Com fechamento de última usina, Reino Unido se torna primeiro país do G7 a abrir mão do carvão

 

Usina termelétrica a carvão de Ratcliffe-on-Soar, na Inglaterra - Molly Darlington - 26.set.2024/Reuters

 

O mais poluente dos combustíveis fósseis, carvão deixará de gerar eletricidade no país após mais de 140 anos 

 

Susanna Twidale

Reuters

Com o fechamento da usina Ratcliffe-on-Soar nesta segunda-feira (30), o Reino Unido se tornará o primeiro país do G7, grupo que reúne as nações mais desenvolvidas do mundo, a abrir mão da produção de energia a carvão.

O momento encerra mais de 140 anos do mais poluente entre os combustíveis fósseis para o fornecimento de eletricidade no país, que foi o berço da Revolução Industrial —considerada um marco no aumento de emissões de gases de efeito estufa pelas atividades humanas.

 

Em 2015, o Reino Unido anunciou planos para fechar usinas a carvão dentro da década seguinte como parte de medidas mais amplas para atingir suas metas climáticas. Naquela época, quase 30% da eletricidade do país vinha do carvão, mas isso caiu para pouco mais de 1% no ano passado.

"O Reino Unido provou que é possível eliminar a energia a carvão em uma velocidade sem precedentes", disse Julia Skorupska, chefe do secretariado da Aliança Powering Past Coal, um grupo de cerca de 60 governos nacionais que buscam acabar com essa fonte de energia.

Os cortes no carvão ajudaram a reduzir as emissões de gases de efeito estufa do Reino Unido, que caíram a mais da metade desde 1990.

 

O Reino Unido, que tem como meta atingir emissões líquidas zero até 2050, também planeja descarbonizar o restante do setor de eletricidade até 2030, o que exigirá um rápido aumento na energia renovável, como eólica e solar.

"A era do carvão pode estar acabando, mas uma nova era de bons empregos na área de energia para nosso país está apenas começando", disse o ministro da energia, Michael Shanks, em comunicado.

 

As emissões provenientes da energia representam cerca de 75% das emissões totais de gases de efeito estufa e cientistas afirmam que o uso de combustíveis fósseis deve ser reduzido para atingir as metas estabelecidas no Acordo de Paris.

Em abril, os principais países industrializados do G7 concordaram em eliminar a energia a carvão na primeira metade da próxima década, mas também deram alguma flexibilidade para economias fortemente dependentes do carvão, o que gerou críticas de grupos ambientais.

"Ainda há muito trabalho a ser feito para garantir que a meta de 2035 seja atingida e antecipada para 2030, especialmente no Japão, nos EUA e na Alemanha", afirmou Christine Shearer, analista de pesquisa do Global Energy Monitor.

A energia a carvão ainda representa mais de 25% da eletricidade na Alemanha e mais de 30% da energia no Japão.

                                         Pequim - China

No ano passado, o consumo de carvão no mundo chegou a um recorde, com 8,53 bilhões de toneladas queimadas, segundo a Agência Internacional de Energia.

A entidade ressaltou que em 2023 houve crescimento do consumo na China, com aumento de 220 milhões de toneladas (4,9%) na comparação com 2022, e na Índia, com avanço de 98 milhões de toneladas (8%). Também foram queimadas 23 milhões de toneladas a mais na Indonésia, o que representou um aumento de 11%, segundo o órgão.

 

 

Hurricane Helene’s ‘historic flooding’ made worse by global heating, Fema says It will be ‘complicated recovery’ in five states, says disaster relief agency, with hurricane killing nearly 70 people so far

 

An aerial view of flood damage caused by Hurricane Helene in Silver Creek, North Carolina, on Sunday. Photograph: North Carolina Division Of Aviation Handout/EPA

 

The head of the US disaster relief agency has called Hurricane Helene, which has killed nearly 70 people so far, a “true multi-state event” that caused “significant infrastructure damage” and had been made worse because of global heating.

The storm killed at least 69 people, according to state and local officials in South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. Officials feared still more bodies would be discovered.

“This is going to be a really complicated recovery in each of the five states” of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, the Fema administrator, Deanne Criswell, said.

She noted that a 15ft storm surge hit Florida’s Taylor county, where Helene came ashore as a category 4 hurricane late Thursday with winds of 140mph (225km/h), and pointed out that areas of western North Carolina, where search and rescue operations are continuing, recorded 29in (74cm) of rain when the storm stalled over the region.

