Climate Change | News & Views

Carbon trading tempts firms to make greenhouse gas

A handful of Chinese and Indian chemicals companies seemingly have the world over a barrel or rather a large number of barrels of a super-greenhouse gas called HFC-23, which is 14,800 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

This week, apparently following Chinese threats to vent stockpiles of HFC-23 into the atmosphere, a UN panel issued two million valuable carbon credits to a company called Juhua. It has a factory in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, where the gas can be destroyed.

Nobody needs HFC-23. It is a waste by-product of the manufacture of a refrigerant called HCFC-22, used mostly in developing nations. To curb the release of HFC-23 into the atmosphere, the signatories to the Kyoto protocol agreed to pay carbon credits to refrigerant manufacturers that agree to capture and destroy it. The manufacturers can then sell the credits to western companies that want to offset their obligations to cut emissions of other greenhouse gases, under a Kyoto scheme known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

The offer only applies to HCFC-22 plants that were built before 2000. Even so it has proved highly lucrative. By some estimates, the value of the carbon credits is up to 100 times the cost of incinerating HFC-23. The resulting income of Chinese companies alone is estimated to reach $1.6 billion by 2012.

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2011 “make or break” for electric cars

The next two years will be “make or break” for the electric vehicle market in the UK, one expert has claimed.

Dr Ben Lane, managing editor of nextgreencar.com, said from a “sales point of view” 2010 was not a good year for low carbon vehicles, however he believes now “a number of key elements are all coming into place”.

These elements were said to be manufacturers making high-quality models, advances in lithium battery technology allowing vehicles to travel further between charges and political support for electric cars. “2011 and 2012 will be make or break years and the signs at the moment are that it will be ‘make’,” Dr Lane said.

The comments come following the announcement of the nine models to be covered by the government’s Plug-In Car grant. Mitsubishi’s i-MiEV, the Peugeot iOn and the smart fourtwo electric drive will be the first vehicles eligible for the maximum £5,000 grant when it comes into force in January. The recently named European Car of the Year, the Nissan Leaf, will also be covered by the scheme.

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Fungus out! The frog resistance is here

From The New Scientist

FROGS across Australia and the US may be recovering from a fungal disease that has devastated populations around the world.

“It’s happening across a number of species,” says Michael Mahony at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, who completed a 20-year study of frogs along the Great Dividing Range in Australia for the Earthwatch Institute. Between 1990 and 1998 the populations of several frog species crashed due to chytridiomycosis infection (chytrid) caused by the pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, but Mahony’s surveys suggest that the frogs are re-establishing.

Barred river frogs (Mixophyes esiteratus) disappeared, he says, but now up to 30 of the animals have returned to streams across Australia’s Central Coast. The tusked-frog (Adelotus) and several tree frog species (Litoria) have also returned there. Ross Alford at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland, says tree frogs are also repopulating other areas of the state after their numbers nosedived. Some have even reached pre-infection levels.

In the US there are also signs of recovery. Roland Knapp at Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory at the University of California says mountain yellow-legged frogs (Rana muscosas) – once “driven virtually to extinction” – are returning. The big question is: are frogs now beating chytrid?

Using electronic tagging to track frogs, Knapp (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0912886107) and Mahony have separately found that recovering frogs are living with low-level infections of the fungus.

It is possible, they say, that the fungus has weakened in recovering areas. Knapp says there is evidence that the frogs are evolving. Initial findings from his team show that frogs from recovered populations can survive when challenged with a fungal strain, unlike frogs with no previous exposure to the fungus, which died after it colonised their skin.

At Vanderbilt University Medical Centre, Nashville, Alford and Louise Rollins-Smith found that a population of Australian green-eyed tree frogs previously decimated by the fungus produced more anti-microbial peptides – which inhibit fungal growth – on their skin than a less affected population (Diversity and Distribution, vol 16, p 703). “It’s quite likely that populations are adapting and developing better defences,” says Rollins-Smith.

