World facing 'unprecedented climate emergency': Brazil's Lula

NEW DELHI — Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told world leaders Saturday the planet was facing an "unprecedented climate emergency" while addressing the G20 Summit in India.

"The lack of commitment to the environment has led us to an unprecedented climate emergency," said Lula at the two-day meeting in New Delhi. "Droughts, floods, storms and fires are becoming more frequent."

G20 leaders meet this weekend during what is likely the hottest year in human history, but hopes are slim that the divided grouping can agree ambitious action on the crisis.

Any failure to do so could lower expectations ahead of crucial COP28 climate talks that begin in November in the United Arab Emirates.

In July, G20 energy ministers failed to even mention coal in their final statement, let alone agree a phase down roadmap, and there was no progress on the renewables goal.

G20 countries account for 85% of global GDP and a similar amount of global climate warming emissions, making action in the forum crucial to real progress.

Agence France-Presse

Extreme heat scorches Europe, world

ROME, Italy - Swathes of Europe baked Tuesday in a heatwave trailed by wildfires and health warnings, as parts of Asia and the United States also suffered under extreme weather.

Firefighters battled blazes in parts of Greece and the Canary Islands and Spain issued heat alerts, while some children in Italy's Sardinia were warned away from sports for safety reasons.

In the United States, the city of Phoenix broke a 49-year-old record with its 19th consecutive day of temperatures of 43.3 Celsius (110 Fahrenheit) or higher, weather officials said.

"You can't be in the street, it's horrible," said Lidia Rodriguez, 27, in Madrid.

From the Washington to Beijing, authorities have warned in recent days of the health dangers of the extreme heat, urging people to drink water and shelter from the sun.

Several local temperature records were broken in southern France, the weather service there said.

Meteo France said a record 29.5 C (85 F) had been reached in the Alpine ski resort of Alpe d'Huez, which sits at an altitude of 1,860 metres (6,100 ft), while 40.6 C (105F) had been recorded for the first time in Verdun in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

In a stark reminder of the effects of global warming, the UN's World Meteorological Agency (WMO) said the trend of heatwaves "shows no signs of decreasing".

"These events will continue to grow in intensity, and the world needs to prepare for more intense heatwaves," John Nairn, a senior extreme heat advisor at the WMO told reporters in Geneva.

Wildfires and scorching heat

Northwest of the Greek capital Athens, columns of smoke loomed over the forest of Dervenohoria, where one of several fires around the capital and beyond was still burning.

Still burning was a forest fire by the seaside resort of Loutraki, where the mayor said 1,200 children had been evacuated Monday from holiday camps.

In the Canary Islands, some 400 firefighters battled a blaze that has ravaged 3,500 hectares of forest and forced 4,000 residents to evacuate, with authorities warning residents to wear face masks outside due to poor air quality.

Temperatures were unforgiving in Italy and in Spain, where three regions were put under hot weather red alerts.

The Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily have been on watch to possibly surpass a continent-wide record of 48.8C (nearly 120F), recorded in Sicily in August 2021.

At Lanusei, near Sardinia's eastern coast, a children's summer camp was restricting beach visits to the early morning and forbidding sports, teacher Morgana Cucca told AFP.

In the Sardinian capital of Cagliari, pharmacist Teresa Angioni said patients were complaining of heat-related symptoms.

"They mainly buy magnesium and potassium supplements and ask us to measure their blood pressure, which is often low," Angioni said.

Many throughout Italy sought escape by the sea, including outside Rome, where the midday heat hit 40C (104F).

"Certainly it's better at the beach, you can at least get a little wind from the sea. It's not even possible to remain in the city, too hot," said Virginia Cesario, 30, at the Focene beach near the capital.

Climate change impact

Tens of millions of Americans experienced dangerous heat levels on Tuesday.

In the town of San Angelo, Texas, where temperatures were expected to reach 104-108F (40-42C), the National Weather Service said it was "running out of ways to say that it's gonna be hot out there today."

"With temperatures across the area likely topping the 105 mark yet again, we implore you to continue to practice heat safety and try to stay as cool," the agency said on Twitter.

And in Arizona, the mercury at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport again reached 110F on Tuesday, breaking the previous record of 18 consecutive days at or above that temperature, set in 1974.

The heat waves across Europe and the globe are "not one single phenomenon but several acting at the same time," said Robert Vautard, director of France's Pierre-Simon Laplace climate institute.

"But they are all strengthened by one factor: climate change."

Heat record in China

In parts of Asia, record temperatures have triggered torrential rain.

Nearly 260,000 people were evacuated in southern China and Vietnam before a typhoon made landfall late Monday, bringing fierce winds and rain but  weakening to a tropical storm by Tuesday.

The record-setting heat came as US climate envoy John Kerry met with Chinese officials in Beijing, as the world's two largest polluters revive stalled diplomacy on reducing planet-warming emissions.

Speaking Tuesday at Beijing's Great Hall of the People with China's top diplomat Wang Yi, Kerry called for "global leadership" on climate issues.