“This is historic flooding up in North Carolina,” Criswell told the CBS show Face the Nation on Sunday. “I don’t know that anybody could be fully prepared for the amount of flooding and landslides they are having right now.”

Damage caused by Hurricane Helene in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina, on Friday. Photograph: City Of Rocky Mountain/EPA
 

 As many as 1,000 people remain unaccounted for in Buncombe county in the Appalachian mountains where the hurricane caused catastrophic flooding and mudslides in the Asheville region, cutting off most communication and making the roads impassable.

 

Kamala Harris said the Joe Biden administration had approved emergency declarations for Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, “making resources and funding available to maximize our coordinated response efforts at the local, state, and federal levels”.

At least 11 people are dead in North Carolina, Governor Roy Cooper’s office said in an update on Sunday “Tragically we know there will be more,” Cooper said. “Even as the rain and winds have subsided, the challenge for people there increases. People are desperate for help.”

At least 23 are dead in South Carolina, including two firefighters. In Georgia, at least 17 people have died, two of them killed by a tornado in Alamo, according to a spokesperson for Governor Brian Kemp.

Kemp said on Saturday that it “looks like a bomb went off” after viewing splintered homes and debris-covered highways from the air.

An aerial picture of the aftermath of Helene in Valdosta, Georgia, on Saturday. Photograph: John Falchetto/AFP/Getty Images
 

 

Heavy rain nearly collapsed the Nolichucky Dam in Greeneville, Tennessee, which the National Weather Service called a “particularly dangerous situation”, as it urged at least 100,000 residents in the area to “seek higher ground now!”

In rural Unicoi county in east Tennessee, dozens of patients and staff were plucked by helicopter from a hospital rooftop on Friday. At least 11 people have died in Florida, according to Governor Ron DeSantis.

“If you had told me there was going to be 15ft to 18ft of storm surge, even with the best efforts, I would have assumed we would have had multiple fatalities,” DeSantis said.

Among the 11 confirmed deaths in Florida were nine people who drowned in their homes in a mandatory evacuation area on the Gulf coast in Pinellas county, where St Petersburg is located, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said.

One person died in Virginia, in a storm-related tree fall and building collapse.

In Buncombe county, North Carolina, which includes the city of Asheville, more than 60 people were unaccounted for Saturday evening and more than 150 search and rescue operations were under way.

“To say this caught us off-guard would be an understatement,” said Quentin Miller, the Buncombe county sheriff.

Sheriff Miller announced on Sunday that in addition to 10 people who had been killed in Buncombe county, about 1,000 remained unaccounted for.

The county manager, Avril Pinder, called the storm “Buncombe county’s own Hurricane Katrina”, and officials said communication systems have been disrupted, with no cellphone service expected in the region for at least “several days”.

To the east in McDowell county, the emergency center was inundated with 911 calls, many of which involved patients “entrapped with severe trauma, running out of oxygen or essential medical supplies”.

Nearly 400 roads are closed in the state and access to clean drinking water has been limited. Fifty boil water advisories are in effect across western communities.

“Water is a big concern,” Criswell said, saying Fema had sent in bottled supplies, dispatched the army corps of engineers to get water treatment plants functioning and sent Starlink satellite receivers to help restore communications.

The devastation, Criswell said, was linked to the climate emergency. “This storm took a while to develop, but once it did it intensified very rapidly – and that’s because of the warm waters in the Gulf that’s creating more storms that are reaching this major category level.”

The conditions, she said, were creating greater amounts of storm surge in the coastal areas and increased rainfall as the storms moved north.

“In the past, damage from hurricanes was primarily wind damage, but now we’re seeing so much more water damage and that is a result of the warm waters which is a result of climate change,” Criswell told CBS.

 

Melting glaciers force Switzerland and Italy to redraw part of Alpine border. Two countries agree to modifications beneath Matterhorn peak, one of Europe’s highest summits

The Matterhorn straddles Switzerland’s Zermatt region and Italy’s Aosta valley. Photograph: Ascent/PKS Media Inc/Getty Images

 

Switzerland and Italy have redrawn a border that traverses an Alpine peak as melting glaciers shift the historically defined frontier.

The two countries agreed to the modifications beneath the Matterhorn, one of the highest mountains in Europe, which straddles Switzerland’s Zermatt region and Italy’s Aosta valley.