Worldwide, most amphibian communities are not recovering, though earlier this year Ursina Tobler at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, showed for the first time that even in devastated populations, some tadpoles can survive infection.

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Cancun delegates reach climate change deal

Delegates at the United Nations’ (UN) summit in Cancun reached an agreement on curbing climate change, although the pledge was not as strong as some had hoped.

The deal called for stricter restrictions to be placed on carbon emissions and efforts being made by developing countries to curb carbon emissions to be brought within the UN system.

Also included to aid developing countries in combating climate change, was the establishment of the Green Climate Fund and the creation of mechanisms which will allow them to access low carbon technology.

However, detailed information on how such measures will be achieved are not included.

Many believe the deal lays the foundations for creating a legally-binding agreement when the delegates meet again in South Africa next year.

UK energy and climate change secretary Chris Huhne commented: “A global deal on climate change is now back on track.”

Neil Bentley, Confederation of Business Industry director of business environment, added: “Such a deal could unlock great new low-carbon markets for our economy, and until this is reached, concerted action will be slow.”

The UN summit was attended by 15,000 delegates from 190 countries and produced 25,000 tonnes of carbon emissions.

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Open shop doors ‘waste 10 tonnes of carbon emissions’

British retailers could save up to ten tonnes of carbon each year if they were to shut their doors, a new study suggests.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge suggested shops are wasting a significant amount of energy generating heat, which then escapes through open doors.

It was estimated that shops could slash their energy bills by up to 50 percent if they were to close their doors during the winter months.

The ten tonnes of carbon is equivalent to that produced by three flights between London and Hong Kong.

Commenting on the findings, Jeannie Dawkins, director of the Close the Doors Campaign, which commissioned the research, said: “It’s time for retailers to acknowledge the massive contribution they are making to energy waste and carbon emissions if they heat the street.”

The findings are based on the emissions of the independent Cambridge Toy shop and the branch of Ryman stationary shop in the city.

Foreign secretary William Hague and Professor Sir David King, a former government chief scientific adviser and director of Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford, have both pledged support for the Close the Doors campaign.

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Warming ‘destabilises aquatic ecosystems’

Future warming could have “profound implications” for the stability of freshwater ecosystems, a study warns.

Researchers said warmer water affected the distribution and size of plankton – tiny organisms that form the basis of food chains in aquatic systems.

The team warmed plankton-containing vessels by 4C (7F) – the temperature by which some of the world’s rivers and lakes could warm over the next century.

The findings appear in the journal Global Change Biology.

“Our study provides almost the first direct experimental evidence that – in the short-term – if a [freshwater] ecosystem warms up, it has profound implications for the size structure of plankton communities,” said lead author Gabriel Yvon-Durocher from Queen Mary, University of London.

“Essentially, what we observed within the phytoplankton (microscopic plants) community was that it switched from a system that was dominated by larger autotrophs (plants that photosynthesise) to a system that was dominated by smaller autotrophs with a lower standing biomass.”

Dr Yvon-Durocher added that a greater abundance, but lower overall biomass, of smaller phytoplankton had “very important implications for the stability of plankton food webs”.

“This meant that the distribution of biomass between plants and animals changed from a… situation where you had a large amount of plants and a smaller amount of animal consumers to an ‘inverted pyramid’ where you have a smaller quantity of plant biomass and a larger amount of animal biomass,” he told BBC News.

“Systems that tend to have larger consumer biomass relative to the resource biomass tend to be less stable over time.”

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Watch what the travel industry is doing about climate change

Videos from travel and tourism leaders discussing climate change at the the Six Senses Symposium are now available to watch online.

The second Six Senses Eco Symposium was held in Soneva Fushi in the Maldives from October 7-10, the conference brought together leaders in the travel and tourism industry from around the world to discuss climate change.

Speakers at the event included President Nasheed of the Maldives, Jonathon Counsell head of Environment at British Airways and climate change advisor Mark Lynas. Following the conclusion of the event internet users can watch video footage of the speakers’ opinions on climate change and hear about the actions they are taking to reduce their carbon footprint.

