Afternoon all, and welcome to another barnstorming edition of the ScholarTribe climate briefing. This one contains 105 capital letters but only 34 full stops, which is more or less the perfect ratio if you ask me (3.09). Anyway, let’s get down to business - in this week’s edition:
🌲 Why tree harvesting ≠ deforestation
🥘 The role of SMEs in food system resilience
🏭 Enforcing producer responsibility on the fossil fuel industry
🌡 …and a small section on whether we can blame specific events on climate change!
It’s not the same, maaaannn
I’d like to start this week with a great piece from Nature Climate Change, which makes an important distinction between deforestation and sustainable tree harvesting. Deforestation implies a change of land use, from forest to something else, which naturally causes major upheaval for ecosystems and is emissions-intensive. Tree harvesting, however, maintains a functioning forest ecosystem, and is currently essential to the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people.
Wells et al. stress the importance of addressing deforestation, and commend the renewed efforts of reducing it borne out of COP26. However, misunderstandings of deforestation have previously led to rigid top-down bans on tree harvesting in the Global South, putting livelihoods and cultural practices at great risk. This also encourages an underground tree harvesting market, leading to lack of regulation and therefore exploitation.
The authors suggest that more nuanced interventions are needed at the local level, as opposed to the one-size-fits-noone tree-harvesting bans we have seen in the past.
SMEs a potential boon to food system resilience
Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute has released a new briefing note, with the title - How can small-medium enterprises (SMEs) enhance resilience of the UK food system? It describes how SMEs currently comprise around 97% of enterprises in the UK food system, meaning that while they don’t supply anywhere near 97% of demand, they make a substantial contribution to our social and cultural landscape. What the briefing suggests, though, is that there is a lot of potential for SMEs to go further, and work with larger institutions to provide the UK with an increased level of food system resilience. The idea is that smaller businesses have a greater ability to innovate, hedge risk and generally be more creative than larger sector players, but face certain challenges not faced by those larger businesses. The briefing note therefore recommends greater synergy between them, to boost innovation and increase resilience to climate change.
Here is a link to the press release, from Oxford’s ECI
Take it back now y’all (no really please take it back)
According to the scientists behind the Carbon Takeback Obligation initiative, a fresh approach is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The Carbon Takeback Obligation, or CTBO, is a proposed law that would mean anyone who extracts or imports fossil fuels would have to recapture a fraction of the CO2 emitted from the use of their product. This stored fraction would ramp up from 0.1% at the moment, to 100% by 2050. This would clearly increase the price of fossil fuels, as the companies that sell them would now be paying for carbon capture, but the researchers show that this price is cheaper than the equivalent carbon price that would be required to reach net zero by 2050 without CBTO. The great thing about this idea is that it provides a reliable backstop for all of the current and future climate policies which are aimed at reducing fossil fuel demand, and if used in tandem with these, provides a smoother path to net zero without overly draconian measures.
A link to their website, and also to a great two-pager
Physical Climate Demystified - Extreme weather attribution
Do you ever wonder what people type into google during a heatwave? Well, I have done such wondering, and I reckon things like “Suncream ok if I ate?” and “Can you fry an egg on the street” would rank fairly highly. However there is one question which people, and especially journalists, always want the answer to, which is - can we blame this weather on climate change?
And unfortunately for those people, they will almost always get the same answer from climate scientists, which is that we don’t know. It is almost impossible to work out whether a given heatwave might have happened in a world without climate change, as no such world exists. Instead, scientists have to compare how the probability of such an event has changed thanks to climate change, which leads to the ‘attribution statements’ you often see in newspapers - ‘this heatwave was made 4 times more likely due to climate change’, for example.
I must add here that it isn’t just heatwaves that are being looked at - extreme flood events, droughts and cold snaps all exhibit the effects of human activity. The main take home point though, and going back to heatwaves again, is that climate change doesn’t make every summer hot, but it rather tips the odds ever more severely in the hot direction.
so damn stoked about that!