Glaciers in Europe, the world’s fastest-warming continent, are retreating at an accelerated pace because of human-caused climate breakdown.

“Significant sections of the border are defined by the watershed or ridge lines of glaciers, firn or perpetual snow,” the Swiss government said in a statement cited by Bloomberg. “These formations are changing due to the melting of glaciers.”

 The famed Zermatt ski resort is affected by the change, with the two countries agreeing to modify the border around the landmarks of Testa Grigia, Plateau Rosa, Rifugio Carrel and Gobba di Rollin based on their economic interests, Bloomberg reported.

A joint Italian-Swiss commission agreed to the changes in May 2023. Switzerland officially approved the treaty on Friday, but Italy still needs to sign.

The changes come after a disagreement between the two countries over the peak’s territory that lasted for years.

Swiss glaciers lost 4% of their volume in 2023, the second-biggest annual decline on record, according to the Swiss Academy of Sciences. The largest decline was 6% in 2022.

Experts have stopped measuring the ice on some Swiss glaciers because there is none left.

The remains of a German mountain climber who disappeared while crossing a glacier near the Matterhorn nearly 40 years ago were discovered in melting ice in July last year.

 

Experts in Italy said this month that the Marmolada glacier, which is the largest and most symbolic of the Dolomites, could melt completely by 2040 as a result of rising average temperatures.

The collapse of part of the Marmolada killed 11 people in 2022.

The glacier has been measured every year since 1902 and is considered a “natural thermometer” of climate change.

 

Grim new death records as brutal heat plagues US south-west into the autumn

Traffic warden Rai Rogers during an eight-hour shift in Las Vegas, Nevada, on 12 July 2023. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

 
 September has offered little reprieve after a sweltering summer, with Las Vegas on 102nd day of temperatures above 100F

 

Brutal heat continues to plague the south-west US, with excessive heat alerts lingering long into September as parts of the region set grim new records for deaths connected to the sweltering temperatures.

Autumn has offered little reprieve for cities that have already spent months mired in triple-digit temperatures. This week, Las Vegas, Nevada; Phoenix, Arizona; and Palm Springs, California, are all grappling with severe weather, with highs that have pushed over 100F (38C). More than 16 million people in the US were under heat alerts on Friday, according to the National Weather Service, mostly clustered in the southern tips of Nevada, Arizona and California.

“Late-season heat is dangerous because people are fatigued from fighting heat all summer,” the NWS forecast office in Las Vegas cautioned in an alert, which warned of extreme weather expected to last through the weekend and into next week. “This is especially true this year,” it added, “as 2024 continues to break all-time heat records.”

Fueled by the climate crisis, and often exacerbated by concrete cityscapes that cook when temperatures rise, heatwaves are getting longer, larger and more intense.

 

Las Vegas had its 102nd day of temperatures above 100F on Friday, a new record for the most days in a single year. Several states, including Arizona and California, have experienced their warmest summers on record this year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and forecasters are predicting that 2024 may rank as the hottest year – a record just set in 2023.

“But it’s not over,” NWS Las Vegas said on Twitter, noting the heat warnings lingering in the forecast through the weekend.

 The scorching and sustained heat has taken a devastating toll; heat already ranks as the most lethal weather-related disaster in the US, and deaths are increasing. Heat-associated fatalities are growing across the south-west, where shadeless streets can grow hot enough to cause second-degree burns in seconds. As dangerously hot weather stretches past summer and into spring and fall, the risks for those who don’t have access to cooling have continued to rise.

In Arizona’s Maricopa county, home to Phoenix, 664 fatalities are believed to have been linked to the heat this year , according to public health officials, who are still working to confirm more than half of them. Southern Nevada, where Las Vegas is located, has seen more deaths this year than in any year prior, with officials confirming this week that there have been 342 fatalities linked to the heat. This surpassed last year’s record, which marked an 80% increase over 2022.

But even these tragically high numbers are believed to paint only part of the picture. Heat deaths can be difficult to track, especially among high-risk populations including in unhoused communities. “We will inevitably see this number climb,” Melanie Rouse, Clark county’s coroner, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Older people, children and people with underlying health conditions are among the most at risk, especially among those without access to air conditioning, but first responders have also reported that heat-related emergencies have been climbing for workers.

