Cropped 21 June 2023: Canada burns; El Niño arrives; Third Pole melts

Carbon Brief Staff

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s Cropped.
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.

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§ Snapshot

Many of North America’s most iconic cities were cloaked in an otherworldly orange haze earlier this month as smoke from Canada’s wildfires travelled across the continent. The smog is set to return this week.

El Niño conditions have been confirmed by US and Australian weather agencies. The weather pattern is expected to take a massive toll on crops, drive up food prices and inflation. The North Atlantic is reeling under a “totally unprecedented” marine heatwave.

Climate change is having an “unprecedented and irreversible” impact on the Hindu Kush Himalaya’s cryosphere, a major new assessment found. Glaciers disappeared 65% faster in the 2010s than in the previous decade and could lose up to 80% of their volume by 2100.

§ Key developments

Canada wildfires

TOXIC FUMES: Hundreds of wildfires burned across Canada earlier this month in an “unprecedented” start to the nation’s fire season. As Carbon Brief reported in an in-depth summary of the event, huge clouds of smoke from the blaze travelled thousands of kilometres down to the eastern US in early June, shrouding cities such as New York and Washington DC in an orange haze and causing levels of toxic air pollution to reach record levels. At least 100 million Americans – nearly one-third of the total population – were under air-quality alerts at the height of the emergency, with the smoke spreading as far west as Chicago and as far south as Atlanta, according to USA Today. By 19 June, dozens of forest fires were still active in southern Quebec – with forecasts of hot and sunny weather raising the alarm once more, CBC News reported. The Hill added that parts of the US are “likely to see a resurgence of wildfire smoke” by Friday.

CLIMATE LINK: As the fires burned, scientists and journalists began to interrogate the link between the fires and climate change. As Carbon Brief noted, there has not yet been a study specifically quantifying the role of climate change in Canada’s 2023 wildfire season. However, there is a wide body of evidence showing that climate change is making “fire weather” – hot, dry conditions – more likely to occur both globally and in Canada. Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor Dr Zeke Hausfather took a closer look at studies on Canada’s wildfires and climate change on his Substack, concluding: “The scientific literature is clear that these sorts of events are likely to become more common as the world warms.” (For more details on how climate change affects wildfires, read Carbon Brief’s in-depth explainer from 2020.)

HOT AIR: As well as examining the link between the fires and climate change, several commentators pondered how the smoke emergency might affect the actions of policymakers in Washington DC. In the Washington Post, reporter Justine McDaniel said it was “far from clear” whether the smoke emergency would lead to US policymakers taking faster action on climate change. Writing in Politico, Prof David Fontana, an expert in constitutional law, wrote: “In a successful democracy, opening Washington’s eyes literally to climate change like this would open the eyes figuratively of the leaders of the federal government to the planet’s problems…The smog that covered eastern cities like Washington in the 1960s was part of what led to the enactment of the Air Quality Act of 1967 and the Clean Air Act in 1970. But today, our politics are so settled – and so stuck – that moments that even open our eyes in Washington do not change the laws coming from Washington.” 

El Niño alarm

PROBLEM CHILD RETURNS: On June 8, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officially announced that El Niño (“the boy” in Spanish) conditions were here to stay. The weather pattern typically brings wetter weather to “southern USA and the Gulf of Mexico” and drier conditions to southeast Asia, Australia and central Africa, explained BBC News. Scientists fear that El Niño on top of climate change “makes it almost certain that a new global temperature record will be set in the next five years”, the outlet wrote. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology confirmed that three out of four conditions for an El Niño event have been met, the Hindu BusinessLine reported.  “When you have an El Niño occurring on top of the long-term warming trend, it’s like a double whammy,” Dr Katherine Hayhoe told Bloomberg. 

OUTSIZE IMPACTS: “With the world grappling with high inflation and recession risk, the arrival of the El Niño comes at exactly the wrong time,” Bhargavi Sakthivel, an economist for Bloomberg Economics, told Bloomberg. El Niños can have serious, “compounding” economic effects that can “last for years”, the piece continued. It described several potential knock-on effects: accompanying drought could devastate the coffee crop in Brazil and cocoa in west Africa, and increased forest fires could threaten the wheat crop in Australia. El Niño is also known to suppress the Indian monsoon, the Indian Express reported. One study reported in Grist projected that the weather pattern “threatens to slow the global economy by as much as $3tn”. El Niño could mark the return of floods in the south and droughts in North China and impact rice, corn and wheat yields, the South China Morning Post reported. Peru, meanwhile, declared a state of emergency after heavy flooding and a deadly dengue outbreak linked to El Niño, the Washington Post and the Daily Telegraph reported.

