Kashmiri farmer and saffron producer Ghulam Mohammad Mir and his family pick saffron stigmas from the flowers at his residence in Kashmir’s Pampore October 31, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Tucked in a valley beneath the snow-capped Himalayas of the Indian Kashmir region is the town of Pampore, famed for its farms that grow the world’s most expensive spice – the red-hued saffron.

This is where most of saffron is farmed in India, the world’s second-largest producer behind Iran of the spice, which costs up to 325,000 rupees ($3,800) a kg (2.2 pounds) because it is so labour-intensive to harvest.

About 90% of India’s saffron is produced in Kashmir, of which a majority is grown in Pampore, but the small town is under threat of rapid urbanisation, according to the Indian Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR).

Experts say rising temperatures and erratic rainfall pose a risk to saffron production, which has dropped from 8 metric tons in the financial year 2010-11 to 2.6 metric tons in 2023-24, the federal government told parliament in February, adding that efforts were being made to boost production.

One such programme is a project to help grow the plant indoors in a controlled environment in tubes containing moisture and vital nutrients, which Dr. Bashir Ilahi at state-run Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences said has shown good results.

“Growing saffron in a controlled environment demonstrates temperature resistance and significantly reduces the risk of crop failure,” said Ilahi, standing in his laboratory between stacks of crates containing tubes of the purple flower.

Ilahi and other local experts have been helping farmers with demonstrations on how to grow the crocus plant indoors. “It is an amazing innovation,” said Abdul Majeed, president of Kashmir’s Saffron Growers Association, some of whose members, including Majeed, have been cultivating the crop indoors for a few years. Manzoor Ahmad Mir, a saffron grower, urged more state support.

“The government should promote indoor saffron cultivation on a much larger scale as climate change is affecting the entire world, and Kashmir is no exception,” Mir said.

The Eaton Fire destroys a structure, January 7, 2025, in Altadena, California.
| Photo Credit: AP

Holding long-term global warming to two degrees Celsius — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a stark new analysis published by leading scientists.

Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought.

Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming.

An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate panel, which gives the planet a 50% chance of keeping warming under 2C by the year 2100, “is an implausible scenario,” Hansen told a briefing Tuesday.

“That scenario is now impossible,” said Hansen, formerly a top NASA climate scientist who famously announced to the US Congress in 1988 that global warming was underway.

“The two degree target is dead.”

Instead, he and co-authors argued, the amount of greenhouse gases already pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels meant increased warming is now guaranteed.

Temperatures will stay at or above 1.5C in the coming years — devastating coral reefs and fueling more intense storms — before rising to around 2.0C by 2045, they forecast.

They estimated polar ice melt and freshwater injection into the North Atlantic will trigger the shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) within the next 20-30 years.

The current brings warmth to various parts of the globe and also carries nutrients necessary to sustain ocean life.

Its end “will lock in major problems including sea level rise of several meters — thus, we describe AMOC shutdown as the ‘point of no return,'” the paper argued.

The world’s nations agreed during the landmark Paris climate accord of 2015 to try to hold end-of-century warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Scientists identified the threshold as critical to preventing the breakdown of major ocean circulation systems, the abrupt thawing of boreal permafrost, and the collapse of tropical coral reefs.

The 1.5C target has already been breached over the past two years, according to data from the EU’s climate monitoring system Copernicus, though the Paris Agreement referred to a long-term trend over decades.

At 2C, the impacts would be even greater, including irreversible loss to Earth’s ice sheets, mountain glaciers and snow, sea ice and permafrost.

The authors acknowledged the findings appeared grim, but argued that honesty is a necessary ingredient for change.

“Failure to be realistic in climate assessment and failure to call out the fecklessness of current policies to stem global warming is not helpful to young people,” they said.

“Today, with rising crises including global climate change, we have reached a point where we must address the problem of special interests,” they added, stressing they were “optimistic” for the future.

Remote, icy and mostly pristine, Greenland plays an outsized role in the daily weather experienced by billions of people and in the climate changes taking shape all over the planet.

Greenland is where climate change, scarce resources, tense geopolitics and new trade patterns all intersect, said Ohio University security and environment professor Geoff Dabelko.

The world’s largest island is now “central to the geopolitical, geoeconomic competition in many ways,” partly because of climate change, Dabelko said.

Since his first term in office, President-elect Donald Trump has expressed interest in acquiring Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, a longtime U.S. ally and a founding member of NATO. It is also home to a large U.S. military base.

Think of Greenland as an open refrigerator door or thermostat for a warming world, and it’s in a region that is warming four times faster than the rest of the globe, said New York University climate scientist David Holland.

Locked inside are valuable rare earth minerals needed for telecommunications, as well as uranium, billions of untapped barrels of oil and a vast supply of natural gas that used to be inaccessible but is becoming less so.

