[Graeme]

Climate change negatively affects the global economy

Carbon advisory firm Promethium Carbon, together with the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB), launched a publication earlier this month that provides reporting committees and internal auditors with a reference tool on integrated and climate-change-related reporting, as the effects of climate change are taking place faster than expected.

The publication, which aims to limit the impact of climate change on businesses, was launched on March 1 at the Climate Change and Integrated Reporting Conference at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, in Sandton, Johannesburg.

“Integrated reporting and climate- change-related reporting have a lot in common. Both are relatively new, both require companies to think and act in new ways and, most importantly, both can help to shape a corporation’s competitive advantage over the next decade,” CDSB executive director Lois Guthrie said at the launch.

She stated that the publication explored and compared the fundamental concepts, guiding principles and content elements set out in the International Integrated Reporting Council’s Prototype Framework with the requirements of the CDSB’s framework.

Promethium Carbon director Robbie Louw, who also addressed the conference, stated that the effect of climate change, including the way in which it would affect all forms of capital, was relevant to any business and was likely to result in material effects for some.

“Businesses across many sectors will, therefore, look to increase disclosures about climate change in their yearly integrated report,” he said.



Louw stated that the WEF’s risk access report pertaining to climate change showed that the natural phenomenon had the potential to directly affect businesses on a global scale.

“The WEF lists ten climate-change-related risks that the world is facing. These are the most [serious] risks that some of the biggest thinkers in the world predict will have a nega- tive impact on the planet in years to come.

“Water supply is one of the things that will be impacted on most by climate change at both ends of the scale – water scarcity and water overabundance. Failure to adapt to climate change will result in high risks environmentally and economically.”

He added that the volatility of energy, especially the pricing of carbon, would also be affected by climate change, as most of the planet’s energy was still generated from fossil fuels and the contribution of renewable energy was still in the initial phases.

“Global food shortage is another impact of climate change. Storms, droughts and fires negatively impact on the planet’s food resources and we have already seen the effect of this in East African countries, such as Uganda.

“Mineral resource supply will also be affected by climate change and will impact on mining companies’ ability to supply raw materials needed by the global economy,” stated Louw.

He said that a major factor that contributed to climate change was increasing greenhouse-gas emissions, which, in turn, made the planet vulnerable to pandemics and diseases.

Louw noted that, globally, there had been a great number of persistent and extreme weather anomalies.

“We have already seen the impacts of this type of weather and, if this continues, it will have definitive negative impacts on a global scale,” he stated, highlighting that there were many extreme weather events brought on by climate change in 2012. There were bushfires in Australia and California, droughts in the US and Africa, as well as several snowstorms, hurricanes, earthquakes and extreme temperature fluctuations.

engineeringnews

[Graeme]

World Bank chief says global warming threatens the planet and the poorest

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim on Tuesday said climate change was a “fundamental threat” to global economic development as he called for a major new push to reduce extreme poverty over the next 17 years.

The bank is in the middle of an internal debate over how to reshape its role in a world where the major developing nations — the core “customers” for its loans and programs — have become increasingly middle class and where states caught in civil war pose an intractable development problem. At the same time, the impact of climate change disproportionately threatens the African and Asian nations that would find it hardest to cope.

Kim said the bank, a sprawling institution that lends to everything from power plants to local governance projects, would try to tailor its work to focus on the elimination of extreme poverty and on easing inequality in countries that are doing better economically. Finding ways to avoid or lessen potential climate effects, he said, are central to that effort.

“If we do not act to curb climate change immediately, we will leave our children and grandchildren an unrecognizable planet,” Kim said. “It is the poor, those least responsible for climate change and least able to afford adaptation, who would suffer the most.”

His comments are part of an emerging push by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to focus on climate change — something that IMF managing director Christine Lagarde on Tuesday said puts global financial stability “clearly at stake.” The IMF last week published a report arguing that fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of $1.9 trillion annually by governments around the world and should be more heavily taxed. On Tuesday, the IMF and the World Resources Institute hosted a speech by British economist Lord Nicholas Stern, author of a controversial climate report for the British government and an advocate of fast and deep carbon emissions cuts.

“We have to go zero carbon more or less where we can” to meet the goal of limiting planetary warming to 2 degrees Celsius over the next 90 years, Stern said.

The joint effort by the IMF and World Bank to elevate thinking about the economics of climate change has accelerated under Kim and Lagarde, pushed by evidence that the effects of a warming planet are already being felt in agricultural yields in some nations and the severity of weather events around the globe.

washingtonpost

[Plantagenet]

the impact of climate change disproportionately threatens the African and Asian nations that would find it hardest to cope.

Actually, the impact of AGW is greatest at higher latitudes---the impact of climate change in the Arctic is 2-3 times greater then at lower latitudes.

[Graeme]

That's true but more people will be affected in those areas. Here is Stern's latest assessment:

Climate Change Worse Than Expected, Argues Lord Stern

Climate change looks far more threatening than it did six years ago as the world marches toward a warming of 4 degrees Celsius higher by the end of the century compared to the preindustrial era, said Lord Nicholas Stern, a professor of economics and chairman of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics.

Stern called for new and better climate models and better economic assessments of climate impacts but maintained that the main obstacle to action is political will.

The former World Bank chief economist was critical of his own 2006 review on the economics of climate change, a document considered seminal to climate change discussions, which estimated that the overall cost of climate change would shave off at least 5 percent of gross domestic product growth annually. Stern said that the review underestimated the "immense risk" from global warming. He made a similar admission and warning earlier this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Speaking at the International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington, D.C., Stern painted a gloomy picture of emissions being at the top end of the Stern Review projections, sea ice decline and ocean acidification occurring faster than anticipated, and growing impacts from feedbacks and tipping points not factored into climate models.

The current rate of greenhouse gas emissions will warm the world much more than the targeted 2 degree Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of the century, according Stern. Even if nations stick to the emissions reduction commitments they made at the 2010 U.N. climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, temperatures will rise between 4 and 5 degrees, causing boundaries for deserts, coastlines and rivers to be redrawn. These issues of human welfare need to be factored into climate models, Stern said.

Life-affecting changes
He drew on the example of climate models that predict a 20 percent loss in agriculture in India with a 4-degree-Celsius rise in temperature. The models do not factor in further deterioration due to loss of snow in the Himalayas that would lead to destruction of rivers or for radical changes in the south Asian monsoon. "Some of the questions we have to ask are what really affects human life -- extreme weather events, inundation, desertification. That's what affects human life," Stern said.

Also missing from current climate models are the lasting and dynamic impacts of extreme weather events. "Some close friends in Pakistan tried to describe to me with what happened in the floods in 2010. They said development was put back by 20 years. If you put back development by 20 years every 10 years, you are going backwards," he said.

Similarly, according to Stern, economic assessments underestimate impacts of climate change, place a modest price tag on carbon, and don't make room for loss of capital, labor and land in the future. The economic scenarios fail to recognize that future generations may be poorer and growth could be reversed, he said. He called the discussion of discounting in climate change "purely awful."

Another major failure of economic policies, he said, has been the pricing of hydrocarbons. "You cannot believe two things together -- that the price of hydrocarbons is right and the world has a 50-50 chance of holding to 2 degrees [Celsius]," Stern said.

The economist said that world has to make the transition to a low-carbon economy with innovation, investment and dynamism. "We have to see this alternative path as a new energy industrial revolution. We must divide emissions output by a factor of seven or eight," said Stern pointing to the fast-falling costs of solar energy technology as evidence that it can be done.

scientificamerican