‘Food and fossil fuel production causing $5bn of environmental damage an hour’. UN GEO report says ending this harm key to global transformation required ‘before collapse becomes inevitable’

A farm worker ploughs fields overlooking Grangemouth petrochemical and refining plant in Scotland. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

 
 by Damian Carrington

 

The unsustainable production of food and fossil fuels causes $5bn (£3.8bn) of environmental damage per hour, according to a major UN report.

Ending this harm was a key part of the global transformation of governance, economics and finance required “before collapse becomes inevitable”, the experts said.

The Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report, which is produced by 200 researchers for the UN Environment Programme, said the climate crisis, destruction of nature and pollution could no longer be seen as simply environmental crises.

“They are all undermining our economy, food security, water security, human health and they are also [national] security issues, leading to conflict in many parts of the world,” said Prof Robert Watson, the co-chair of the assessment.

 

All the environmental crises were worsening as the global population grows and required more food and energy, most of which was produced in ways that pollute the planet and destroy the natural world, the experts said. A sustainable world was possible, they said, but required political courage.

“This is an urgent call to transform our human systems now before collapse becomes inevitable,” said Prof Edgar Gutiérrez-Espeleta, another co-chair and the former environment minister in Costa Rica.

“The science is good. The solutions are known. What is required is the courage to act at the scale and speed that history demands,” he said, adding that the window for action was “rapidly narrowing”.

The experts acknowledged that the geopolitical situation today was difficult, with the US under Donald Trump, some other countries and corporate vested interests working to block or reverse environmental action. Watson, a former chair of leading international climate and biodiversity science groups, said: “The public have got to demand that they want a sustainable future for their children and their grandchildren. Most governments do try and respond.”

The GEO report is comprehensive – 1,100 pages this year – and is usually accompanied by a summary for policymakers, which is agreed by all the world’s countries. However, strong objections by countries including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Turkey and Argentina to references to fossil fuels, plastics, reduced meat in diets and other issues meant no agreement was reached this time.

A statement made by the UK on behalf of 28 countries said: “We witnessed diversion attempts to question the scientific nature of this process. Our delegations fully respect every state’s right to safeguard their country’s national interests and rights, but science is not negotiable.”

The GEO report emphasised that the costs of action were much less than the costs of inaction in the long term, and estimated the benefits from climate action alone would be worth $20tn a year by 2070 and $100bn by 2100. “We need visionary countries and private sector [companies] to recognise they will make more profit by addressing these issues rather than ignoring them,” Watson said.

The report contained several “critical truths”, Gutiérrez-Espeleta said: environmental crises were political and security emergencies, threatening the social ties that held societies together. Today’s governments and economic systems were failing humanity and financial reform was the cornerstone of transformation, he said: “Environmental policy must become the backbone of national security, social justice, and economic strategy.”

One of the biggest issues was the $45tn a year in environmental damage caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas, and the pollution and destruction of nature caused by industrial agriculture, the report said. The food system carried the largest costs, at $20tn, with transport at $13tn and fossil-fuel powered electricity at $12tn.

These costs – called externalities by economists – must be priced into energy and food to reflect their real price and shift consumers towards greener choices, Watson said: “So we need social safety nets. We need to make sure that the poorest in society are not harmed by an increase in costs.”

The report suggests measures such as a universal basic income, taxes on meat and subsidies for healthy, plant-based foods.

There were also about $1.5tn in environmentally harmful subsidies to fossil fuels, food and mining, the report said. These needed to be removed or repurposed, it added. Watson noted that wind and solar energy was cheaper in many places but held back by vested interests in fossil fuel.

The climate crisis may be even worse than thought, he said: “We are likely to be underestimating the magnitude of climate change”, with global heating probably at the high end of the projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Removing fossil fuel subsidies could cut emissions by a third, the report said.

Typhoon in Philippines Casts Long Shadow Over U.N. Talks on Climate Treaty

The typhoon that struck the Philippines produced an outpouring of emotion Monday at United Nations talks on a global climate treaty in Warsaw, where delegates were quick to suggest that a warming planet turned the storm into a lethal monster.

