and establish plants in the US.

The European Union, for example, has praised the IRA’s overall approach, but fiercely criticised its made-in-America provisions. French President Emmanuel Macron called the Act “super aggressive” toward European companies. European leaders say the IRA violates trade rules by discriminating against imported products, and could “trigger a harmful global subsidy race to the bottom on key technologies and inputs for the green transition.”

Yet even as it criticises the US, the EU has responded to the IRA by relaxing its rules and allowing individual states to provide direct support to clean energy companies to stop them taking their projects to the US.

Canada, worried about investment flowing south to benefit from the IRA even though its free trade agreement with the US should give its companies access to the subsidies, has also announced tax credits and programs to boost clean energy production. Japan and South Korea have announced similar programs.

Why the IRA challenges Australia

In Australia, before the IRA was legislated, the Morrison government provided a A$1.25 billion loan to Iluka Resources to fund construction of an integrated rare-earths refinery in Western Australia. The refinery will produce separated rare earth oxide products that are used in permanent magnets in electric vehicles, clean energy generation and defence.

But Australia risks being left behind in the race to build clean energy industries. The US could so heavily subsidise green hydrogen production that our own planned industry – seen as a foundation of our aspiration to be a clean energy superpower – will be uncompetitive, leading our aspiring manufacturers to set up shop in the US.

The IRA, however, brings Australia many potential benefits. The US wants to source the raw and refined materials it needs from countries, such as Australia, with which it has a free trade agreement. To respond to this interest, Australian industry, transport and mining must have access to low-emissions electricity.

The US will be an essential market for our rare earths such as neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium, used to make the powerful permanent magnets in wind turbines and electric car motors. Australia can also build new industrial processes and supply chains so that we earn more from decarbonised metallic iron, aluminium and nitrogenous fertiliser. We can ship our renewable energy in the form of hydrogen and ammonia.

In this race, Australia’s friendship with the US and volatile relationship with China could be decisive. The IRA does not spell out the concept of friend-shoring but nevertheless it seeks “to onshore and friend-shore the electric vehicle supply chain, to capture the benefits of a new supply chain and reduce entanglement with China,” according to the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

The IRA denies electric vehicle tax credits when any component or critical mineral in the vehicle is sourced from China or any “foreign entity of concern.”

A clean energy trade war is just one of the potential obstacles that could prevent the full benefits of the IRA being realised. Many communities in the US and Australia are resisting the installation of new transmission lines, wind farms and other clean energy infrastructure, and these objections are often on environmental grounds – the so-called Greens’ Dilemma. And a win for Donald Trump in next year’s presidential election could reverse American climate policy.

Yet on balance, the IRA can only be good for getting to net zero. It brings the US in from the climate wilderness to be a leader in emissions reduction, helping to drive new technologies and lower costs that will benefit not only America but the world.

Alan Finkel, Chair of ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Biotechnology, The University of Queensland

This article is part of a series by The Conversation, Getting to Zero, examining Australia’s energy transition.

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

(The Conversation) – When she took to the floor to give her State of the Union speech on 13 September, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen largely stood by the script. Describing her vision of an economically buoyant and sustainable Europe in the era of climate change, she called on the EU to accelerate the development of the clean-tech sector, “from wind to steel, from batteries to electric vehicles”. “When it comes to the European Green Deal, we stick to our growth strategy,” von der Leyen said.

Her plans were hardly idiosyncratic. The notion of green growth – the idea that environmental goals can be aligned with continued economic growth – is still the common economic orthodoxy for major institutions like the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The OECD has promised to “strengthen their efforts to pursue green growth strategies […], acknowledging that green and growth can go hand-in-hand”, while the World Bank has called for “inclusive green growth” where “greening growth is necessary, efficient, and affordable”. Meanwhile, the EU has framed green growth as

“a basis to sustain employment levels and secure the resources needed to increase public welfare […] transforming production and consumption in ways that reconcile increasing GDP with environmental limits”.