Agence France-Presse

Poor countries call for debt revolution at UN summit

DOHA - Worn down by growing debt and a barrage of crises, leaders of the world's poorest countries have stepped up calls for the rules governing handouts of billions of dollars to be rewritten.

Western nations gave out more than $185 billion in grants and cheap loans in 2021, according to the OECD. Official development assistance is one of the pillars of the international financial system.

But the 46 Least Developed Nations holding their own UN-organized summit in Doha this week feel short-changed.

Five decades after the LDC club was set up by the UN to organize trade privileges and easier access to other finance, presidents and prime ministers said their problems have piled up.

Climate change, Covid-19 fallout, food and fuel price rises stoked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and ever bigger debts are weighing on the poor nations who are blaming the system.

"Our partners have a tendency to cast all blame on the recipient partner for failures and avoid scrutiny of their of their own aid programs that certainly might have contributed to the failures," said East Timor's President Jose Ramos-Horta.

Poor nations' leaders unleash anger and despair at UN summit

100 million more workers plunged into poverty during pandemic, says UN

Debt blame game 

Seychelles President Wavel Ramkalawan said it was time for the international finance institutions to move beyond per capita gross domestic product as the only measurement for development.

"One size does not fit all," he said calling for a system that recognizes that different countries have different problems.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres widened the attack when he condemned a global financial system "designed by wealthy countries, largely to their benefit." Without any cash reserves, the poor nations were being forced to pay "predatory interest rates."

The coronavirus pandemic was regularly cited at the summit. The LDCs got fewer vaccines and then had to borrow at crippling rates to pay for their emergency measures.

Ahead of the summit, the UN Development Program (UNDP) estimated that 52 countries were either suffering debt stress or close to it and in danger of default.

Lesotho's deputy prime minister Nthomeng Majara was among leaders to call for an "urgent" rescheduling or writing off debt.

The calls added to longstanding criticism of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for imposing austerity on poor populations to get loans.

China is now the biggest single creditor nation, often seen as rivalling western influence, but has recently indicated a willingness to work with the IMF and other institutions to organize debt relief. 

Alongside the official summit, civil society activists held their own meetings to propose radical solutions to the debt problem.

Lidy Nacpil, Asian Peoples Movement on Debt and Development, a coalition of several activist groups, said the developed world should just agree to give compensation as they have in international talks on countering climate change. 

"We want something that is similar to the climate convention, an acknowledgement of the responsibility that wealthy nations have in this unsustainable economic system we have," said Nacpil.

At a 2009 climate conference, major economies promised $100 billion a year by 2020 to help pay for the ravages of rising temperatures but have not yet managed to reach that figure.

Rolf Traeger, an LDC specialist at the UN Conference on Trade and Development, told one Doha panel meeting that specialists had long looked for alternatives to official aid but that few ideas have come forward. "It's hard to see," he said.

 Agence France-Presse

World Bank to provide additional $12B to address ‘devastating’ global food crisis

The World Bank announced Wednesday an additional $12 billion in funding to mitigate the "devastating effects" of severe growing global food insecurity driven by climate change and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The move, which will bring total available funding for projects over the next 15 months to $30 billion, was unveiled hours before a major United Nations meeting on global food security.

Amid the growing shortages intensified by the war in Ukraine, a key grain producer, the new funding will help boost food and fertilizer production, facilitate greater trade and support vulnerable households and producers, the World Bank said.

"Food price increases are having devastating effects on the poorest and most vulnerable," World Bank President David Malpass said in a statement. 

"It is critical that countries make clear statements now of future output increases in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine."

WHO says coordinating with UK over monkeypox outbreak

The bank previously announced $18.7 billion in funding for projects linked to "food and nutrition security issues" for Africa and the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and South Asia.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine and international economic sanctions on Moscow have disrupted supplies of fertilizer, wheat and other commodities from both countries, pushing up prices for food and fuel, especially in developing nations.

And India over the weekend banned wheat exports, which sent prices for the grain soaring.

"Countries should make concerted efforts to increase the supply of energy and fertilizer, help farmers increase plantings and crop yields, and remove policies that block exports and imports, divert food to biofuel, or encourage unnecessary storage," Malpass said.

- Ukraine only 'latest shock' -

Washington welcomed the decision, which is part of a joint action plan by multilateral lenders and regional development banks to address the food crisis.

"The Russian war against Ukraine is the latest global shock that is exacerbating the sharp increase in both acute and chronic food insecurity in recent years driven by conflict, climate change and economic downturns, such as those associated with the Covid-19 pandemic," the Treasury Department said, applauding the institutions for working swiftly to address the issues.

The situation will only grow worse because of the Ukrainian war, experts warn, as Russia and Ukraine alone produce 30 percent of the global wheat supply.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is due in New York on Wednesday to chair a UN meeting on global food security.

Vellamvelly Muraleedharan, India's minister of state for external affairs, also is due to participate in the meeting.

Washington's UN ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, on Monday urged New Delhi to revoke the ban announced Saturday in the face of falling production caused primarily by an extreme heatwave.