Many of the same minerals are currently being supplied mostly by China, so other countries such as the United States are interested, Dabelko said. Three years ago, the Denmark government suspended oil development offshore from the territory of 57,000 people.

But more than the oil, gas or minerals, there’s ice — a “ridiculous” amount, said climate scientist Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine.

If that ice melts, it would reshape coastlines across the globe and potentially shift weather patterns in such a dramatic manner that the threat was the basis of a Hollywood disaster movie. Greenland holds enough ice that if it all melts, the world’s seas would rise by 24 feet (7.4 meters). Nearly a foot of that is so-called zombie ice, already doomed to melt no matter what happens, a 2022 study found.

Since 1992, Greenland has lost about 182 billion tons (169 billion metric tons) of ice each year, with losses hitting 489 billion tons a year (444 billion metric tons) in 2019.

Greenland will be “a key focus point” through the 21st century because of the effect its melting ice sheet will have on sea levels, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. “It will likely become a bigger contributor in the future.”

That impact is “perhaps unstoppable,” NYU’s Holland said.

Greenland also serves as the engine and on/off switch for a key ocean current that influences Earth’s climate in many ways, including hurricane and winter storm activity. It’s called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, and it’s slowing down because more fresh water is being dumped into the ocean by melting ice in Greenland, Serreze said.

A shutdown of the AMOC conveyor belt is a much-feared climate tipping point that could plunge Europe and parts of North America into prolonged freezes, a scenario depicted in the 2004 movie “The Day After Tomorrow.”

“If this global current system were to slow substantially or even collapse altogether — as we know it has done in the past — normal temperature and precipitation patterns around the globe would change drastically,” said climate scientist Jennifer Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “Agriculture would be derailed, ecosystems would crash, and ‘normal’ weather would be a thing of the past.”

Greenland is also changing color as it melts from the white of ice, which reflects sunlight, heat and energy away from the planet, to the blue and green of the ocean and land, which absorb much more energy, Holland said.

Greenland plays a role in the dramatic freeze that two-thirds of the United States is currently experiencing. And back in 2012, weather patterns over Greenland helped steer Superstorm Sandy into New York and New Jersey, according to winter weather expert Judah Cohen of the private firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research.

Because of Greenland’s mountains of ice, it also changes patterns in the jet stream, which brings storms across the globe and dictates daily weather. Often, especially in winter, a blocking system of high pressure off Greenland causes Arctic air to plunge to the west and east, smacking North America and Europe, Cohen said.

Because it straddles the Arctic circle between the United States, Russia and Europe, Greenland is a geopolitical prize that the U.S. and others have eyed for more than 150 years. It’s even more valuable as the Arctic opens up more to shipping and trade.

None of that takes into consideration the unique look of the ice-covered island that has some of the Earth’s oldest rocks.

“I see it as insanely beautiful. It’s eye-watering to be there,” said Holland, who has conducted research on the ice more than 30 times since 2007. “Pieces of ice the size of the Empire State Building are just crumbling off cliffs and crashing into the ocean. And also, the beautiful wildlife, all the seals and the killer whales. It’s just breathtaking.”

More than one-third of all animals on Earth, from beetles to cows to elephants, depend on plant-based diets. Plants are a low-calorie food source, so it can be challenging for animals to consume enough energy to meet their needs. Now climate change is reducing the nutritional value of some foods that plant eaters rely on.

Human activities are increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and raising global temperatures. As a result, many plants are growing faster across ecosystems worldwide.

Some studies suggest that this “greening of the Earth” could partially offset rising greenhouse gas emissions by storing more carbon in plants. However, there’s a trade-off: These fast-tracked plants can contain fewer nutrients per bite.

I’m an ecologist and work with colleagues to examine how nutrient dilution could affect species across the food web. Our focus is on responses in plant-feeding populations, from tiny grasshoppers to giant pandas.

We believe long-term changes in the nutritional value of plants may be an underappreciated cause of shrinking animal populations. These changes in plants aren’t visually evident, like rising seas. Nor are they sudden and imminent, like hurricanes or heat waves. But they can have important impacts over time.

Plant-eating animals may need more time to find and consume food if their usual meal becomes less nutritious, exposing themselves to greater risks from predators and other stresses in the process. Reduced nutritional values can also make animals less fit, reducing their ability to grow, reproduce and survive.

Rising carbon, falling nutrients

Research has already shown that climate change is causing nutrient dilution in human food crops. Declines in micronutrients, which play important roles in growth and health, are a particular concern: Long-term records of crop nutritional values have revealed declines in copper, magnesium, iron and zinc.