However, a survey of nearly 800 climate policy researchers from around the world reveals widespread scepticism toward the concept in high-income countries, amid mounting literature arguing that the principle may neither be viable nor desirable. Instead, alternative post-growth paradigms including “degrowth” and “agrowth” are gaining traction.

Differentiating green growth from agrowth and degrowth

But what do these terms signify?

The “degrowth” school of thought proposes a planned reduction in material consumption in affluent nations to achieve more sustainable and equitable societies. Meanwhile, supporters of “agrowth” adopt a neutral view of economic growth, focusing on achieving sustainability irrespective of GDP fluctuations. Essentially, both positions represent scepticism toward the predominant “green growth” paradigm with degrowth representing a more critical view.

Much of the debate centres around the concept of decoupling – whether the economy can grow without corresponding increases in environmental degradation or greenhouse gas emissions. Essentially, it signifies a separation of the historical linkage between GDP growth and its adverse environmental effects. Importantly, absolute decoupling rather than relative decoupling is necessary for green growth to succeed. In other words, emissions should decrease during economic growth, and not just grow more slowly.

Green growth proponents assert that absolute decoupling is achievable in the long term, although there is a division regarding whether there will be a short-term hit to economic growth. The degrowth perspective is critical that absolute decoupling is feasible at the global scale and can be achieved at the rapid rate required to stay within Paris climate targets. A recent study found that current rates of decoupling in high-income are falling far short of what is needed to limit global heating to well below 2°C as set out by the Paris Agreement.

The agrowth position covers more mixed, middle-ground views on the decoupling debate. Some argue that decoupling is potentially plausible under the right policies, however, the focus should be on policies rather than targets as this is confusing means and ends. Others may argue that the debate is largely irrelevant as GDP is a poor indicator of societal progress – a “GDP paradox” exists, where the indicator continues to be dominant in economics and politics despite its widely recognised failings.

7 out of 10 climate experts sceptical of green growth

How prevalent are degrowth and agrowth views among experts? As part of a recent survey completed by 789 global researchers who have published on climate change mitigation policies, we asked questions to assess the respondents’ positions on the growth debate. Strikingly, 73% of all respondents expressed views aligned with “agrowth” or “degrowth” positions, with the former being the most popular. We found that the opinions varied based on the respondent’s country and discipline (see the figure below).

While the OECD itself strongly advocates for green growth, researchers from the EU and other OECD nations demonstrated high levels of scepticism. In contrast, over half of the researchers from non-OECD nations, especially in emerging economies like the BRICS nations, were more supportive of green growth.

Disciplinary rifts

Furthermore, a disciplinary divide exists. Environmental and other social scientists, excluding orthodox economists, were the most sceptical of green growth. In contrast, economists and engineers showed the highest preference for green growth, possibly indicative of trust in technological progress and conventional economic models that suggest economic growth and climate goals are compatible.

Our analysis also examined the link between the growth positions and the GDP per capita of a respondent’s country of origin. A discernible trend emerged: as national income rises, there is increased scepticism toward green growth. At higher income levels, experts increasingly supported the post-growth argument that beyond a point, the socio-environmental costs of growth may outweigh the benefits.

The results were even more pronounced when we factored in the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI), suggesting that aspects beyond income, such as inequality and overall development, might influence these views.

In a world grappling with climate change and socio-economic disparities, these findings should not simply be dismissed. They underline the need for a more holistic dialogue on sustainable development, extending beyond the conventional green growth paradigm.

Post-growth thought no longer a fringe position

Although von der Leyen firmly stood in the green growth camp, this academic shift is increasingly reflected in the political debate. In May 2023, the European Parliament hosted a conference on the topic of “Beyond Growth” as an initiative of 20 MEPs from five different political groups and supported by over 50 partner organisations. Its main objective was to discuss policy proposals to move beyond the approach of national GDP growth being the primary measure of success.