She said Wednesday's session aims to "bring countries together to look at what countries might be able to help fill the gap" in wheat supplies caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But food insecurity had begun to spike even before Moscow invaded its neighbor on February 24.

UN data showed that 193 million people in 53 countries were acutely food insecure last year, meaning they needed urgent assistance to survive.

Agence France-Presse

Google to stop pairing ads with climate change misinformation

SAN FRANCISCO, United States - Google on Thursday said it will no longer post ads next to misinformation about climate change on its search engine or on global video-sharing platform YouTube.

The new policy for Google advertisers, publishers and YouTube creators will prohibit the platforms from helping people make money from content that "contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change."

That includes online content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, or denying the world's temperature is rising and that human activity is contributing to the problem, Google said in a post.

"Advertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content," Google said.

"And publishers and creators don’t want ads promoting these claims to appear on their pages or videos."

The internet giant added that the policy change aligns with efforts by the company to promote sustainable practices and confront climate change.

"Google's important decision to demonetize climate misinformation could turn the tide on the climate denial economy," said NGO Avaaz campaign director Fadi Quran.

"For years, climate misinformers have confused public opinion and obstructed urgent political action on climate change, and YouTube has been one of their weapons of choice."

Quran urged other online platforms to follow Google's lead and stop funneling money to those peddling debunked denials of climate change.

Social networking colossus Facebook, which is Google's biggest competitor in the digital advertising market, touts efforts to curb climate misinformation at its platform but has no such ad ban in place.

Social media platforms are regularly accused of promoting content that provokes strong emotional responses in order to keep users engaged so the platforms can make more money made from ads, even if the content can cause harm.

Agence France-Presse

Warming report sees violent, sicker, poorer future

WASHINGTON  — Starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war and disease already lead to human tragedies. They’re likely to worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change, a leaked draft of an international scientific report forecasts.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report next March on how global warming is already affecting the way people live and what will happen in the future, including a worldwide drop in income. A leaked copy of a draft of the summary of the report appeared online Friday on a climate skeptic’s website. Governments will spend the next few months making comments about the draft.

“We’ve seen a lot of impacts and they’ve had consequences,” Carnegie Institution climate scientist Chris Field, who heads the report, told The Associated Press on Saturday. “And we will see more in the future.”

Cities, where most of the world now lives, have the highest vulnerability, as do the globe’s poorest people.
“Throughout the 21st century, climate change impacts will slow down economic growth and poverty reduction, further erode food security and trigger new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger,” the report says. “Climate change will exacerbate poverty in low- and lower-middle income countries and create new poverty pockets in upper-middle to high-income countries with increasing inequality.”

For people living in poverty, the report says, “climate-related hazards constitute an additional burden.”

The report says scientists have high confidence especially in what it calls certain “key risks”:

—People dying from warming- and sea rise-related flooding, especially in big cities.
—Famine because of temperature and rain changes, especially for poorer nations.
—Farmers going broke because of lack of water.
—Infrastructure failures because of extreme weather.
—Dangerous and deadly heat waves worsening.
—Certain land and marine ecosystems failing.

“Human interface with the climate system is occurring and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems,” the 29-page summary says.

None of the harms talked about in the report is solely due to global warming nor is climate change even the No. 1 cause, the scientists say. But a warmer world, with bursts of heavy rain and prolonged drought, will worsen some of these existing effects, they say.

For example, in disease, the report says until about 2050 “climate change will impact human health mainly by exacerbating health problems that already exist” and then it will lead to worse health compared to a future with no futher warming.

If emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil and gas continue at current trajectories, “the combination of high temperature and humidity in some areas for parts of the year will compromise normal human activities including growing food or working outdoors,” the report says.

Scientists say the global economy may continue to grow, but once the global temperature hits about 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than now, it could lead to worldwide economic losses between 0.2 and 2.0 percent of income.

One of the more controversial sections of the report involves climate change and war.

“Climate change indirectly increases risks from violent conflict in the form of civil war, inter-group violence and violent protests by exacerbating well-established drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks,” the report says.

Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn’t part of the international study team, told the AP that the report’s summary confirms what researchers have known for a long time: “Climate change threatens our health, land, food and water security.”

The summary went through each continent detailing risks and possible ways that countries can adapt to them.

For North America, the highest risks over the long term are from wildfires, heat waves and flooding. Water — too much and too little — and heat are the biggest risks for Europe, South America and Asia, with South America and Asia having to deal with drought-related food shortages. Africa gets those risks and more: starvation, pests and disease. Australia and New Zealand get the unique risk of losing their coral reef ecosystems, and small island nations have to be worried about being inundated by rising seas.

Field said experts paint a dramatic contrast of possible futures, but because countries can lessen some of the harms through reduced fossil fuel emissions and systems to cope with other changes, he said he doesn’t find working on the report depressing.

“The reason I’m not depressed is because I see the difference between a world in which we don’t do anything and a world in which we try hard to get our arms around the problem,” he said.

source: business.inquirer.net