In particular, human deficiencies in iron, zinc and protein are expected to increase in the coming decades because of rising carbon dioxide levels. These declines are expected to have broad impacts on human health and even survival, with the strongest effects among populations that are highly dependent on rice and wheat, such as in East and Central Asia.

The nutritional value of livestock feed is also declining. Cattle spend a lot of time eating and often have a hard time finding enough protein to meet their needs. Protein concentrations are falling in grasses across rangelands around the world. This trend threatens both livestock and ranchers, reducing animals’ weight gains and costing producers money.

Nutrient dilution affects wild species too. Here are some examples.

Dependent on bamboo

Giant pandas are a threatened species with great cultural value. Because they reproduce at low rates and need large, connected swaths of bamboo as habitat, they are classified as a vulnerable species whose survival is threatened by land conversion for farming and development. Pandas also could become a poster animal for the threat of nutrient dilution.

The giant panda is considered an “umbrella species,” which means that conserving panda habitat benefits many other animals and plants that also live in bamboo groves. Famously, giant pandas are entirely dependent on bamboo and spend large portions of their days eating it. Now, rising temperatures are reducing bamboo’s nutritional value and making it harder for the plant to survive.

Mixed prospects for insects

Insects are essential members of the web of life that pollinate many flowering plants, serve as a food source for birds and animals, and perform other important ecological services. Around the world, many insect species are declining in developed areas, where their habitat has been converted to farms or cities, as well as in natural areas.

In zones that are less affected by human activity, evidence suggests that changes in plant chemistry may play a role in decreasing insect numbers.

Many insects are plant feeders that are likely to be affected by reduced plant nutritional value. Experiments have found that when carbon dioxide levels increase, insect populations decline, at least partly due to lower-quality food supplies.

Not all insect species are declining, however, and not all plant-feeding insects respond in the same way to nutrient dilution. Insects that chew leaves, such as grasshoppers and caterpillars, suffer the most negative effects, including reduced reproduction and smaller body sizes.

In contrast, locusts prefer carbon-rich plants, so rising carbon dioxide levels could cause increases in locust outbreaks. Some insects, including aphids and cicadas, feed on phloem – the living tissue inside plants that carries food made in the leaves to other parts of the plant – and may also benefit from carbon-rich plants.

Uneven impacts

Declines in plant food quality are most likely to affect places where nutrients already are scarce and animals struggle now to meet their nutritional needs. These zones include the ancient soils of Australia, along with tropical areas such as the Amazon and Congo basins. Nutrient dilution is also an issue in the open ocean, where rapidly warming waters are reducing the nutritional content of giant sea kelp.

Certain types of plant-feeding animals are likely to face greater declines because they need higher-quality food. Rodents, rabbits, koalas, horses, rhinoceroses and elephants are all hind-gut fermenters – animals that have simple, single-chambered stomachs and rely on microbes in their intestines to extract nutrients from high-fiber food.

These species need more nutrient-dense food than ruminants – grazers like cattle, sheep, goats and bison, with four-chambered stomachs that digest their food in stages. Smaller animals also typically require more nutrient-dense food than larger ones, because they have faster metabolisms and consume more energy per unit of body mass. Smaller animals also have shorter guts, so they can’t as easily extract all the nutrients from food.

More research is needed to understand what role nutrient dilution may be playing in declines of individual species, including experiments that artificially increase carbon dioxide levels and studies that monitor long-term changes in plant chemistry alongside animals in the field.

Over the longer term, it will be important to understand how nutrient dilution is altering entire food webs, including shifts in plant species and traits, effects on other animal groups such as predators, and changes in species interactions. Changes in plant nutritional value as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels could have far-reaching impacts throughout ecosystems worldwide.

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

At the bottom of the oceans and seas lie more than 8,500 shipwrecks from two world wars. These wrecks have been estimated to contain as much as 6 billion gallons of oil, as well as munitions, toxic heavy metals and even chemical weapons.

For decades, these wrecks have largely lain out of sight and out of mind. But all this time, their structures have been degrading, inexorably increasing the chances of sudden releases of toxic substances into the marine environment.

In parts of the globe, climate change is exacerbating this risk. Rising ocean temperatures, acidification and increasing storminess accelerate the breakdown of these wrecks.

Of course, wrecks from the world wars are far from the only ones to be found at the bottom of the sea, with many others adding to the problem. The cost of addressing this global issue has been estimated at US$340 billion (£261 billion).

How many of these wrecks pose a threat to people’s safety, to coastal communities and to the environment? What can be done – and why haven’t we done it sooner?

Mapping the problem

The raw figures in dollars and the numbers of wrecks on the map rightly cause concern. Work by researchers such as Paul Heersink have drawn together different datasets to help visualise the scale of the challenge. Yet these figures, and the position of dots on maps, may also give a false sense of certainty.