Image by Alexander Droeger from Pixabay

Six national and regional governments – Scotland, New Zealand, Iceland, Wales, Finland, and Canada – have joined the Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEGo) partnership. The primary aim of the movement is to transition to “an economy designed to serve people and planet, not the other way around.”

Clearly, post-growth thought is no longer a fringe, radical position within those working on solutions to climate change. Greater attention needs to be given to why some experts are doubtful that green growth can be achieved as well as potential alternatives focussed on wider concepts of societal wellbeing rather than limited thinking in terms of GDP growth.

Ivan Savin, Associate Professor of Business Analytics at ESCP Business School, Madrid campus & Research Fellow at ICTA-UAB, ESCP Business School and Lewis King, Lecturer in climate policy and green economics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

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

( Tomdispatch.com ) – The wording in Article IX, Section 1, of Montana’s constitution couldn’t be clearer: “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” Accordingly, in April, a district court judge in Yellowstone County voided a permit for a natural-gas-fired power plant under construction there. Over its lifetime, it would have released an estimated 23 million tons of planet-roasting carbon dioxide and that, ruled the judge, was incompatible with a “clean and healthful environment” in Montana or, for that matter, anywhere else.

Within a week, the state legislature had voted to reinforce a 2011 law barring the consideration of climate change in policymaking and so allowing the construction of the power plant to resume. But that wasn’t the end of the matter. Last month, the lawmakers were slapped down a second time when another district judge ruled in favor of a group of 16 youthful Montanans in a suit filed in 2020 seeking to strike down that very 2011 anti-climate legislation.

In her ruling, Judge Kathy Seeley wrote, “Montana’s climate, environment, and natural resources are unconstitutionally degraded and depleted due to the current atmospheric concentration of [greenhouse gases] and climate change.” She added that “every additional ton of greenhouse gas emissions exacerbates Plaintiffs’ injuries and risks locking in irreversible climate injuries.” The state, she made it abundantly clear, is obligated to correct such a situation.

The plaintiffs, who were all in their teens or younger when their suit, Held v. Montana, was filed three years ago, are represented by a nonprofit group, Our Children’s Trust. Since 2011, it has been pursuing climate action on behalf of this country’s youth in the courts of all 50 states. The Montana case was simply the first to go to trial. The second, a climate case against the Hawaii Department of Transportation, is scheduled to begin next summer. 

Matt Rosendale, a Montana Republican serving in the House of Representatives, responded to the Held v. Montana decision with the worst sort of condescending bluster. “This is not a school project,” he insisted. “It’s a courtroom… Judge Seeley did a huge disservice to the courts and to these youths by allowing them to be used as pawns in the Left’s poorly thought-out plan to ruin our power grid and compromise our national security in the name of their Green New Fantasy.”

The only fantasy, however, was Rosendale’s characterization of the proceedings. The plaintiffs’ case was overwhelmingly persuasive, with extensive testimony from climate and pediatric health experts showing that people younger than 25 were going to be especially vulnerable to the many impacts climate change is going to have on physical and psychological health. In her ruling, Seeley summarized some of the damages to which the plaintiffs had testified. 

All of the young people in the suit were afflicted with allergies and asthma (three especially severely) and had suffered significant health problems thanks to the unavoidable inhalation of smoke from North America’s ever-increasing wildfires. Much of that damage had occurred during Montana’s horrendous fire seasons of 2017 (when more than 2,400 fires burned across 1.4 million acres of the state) and 2021 (when more than 2,500 fires burned almost 1 million more), followed, of course, by the smoke from the devastating and ongoing Canadian wildfires of this spring and summer.  

Three Indigenous plaintiffs testified that climate disruption has already ensured that their traditional sources of food and medicinal plants would become ever scarcer. As a result, it is preventing them from taking part in their usual cultural practices, including ones involving increasingly scarce snow. As the lawsuit put it, the changing planet has “disrupted tribal spiritual practices and longstanding rhythms of tribal life by changing the timing of natural events like bird migration.”

