Up to 2.6 billion people in Asia, Africa could be exposed to heatwaves by 2090: IOM

River floods are expected to affect up to 156 million people, with 87% of them projected to live in Asia

Kiran Pandey

Down To Earth | December 08, 2023

 In 2022, close to 62,000 deaths in Europe were attributed to heatwaves. Photo for representation: iStock

Close to 568 million people could be exposed to heatwaves by 2030 under a high-warming (HW) scenario where global temperature rises by 3-4 degrees Celsius by 2100, according to the new Climate Mobility Impacts dashboard of the Global Data Institute at the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Under the scenario, up to 2.79 billion people could be exposed to heatwaves by 2090. 

The open-access interactive tool was launched by IOM on December 5, 2023. The dashboard indicated that of these 2.79 billion, almost 2.6 billion or roughly 93 per cent, are projected to live in  Asia and Africa. 

The low- and high-warming scenarios represent different future trajectories in greenhouse gas concentrations. Under the low-warming (LW) scenario, a global temperature rise below 2°C by 2100 is likely. 

COP28 climate summit signals the end of fossil fuels — but is it enough?

As nations make historic pledge to ‘transition’ energy systems away from fossil fuels — some scientists are disappointed by the softened wording.

Katharine Sanderson

Nature | 13 December 2023

Delegates applauding at the end of COP28 in Dubai.Credit: Fadel Dawod/Getty

Scientists have voiced mixed reactions to a pledge to “transition away from fossil fuels” made by the world’s governments at the end of the United Nations COP28 climate summit in Dubai.

“It’s major,” says Lisa Schipper a developmental geographer at the University of Bonn, Germany. Previous end-of-COP declarations have failed to mention fossil fuels in this way. At COP26 in Glasgow, delegates pledged to “phase down” coal use without carbon capture and storage, which was regarded as a first at the time.

COP28 is the first ‘global stocktake’ of progress towards meeting the goals of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement (COP21), in which representatives of more than 190 countries pledged to limit global warming to within 1.5 ºC of pre-industrial levels.

‘Head-scratcher’: first look at asteroid dust brought to Earth offers surprises

Researchers have begun examining the pristine space rocks collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission.

Alexandra Witze

Nature | 12 December 2023

Researchers handle OSIRIS-REx’s sample canister inside a glovebox at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.Credit: NASA/Kimberly Allums

San Francisco, California

In the 2.5 months since NASA’s first asteroid sample-return mission landed safely on Earth, technicians have carefully plucked more than 70 grams of asteroid dust and pebbles from the spacecraft’s canister. That’s more than ten times the amount brought back from an asteroid previously, and more than NASA declared necessary to call the mission a success. Some of the pebbles even seem to contain a combination of chemical elements that is puzzling researchers.

Scientists skip COP28 to demand climate action at home

Concerned about safety at the global climate summit and wanting to make their protests count, researchers stage demonstrations elsewhere.

Anil Oza

Nature | December 05, 2023

Members of two activist groups, Scientist Rebellion and Just Stop Coal, blocked a train track on 4 December to demand that the Netherlands rapidly phase out fossil fuels.Credit: Scientist Rebellion NL & Kappen Met Kolen NL

Some scientists-turned-activists have changed tactics during this year’s United Nations climate summit. Rather than staging demonstrations in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, at the meeting itself, they are coordinating protests against governments’ lack of progress reining in greenhouse-gas emissions closer to home — by blocking parts of fossil-fuel operations in their own countries and appealing to local governments.

‘Incredible’ asteroid sample ferried to Earth is rich in the building blocks of life

Samples of asteroid Bennu delivered by the OSIRIS-REx mission contain carbon, water and other ingredients from the primordial Solar System.

Alexandra Witze

Nature | October 11, 2023

The sample-collection device from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft includes material from asteroid Bennu (black grains, middle right).Credit: Erika Blumenfeld, Joseph Aebersold/NASA via AP/Alamy

Pieces of the asteroid Bennu, brought back to Earth in September by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, include crumbly rocks and dust that contain water and carbon — some of the building blocks of life on Earth. NASA provided a first glimpse of the rocks, which are the largest asteroid sample ever returned to Earth, on 11 October.

The Bennu sample includes clay minerals with water trapped inside their crystal structures, bright and dark dust grains that look like flecks of salt and pepper and sulfur-rich minerals such as those that might play a key part in planetary evolution. “The pristine sample material from Bennu represents a valuable resource providing a window into the early Solar System,” says Eileen Stansbery, an astromaterials researcher at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and one of the leaders of the Bennu analysis.

Greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high and Earth is warming faster than ever: Report

Humanity has caused surface temperatures to warm by 1.14°C since the late 1800s; this warming is increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2°C per decade

Down To Earth | June 08, 2023

Greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high, with yearly emissions equivalent to 54 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. Humanity has caused surface temperatures to warm by 1.14°C since the late 1800s – and this warming is increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2°C per decade. The highest temperatures recorded over land (what climate scientists refer to as maximum land surface temperatures) are increasing twice as fast. And it’s these temperatures that are most relevant to the record heat people feel or whether wildfires spawn.

These changes mean that the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C – the amount of carbon dioxide global society can still emit and keep a 50% chance of holding temperature rise to 1.5°C – is now only around 250 billion tonnes. At current emission levels, this will run out in less than six years.

Earth’s 6th Mass Extinction: Climate Crisis, Pollution, Depleting Resources Could Extinct 27% Of World Animal Life

 Countercurrents Collective | December 20, 2022

The planet has entered the sixth mass extinction. Pollution, climate change and depleting resources could drive up to 27% of the world’s animal life to extinction, a new paper has claimed. The study used a supercomputer to map out how interdependent food chains could collapse in the coming decades.

Published on Friday and authored by European Commission scientist Giovanni Strona and Professor Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University in Australia, the study (Coextinctions dominate future vertebrate losses from climate and land use change, GIOVANNI STRONA HTTPS://ORCID.ORG/0000-0003-2294-4013 AND COREY J. A. BRADSHAW HTTPS://ORCID.ORG/0000-0002-5328-7741, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abn4345) presented a series of increasingly grim scenarios. The researchers claimed that the magnitude of the coming extinctions will depend largely on how much carbon mankind emits over the coming century.

Global warming: 400 million tonnes CO2 pumped to atmosphere a year from this source the world is blind to

Gas flared at and gas facilities is greater than EU’s total import from Russia and a key source of methane emission

Down To Earth | May 06, 2022

Something that has not changed over 160 years of oil production is the deliberate burning of gas associated with it, called gas flaring. It is turning out to be a major source of methane emission, a greenhouse gas (GHG) “over 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a warming gas on a 20-year timeframe”.

The World Bank’s latest 2022 Global Gas Flaring Tracker Report underscored that the efforts to curb this global warming causing activity have “stalled” in the last one decade.

Economics for people and planet—moving beyond the neoclassical paradigm

Lina Brand-Correa, PhD *, Anna Brook, MPH, Milena Büchs, PhD, Petra Meier, PhD, Yannish Naik, MPH & Daniel W O’Neill, PhD

The Lancet | Open Access | Published: April, 2022 | DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00063-8

Summary

Despite substantial attention within the fields of public and planetary health on developing an economic system that benefits both people’s health and the environment, heterodox economic schools of thought have received little attention within these fields. Ecological economics is a school of thought with particular relevance to public and planetary health. In this article, we discuss implications of key ecological economics ideas for public and planetary health, especially those related to critiques of gross domestic product as a measure of progress and economic growth as the dominant goal for economic and policy decision making. We suggest that ecological economics aligns well with public health goals, including concern for equality and redistribution. Ecological economics offers an opportunity to make the transition to an economic system that is designed to promote human and planetary health from the outset, rather than one where social and environmental externalities must be constantly corrected after the fact. Important ideas from ecological economics include the use of a multidimensional framework to evaluate economic and social performance, the prioritisation of wellbeing and environmental goals in decision making, policy design and evaluation that take complex relationships into account, and the role of provisioning systems (the physical and social systems that link resource use and social outcomes). We discuss possible interventions at the national scale that could promote public health and that align with the prioritisation of social and ecological objectives, including universal basic income or services and sovereign money creation. Overall, we lay the foundations for additional integration of ecological economics principles and pluralist economic thinking into public and planetary health scholarship and practice.

National responsibility for ecological breakdown: a fair-shares assessment of resource use, 1970–2017

Prof Jason Hickel, PhD, Daniel W O’Neill, PhD, Andrew L Fanning, PhD & Huzaifa Zoomkawala, BS

The Lancet | Open Access | Published: April, 2022| DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00044-4

Summary
Background
Human impacts on earth-system processes are overshooting several planetary boundaries, driving a crisis of ecological breakdown. This crisis is being caused in large part by global resource extraction, which has increased dramatically over the past half century. We propose a novel method for quantifying national responsibility for ecological breakdown by assessing nations’ cumulative material use in excess of equitable and sustainable boundaries.