It remains the case that the world’s oceans and seas are not as well mapped as we would like, with about 23% having been described and mapped in detail. Even that level of detail often falls short of what we need to positively identify a wreck, let alone determine the risk it might pose.

There is an ongoing global push to improve our mapping of ocean space under the auspices of the Seabed 2030 project, which is looking to reach a universal resolution of 100x100m. That means one “pixel” of information would be equivalent to about two football pitches. This will be transformative for our understanding of the ocean floor, but will not reveal the detail of all those things that you could hide within those two football pitches (which includes quite a few wrecks).

Many of the wrecks that may pose the greatest problems are found in shallower coastal waters, where government mapping initiatives and work by industry provide much higher resolutions, yet still the challenge of identification remains.

What about archival records? Historical records, such as those held by Lloyd’s Register Foundation in London, are fundamental to bringing greater certainty to the scale and nature of the challenge. They contain the details of ship structures, cargos carried and last known positions prior to loss.

The accuracy of those positions, however, is variable, meaning that knowing exactly where on the seabed a wreck might be, and so how to survey it and assess its risk, is not straightforward. This is placed in stark relief by the work of British maritime archaeologist Innes McCartney and oceanographer Mike Roberts, whose detailed geophysical and archival investigations in the Irish Sea demonstrated that historic wrecks have been frequently misattributed and mislocated. This means that the dots on the map are often in the wrong places, and up to 60% can be sitting in unknown locations on the sea floor.

A race against time

Most of the wrecks causing greatest concern are of metal, or metal and wood construction. The steel in these wrecks is slowly degrading, increasing the chance of cargos being spilt, and components breaking down. However, this is only part of the risk.

The sea is becoming an ever busier place, as we carry out more intensive fishing and ramp up the construction of offshore wind farms and other energy installations to meet net zero commitments. These all affect the seabed and can physically disturb or change the dynamics of wreck sites.

There is increasing global recognition of the need to address this problem. It has remained unresolved to date because of the complex international and interdisciplinary challenge it poses.

Many of the wrecks lie in waters off countries that have nothing to do with the original owner of the ship. How then, do we determine who is responsible? And who pays for the clean-up – especially when the original owner benefits from the legal loophole of sovereign immunity? Under this concept, the flag State (the country where the ship is registered) cannot be held responsible under international law and therefore is not legally obliged to pay up.

Beyond these fundamental questions of responsibility, there are technical challenges. It’s difficult to know exactly how many wrecks of concern there are, and how to locate them. So how do we assess their condition and determine if intervention is needed? And if so, how do we intervene?

Each of these questions is a complex challenge, and solving them requires the contributions of historians, archaeologists, engineers, biologists, geophysicists, geochemists, hydrographic surveyors, geospatial data analysts and engineers.

This has already been happening, with regional projects making critical headway and demonstrating what can be achieved. However, the immense scale of the problem outweighs the amount of work done to date.

New technologies are clearly critical, as are new attitudes. At the heart of the problem is an issue of knowledge and certainty – is this the wreck we think it is, does it pose a problem and if so, over what time scale?

Advances in subsea drones known as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), which are fitted with an array of sensors to measure the seabed and detect pollutants, could help enhance our knowledge about the locations of wrecks, what they’re carrying and their state of deterioration. AUVs can provide relatively cheap, high resolution data that produces fewer emissions than a comparable survey campaign conducted from a large research vessel.

But we also need to share that information, and compare it with data from archives to help generate knowledge and higher levels of certainty. Too often, underwater surveys and investigations occur in silos, with data held by individual agencies or companies, preventing a rapid and cumulative increase in understanding.

The severity of the environmental and safety risk posed by wrecks on the ocean floor, and how it changes over time, is not fully known. But this is a problem we can solve.

Action is needed now, driven by a robust regulatory and funding framework, and technical standards for remediation. A global partnership – codenamed Project Tangaroa – has been convened to stimulate that framework – but political will and financing is required to make it a reality.

Through targeted archival and survey work, and by sharing data and ideas, we can chart a course to a future where the sea is not a place where we ignore things today that will threaten us tomorrow.

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

Pacific Island nation leaders pose for a group photograph with U.S. President Joe Biden during a summit at the White House in Washington, U.S., September 25, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Pacific island nations at the centre of a strategic rivalry between the U.S. and China that brought infrastructure and funding hope President-elect Donald Trump stays engaged in the region but are wary of competition spilling into confrontation, diplomats say.

A 2023 defence deal giving the U.S. military access to ports and airfields across Papua New Guinea came with a pledge of $3.5 billion in infrastructure, equipment and training, according to PNG Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko, publicly disclosing an investment figure for the U.S. defence deal for the first time.

Papua New Guinea will continue to trade with China, even as U.S. military ties increase, he also told a resources conference in Sydney this week, highlighting a key worry among Pacific leaders about Trump’s tougher approach towards Beijing.

