Australia’s Great Barrier Reef suffered its most extensive coral bleaching event in March, with scientists fearing the coral recovers less each time after the third bleaching in five years.
February 2020 was the hottest month on record since records began in 1900, Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, told Reuters Newsagency.
“We saw record-breaking temperatures all along the length of the Great Barrier Reef, there wasn’t a cool portion in the north, or a cool portion in the south this time around,” Professor Hughes said. “The whole Barrier Reef was hot so the bleaching we have seen this year is the most extensive so far.”
Professor Hughes added that he was now almost certain that the Reef was not going to recover to what it looked like even five years ago, not to mention 30 years ago. If the global warming trends continued the Great Barrier Reef would be destroyed, he said.
“We will have some sort of tropical ecosystem, but it won’t look like coral reef, there might be more seaweed, more sponges, a lot less coral, but it will be a very different ecosystem.”
The Great Barrier Reef, covering 348,000 square kilometres was UNESCO world heritage listed in 1981 as the most extensive and spectacular coral reef ecosystem on the planet, according to the UNESCO website.
The warnings are stark. With the Covid-19 crisis wreaking global havoc and the overheating atmosphere threatening far worse in the long term, especially if governments rely on the same old carbon-intensive ways, both economy and climate will sink or swim together.
“There are reasons to fear that we will leap from the Covid-19 frying pan into the climate fire”, says a new report, Will Covid-19 fiscal recovery packages accelerate or retard progress on Climate Change? Published by the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford, UK, it says now is the time for governments to restructure their economies and act decisively to tackle climate change.
“The climate emergency is like the Covid-19 emergency, just in slow motion and much graver”, says the study, written by a team of economic and climate change heavyweights including Joseph Stiglitz, Cameron Hepburn and Nicholas Stern.
Economic recovery packages emerging in the coming months will have a significant impact on whether globally agreed climate goals are met, says the report.
“The recovery packages can either kill two birds with one stone – setting the global economy on a pathway to net-zero emissions – or lock us into a fossil system from which it will be nearly impossible to escape.”
The study’s authors talked to economists, finance officials and central banks around the world.
They say that putting policies aimed at tackling climate change at the centre of recovery plans makes economic as well as environmental sense.
“… Green projects create more jobs, deliver higher short-term returns per dollar spend and lead to increased long term-term cost saving, by comparison with traditional fiscal stimulus”, says the report.
“Examples include investment in renewable energy production, such as wind or solar.
“As previous research has shown, in the short term clean energy infrastructure construction is particularly labour-intensive, creating twice as many jobs per dollar as fossil fuel investments.”
Fundamental change coming
Covid-19 is causing great suffering and considerable economic hardship around the world. But it has also resulted in cleaner air and waterways, a quieter environment and far less commuting to and from work, with people in the developed countries doing more work from home.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a recent survey that Covid-19 and other factors were bringing about a fundamental change in the global energy market, with the use of climate-changing fossil fuels falling sharply and prices of oil, coal and gas plummeting. The IEA also projected that global emissions of greenhouses gases would fall by 8 per cent in 2020, more than any other year on record.
The Oxford report says that with the implementation of the right policies, these positive changes can be sustained: by tackling climate change, many economic and other problems will be solved.
Sceptics have often said that public resistance to changes in lifestyle will prevent governments from taking any substantial action on the climate issue. The study begs to differ: “The (Covid-19) crisis has also demonstrated that governments can intervene decisively once the scale of an emergency is clear and public support is present.”
Economists and finance experts are calling for the UK to play a decisive role in ensuring that economies around the world do not return to the old, high-carbon ways but instead implement green recovery packages.
Climate conference
The UK is president and co-host of COP-26, the round of UN climate talks originally due to take place in November this year but now, due to Covid, postponed to early 2021.
The round is seen as a vital part of efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change.
“The UK’s global leadership in financial services provides a unique opportunity to address climate change by transforming the financial system”, he says.
“To seize it, all financial decisions need to take into account the risks from climate change and the opportunities from the transition to a net zero economy.”
America’s JP Morgan Chase has pumped more than the GDP of Finland into fossil fuels expansion since the Paris climate accord of 2015, while Japan’s and China’s mega banks have also been ‘failing miserably’ in their response to climate change over the last four years, a report from a coalition of NGOs has shown.
It’s as if the penny hasn’t dropped for the financial services industry that climate change is not only an increasingly disruptive environmental phenomenon, but a grave risk to the stability of the global economy.
Financial support for the fossil fuel industry has increased every year since the Paris Agreement came into being in 2015, according to a new report, Banking on Climate Change 2020, from a collective of environmental groups including Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack and Indigenous Environmental Network.
The Paris Agreement recommended that global warming be capped at 2°C above pre-industrial levels to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change. To do so, scientists say greenhouse gas emissions, the bulk of which come from the burning of fossil fuels, must be slashed.
However, the report found that 35 global banks have not only been maintaining but expanding the fossil fuels sector, with more than US$2.7 trillion in investments made since 2015.
It is unconscionable for banks to be approving new loans and raising capital for the companies that are pushing hardest to increase carbon emissions.
Alison Kirsch, climate and energy leader researcher, Rainforest Action Network
United States-headquartered banks JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi and Bank of America have accounted for 30 per cent of all fossil fuel financing from the major global banks since the Paris accord.
JPMorgan Chase, which recently announced it will close one-fifth of its branches in the US in response to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, pumped US$269 billion—more than the gross domestic product of Finland—into the fossil fuels sector over the last four years, notably in fossil fuel expansion, Arctic oil and gas, offshore oil and gas, and fracking.