 “Delivery drivers, warehouse operators, our construction trades – basically anyone who has to work outside – we have seen emergencies from them and people with regular medical emergencies, and during a normal day the heat causes them to succumb,” Scott Vivier, the deputy fire chief in Henderson, a city south-east of Las Vegas, said in July.

Vivier’s department is among the first in the region to use a new tool called the polar pod, which enables emergency responders to pack someone in ice and water while they transport them to the hospital. Vivier said it’s had an incredible impact on their ability to save lives, and that they’ve even been trained to use the pods to revive overheated pets.

Exposure to prolonged extreme heat can also have lingering effects that are harder to quantify. As residents across the south-west yearn for the coming of a cooler autumn, public health clinicians have cautioned the heat can pack a psychological punch as well, leading to symptoms like irritability, anxiety and difficulty concentrating.

 

Global heating ‘doubled’ chance of extreme rain in Europe in September

Residents wade through flood water after the Nysa Klodzka River flooded the town of Lewin Brzeski in south-west Poland on 19 September. Photograph: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

 
 

Planet-heating pollution doubled the chance of the extreme levels of rain that hammered central Europe in September, a study has found.

Researchers found global heating aggravated the four days of heavy rainfall that led to deadly floods in countries from Austria to Romania.

The rains were made at least 7% stronger by climate change, World Weather Attribution (WWA) found, which led to towns being hit with volumes of water that would have been half as likely to occur if humans had not heated the planet.

“The trend is clear,” said Bogdan Chojnicki, a climate scientist at Poznań University of Life Sciences, and co-author of the study. “If humans keep filling the atmosphere with fossil fuel emissions, the situation will be more severe.”

 

Storm Boris stalled over central Europe in mid-September and unleashed record-breaking amounts of rain upon Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The heavy rains turned calm streams into wild rivers, triggering floods that wrecked homes and killed two dozen people.

The researchers said measures to adapt had lowered the death toll compared with similar floods that hit the region in 1997 and 2002. They called for better flood defences, warning systems and disaster-response plans, and warned against continuing to rebuild in flood-prone regions.

“These floods indicate just how costly climate change is becoming,” said Maja Vahlberg, technical adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and co-author of the study. “Even with days of preparation, flood waters still devastated towns, destroyed thousands of homes and saw the European Union pledge €10bn in aid.”

Rapid attribution studies, which use established methods but are published before going through lengthy peer-review processes, examine how human influence affects extreme weather in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

The scientists compared the rainfall recorded in central Europe over four days in September with amounts simulated for a world that is 1.3C cooler – the level of warming caused to date by burning fossil fuels and destroying nature. They attributed a “doubling in likelihood and a 7% increase in intensity” to human influence.

But the results are “conservative”, the scientists wrote, because the models do not explicitly model convection and so may underestimate rainfall. “We emphasise that the direction of change is very clear, but the rate is not.”

 

Physicists have shown that every degree celsius of warming allows the air to hold 7% more moisture, but whether it does so depends on the availability of water. The rains in central Europe were unleashed when cold air from the Arctic met warm, wet air from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Warmer seas enhance the rainy part of the hydrological cycle, though the trend on parts of the land is towards drier conditions, said Miroslav Trnka, a climate scientist at the Global Change Research Institute, who was not involved in the study. When the conditions were right, he said, “you can have floods on steroids”.

Trnka compared the factors that result in extreme rainfall to playing the lottery. The increase in risk from global heating, he said, was like buying more lottery tickets, doing so over a longer period of time, and changing the rules so more combinations of numbers result in a win.

“If you bet long enough, you have a higher chance of a jackpot,” said Trnka.

The study found heavier four-day rainfall events would hit if the world heats 2C above preindustrial levels, with a further increase from today of about 5% in rainfall intensity and 50% in likelihood.

Other factors could increase this even more, such as the waviness of the jet stream, which some scientists suspect is increasingly trapping weather systems in one place as a result of global heating. A study published in Nature Scientific Reports on Monday projected that such blocking systems would increase under medium- and worst-case emissions scenarios.

Hayley Fowler, a climate scientist at Newcastle University, who was not involved in the study, said: “These large storms, cut off from the jet stream, are able to stagnate in one place and produce huge amounts of rainfall, fuelled by increased moisture and energy from oceans that are record-shatteringly hot.”

“These ‘blocked’ slow-moving storms are becoming more frequent and are projected to increase further with additional warming,” she added. “The question is not whether we need to adapt for more of these types of storm but can we.”