“The main concern is the Pacific doesn’t want to be forced into a position where it has to choose,” Meg Taylor, the secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum regional bloc during the first Trump Administration, told Reuters.

Washington was in “acute strategic competition” with China in the Pacific Ocean, where Beijing hopes to establish a military base, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said last month.

He urged the incoming Trump Administration to not withdraw from the region, where Biden has opened embassies and increased coast guard patrols and aid.

While the U.S. has long held close defence ties with northern Pacific islands near its military base on Guam, Biden had sought to catch up to China’s influence-building in the South Pacific.

U.S. Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin visited Fiji last month, opening negotiations for a military agreement. The defence deal with PNG, the most populous Pacific Island country, was signed last year in response to a Chinese security pact with Solomon Islands.

‘Wait and see’

It was “wait and see” on Trump, PNG’s Tkatchenko said on Monday, while noting that work on the defence agreement had already started with runways, wharfs and fuel storage facilities under construction.

“That agreement is over $3.5 billion in investment in infrastructure development, training, equipment for the benefit of security in our region,” he said.

A U.S. State Department spokesman said the agreement “aims to address shared defense and security challenges in Papua New Guinea”, and “does not have a dollar amount associated with it”.

Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is a China hawk who previously pressed the need to block Beijing from building the subsea cables that connect Pacific Islands, and is likely to maintain a focus on the region, Pacific analysts and diplomats said.

“During his past presidency Trump demonstrated he understood the strategic importance of the Pacific, given its close proximity to the U.S., shared ocean borders, and critical military and telecommunication assets in the North Pacific,” said Meg Keen, senior fellow for the Lowy Institute’s Pacific Islands Program.

U.S. diplomacy with island states on the front line of sea level rise could be complicated by Trump’s threats to withdraw from the Paris Agreement climate pact, however.

“The climate issues are the most important issues for the region, that is the fundamental security issue for the Pacific and we know that President Trump doesn’t believe in climate change,” said Taylor, the former regional bloc leader.

Other diplomats said U.S. funding for climate adaptation projects vital to small Pacific states was likely to continue, even if rebadged.

Pacific leaders balancing ties with Beijing and Washington were also bracing for Rubio’s tough talk on China.

“More confrontation in the Pacific will not be welcome and could work against the U.S.,” said Keen.

“A Trump administration might take a harder line, but the art of the deal is not to alienate leaders important to regional security.”

A worker wearing a protective suit harvests potato tubers at a greenhouse under Yakeshi Senfeng Potato Industry Company, where seed potatoes are farmed through the aeroponics method, in Yakeshi, Inner Mongolia, China, June 16, 2024. The company has invested in aeroponic systems where plants are grown in the air under controlled conditions, and farmers are increasingly demanding potato varieties that are higher-yielding and less susceptible to disease.  “Some new and more aggressive (late blight) strains have begun to appear, and they are more resistant to traditional prevention and control methods,” said general manager Li Xuemin.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

In a research facility in the northwest of Beijing, molecular biologist Li Jieping and his team harvest a cluster of seven unusually small potatoes, one as tiny as a quail’s egg, from a potted plant.

Grown under conditions that simulate predictions of higher temperatures at the end of the century, the potatoes provide an ominous sign of future food security.

At just 136 grams (4.8 oz), the tubers weigh less than half that of a typical potato in China, where the most popular varieties are often twice the size of a baseball.

China is the world’s biggest producer of potatoes, which are crucial to global food security because of their high yield relative to other staple crops.

But they are particularly vulnerable to heat, and climate change, driven by fossil fuel emissions, is pushing temperatures to dangerous new heights while also worsening drought and flooding.

With an urgent need to protect food supplies, Li, a researcher at the International Potato Center (CIP) in Beijing, is leading a three-year study into the effects of higher temperatures on the vegetable. His team is focusing on China’s two most common varieties.

“I worry about what will happen in the future,” Li said. “Farmers will harvest fewer potato tubers, it will influence food security.”

Li’s team grew their crop over three months in a walk-in chamber set at 3 degrees Celsius above the current average temperature in northern Hebei and Inner Mongolia, the higher altitude provinces where potatoes are usually grown in China.

Their research, published in the journal Climate Smart Agriculture this month, found the higher temperatures accelerated tuber growth by 10 days, but cut potato yields by more than half.

Under current climate policies, the world is facing as much as 3.1 C of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100, according to a United Nations report released in October.

Farmers in China say they are already feeling the effect of extreme weather events.

In Inner Mongolia, dozens of workers clutching white sacks rush to gather potatoes dug up from the soil before the next downpour.

“The biggest challenge for potatoes this year is the heavy rain,” said manager Wang Shiyi. “It has caused various diseases… and greatly slowed down the harvest progress.”