MARINE HEATWAVE: An “unheard-of” marine heatwave off the coast of the UK and Ireland could “pose a serious threat to species”, scientists told the Guardian. Sea surface temperatures have “smashed records” for this time of the year, according to the UK Met Office, while NOAA said areas off the coast of England were 5C warmer than usual, dubbing it a “category four marine heatwave” – the most severe category and forecasted a growing threat of coral bleaching. Marine species such as fish, coral and seagrass are at high risk, CNN reported. “It is the classic combination of the underpinning of human-caused climate change with a layer of natural variation within the climate system on top,” a UK Met Office statement said. Met Office scientists pointed to a range of factors that could be contributing to the heatwave’s intensity, including high rates of human-induced warming, El Niño, less dust from the Sahara than usual and stronger shipping pollution regulations. Heatwave conditions currently stretch from southern Iceland to west Africa.

§ Spotlight

Himalayan glacier melt

Global warming’s impact on the Hindu Kush Himalaya’s cryosphere is “unprecedented and largely irreversible”, said a major new assessment by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). According to the assessment, Himalayan glaciers disappeared 65% faster in the 2010s than in the previous decade. The Himalaya’s glaciers, snow and ice provide freshwater for nearly 2bn people.

Cropped’s Aruna Chandrasekhar spoke to ICIMOD’s Dr Amina Maharjan and Dr Jakob Steiner about the implications of the report. 

CARBON BRIEF: What does this assessment mean for the livelihoods of mountain communities linked to agriculture, pastoralism and biodiversity?

DR AMINA MAHARJAN: In the mountains, there are four major sources of livelihood: agriculture, livestock, collecting medicinal and aromatic plants, and tourism. The smallest changes in the cryosphere impacts all four sectors, because they are so climate-dependent. Farmers are struggling to understand and cope with changes in the seasonal calendar. Because of extreme events and prolonged snowfall, there have been livestock and starvation deaths. Climate change is not the only driver for mountain communities abandoning agriculture or villages, but when it is directly linked to glaciers, then the attribution becomes easier. In Pakistan’s Gilgit areas and Nepal‘s Mustang district, for instance, irrigation and drinking water was directly from glaciers. So when the glaciers started to retreat, people had to relocate.

DR JAKOB STEINER: Afghanistan and its people are extremely vulnerable. [The country] is very sensitive to what is happening to snow, which is changing in a way [that is] much more difficult to predict than glaciers. In the lower parts of the Indus, sometimes multiple months there is no more fresh water in the river. Some parts of the Ganga and Brahmaputra basins are very, very vulnerable.

CB: How should policymakers respond, given the transboundary nature of the challenges?

AM: Regional cooperation at one point will become inevitable, because, without it, it will be impossible to adapt to those changes. We forget that even at the heights of geopolitical tensions, the Indus water treaty did happen and dialogue continued. If India and Pakistan can come together to cooperate, that should be possible in other regions. At ICIMOD, we are actually in a more optimistic space because we managed to bring ministers from the eight countries together in 2020 and we’ve been asked to help set up a regional mechanism, such as in the Alps or the Arctic.

CB: There were some sobering statistics in the report, so it was interesting to see you tweet “not all is dire” while introducing the report. Is there hope for the Himalaya?

JS: There are a lot of indications that things are not looking good. But the Himalaya is not a hopeless case. Scientifically, if you look at the ice mass, if you look at the Alps where I’m from, in Europe, even if we change our behaviour tomorrow, the glaciers in the Alps are gone, there’s nothing we can do, it’s too late, so to say. In the Himalaya, the situation is different: there is so much more ice, the glaciers are so much thicker. So, there is hope. It would make a difference if we limit our CO2 production tomorrow, there is actually hope for a better future 150 years from now. 

§ News and views

BONN CHALLENGED: After a shot in the arm in Sharm el-Sheikh, technical bodies at the Bonn climate talks officially established a joint work programme on climate action, agriculture and food security. However, observers said agriculture negotiations were a “major disappointment”, as countries were not able to agree on a roadmap or on workshops that will inform it. “Many parties were pushing for agroecology, but some countries [were] trying to push a horrifying buffet of corporate agriculture approaches,” Teresa Anderson of ActionAid told Carbon Brief. This included a push for AI in agriculture as well as workshops on measurement, monitoring, reporting and verification (MMRV) that the US championed, but, Anderson warns, will perpetuate existing inequities. “Corporate agriculture will be able to show digital evidence for their climate benefit, but small holder farmers can’t, so it will be the former that gets climate finance and subsidies while the latter doesn’t,” she added.