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Testimony also showed that the extreme heat of recent summers, only expected to grow more severe in the coming years, is threatening the health of the plaintiffs, all of whom engage in extensive outdoor work or recreation. Those who participate in competitive sports have seen their training severely curtailed by summer heat (and for one of them, a Nordic skier, by lack of winter snow). The plaintiffs’ ability to hunt and fish, especially important in Montana, is being dramatically limited by drought and wildfire.

Some of the plaintiffs testified that increasing damage from storms, flooding, wildfires, and drought will make it ever more difficult, if not impossible, to keep their family’s property intact for coming generations. And backed by the testimony of several experts, the young plaintiffs explained how the increasing chaos brought on by climate change had left them with feelings of deep distress, despair, and loss.

Congressman Rosendale undoubtedly read none of their testimony, which made it so much easier for him to callously dismiss their plight, while accusing them of being witless “pawns” of far greater forces. How, after all, could anyone have been left unmoved by the poignant testimony of 20-year-old Olivia Vesovich? She told the court that, given the severe and ever worsening impact of climate change, she “would not want to make a child endure that. It is one of the greatest sadnesses of my life — and my family is one of the most important parts of my life — that I may not be starting a family of my own. It breaks my heart, it really does.”

Plaintiffs from the Future

From the 1990s through the first two decades of this century, academic discussion of “intergenerational climate justice” weighed the interests of the “current generation” that may or may not do what’s needed to end greenhouse gas emissions against “future generations” lacking any say in the matter. They will nonetheless suffer its increasingly severe consequences. (Of course, those of us in privileged societies have also largely ignored the billions of people globally with no say in the matter and so the functional equivalents of those “future generations.”)

Now, with heat waves, megafires, increasingly severe freak storms, and floods striking ever more often, those at-risk future generations are finally beginning to show up, well ahead of schedule. That, after all, is just what the Held v. Montana plaintiffs are, as are the young Global South activists who shook up the most recent world climate summits by refusing to accept the selling-out of their future.

Though it’s cited often enough in relation to climate change, there’s nothing magical about the year 2050. It’s just a nice, round, midcentury number. That’s undoubtedly why world climate negotiators have chosen it as the target year for national pledges to drive greenhouse gas emissions down to zero.

Come 2050, the Montana plaintiffs will only be in their thirties and forties. By that time, they should know whether the world acted boldly enough in the 2020s to turn the climate emergency around.

In court, the young plaintiffs expressed deep concern not only for their own health and well-being but for those of their potential children and grandchildren. What kind of future will they and their kids face? For one thing, those still living in Montana in 2050 can expect to deal with wildfire and smoke disasters far worse than the ones endured in 2017, 2021, or 2023. Predictions are that, without drastic action, between 2041 and 2070, much of Montana will see a 600% increase in the incidence of “very large wildfires” — those covering 20 square miles or more.

The fire risk will have been raised largely by intensifying global heat. Consider this warning from U.S. government scientists, should the world economy carry on with business-as-usual in the coming decades:

“[A] teenager in eastern Montana in 2075 might experience maximum summer temperatures that his or her grandparents would have had to travel to the Mojave Desert to see, [while] a child born in southern Texas in 2060 might experience as much as 6 weeks per summer when maximum temperatures are hotter than his or her grandparents experienced just once per year. And in this same future, a child in the southeastern United States can expect to spend more than half of his or her summer experiencing heat waves that would have occurred only 3 days per year for his or her grandparents.”

Unless there are steep reductions in global carbon emissions, Montana will be eternally burning, while much of the country to the south and east grows even hotter and more unbearably humid. So, should young Montanans migrate north to Canada? At one time, that seemed like a viable climate escape route. But in 2023, with a large share of the U.S. population inhaling smoke from the extraordinarily vast and intense wildfires burning across that country, month after month, northward migration could just be a jump from the frying pan into the all-too-literal fire.