Meanwhile, seed potato producer Yakeshi Senfeng Potato Industry Company has invested in aeroponic systems where plants are grown in the air under controlled conditions.

Farmers are increasingly demanding potato varieties that are higher-yielding and less susceptible to disease, particularly late blight, which caused the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-19th century and thrives in warm and humid conditions.

“Some new and more aggressive (late blight) strains have begun to appear, and they are more resistant to traditional prevention and control methods,” said general manager Li Xuemin, explaining the Inner Mongolia-based company’s strategy.

The research by CIP, which is headquartered in Lima, is part of a collaborative effort with the Chinese government to help farmers adapt to the warmer, wetter conditions.

In the greenhouse outside Li’s lab, workers swab pollen on white potato flowers to develop heat-tolerant varieties.

Li says Chinese farmers will need to make changes within the next decade, planting during spring instead of the start of summer, or moving to even higher altitudes to escape the heat.

“Farmers have to start preparing for climate change,” Li said. “If we don’t find a solution, they will make less money from lower yields and the price of potatoes may rise.”

Clouds are pictured over the residential buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Baabda, Lebanon, November 11, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Clouds form when water vapor – an invisible gas in the atmosphere – sticks to tiny floating particles, such as dust, and turns into liquid water droplets or ice crystals. In a newly published study, we show that microplastic particles can have the same effects, producing ice crystals at temperatures 5 to 10 degrees Celsius (9 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than droplets without microplastics.

This suggests that microplastics in the air may affect weather and climate by producing clouds in conditions where they would not form otherwise.

We are atmospheric chemists who study how different types of particles form ice when they come into contact with liquid water. This process, which occurs constantly in the atmosphere, is called nucleation.

Clouds in the atmosphere can be made up of liquid water droplets, ice particles or a mixture of the two. In clouds in the mid- to upper atmosphere where temperatures are between 32 and minus 36 F (0 to minus 38 C), ice crystals normally form around mineral dust particles from dry soils or biological particles, such as pollen or bacteria.

Microplastics are less than 5 millimeters wide – about the size of a pencil eraser. Some are microscopic. Scientists have found them in Antarctic deep seas, the summit of Mount Everest and fresh Antarctic snow. Because these fragments are so small, they can be easily transported in the air.

Why it matters

Ice in clouds has important effects on weather and climate because most precipitation typically starts as ice particles.

Many cloud tops in nontropical zones around the world extend high enough into the atmosphere that cold air causes some of their moisture to freeze. Then, once ice forms, it draws water vapor from the liquid droplets around it, and the crystals grow heavy enough to fall. If ice doesn’t develop, clouds tend to evaporate rather than causing rain or snowfall.

While children learn in grade school that water freezes at 32 F (0 C), that’s not always true. Without something to nucleate onto, such as dust particles, water can be supercooled to temperatures as low as minus 36 F (minus 38 C) before it freezes.

For freezing to occur at warmer temperatures, some kind of material that won’t dissolve in water needs to be present in the droplet. This particle provides a surface where the first ice crystal can form. If microplastics are present, they could cause ice crystals to form, potentially increasing rain or snowfall.

Clouds also affect weather and climate in several ways. They reflect incoming sunlight away from Earth’s surface, which has a cooling effect, and absorb some radiation that is emitted from Earth’s surface, which has a warming effect.

The amount of sunlight reflected depends on how much liquid water vs. ice a cloud contains. If microplastics increase the presence of ice particles in clouds compared with liquid water droplets, this shifting ratio could change clouds’ effect on Earth’s energy balance.

How we did our work

To see whether microplastic fragments could serve as nuclei for water droplets, we used four of the most prevalent types of plastics in the atmosphere: low density polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene terephthalate. Each was tested both in a pristine state and after exposure to ultraviolet light, ozone and acids. All of these are present in the atmosphere and could affect the composition of the microplastics.

We suspended the microplastics in small water droplets and slowly cooled the droplets to observe when they froze. We also analyzed the plastic fragments’ surfaces to determine their molecular structure, since ice nucleation could depend on the microplastics’ surface chemistry.

For most of the plastics we studied, 50% of the droplets were frozen by the time they cooled to minus 8 F (minus 22 C). These results parallel those from another recent study by Canadian scientists, who also found that some types of microplastics nucleate ice at warmer temperatures than droplets without microplastics.

Exposure to ultraviolet radiation, ozone and acids tended to decrease ice nucleation activity on the particles. This suggests that ice nucleation is sensitive to small chemical changes on the surface of microplastic particles. However, these plastics still nucleated ice, so they could still affect the amount of ice in clouds.