WWA described the week following Storm Boris as “hyperactive” because 12 disasters around the world triggered its criteria for analysis, more than in any week in the organisation’s history.

The study did not try to work out how much global heating had increased the destruction wreaked by the rains but the researchers said even minor increases in rainfall disproportionately increased damages.

“Almost everywhere in the world it is the case that a small increase in the rainfall leads to a similar order-of-magnitude increase in flooding,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute and co-author of the study. “But that leads to a much larger increase in the damages.”

 

‘Red Flags’ on Climate: U.S. Methane Emissions Keep Climbing (see permafrost)

The concentration of methane in the atmosphere is now more than two-and-a-half times greater than preindustrial levels.Credit...David Goldman/Associated Press

 

 

By Max Bearak

 

The United States’ booming fossil-fuel industry continues to emit more and more planet-warming methane into the atmosphere, new research showed, despite a U.S.-led effort to encourage other countries to cut emissions globally.

Methane is among the most potent greenhouse gases, and “one of the worst performers in our study is the U.S., even though it was an instigator of the Global Methane Pledge,” said Antoine Halff, the co-founder of Kayrros, the environmental data company issuing the report. “Those are red flags.”

Much of the world’s efforts to combat climate change focus on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, which result largely from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, and whose heat-trapping particles can linger in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. But methane’s effects on the climate — which have earned it the moniker “super pollutant” — have become better appreciated recently, with the advent of more advanced leak-detection technology, including satellites.

Unlike carbon dioxide, methane emissions don’t derive from consumption, but rather from production and transportation of the gas, which is the main component of what is commonly known as natural gas. Methane can leak from storage facilities, pipelines and tankers, and is also often deliberately released. Methane is also released from livestock and landfills, and occurs naturally in wetlands.

 Kayrros focused on fossil fuel facilities, where the practices of “venting,” or the intentional release of large quantities of methane, and “flaring,” which is when it is intentionally burned off, are both common. Kayrros used satellite data combined with artificial intelligence analysis of the data to draw its conclusions.

 

The concentration of methane in the atmosphere is now more than two-and-a-half times as much as preindustrial levels, and more than half of the world’s methane emissions are man-made.

Its presence in the atmosphere dissipates in roughly 12 years, a relatively short span of time, but numerous studies point to its heat-trapping effects as being as much as 80 or more times stronger than carbon dioxide’s. That means it can have more immediate consequences for the climate.

In 2021, the United States was among the first signers and promoters of the Global Methane Pledge, which set a target of reducing global, man-made methane emissions by 30 percent from 2020 levels within a decade. The pledge has been signed by 158 countries.

 “2030 is rapidly approaching, though, and emissions are still being released in huge amounts,” said Mr. Halff. “This seems in large part because oil and gas production is surging both in the U.S. and elsewhere.”

 

President Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, includes billions of dollars in funding for methane emission-reduction strategies.

According to to the Environmental Protection Agency, the rule could result in the elimination of “more than the annual emissions from 28 million gasoline cars” and “a nearly 80 percent reduction below the future methane emissions expected without the rule.”

The American fossil fuel sector today emits less methane per unit of energy than in years past. However, production has ramped up so significantly that methane emissions overall have increased. The United States is now, by far, the world’s leading gas producer and exporter.

 

China is the world’s largest emitter of both carbon dioxide and methane, and has not signed the pledge. John Podesta, the U.S. climate envoy, recently traveled to Beijing to meet with China’s top climate negotiators and the two countries agreed to co-host a summit on methane coinciding with this year’s main climate summit in Azerbaijan in November, raising hopes that China might sign this year.

The Kayrros report includes findings from 13 fossil fuel basins across the world, including in three countries that haven’t signed the pledge: Algeria, Iran and South Africa. In those three countries, methane emissions rose even more steeply than in signatory countries.

“It shows the pledge has influence,” said Jutta Paulus, a member of the European Union Parliament from the German Green party who was recently the bloc’s rapporteur on greenhouse gas emissions. She also noted that “many of the fixes are within reach. Leak detection and repair, management of abandoned facilities, they aren’t impossible. In fact, many of them can be done at almost no cost.”

