A Campaign for Natural Solutions to the Climate Crisis

A natural solution to the climate disaster

Climate and ecological crises can be tackled by restoring forests and other valuable ecosystems, say scientists and activists

Letters | April 3, 2019 | The Guardian

The world faces two existential crises, developing with terrifying speed: climate breakdown and ecological breakdown. Neither is being addressed with the urgency needed to prevent our life-support systems from spiralling into collapse. We are writing to champion a thrilling but neglected approach to averting climate chaos while defending the living world: natural climate solutions. This means drawing carbon dioxide out of the air by protecting and restoring ecosystems.

By defending, restoring and re-establishing forests, peatlands, mangroves, salt marshes, natural seabeds and other crucial ecosystems, large amounts of carbon can be removed from the air and stored. At the same time, the protection and restoration of these ecosystems can help minimize a sixth great extinction, while enhancing local people’s resilience against climate disaster. Defending the living world and defending the climate are, in many cases, one and the same. This potential has so far been largely overlooked.

We call on governments to support natural climate solutions with an urgent program of research, funding and political commitment. It is essential that they work with the guidance and free, prior and informed consent of indigenous people and other local communities.

This approach should not be used as a substitute for the rapid and comprehensive de-carbonisation of industrial economies. A committed and well-funded program to address all the causes of climate chaos, including natural climate solutions, could help us hold the heating of the planet below 1.5C.

We ask that they are deployed with the urgency these crises demand.

Greta Thunberg Activist
Margaret Atwood Author
Michael Mann Distinguished professor of atmospheric science
Naomi Klein Author and campaigner
Mohamed Nasheed Former president, the Maldives
Rowan Williams former Archbishop of Canterbury
Dia Mirza Actor and UN environment goodwill ambassador
Brian Eno Musician and artist
Philip Pullman Author
Bill McKibben Author and campaigner
Simon Lewis Professor of global change science
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall Presenter and author
Charlotte Wheeler Forest restoration scientist
David Suzuki Scientist and author
Anohni Musician and artist
Asha de Vos Marine biologist
Yeb Saño Activist
Bittu Sahgal Founder, Sanctuary Nature Foundation
John Sauven Executive director, Greenpeace UK
Craig Bennett CEO, Friends of the Earth
Ruth Davis Deputy director of global programmes, RSPB
Rebecca Wrigley Chief executive, Rewilding Britain
George Monbiot Journalist

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For additional details, see:

The natural world can help save us from climate catastrophe

Ecological restoration can be a powerful means of protecting the atmosphere – we need to rewild on a massive scale 

By George Monbiot | April 3, 2019 |  The Guardian

2017: Historic and Most Expensive Year of U.S. Weather and Climate Disasters on Our Continuously Warming Planet

Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters
1st Quarter Release | National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

The U.S. has sustained 219 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including CPI adjustment to 2017). The total cost of these 219 events exceeds $1.5 trillion. This total now includes the initial cost estimates for Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.

In 2017, there were 16 weather and climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each across the United States. These events included 1 drought event, 2 flooding events, 1 freeze event, 8 severe storm events, 3 tropical cyclone events, and 1 wildfire event. Overall, these events resulted in the deaths of 362 people and had significant economic effects on the areas impacted.

[Click image to enlarge]

During 2017, the U.S. experienced a historic year of weather and climate disasters. In total, the U.S. was impacted by 16 separate billion-dollar disaster events tying 2011 for the record number of billion-dollar disasters for an entire calendar year. In fact, 2017 arguably has more events than 2011 given that our analysis traditionally counts all U.S. billion-dollar wildfires, as regional-scale, seasonal events, not as multiple isolated events.

More notable than the high frequency of these events is the cumulative cost, which exceeds $300 billion in 2017 — a new U.S. annual record. The cumulative damage of these 16 U.S. events during 2017 is $306.2 billion, which shatters the previous U.S. annual record cost of $214.8 billion (CPI-adjusted), established in 2005 due to the impacts of Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Rita and Wilma.

Read more at NOAA

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World's Oceans Were Hottest On Record In 2017, Study Finds
by Mary Papenfuss | 1.27.2018 | HuffPost

The world’s oceans in 2017 were the hottest ever recorded, scientists revealed in a new study recently published.

Institute of Atmospheric Physics - [Click image to enlarge]

The findings were based on an updated analysis of the top 6,000 feet of the world’s seas by the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and the Chinese Academy of Science.

“The long-term warming trend driven by human activities continued unabated,” researchers said in the study, which was published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. “The high ocean temperatures in recent years have occurred as greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere have also risen.”

Owing to its “large heat capacity, the ocean accumulates the warming derived from human activities; indeed, more than 90 percent of Earth’s residual heat related to global warming is absorbed by the ocean,” according to the researchers. “As such, the global ocean heat content record robustly represents the signature of global warming.”

While ocean temperatures dropped slightly in 2016 because of a massive El Nino effect, the last five years were still the hottest recorded for the world’s oceans. The second hottest ocean year was 2015.

Read more at HuffPost

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Global Heat Records 2017

1.18.2018  |  Climate Signals | NASA Map

2017 is among the hottest years on record, spawning a number of all-time global heat records, and it occurred without the warming influence of El Niño, which boosted the global average temperatures of the previous two record hot years. According to the NASA surface global temperature dataset, 2017 was the 2nd-hottest year on record for the globe. By NOAA's calculations, it was the 3rd hottest.(The two datasets use different baseline periods and methods to analyze Earth’s polar regions and global temperatures.)

The NASA map below shows Earth’s average global temperature from 2013 to 2017, as compared to a baseline average from 1951 to 1980. Yellows, oranges, and reds show regions warmer than the baseline temperature. (Credits: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio) 

One of the strongest findings of climate science is that global warming amplifies the intensity, duration and frequency of extreme heat events. These events occur on multiple time scales, from a single day or week, to months or entire seasons.

The number of local record-breaking monthly temperature extremes worldwide is now on average five times larger than expected in a climate with no long-term warming, implying that on average there is an 80 percent chance that a new monthly heat record is due to climate change.

An April 2017 study found that anthropogenic global warming had a significant hand in the temperatures seen during the hottest month and on the hottest day on record throughout much of the world from 1931–2016. The study found that climate change made heat records more likely and more severe for about 80 percent of the area of the globe with good observational data.
 
Read more at Climate Signals

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