What still isn’t known

To understand how microplastics affect weather and climate, we need to know their concentrations at the altitudes where clouds form. We also need to understand the concentration of microplastics compared with other particles that could nucleate ice, such as mineral dust and biological particles, to see whether microplastics are present at comparable levels. These measurements would allow us to model the impact of microplastics on cloud formation.

Plastic fragments come in many sizes and compositions. In future research, we plan to work with plastics that contain additives, such as plasticizers and colorants, as well as with smaller plastic particles.

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

Carbon offsets have become big business as more companies make promises to protect the climate but can’t meet the goals on their own.

When a company buys carbon offsets, it pays a project elsewhere to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on its behalf – by planting trees, for example, or generating renewable energy. The idea is that reducing greenhouse gas emissions anywhere pays off for the global climate.

But not all offsets have the same value. There is growing skepticism about many of the offsets sold on voluntary carbon markets. In contrast to compliance markets, where companies buy and sell a limited number of allowances that are issued by regulators, these voluntary carbon markets have few rules that can be enforced consistently. Investigations have found that many voluntary offset projects, forest management projects in particular, have done little to benefit the climate despite their claims.

I specialize in sustainable finance and corporate governance. My colleagues and I recently conducted the first systematic, evidence-based look at the global landscape of voluntary carbon offsets used by hundreds of large, publicly listed firms around the world.

The results raise questions about how some companies use these offsets and cast doubt on how effective voluntary carbon markets – at least in their current state – are in assisting a global transition to net-zero-emissions.

Which companies use low-quality offsets might surprise you

Our analysis shows that the global carbon-offset market has grown to comprise a rich variety of offset projects. Some generate renewable energy, contribute to energy-efficient housing and appliances, or capture and store carbon. Others preserve forests and grassland. The majority are based in Asia, Africa and the Americas, but they exist in other regions too.

Companies use these projects to boost their environmental claims in order to help attract investors, customers and support from various groups. That practice has skyrocketed, from virtually nothing in 2005 to roughly 30 million metric tons of carbon offset per year in 2022. Investment banking firm Morgan Stanley in 2023 forecast that the voluntary offset market would grow to about US$100 billion by 2030 and to around $250 billion by 2050.

For our analysis, we examined 866 publicly traded companies that used offsets between 2005 and 2021.

We found that large firms with a high percentage of big institutional investors and commitments to reach net-zero emissions are particularly active in voluntary carbon markets.

Our results also reveal a peculiar pattern: Industries with relatively low emissions, such as services and financial industries, are much more intensive in their use of offsets. Some used offsets for almost all of the emissions cuts they claimed.

In contrast, high-emissions industries, such as oil and gas, utilities or transportation, used negligible amounts of offsets compared to their heavy carbon footprints.

These facts cast a cloud of doubt on how effective voluntary carbon markets could really be at cutting global greenhouse gas emissions. They also raise questions about companies’ motives for using offsets.

Why companies rely on offsets: 2 explanations

One explanation for these patterns is that offsetting is a means to “outsource” efforts to transition away from greenhouse gas emissions. Companies with smaller carbon footprints find it cheaper to buy offsets than to make expensive investments in reducing their own emissions.

At the same time, we found that emissions-heavy companies were more likely to reduce their own emissions in-house, because offsetting massive amounts of emissions every year for an indefinite future would be more costly.

A more pernicious explanation for the growth in voluntary offsets is that offsets enable “greenwashing.” In this view, companies use offsets to cheaply refurbish their image to naive stakeholders who are not well informed about the quality of offsets. Agencies rate offset projects on how likely they are to meet their climate claims, among other indicators of the trustworthiness of offsets. Our reviews of pricing data and ratings found that projects rated as low quality have substantially lower prices.

We found that relatively few of the 1,413 offset projects used by companies in our sample had been verified as high quality by an external carbon rating agency. Most offset credits used by companies were strikingly cheap. More than 70% of retired offsets were priced below $4 per ton.

These explanations are not mutually exclusive. We found that low-emissions companies could easily alter their peer rankings for ESG performance – how well they do on environmental, social and governance issues – by offsetting a small quantity of emissions.

Fixing the voluntary market for the future

Our findings have important implications as policymakers and regulators debate rules for the voluntary carbon markets.

The data suggests that voluntary carbon markets are currently flooded with cheap, low-quality offsets, likely due to a lack of integrity guidelines and regulations for voluntary carbon markets to ensure the transparency and authenticity of offset projects. This lack of guidelines may also encourage the use of low-quality offsets.

Ever since Article 6 of the Paris climate agreement created principles for carbon markets and ways countries could cooperate to reach climate targets, agreeing on how to implement those principles has been a challenge. For the principles to be successful, negotiators must agree on project eligibility and information disclosure standards, among other issues.