The European Union introduced a regulation this summer that drafts all its member states into a process of studying their own methane emissions and setting targets for reducing them. Perhaps more significantly, starting in 2029, it will apply the same stringent caps on emissions to its imports, including of gas from countries that haven’t signed the pledge, like Algeria. In 2030, the E.U. would begin imposing fines on imports above a certain emissions threshold.

Australia and Turkmenistan were the only two countries in the study that saw major reductions in methane emissions. Australia’s success was likely related to policies aimed at limiting the intentional release of gas during coal production, Mr. Halff said. Turkmenistan, which in many cases operates leaky, decades-old Soviet gas infrastructure, has begun a process of updating its facilities.

Floods Wreak Havoc Across Four Continents

 

The swollen Elbe river in Dresden, Germany, on Tuesday.Credit...Filip Singer/EPA, via Shutterstock

By Austyn Gaffney and Somini Sengupta

 

Chad. Vietnam. Austria. The American South.

In very disparate regions of the world, extreme rainfall in recent weeks has killed thousands of people, submerged entire towns, set off landslides and left millions without power. It’s a harbinger of the wild weather events that are a hallmark of climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, and it is highlighting the need to urgently adapt, in rich and poor countries alike.

Bursts of extreme rainfall are making both coastal and riverine flooding more dangerous and unpredictable.

“Extreme events are getting stronger everywhere, so we should expect floods to be bigger regardless of where we are,” said Michael Wehner, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “There is no question that these kinds of floods all over the world are getting worse.”

What’s the climate connection?

Some of the recent deadly floods, like the landslides in Kerala, in southern India, earlier this summer, can be directly attributable to human-induced climate change.

 

A scientific study, released in August, found that the downpour that caused the landslide was 10 percent heavier because of human-caused climate change.

There are no similar attribution studies yet for the floods of recent weeks. Though some studies are underway, there simply aren’t enough resources to carry out an attribution study for every single event.

 Sifting through debris at the site of a landslide in Lao Cai province in Vietnam in the aftermath of Typhoon Yagi last week.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 

Nonetheless, the science is clear: A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. That can cause bursts of extreme rainfall, on top of other meteorological factors. For instance, Storm Boris, a sluggish, low-pressure system, has dumped five times September’s average rainfall across Europe since the storm began last week. A blast of cold polar air collided with a sweep of warm Mediterranean air dense with water vapor, producing an unusually powerful storm that brought heavy rains and strong winds. As of Wednesday, at least 23 people have died in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania, according to Reuters.

In the United States, North and South Carolina are being battered this week by equally rare storms. Some areas recorded 18 inches of rain over 12 hours, an amount so statistically rare it’s considered a one-in-a-thousand-year event.

 

Typhoon Yagi, one of the region's most powerful storms, brought rain and winds up to 127 miles per hour across northern Vietnam. At least 143 people have died in the aftermath, including 22 who died following a landslide in the Lao Cai, a mountainous province bordering China. The storm marched on to Myanmar, killing at least 110 more people in flash floods and landslides.

Death tolls are higher in places already at risk

The latest floods come on top of accumulating hazards that have whittled away at people’s ability to cope.

Parts of Northern Nigeria were battered by seven days of nonstop heavy rainfall that caused a dam to burst, killing at least 200 people and submerging half the city of Maiduguri. Local officials told Reuters it was the worst flooding in two decades. The rain came just months after scorching pre-monsoon heat and after years of conflict in the area between Boko Haram militants and the Nigerian government forces. The governor of Borno state said that the floods had displaced more than a million people and that there was a high risk of diseases spreading

 

People displaced by floods arrived in Maiduguri, Nigeria, on Sept. 12.Credit...Audu Marte/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 

 

Likewise in Chad, reeling from years of conflict and the influx of refugees from neighboring countries, 341 people have died in flooding in recent days, according to the United Nations.

 

Extreme weather is exceptionally costly for African governments. On average, African nations are losing 5 percent of their economies because of floods, droughts and heat, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Many are spending up to a tenth of their budgets just managing extreme weather disasters. Many of those extreme events are driven by the emissions of planet-heating greenhouse gases, but Africa is responsible for only a fraction of the world’s annual emissions.

Adaptation is urgent

The latest floods have made it abundantly clear that both rich and poor countries need to invest in shoring up their physical infrastructure and their public policies to minimize the effects of extreme weather.

The United Nations has pressed governments to put in place more early-warning systems, which are relatively inexpensive and potentially effective in saving lives. The U.N. says 101 countries now have early-warning protocols, at least on paper, which is double the number that reported having them in 2015.