OCEANS TREATY ADOPTED: On Monday, UN member states finally adopted a historic treaty to protect oceans and sustainably use marine biodiversity, following marathon negotiations in March to arrive at an agreement. The treaty was adopted by consensus. Russia later distanced itself from the consensus, but did not demand a vote “out of respect for the position of developing countries”. Venezuela did not have a vote, but joined in the consensus as well. “The ocean is the lifeblood of our planet. And today, you have pumped new life and hope to give the ocean a fighting chance,” said UN secretary-general António Guterres, pointing to “off the charts” sea surface temperatures and threats of marine ecosystems. Chile reiterated its offer to host the secretariat for the new treaty “to bring the governance of the high seas closer to the global south”. 

UK FOOD STRATEGY BEEF: Campaigners have won the right to challenge the government over its failure to adequately consider climate change in its food strategy for England, the Guardian reported. It explained: “Ministers broke the law by failing to make plans to cut consumption of meat and dairy in England, activists will argue in a legal challenge after they were granted permission for a full judicial review of the government’s food strategy.” The government had tried to argue that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which drafted the strategy, was not bound by the obligations set out in the UK’s landmark 2008 Climate Change Act, the Guardian said. But the appeals court overturned two prior decisions, ruling that the strategy “failed to take into account ministers’ duties to cut carbon emissions”.

‘ECOCIDE’ IN UKRAINE: More than 700,000 people are in need of drinking water in Ukraine after an explosion at the Nova Kakhovka dam, which unleashed 18 cubic kilometres (4.3 cubic miles) of water, submerging villages and farmland, Al Jazeera reported. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of deliberately blowing up the dam and said the sabotage amounted to a “war crime”, “an act of terrorism” and “brutal ecocide”, Al Jazeera said. It added: “The portmanteau word, which combines ‘ecology’ and ‘genocide’, describes the wilful destruction of the environment as a weapon of war and is codified at the national level by a few states.” Russia has denied causing the explosion.

CHARCOAL CONFLICT: The president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, has issued an executive order banning the commercial production of charcoal in the north of the country, amid escalating violence between producers who rely on the practice for their livelihoods and locals concerned about deforestation and climate change, the Associated Press reported. Charcoal is a fuel created from burning wood, which is heavily relied upon for cooking and heating in sub-Saharan Africa.The ban in the country follows a climate change law, enacted in 2021, that “empowers local authorities across the country to regulate activities deemed harmful to the environment”, according to the newswire. It added: “In reality, not much has changed as charcoal producers skirt around the rules to keep supply flowing and watchful vigilantes take matters into their own hands.”

‘SUPERBUG CHICKEN’: A Polish meat giant that supplies to UK supermarkets is allegedly sourcing chicken treated with antibiotics “linked to the spread of deadly superbugs”, according to an investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The supplier, SuperDrob, supplies frozen chicken to Lidl, Asda and Iceland, according to the investigation. It added: “The company was linked to a fatal salmonella outbreak in 2020 – which TBIJ can now reveal involved bacteria resistant to multiple drugs – and there were at least 15 salmonella contaminations linked to SuperDrob poultry in the 18 months that followed.” The investigation was covered by ITV News and the Guardian.

§ Extra reading

§ New science

The colonial legacy of herbaria
Nature Human Behaviour

The impact of colonialism on the world’s understanding of plants is still being felt despite largely ending over half a century ago, new research suggested. The study examined 85m plant specimen records in 92 plant collections (“herbaria”), which are sites that are vital for the study of how plants can contribute to food security, health and climate and biodiversity goals. It found that the world regions with the highest plant diversity – which, they point out, are also the regions most affected by colonialism – are the least well represented in herbaria. The researchers concluded: “We emphasise the need for acknowledging the colonial history of herbarium collections and implementing a more equitable global paradigm for their collection, curation and use.”

Puma predation on Magellanic penguins: An unexpected terrestrial-marine linkage in Patagonia
Food Webs

A camera-trap study has, for the first time, captured pumas hunting penguins in Argentinian Patagonia, after conservation efforts in the region have helped the predator to begin to recover from human impacts. The three-month study observed 28 instances of pumas preying on Magellanic penguins in Monte León National Park along the Atlantic coast of Argentina. The researchers said the newly discovered behaviour “may have widespread ecological implications”. Magellanic penguins are considered to be “near threatened” by extinction. In the past, Patagonian puma populations crashed amid conflict between the predators and sheep farmers, but have since been aided by conservation efforts.

Changes in global food consumption increase GHG emissions despite efficiency gains along global supply chains
Nature Food

New research found that, in 2019, emissions through global food supply chains accounted for a third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, “largely triggered” by beef and dairy consumption in rapidly developing countries, while the per-capita emissions of animal-food-rich developed countries declined. The study evaluated global consumption-based food emissions between 2000 and 2019 and found that decreasing emissions intensity from land-use activities was the major factor to dampen emissions. Researchers concluded: “climate change mitigation may depend on incentivizing consumer and producer choices to reduce emissions-intensive food products”.

§ In the diary

Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to [email protected]

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