Olai Ngedikes, the lead negotiator for an alliance of small island nations, said in a statement that Typhoon Haiyan, which by some estimates killed 10,000 people in one city alone, “serves as a stark reminder of the cost of inaction on climate change and should serve to motivate our work in Warsaw.”

Naderev Saño, the chief representative of the Philippines at the conference, said he would stop eating in solidarity with the storm victims until “a meaningful outcome is in sight.”

“What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness; the climate crisis is madness,” Mr. Saño said. “We can stop this madness right here in Warsaw.”

His declaration, coupled with the scope of the disaster, moved many of the delegates to tears. Yet scientists remain cautious about drawing links between extreme storms like Haiyan and climate change. There is not enough data, they say, to draw conclusions about any single storm.

“Whether we’re seeing some result of climate change, we find that impossible to find out,” said Kerry A. Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scientists largely agree that it appears that storms will become more powerful as the climate changes. Dr. Emanuel helped write a 2010 study, for example, that forecast that the average intensity of hurricanes and typhoons — different names for the same phenomenon — would increase by up to 11 percent by the end of the century.

Haiyan, with winds of at least 150 miles an hour, was considered one of the strongest storms to make landfall on record. “The data suggests that things like this will be more frequent with global warming,” said James P. Kossin, an atmospheric scientist with the National Climatic Data Center.

Dr. Emanuel said that as the planet warms because of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, the difference between sea and air temperatures increases. It is this difference that fuels these kinds of cyclonic storms.

“As you warm the climate, you basically raise the speed limit on hurricanes,” he said.

As with Hurricane Sandy last year in the United States, powerful storm surges contributed to the deaths and destruction in the Philippines. And Dr. Kossin and others noted that one of the impacts of climate change — an overall rise in sea levels — is sure to worsen storm surges. While factors like wind speed, storm track, geography and the timing of tides affect the height and extent of a surge and the damage it causes, a higher sea level baseline will lead to a higher surge.

“When you strip everything else away, we’re seeing a general rise in sea level,” Dr. Kossin said. “There’s no question that storm surge is going to be compounded.”

The effect of climate change on storms in the Pacific is especially difficult to study, scientists said, because no governments fly research planes into storms to gather data. In the Atlantic the United States government regularly sends reconnaissance flights into hurricanes, but the last regular flights into Pacific typhoons — also by American aircraft — occurred more than a quarter of a century ago. “Since then, we’ve been pretty much blind,” Dr. Emanuel said.

Instead, researchers have to rely on remote sensing data from satellites that essentially detect the degree of cloud cover, and use pattern-recognition software and algorithms to come up with estimates of storm intensity. Dr. Kossin used that data in a 2008 study of the Pacific that found “that the strongest storms are getting stronger,” he said.

In Warsaw, some of the delegates expressed hope that the typhoon and its aftermath would give fresh impetus to the talks.

“The scale of the response in the talks must match with what is clearly an escalating situation,” Dessima Williams, a former chairwoman of the alliance of island states, said in an interview from Warsaw.

The negotiations, which will last about two weeks, are another step in a long effort to replace a weak treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, which failed to slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, with a new one that would take effect in 2020.

The Philippines disaster is likely to be cited by delegates debating one of the main issues, a longstanding fight about climate justice. As global warming proceeds, some of the poorest people in the world, who have had the least to do with the burning of fossil fuels, stand to be among the primary victims in small island nations and in countries like Bangladesh, India and the Philippines.

Developing countries want the West, historically responsible for emissions, for the most part, to take the lead not only in reducing the use of fossil fuels, but to put up huge amounts of money to help poorer countries adapt to climatic changes that have already become inevitable. Western governments — which in some cases are already starting to consider their own adaptation to climate change — agree in principle that they should help poor countries. But they have committed relatively small sums, and they are wary of letting fast-growing countries like China off the hook on emissions.

Analysts say the likeliest outcome of the Warsaw negotiations is a weak pact that essentially urges countries to do what they can to cut emissions.