There are many feasible measures to reduce the loss of lives caused by flooding. They include giving small amounts of cash to people so they can move out of harm’s way, and putting in emergency water and power systems to prevent the outbreak of disease after floods.

 

Flooding from Tropical Storm Debby in Isle of Palms, S.C., in August.Credit...Marco Bello/Reuters

Harder to do, but essential, local officials and disaster management specialists say, is to prevent deforestation and construction in areas that are prone to heavy flooding and landslides. The floods in Kerala were all the more devastating because of widespread deforestation and unplanned development in ecologically sensitive areas.

In wealthy countries like the United States, local governments have invested heavily in expensive infrastructure. North and South Carolina, for instance, both veterans of powerful storms, have spent millions of dollars retrofitting roads to better withstand extreme rainfall and starting to protect natural flood barriers, like wetlands, from development.

By contrast, low-income countries that are already strapped and weighed down by debts, have been less able to maintain their roads, let alone build flood-resilient infrastructure.

“We need to develop critical infrastructure,” said Olasunkanmi Habeeb Okunola, an urban planner from Nigeria who is working as a visiting scientist at United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security. “If you get that right, to some extent, you can lessen the impact of climate change.”

There is little doubt that climate change is making weather wilder and more erratic. That requires preparing for the unexpected.

 “We don’t know exactly when or which type of event will come,” said Diana Urge-Vorsatz, a professor at Central European University and vice chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Unfortunately there’s no question that more severe events are coming.”

 

 

 

Portugal declares a state of calamity as wildfires rage out of control

 

 

By  HELENA ALVES and JOSEPH WILSON

 

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — More than 100 wildfires stretched thousands of firefighters to the limit in northern Portugal on Wednesday, with seven deaths since the worst spate of fires in recent years spread out of control over the weekend.

Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro declared a state of calamity for the hardest-hit areas late on Tuesday, invoking powers to mobilize more firefighters and civil servants. He also called on police investigators to redouble their efforts to find those who started the fires and pledged help for those who have lost their homes or have been evacuated.

“We are well aware that these difficult hours are not over yet,” Montenegro told the nation in a televised address. “We have to continue to give everything we have and ask for help from our partners and friends so that we can reinforce the protection of our people and property.”

 The European Copernicus satellite service said that over 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) had been scorched and a combined 13 kilometers (8 miles) of fire fronts had been detected as on Tuesday night. It added that an area home to 210,000 people was exposed to the fire risk.

 

The hot, dry conditions behind the outbreaks in Portugal coincided this week with flooding in central Europe. The European Union said Wednesday that the juxtaposed extreme weather phenomena are proof of a “climate breakdown. ”

Spain’s military sent 240 soldiers and vehicles from its emergency response battalions specialized in combating fires to its neighbor.

Four water-dumping planes from France, two from Spain and two from Italy were deployed after answering an appeal to help their fellow EU member. Morocco likewise responded to a request by Portugal with two water-dumping planes that arrived on Wednesday.

“The thick smoke produced by most of these fires is making it very difficult for air units to operate,” said Civil Protection official André Fernandes. “We are still at high risk for forest fires over the next 48 hours.”

 

Thick grey smoke and the smell of burnt wood reached some 85 kilometers across the border into northwest Spain.

Montenegro made a special call for security forces to pursue both arsonists and any individuals who started a fire out of negligence. Portuguese national police said that they have arrested seven men suspected of having started wildfires in recent days. Authorities have prohibited the use of heavy farming equipment to reduce the risk of inadvertently starting a blaze.

Among the hardest hit areas is the district of Aveiro, south of the northern city of Porto, but several major blazes were also raging out of control in other wooded areas.

Authorities have yet to release figures for property damage or the number of evacuees, but Portuguese state broadcaster RTP has shown charred houses in rural villages and local residents trying to battle flames with buckets of water, hoses, and even large tree branches. Other televised images showed visibility reduced to a few meters as orange smoke enveloped the terrain. 

 

Three firefighters died in their vehicle on Tuesday, while another had succumbed to what authorities called a “sudden illness” while on duty over the weekend. Three civilians have also perished, according to civil protection authorities. Health services have attended to 10 seriously wounded people and another 49 people with minor injuries, Fernandes said.

Portugal was devasted by massive fires in 2017 that killed over 120 people.