A Constitutional Right to a Future

Such dire forecasts are based on worst-case “business-as-usual” scenarios, and that’s important. After all, catastrophe is not inevitable. If today’s youth find themselves facing such nightmares in the 2050s, it will be because our nation and the rest of the world didn’t act in a necessary fashion in this decade. Such conditions can indeed be prevented, but only if the climate struggle intensifies.

When the Montana 16 filed their suit in 2020, only two of them were old enough to vote in that fall’s election. But as Judge Seeley ruled, they all had standing to challenge the fossil-fuel juggernaut in a court of law. And so far, they’re winning.

Amber Polk, assistant professor of law at Florida International University, focuses her studies on new legal claims by the environmental rights movement. She recently wrote a short history of “green amendments” — constitutional provisions like the section of Article IX on which Held v. Montana relied. Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, and Pennsylvania all added such provisions to their state constitutions in the 1970s, as environmentalism was surging. But in the 1980s and 1990s, legal cases based on green amendments foundered until, in 1999, the Supreme Court of — you guessed it! — Montana struck down laws that permitted water pollution, basing their decision on the constitutional “right” of state residents “to a clean and healthful environment.”

Fourteen years later, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court relied on a similar green amendment to strike down a law permitting hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) statewide. Until Held v. Montana, though, green amendments had not been used to challenge laws explicitly affecting climate policy. Count on one thing, however: they will be widely tested in the coming years (though a conservative, anything-but-environmentalist Supreme Court could prove a problem in wielding them).

The Montana case, writes Polk,

“sets a groundbreaking precedent for climate litigation and demonstrates a new way in which green amendments can be invoked to elicit environmental change. It suggests that in other states with green amendments, state laws cannot forbid the consideration of greenhouse gas emissions and their climate impact during environmental review… In the states that have green amendments, climate advocates will certainly rely on the Montana youth case as they challenge state laws that promote climate change.

And expect ever more challenges in places where such green amendments exist. New York typically passed one last year and 13 other states — some red like Montana, some blue, some purple — are considering them, according to Polk.

Unfortunately, only limited reductions of greenhouse gases can be achieved via state-by-state challenges to bad laws. Congressional action would be needed to, for example, achieve the most essential policy of all: a rapid, mandatory phase-out of oil, natural gas, and coal nationwide. You would, however, need a very different Congress to have a hope in hell of passing such a bill. Still, such a phase-out is a goal of Juliana v. United States, another youth climate lawsuit, originally filed in federal court in 2015 and still pending after eight long years.

In that case, 21 plaintiffs, aged seven to 19 (at the time of its filing) and backed by Our Children’s Trust, allege that the federal government has permitted the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels despite knowing that they cause “dangerous concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere and a dangerous climate system, and irreversible harm to the natural systems critical to Plaintiffs’ rights to life, liberty, and property.” These activities, it adds, “unconstitutionally favor the present, temporary economic benefits of certain citizens, especially corporations, over Plaintiffs’ rights to life, liberty, and property.”

In Juliana, the youthful plaintiffs are asking the courts to order the federal government to take wide-ranging, ambitious climate action, including “to prepare and implement an enforceable national remedial plan to phase out fossil fuel emissions and draw down excess atmospheric CO₂.”

Three administrations — Obama’s, Trump’s, and now Biden’s — have vigorously fought back against the youths’ case and, in 2021, it appeared doomed when an appeals court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing. This summer, however, Juliana came back from the dead when a federal judge in Oregon ruled that the plaintiffs could proceed to trial after amending their filing. It remains in limbo, however, thanks to continued fierce opposition from President Biden’s Department of Justice. As CNN reported, the DOJ “has argued there is no federal public trust doctrine that creates a right for a stable climate system for U.S. citizens.”