In Asia, Tokyo-headquartered Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) was the region’s biggest fossil fuel financer and the world’s sixth-biggest financier, investing US$119 billion since 2015.
The investments in fossil fuels made by the world’s biggest 35 banking institutions between 2016 and 2019. Source: Banking on climate change report.
Counting out coal
China’s mega banks were found to be world’s biggest financiers of coal—the single biggest driver of greenhouse gas emissions—since the Paris Agreement. China Construction Bank and Bank of China are the biggest bankers of coal mining, pumping US$25 billion into the sector between them. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Bank of China were the heaviest funders of coal power globally, investing US$42 billion combined, according to the report.
However, financial support for the carbon-intensive fuel is dwindling globally, the report noted. Finance to the top 30 coal mining companies fell by 6 per cent between 2016 and 2019, while finance to the top 30 coal power companies shrank by 13 per cent.
Though China’s banks are a noteable exception, the report found that 26 of the 35 banks in the report now have policies restricting coal finance, which has helped to push the finance sector away from coal. China’s big four banks do not have any climate policies in place.
A growing minority of the world’s biggest banks—now 16—now also restrict finance to some oil and gas sectors. The report said European banks have the toughest fossil fuel lending restrictions. France’s Crédit Agricole, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Italy’s Unicredit are said to have the most progressive climate policies.
Banking on Paris
The majority of the world’s top banks are signatories of frameworks such as the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Banking and the Equator Principles, which commit banks to align their business strategies with the Paris Agreement.
But because potential emissions from the coal, oil and natural gas already in production exhaust the carbon budget for the 2°C warming limit of the Paris Agreement, any bank that supports the further expansion of the fossil fuel sector is Paris-incompatible, the report noted.
Alison Kirsch, climate and energy leader researcher, Rainforest Action Network, said that it is “crystal clear” that banks are “failing miserably” in their response to climate change and the decarbonisation of the global economy.
“As the toll of death and destruction from unprecedented floods, droughts, fires and storms grows, it is unconscionable and outrageous for banks to be approving new loans and raising capital for the companies that are pushing hardest to increase carbon emissions,” she said.
The report emerges at a time when the ongoing Covid-19 coronavirus is threatening to derail investment in renewable energy, according to the International Energy Agency.
The same firms have topped the global plastic polluter audit, conducted by a collective of environmental groups running cleanup operations, for the second year in succession.
This is despite initiatives the multi-national consumer goods companies have launched to address the chronic plastic pollution problem they have contributed to.
Coke uses PlantBottle packaging, which are bottles made from plants, saves the equivalent annual emissions of more than 315,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide, Coke estimates. Image: Coca-Cola
But these measures do not address the root of the problem – the overuse of plastic by consumer goods firms – and so have not affected their standing in the global litter audit, the campaigners noted.
“Commitments by corporations like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and PepsiCo to address the crisis unfortunately continue to rely on false solutions like replacing plastic with paper or bioplastics and relying more heavily on a broken global recycling system,” said Abigail Aguilar, plastic campaign coordinator for Greenpeace Southeast Asia, the lead group for the Break Free From Plastic campaign, in a media briefing on Wednesday.
“We call them false solutions because they perpetuate the throwaway culture that caused the plastic pollution crisis, and will do nothing to prevent these brands from being named the top polluters again in the future.”
As part of Break Free From Plastic, a global movement of non-governmental organisations advocating against new plastic production, Greenpeace orchestrated 4,384 cleanups in over 50 countries from August 1 to September 30, picking up 476,423 pieces of plastic. Almost half of the plastic waste was marked with a clear consumer brand.
Other companies identified in the study included Mondelez International, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Philip Morris International and Perfetti van Melle.
The world’s top 10 biggest plastic polluters in 2019. Image: Break Free From Plastic.
Von Hernandez, global coordinator of Break Free from Plastic, called on corporations to reduce their production of single-use plastic, instead of using recycling or recyclable packaging as a solution.
He cited a 2017 study that found that 8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastic trash have been produced since 1950, but only 9 per cent of it has been recycled globally.
“Even if all plastic packaging were collected to be recycled, it would only be down-cycled or transformed into another inferior product that inevitably becomes waste, ending up in incinerators and landfill, polluting our oceans,” Hernandez said.
“Over the next 30 years, the amount of plastic waste is set to quadruple,” he warned.
A call for ‘alternative delivery systems’
Environmentalists urged the consumer goods companies to invest in different ways to package their products that do not create pollution.
Unilever’s hair refilling station in a mall at the Makati Central Business District in the Philippines.
Image: Unilever
Unilever, which ranked as the fifth largest polluter in the audit, launched a shampoo and conditioner refilling station in three high-traffic malls in Metro Manila, Philippines in March.
The hair and skincare giant, which owns brands such as Dove, Sunsilk, and Lux, sells many of its products in single-use plastic sachets in developing countries like the Philippines and Indonesia to make its products more affordable.
While environmentalists lauded Unilever’s intiative, they said consumers in the lower income bracket who mostly use single-use sachets will not use the refilling stations.
“It’s a step in the right direction, but malls especially in the central business district are not that accessible to the common Filipino. In our dialogue with the companies, we told them that if they are to invest and introduce an alternative [to plastics], they need to position them where they are easily accesible, like in sari-sari (retail) stores or public markets,” Aguilar said.
“Solutions must be affordable, simple, convenient, durable, and non-toxic,” he said.