Experts link the fires to both climate change and the abandonment of traditional farming and forestry professions that helped keep rural areas clear of underbrush that is now fuel for fires.

 Joseph Wilson wrote from Barcelona, Spain. Teresa Medrano contributed from Pontevedra, Spain.

 

 

 

The fires that could reshape the Amazon

A firefighter battling flames in the Brasilia National Forest of Brazil on Sept. 4. Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters
 

 By Manuela Andreoni

 

Large parts of Brazil, a country that holds over a tenth of the world’s fresh water, are on fire. They include vast areas of the Amazon rainforest and the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetlands, as well as the Cerrado grasslands and the Atlantic forests along the country’s eastern coast.

The number of fires in the country has more than doubled compared with last year, burning an area the size of Costa Rica in August alone.

Smoke covered large parts of South America this month and blackened the skies of some of the region’s biggest cities, including Buenos Aires; São Paulo, Brazil; and La Paz, Bolivia. As if that weren’t dystopian enough, black rain from the soot produced by the fires has fallen over cities in several states in Brazil in the past few days.

In much of Brazil, fire season usually peaks this time of the year, as farmers set fire to pasture and burn recently deforested plots to clear them of unwanted vegetation. But blazes have unleashed a lot more destruction this year.

Though experts say many of the fires were very likely started by humans, the abundance of dry vegetation fueled immense blazes that grew out of control in extraordinary ways.

Almost half of the fires in the Amazon burned pristine forests, according to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. That is far from typical. It means fighting deforestation in the Amazon is no longer enough to stop fires.

This matters because it shows that the fire-control practices in some of the world’s most biodiverse places are not working. And that threatens myriad forms of life, including us. The collapse of the Amazon rainforest could release the equivalent of as much as 20 years’ worth of global carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Deforestation and fires

The drought-depleted Madeira River, a tributary of the Amazon, in Humaita, Amazonas State, on Sept. 7. Edmar Barros/Associated Press

 

 

Deforestation is still a big problem in South America. The Cerrado grasslands, in the east of Brazil, continue to lose much of their tree cover as farmers plant soy crops that can cover areas as big as whole cities. And, while deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has slowed, it is still happening at a faster pace than the forest’s recovery rate.

Stopping deforestation should still be the priority, scientists told me. But, as the planet warms, other threats are growing.

A study from 2018 showed that, when there is drought in the Amazon, fires can increase even when deforestation goes down. That’s because drier vegetation in the form of standing trees continues to fuel the blazes.

“If fires are a direct consequence of deforestation, then a policy to fight deforestation should also be effective against fires,” said Luiz Aragão, a scientist at the space research institute and one of the authors of the study. “And what we are seeing is that it isn’t.”

Large parts of South America are under the worst category of drought. That’s partly because of natural climate patterns, such as the El Niño, which are associated with scarcer rains in the region. But global warming is probably making matters worse in the background.

Last year, scientists found that higher temperatures had made the drought in the Amazon more intense. It’s also likely that these weather patterns will change soon, as La Niña, which cools the Pacific and usually means more rain in this part of the world, sets in.

Ecosystems may change in dramatic ways

  

Part of the Brasília National Forest burning on Sept. 3. Eraldo Peres/Associated Press

 

 Looking years ahead, the situation is unlikely to improve. Humans are still burning fossil fuels that heat up the atmosphere, so extreme droughts like the current one are likely to become more frequent, scientists say.

“Maybe 2024 is the best year of the ones that are coming, as incredible as it may seem,” said Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate at the University of Oxford. “The climate models show a big share of the biome is going to become drier.”

Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, recently told senators there that “we may lose the Pantanal by the end of the century,” explaining that dwindling rain and increasing heat are huge obstacles to the wetlands’ abitity to recharge to sustainable levels.

The Amazon is very likely to transform sharply if this trend continues. The forest didn’t evolve to burn like other ecosystems such as the boreal forests, Berenguer told me. The bark on its trees is thin, unlike that of redwood trees and sequoias, so even a little fire can kill them.

The types of Amazonian plants that can grow back after fires aren’t the majestic trees we associate with the rainforest, but scrubbier ones that grow and die fast and hold a lot less planet-warming carbon in their trunks.

“What the data shows is that even 30 years after fire, the burned forest still has 25 percent less carbon than a forest that never burned,” Berenguer told me.