Such a refusal to take climate disruption seriously came even as the president was touring the country and bragging about energy and electric-vehicle projects related to the climate provisions in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. Biden, it seems, is happy to take credit for limited green actions, but isn’t faintly ready to plan for truly phasing out fossil fuels and so keeping the world livable through this century and beyond. So, give some credit to the young who are pushing him, the courts, and Congress to ensure that they have a future worth living for. In truth, nothing matters more than that.

Copyright 2023 Stan Cox

Via Tomdispatch.com

In early 2023, the Guardian published an article suggesting that more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets are worthless. These credits are essentially a promise to protect forests and can be bought as a way to “offset” emissions elsewhere. Verra, the largest certifier of these offset credits, said the claims were “absolutely incorrect” but the story still shook confidence in the billion-dollar market. Soon after, Verra’s CEO stood down.

The claims in the Guardian article rested heavily on analysis which had been published as a preprint (before peer review). Now the research has been fully peer-reviewed and is published in the journal Science. It shows unequivocally that many projects which have sold what are known as REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) credits have failed to reduce deforestation.

REDD+ projects aim to slow deforestation (for example, by supporting farmers to change their practices). They quantify the carbon saved through reducing deforestation relative to what would have happened without the project, and sell these emission reductions as credits.

Such REDD+ credits are widely used to “offset” (that is, cancel out) emissions from companies (who may use them to make claims that their operations are carbon neutral) or by people concerned about their carbon footprint. For example, if you were planning to fly from London to New York you might consider buying REDD+ credits that promise to conserve rainforest in the Congo Basin (with added benefits for forest elephants and bonobos). Offsetting your return flight would appear to cost a very affordable £16.44.

However, while previous analysis showed that some REDD+ projects have contributed to slowing deforestation and forest degradation, the central finding from the new study is that many projects have slowed deforestation much less than they have claimed and, consequently, have promised greater carbon savings than they have delivered. So that guilt-free flight to New York probably isn’t carbon neutral after all.

The finding that many REDD+ carbon credits have not delivered forest conservation is extremely worrying to anyone who cares about the future of tropical forests. We spoke to Sven Wunder, a forest economist and a co-author of the new study. He told us that: “To tackle climate change, tropical deforestation must be stopped. Forests also matter for other reasons: losing forests will result in loss of species, and will affect regional rainfall patterns. Despite the evidence that REDD+ has not been delivering additional conservation, we cannot afford to give up.”

Deforestation could simply move elsewhere

Carbon credits also face other challenges, one of the biggest being “leakage” or displacement of deforestation. Leakage may occur because the people who were cutting down the forest simply relocate to a different area. Alternatively, demand for food or timber that was fuelling deforestation in one place may be met by deforestation elsewhere – perhaps on the other side of the world. Another problem is ensuring that the forests are protected in perpetuity so that reduced deforestation represents permanent removal of carbon from the atmosphere.

Addressing these challenges is vital because selling carbon credits is an important source of finance for forest conservation. It is not too dramatic to say that unreliable REDD+ credits directly threaten forests.

However, this is an active research area and new approaches are increasingly available. Andrew Balmford is a professor of conservation science at the University of Cambridge who is actively developing methods to improve the credibility of forest carbon markets. He says the new study raises some important concerns but that more robust and transparent methods have been developed. Deploying these new methods, he told us, is “an urgent priority”.

Change is also needed to how certification operates. At present, there are incentives for verifiers to inflate estimates of the amount of deforestation that would have happened without the project, and therefore the number of credits that can be issued. Sven Wunder explains: “We need to move beyond vested interest towards independent governance employing scientifically informed, cutting-edge methods.”

Reasons to be cautious

Even if these problems can be solved, there are still reasons to be cautious about the role of carbon offsets in combating climate change. First, there is the risk that offsetting actually increases emissions because people or companies might feel more comfortable emitting carbon if they believe they can undo any damage by simply buying carbon credits. For this reason, some argue that offsets must only ever be a last resort, after all non-essential emissions have been cut (the problem being of course: who decides which emissions are essential?).