In April 2024, SBTi, the world’s leading science-based arbiter of corporate climate targets, added urgency to that process when it announced that it would allow companies to meet their carbon goals with carbon offsets to cover emissions in their supply chains.

The following month, the U.S. Treasury, Energy and Agriculture departments jointly released a policy statement laying out their own template for rules to govern voluntary carbon markets. “Voluntary carbon markets can help unlock the power of private markets to reduce emissions, but that can only happen if we address significant existing challenges,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said at the time.

Article 6 and standards for carbon offsets are on the agenda for the 2024 United Nations climate conference, COP29, Nov. 11-22 in Baku, Azerbaijan.

With many segments of voluntary carbon markets faltering, the COP29 summit may be a make-or-break moment for voluntary carbon offsets to become a viable contributor to decarbonization going forward.

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

A view shows a sign of the COP29 United Nations Climate Change Conference with a backdrop of the cityscape in Baku, Azerbaijan October 31, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

This month’s U.N. climate summit – COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan – has been dubbed the “climate finance COP” for its central goal: to agree on how much money should go each year to helping developing countries cope with climate-related costs.

That discussion could be tough following Tuesday’s re-election of former U.S. President Donald Trump, a climate denier whose campaign vowed to remove the top historic greenhouse gas emitter and leading oil and gas producer from the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement to fight climate change for a second time.

COP29 delegates will also be looking to advance other deals made at previous summits.

Here are some of the top agenda items for the Nov. 11-22 summit.

Climate finance

The acronym dominating this year’s summit is NCQG – which stands for the New Collective Quantified Goal.

That refers to the new annual climate financing target, which is meant to kick in when the current $100 billion pledge expires at the end of this year.

Wealthy nations have only sometimes met that annual goal since 2020, leading to growing mistrust among the world’s climate-vulnerable nations.

As COP29 aims to set a much higher target for the years ahead, wealthy nations insist the money cannot come entirely from their budgets.

Instead, they are discussing a far more complex effort that would involve reforming the global multilateral lending complex in ways that de-escalate climate-linked financial risks and encourage more private capital.

It is unclear how much of the total annual target would be offered by rich nations. Also unresolved is whether fast-developing nations like China or the Middle East Gulf oil states should also contribute, a position championed by the United States and European Union.

By reforming the global banking system, countries hope to drive up the annual climate finance sum. U.N. agencies estimate that trillions of dollars are needed yearly, but officials with the COP29 host Azerbaijan said that a number in the “hundreds of billions” has a more realistic chance of being approved by consensus.

Fossil fuel transition

Last year’s COP28 summit in Dubai ended with countries agreeing for the first time to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.”

Since then, however, both fossil fuel use and export sales have continued to rise globally, while new areas have been approved for oil and gas production in countries like Azerbaijan, the United States, Namibia, and Guyana.

With countries and companies unclear in their resolve to quit coal, oil and gas, negotiators said COP29 was unlikely to deliver timelines or stronger language on fossil fuels, though some countries might push for a halt in new coal plant permitting.

Countries will also be discussing progress in their pledge to triple renewable energy capacity and double energy efficiency, as a way of easing demand for fossil fuels.

Rules for carbon market

Governments are eager to resolve rules for trading carbon credits earned through the preservation of forests and other natural carbon sinks.

While these credits are meant to be issued to nations as optional offsets to their countries’ emissions, they can also be traded on open markets. Business leaders are looking for COP29 to set rules for guaranteeing transparency and environmental integrity in projects logged with the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM).

Still to decide are key issues including how the PACM supervisory body will set standards, if credits should be evaluated before being traded, and whether and when credits can be revoked.

Boosting transparency

Azerbaijan hopes countries will submit their first climate action progress reports during the summit ahead of a Dec. 31 deadline, but it is unclear if countries will do so.

These so-called Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs) are meant to describe a country’s progress in reaching its climate goals – and how much further they need to go in setting fresh goals by February. As it stands, national pledges to cut emissions still fall far short of what is needed, the U.N. said last week.

The BTRs will also offer insight into how much finance is currently needed in developing countries, both for transitioning their economies away from fossil fuels and for adapting to the conditions of a warmer world.

Adaptation in focus

Countries last year committed to a framework of guidelines for national plans to help people adapt to climate disruptions such as warmer days, rising sea levels or parched farmlands.

But the framework for adaptation lacks details, such as quantifiable targets for measuring progress or strategies for linking projects with climate finance.

Countries hope to set more specific adaptation goals during COP29.

Money for loss and damage

Two years since Egypt’s COP27 summit agreed to help poor countries with the costs of climate-driven disasters like extreme floods, storms or drought, about $660 million has been mobilized through the newly created Fund For Responding To Loss and Damage, that will be headquartered in the Philippines.

Climate-vulnerable countries will call on wealthy nations to offer more for the fund.