From a travel perspective one of the most interesting points of the conference was Mr. Counsell’s interview regarding the development of environmentally friendly bio-fuels by British Airways and the airline industry as a whole, according to Mr. Counsell bio-fuels could become a viable fuel source by 2014.

The airline industry under the International Air Transport Association has set several targets for climate reduction including a 1.5 percent-a-year improvement in fuel efficiency by 2020 and carbon neutral growth afterwards. However speaking in September 2010 UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said that the air transport industry still held “critical keys” to tackling emission reductions.

Videos from the Six Senses Eco Symposium can be viewed on YouTube here

More information about the Six Senses Eco Symposium can be found at: http://www.sixsenses.com/ecosymposium/

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Show world leaders how you see climate change

Amateur filmmakers from around the globe are encouraged to participate in the “1 minute to save the world” competition which closes in two months. The winning entry will be screened at COP16 in Mexico.

The international film competition is open to all ages and is free to enter; budding filmmakers must submit a short film (roughly one minute in length) about climate change. The films will be judged by professionals in the film and environmental industries, including Ben Kott of Google Europe Environmental Operations. The deadline for entries is December 17; entries from filmmakers under 18 in the Best Youth Film category must be submitted by November 12.

As well as winning a variety of electronic and cash prizes, the winning movie in the Best Youth Film category will be screened in front of world leaders at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change COP16 in Cancun, Mexico, which runs November 29 – December 10 (http://www.cc2010.mx/en/).

Last year’s winning entry was titled My Paper Boat and was made by Arun Bose from India; the short film depicts a young boy searching an arid desert for somewhere to play with his paper boat.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has also launched its second video competition to promote awareness of climate change. This year’s competition is called My View H20 and requires entrants to make a short film about water; the competition is open to all of ADB’s 67 member countries and closes to entrants on January 31, 2011.

For more details about how to enter 1 minute to save the world see: http://www.1minutetosavetheworld.com/awards/

Watch last year’s 1 minute to save the world winning entry at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gasMl5DdhkA

For more information about My View H2O see: http://www.adb.org/MyView/2010/

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Climate change ‘affecting harvests’

Crop failure could become a more common occurrence as climate change begins to take effect, new research shows.

A team made up of experts from the University of Leeds, the Met Office Hadley Centre and University of Exeter conducted the study, which concluded that the extreme weather events caused by climate change will lead to increasing numbers of crop failures.

Forest fires in Russia caused by heat and drought over the summer led to an area of crops larger than the size of Hungary being unusable.

Using spring wheat crops in northern China as the basis for the study, the researchers used a climate model to predict the weather patterns and assess how this would affect yields. Socio-economic factors related to the farmers were also taken into account.

Lead author Dr Andy Challinor, from the University of Leeds School of Earth and Environment, said that solutions must be found to the problem.

“It is highly unlikely that we will find a single intervention that is a ’silver bullet’ for protecting crops from failure. What we need is an approach that combines building up crop tolerance to heath and water stress with socio-economic interventions,” he added.

The study appears in Environmental Research Letters.

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World Green Building Week outlines the social benefits

Ahead of World Green Building Week the World Green Building Council stresses the social and environmental benefits of green architecture.

On the first day of Green Building Week, which runs September 20-26, the World Green Building Council (WorldGBC) will be releasing a special report entitled “Tackling Global Climate Change- Meeting Local Priorities.”

The report focuses on how green buildings provide not just environmental benefits but also how they help meet social and economic priorities in different countries. The report will be free to download from the WorldGBC website from September 20.

According to researchers at Michigan State University, one of the social benefits of green buildings is that they improve worker productivity – employees working in an environmentally friendly environment take less sick days.

Throughout World Green Building Week, a series of galas, festivals, lectures and business meetings will be taking place around the world in order to raise the profile of environmentally friendly architecture.

On October 10, Global Work Party Day aims to stress the importance of cutting carbon emissions and encourages people to undertake activities such as fixing bicycles, or installing solar panels.

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