Second, keeping warming within 2°C will require most deforestation to be stopped and major reductions in fossil fuel emissions. There is a limit to which one can be used to balance out the other.

REDD+ projects mustn’t harm local farmers.

Finally, there are serious equity concerns with some forest carbon offsets. If forest conservation is achieved by stopping farmers in low-income countries from clearing land for agriculture, REDD+ may exacerbate poverty: your long haul flight would come at the expense of others being able to feed their families.

We don’t know how much it would cost to achieve genuinely additional offsets which avoid leakage and ensure equity but it is likely to be considerably more expensive than forest carbon credits currently sell for. A higher price would reduce the perception that offsetting is an easy option and should encourage more focus on reducing emissions.

So, should you buy those cheap forest carbon offsets when taking a flight? Unfortunately, there’s currently little evidence that doing so will really make your journey carbon neutral. If you want to contribute to tackling climate change, perhaps the only real option is to not take the flight.

Julia P G Jones, Professor of Conservation Science, Bangor University and Neal Hockley, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Economics & Policy, Bangor University

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

When asked to situate the world’s most iconic rainforest on a map, most people will pinpoint Brazil. And given the intense media coverage of the country’s deforestation and fires – concerns reached a peak under former president Jair Bolsonaro and his free-for-all approach – they might also imagine a thick black soot clinging to the remaining trees. While newly re-elected president Lula da Silva has vowed to prioritize the Amazon forest and sparked hope among environmentalists, deforestation in the Brazilian section of Amazon remains of deep concern.

That interest is only set to grow as Brazil gets ready to host a high-level meeting to renew the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) in the northern town of Belem on 8 and 9 August. Bringing together the eight countries containing the Amazon forest – Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela – along with senior officials from the United States and France, the event will enable them to discuss how to attract investment, fight deforestation, protect indigenous communities and encourage sustainable development.

The meeting will also be the occasion for sustainability scientists such as ourselves to draw attention to one of the Amazonian ecosystems that will be just as vital to protect if we are to limit global warming to the safer threshold of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels: Bolivia.

One of the highest carbon-emitting countries per capita

I have studied the flows that contribute to deforestation in the Amazon for more than five years. Earlier this year, I met with academics, environmental NGOs, smallholder farmers, and multilateral development banks in Bolivia to learn more about their work to protect the Bolivian Amazon.

Bolivia is not only at the centre of the current international rush for lithium. It is also one of the world leaders in deforestation. According to Global Forest Watch, the country lost more than 3,3 million hectares of humid primary forest from 2002 to 2021 to deforestation, or the equivalent of 4 million soccer fields, with an exponential growth in deforestation rates of more than 5.5% per year over the last two decades.

Bolivia’s forests have also increasingly been forced to cope with a combination of drought and large wildfires. In 2020 alone, 4,5 million hectares were affected by such fires, of which more than 1 million hectares took place in protected areas (data from Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza) – and the deforestation trend is worsening (see Figure 1). As a result, Bolivia has placed itself at the top of carbon-emitting countries per capita, with emissions of 25 tCO2eq per person per year – more than five times higher than the global average, ahead of large economies like the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Accelerated deforestation might seem paradoxical in a country known internationally for its commitment to the “Rights of Mother Earth”. But it seems that the government has chosen to prioritize economic development based on natural resources over its promises to become stewards of Nature.

The accelerated loss of tropical rainforest is the result of destructive and familiar combination: increased global demand for commodities such as soy and cattle, and extractive national and regional policies with the explicit ambition to boost economic growth with little consideration on its environmental impact.

Soybean production has accelerated from negligible levels in 1970 to almost 1.4 million hectares in 2020, and 5 million hectares deforested since 2001 is mainly used for cattle. A similar trend can be observed for the export of beef in the last years, as well as for mining.

