Up to one million wild species are now at risk of extinction due to human activities. We talk to Dr. Kai Chan, a professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia and co-author of the UN biodiversity report.
TJ Watt from the AncientForestAlliance.org took his camera to clear cut logging sites in Vancouver Island’s Nahmint Valley. Plus a clip from New Zealands’ wonderful Prime Minister Jacinda Adern. Talking fast… to meet a challenge.
Environment News for Nov. 12, 2019
In Australia bush fires covered a distance half the length of the California coastline and killed at least three people and destroyed more than 150 homes in Australia over the weekend. Senior firefighters warned Sunday that the blazes could become so dangerous in coming days that they might not be able to protect lives and property.
From Crowdy Bay National Park on the coast of New South Wales state to just north of the affluent beach town of Noosa in adjacent Queensland state — a distance of 460 miles — emergency agencies were struggling to bring some 70 bush fires under control.
Eastern Australia’s major north-south road, the Pacific Highway, was cut off by fire and smoke about five hours north of Sydney near the township of Johns River, where the body of a 63-year-old woman, Julie Fletcher, was found in her burned home.
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Last week, the province increased the annual allowable cut in a section of Vancouver Island’s old-growth forests that environmentalists view as dangerously rare.
The conservation group Sierra Club BC estimates that about 20 per cent of Vancouver Island’s original productive old-growth forests – those big trees that are of greatest value to the logging industry – remain standing.
The government insists the picture is not so grim, but both sides define old growth differently. The province suggests there is plenty of old growth left: 13.2 million hectares, provincewide. According to the ministry of forests, the forest industry cuts just more than 200,000 hectares forest land every year, and of that, 27 per cent comes from old growth.
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A decade ago, a boom in urban gardens and farms became a new agricultural trend. In the past five years, another trend has entered the urban agricultural scene: agrihoods, short for agricultural neighborhoods.
The term is a real estate brand that—different from urban gardening—centers agriculture in neighborhoods, and is mostly targeted at affluent millennials, who are increasingly considering proximity to fresh and “clean” foods in their homebuying decisions.
The Urban Land Institute defines agrihoods as master-planned housing communities with working farms as their focus. Overwhelmingly, they have large swaths of green space, orchards, hoop houses and greenhouses, and some with barns, outdoor community kitchens, and environmentally sustainable homes decked with solar panels and composting.
They’re newer communities with homes that cost $300,000 to $700,000, but can be in the millions such as those in the Walden Monterey community in the Bay Area.
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In New Zealand the government of PM Jacinda Ardern’s has passed major climate legislation, with historic cross-party support, committing the nation to reduce its carbon emissions to zero by 2050 and meet its commitments under the Paris climate accords.
The climate change response (zero carbon) amendment bill was passed with the centre-right opposition National party throwing their support behind it late in the day. The bill passed 119 votes to one.
Climate change minister James Shaw said the bill, which commits New Zealand to keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees, provided a framework for the island country of nearly 5 million to adapt too, and prepare for the climate emergency.
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Montreal’s Concordia University plans to divest about C$14 million in coal, oil, and gas companies and redirect its entire C$243-million endowment to sustainable investments by 2025.
Concordia’s announcement said it has responsibilities as a signatory to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI).
“Other Canadian universities have announced similar divestment commitments, including Université du Québec à Montréal, which sold off its fossil fuel assets last year,” reports CP. Carr said Concordia is “the first university in Quebec to have committed to a 100% sustainable endowment portfolio, along with a specific timeline for reaching that goal.”
https://theenergymix.com/2019/11/11/concordia-promises-full-fossil-divestment-by-2025/
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The annual “Brown to Green” report from the Climate Transparency partnership said Canada is far from contributing its fair share toward the 1.5 C climate goal. The report notes Canada is the third most energy-intensive economy in the G20.
Canada’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are much higher than the G20 average, at 18.9 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person. Much of Canada’s failure to limit overall emissions is due to energy-inefficient buildings and rising pollution from two provinces: Alberta and Saskatchewan.
“South Korea, Canada and Australia are the G20 countries furthest off track to implement their NDCs,” the report said, referring to the nationally determined contributions countries committed to as part of a global response to the climate crisis.
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Scientific American reports on a new study that shows that deforestation released 626 percent more CO2 between 2000 and 2013 than previously thought. The piece calls deforestation a carbon bomb.
Intact forests are packing ever more carbon into the living matter, deadwood and soils on each acre of land. Summed across all intact forests, and to a lesser extent some other intact ecosystems like grasslands, this so-called “sink” removes fully a quarter of all humanity’s carbon emissions each year.
The study also highlighted the danger of forest fragmentation. By looking at the millions of acres across the tropics that were damaged during 2000–2013, the study tallied up the extent to which pressures like fires, logging, and drought along new forest edges reduced the carbon stored and absorbed long-term by previously intact forests.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-carbon-bomb/
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Scientists are delving four kilometres beneath the earth’s surface to find out why hydraulic fracturing triggered a 4.5 magnitude earthquake in northeastern B.C in 2018.
The quake was felt in 14 different places, including the construction site of the massive Site C dam, where B.C. Hydro temporarily halted work.
Soon after, B.C.’s energy regulator determined the quake and several other smaller ones were induced after fracking fluid was injected into a Canadian Natural Resources well site, south of Fort St John.
Now, preliminary geological research suggests underground rocks in the gas-rich area, between Dawson Creek and Fort St John, are in a “near critical state,”
Researchers say that means just a small increase in fracking fluid pressure may be enough to “critically stress” some ground fractures and faults, a key factor in human-caused earthquakes.
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Scotland has begun an ambitious program to restore its degraded peatlands, stating that the boggy ecosystems, which at present cover 3% of the planet’s surface, store twice as much carbon as all of its forests combine. The Scottish plan is part of its commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2045.
According to current government estimates, however, nearly 30% of Scottish bogland is badly degraded, thanks to a combination of past land use practices and an exploding deer population.
While efforts to turn the region’s peatlands into farmland by draining away the water “date back to Roman times,” writes DW, the process accelerated in Scotland in the 1950s “with the advent of new machinery and government grants aimed at improved grazing”.
the Scottish government offering US$18 million in grants this year alone to landowners who “block the drainage ditches their predecessors were encouraged to dig,” hopes are high that “50,000 hectares will have been restored by the end of 2020, and 250,000 hectares by 2030”.
https://theenergymix.com/2019/11/11/scotland-restores-degraded-peatlands-to-boost-carbon-capture/
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