Between 2015 and 2021, the number of mining concessions in the country’s Amazon regions (La Paz, Beni and Pando) has increased from 88 to 341 while the mining area (cuadriculas in Spanish) have increased from 3,789 to 15,710 (+414%). According to Bolivian mining law, a cuadricula is a square of 500 meters per side, with a total surface area of 25 hectares, according to the Study Center for Labor and Agrarian Development (CEDLA). The rapid expansion of illegal gold mining in the Amazon powers one of the country’s largest export industries. As global gold prices have increased, the industry is creating massive social and environmental challenges as well as severe health threats to indigenous communities.

This expansion is fuelled in part by generous fossil-fuel subsidies, which in turn finance the growth of the soy, cattle and mineral sector. According to 2021 data from the International Monetary Fund fossil-fuel subsidies consume 6,7% of Bolivia’s GDP. In addition, illegal settlements in the lowlands feed from these larger economic changes as communities transform forests into agricultural production lands through destructive slash-and-burn techniques, which increase wildfire risks.

How to save the Amazon

Regional collaboration to protect the Amazon took a serious hit during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. The announced revitalization of cooperation in the Amazon basin and surrounding forests through the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization offers a unique window of opportunity to end deforestation. But this opportunity will be wasted unless the following key issues are addressed.

• Pan-continental regulation: It is no secret that countries that enforce strict forest-conservation laws tend to see the most ruthless industries emigrate to less-regulated countries; experts call this phenomenon “deforestation leakage”. To protect the Amazon in Brazil, the international community therefore has every interest in ensuring that Bolivia is not forgotten. World Bank data shows that Bolivia is a perfect destination for its neighbours’ predatory sectors, with much of the state’s regulation rolled back in the past 10 years.

  To counter this, the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization should form a task force that directly addresses such cross-border leakage risks to protect the forests of the region, and the people who depend on them for their livelihoods. Lessons from studies of the effects of previous zero-deforestation policies] will offer useful guidance in these ambitions. Countries should ramp up their support for cross-border supply chain transparency, provide enough resources to enforce environmental legislation on the ground, and make sure indigenous rights are properly protected.

• Phasing out forest-hungry policies and industries: The case of Bolivia also highlights a general challenge that countries in the region are facing: the need to not only “scale up” green financial innovations, but also actively phase out unsustainable economic activities, harmful subsidies and policies that increase inequality.

  Don’t get us wrong: saying goodbye to industries like unchecked cattle ranching, and incentives such as fossil-fuel subsidies will take strong political will. But the world abounds with examples to draw inspiration from. Two include the Just Energy Transition Partnership that was concluded at the annual climate summit in Glasgow, COP26 and the international support to help decarbonize coal retirement in Indonesia. They show it is possible to move away from harmful industries while making sure local communities aren’t left behind.

• Cleaning up the finance industry: In today’s globalized economy, large companies often rely on capital from financial institutions to conduct their operations. The financial sector has made progress in mobilizing its influence as owners and lenders to put pressure on industries associated with deforestation risks in the Brazilian Amazon. The sector must now mobilize to help protect the enlarged Bolivian Amazon.

Cascading negative changes resulting from deforestation, such as disrupted hydrological cycles, negative health impacts, and biodiversity loss will eventually impact negatively on investments. The financial sector thus needs to support national legislation and financial regulation that shift investments away from extractive economic practices that amplify social inequalities, toward new ways of protecting forests while simultaneously promoting education, health, sanitation, employment, and other development goals. Major initiatives like the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Investment, pension funds in the Global North, and international development banks must work closely with countries around the Amazon basin to make sure deforestation and climate ambitions are translated into action.

Bolivia’s forests, and the communities that depend on their resilience for their livelihoods, are facing a perfect deforestation storm. Swift national and international action is of the essence.

This article was co-written with Guido Meruvia Schween, a programme officer at the Swedish Embassy in La Paz, Bolivia.

Victor Galaz, Deputy Director and Associate Professor, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University

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

Featured Image: Deforestation in Santa Cruz, Bolivia (2021). Photo courtesy of Overview.
https://www.over-view.com/, CC BY-NC