Cropped 25 October 2023: Agri-disasters costing trillions; Bankrolling deforestation; COP15 official finale

§ Key developments

Agri-disasters costing trillions

CATASTROPHE COSTS: Disasters have caused about $3.8tn worth of lost crops and livestock production over the past three decades, according to a new report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The report, the first of its kind, looked at the impact of disasters such as floods, droughts and wildfires on agriculture and food security. It highlighted proactive ways to address agrifood system risks and ways to “mainstream disaster risk management”, FAO director general Qu Dongyu said in the foreword of the report. Overall, disaster-related losses have “moderately” increased since the 1990s, the report said, but “they have become more widespread in terms of the countries and products that they affect”.

IMPACTS: Extreme temperatures and droughts “inflict the largest impact per event” according to the report. It is “essential” to look at the interconnected nature of risks, the report noted, adding: “Climate change, pandemics, epidemics and armed conflict are all affecting agricultural production, value chains and food security.” Losses of cereal, such as wheat and maize, caused by disasters amounted to an average of 69m tonnes per year over the past 30 years – around the same as all of France’s cereal production in 2021, the report said. Meat, dairy and eggs accrued around 16m tonnes in losses each year. 

FAO FALLOUT: Meanwhile, the Guardian reported that former FAO officials said they were “censored, sabotaged, undermined and victimised” for more than a decade after writing about and investigating the extent livestock contributes to methane emissions between 2006 and 2019. The allegations date back to the years after 2006 when a landmark UN report, “livestock’s long shadow”, was published. This report “pushed farm emissions on to the climate agenda for the first time”, the newspaper said, adding: “The officials described a culture in which attempts to probe the connection between livestock and climate change were discouraged and, in some cases, suppressed, and where management attempted to sabotage research and research networks.”

RECENT CHANGES: The 2006 FAO livestock report estimated that 18% of total greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock, mostly cattle. This figure was “revised downwards to 14.5% in a follow-up paper” in 2013, the Guardian said. Dr Anne Mottet, the FAO’s livestock development officer, “stressed that the changing figures reflected best practices and evolving methodologies”, the newspaper said. She told the Guardian: “Livestock is part of the FAO’s strategy on climate change and we work with governments and farmers and industry on this programme as well. We can’t ignore the main actors of the sector but there has been no particular pressure from them.” The newspaper said that the wider FAO declined to comment, along with several meat and dairy industry lobbyists. 

Bankrolling Amazon destruction

‘GREEN BONDS’ INVESTIGATION: European banks Santander and UBS have allegedly raised hundreds of millions of pounds by selling “green” bonds, but some of these funds have gone to groups linked to Amazon deforestation and human-rights abuses, according to a new investigation from Greenpeace UK’s Unearthed and O Joio e O Trigo. Unearthed reported: “Among those linked to the bonds are a farmer who allegedly held five labourers in ‘slave-like’ conditions, a soy company identified as the biggest deforester in Brazil’s Cerrado savannah, a cattle rancher fined for preventing the regeneration of 17km2 of Amazon rainforest and an ethanol producer that poisoned a river relied on by an Indigenous community.”

BANKS’ RESPONSE: According to Unearthed, the financing was made possible by tools called “CRAs”, which are bonds specifically linked to Brazilian agribusiness. A spokesperson for Santander told Unearthed that CRAs are independently regulated and that it “has strong governance processes in place to ensure that required market standards are adhered to”. A UBS spokesperson told Unearthed that the bank “does not provide finance or advisory services to companies whose primary business activity is associated with illegal logging or high conservation value forest”.

AMAZON DROUGHT: Elsewhere, unprecedented drought in the Amazon continued to intensify. Earlier this month, the Negro River – the Amazon’s second-largest tributary – reached its lowest level since official measurements began 121 years ago, the Associated Press said. Reuters reported that human faces sculpted into stone up to 2,000 years ago have appeared at the edge of the Amazon River amid extremely low water levels. Bloomberg spoke to Brazilian atmospheric scientist Prof Paulo Artaxo, who said the drought is expected to “get worse” as no rainfall is projected “in the immediate horizon”.

§ Spotlight

COP15 official finale

In this spotlight, Carbon Brief examines the reaction to the conclusion of the COP15 meetings last week in Nairobi. 

Although it has been almost one year since countries agreed to “halt and reverse” biodiversity loss by 2030, the meetings behind the UN agreement officially drew to a close last week. 

Almost every country in the world signed up to the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) at the COP15 biodiversity summit in Montreal in December 2022. 

Bernadette Fischler Hooper, the head of global advocacy at WWF International, said there “were no major breakthroughs, but also no catastrophes” at the talks. She told Carbon Brief: 

“They couldn’t finish some of the outstanding business in Montreal, so they had to reopen the COP15 here [in Nairobi]. Then there were some elections that were still to be done and some other general orders of business.” 

More than 700 people attended the meetings in Nairobi. The talks were two-fold – one was the resumed COP15 discussions and one was the 25th meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA-25). 

A number of elections were also held for different positions within the COP. 

The SBSTTA discussions brought together scientific and technical experts to give advice on the implementation of the GBF. A global review of progress, which will take place in 2026, was among the key discussion points, Fischler Hooper said. 

This review is “the equivalent of the global stocktake in the climate COPs”, she said, which will see nations assess movement toward climate goals at COP28 in Dubai this year. Fischler Hooper said: 

“The technical experts and scientific experts discussed what should be in this report. So it was very focused on what that report should contain.” 

There was “significant progress” in providing scientific, technical and technological guidance on implementation, according to the SBSTTA chair, Hesiquio Benitez, who ended his five-year run as chair last week. 

The recent assessment on invasive alien species was also discussed, alongside sustainable wildlife management plans and conservation. 

Countries welcomed the sixth assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and “expressed alarm” about the “accelerating negative impact of climate change on biodiversity”, a Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) press release said. 

The interconnected nature of climate change and biodiversity was “hotly debated”, Fischler Hooper added. Delegates approved a draft recommendation on biodiversity and climate change in Nairobi.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) continue to be a “contentious” topic causing “a lot of frustration on many sides”, Fischler Hooper said. The controversial concept was a dividing issue at previous COP15 discussions. 

NBS are essentially actions to protect, conserve and use ecosystems to address different challenges and provide benefits. (Read Carbon Brief’s Q&A on whether nature-based solutions help address climate change.)

A location has yet to be confirmed for the next UN biodiversity summit, COP16, due to take place next autumn. Turkey withdrew as host due to the three earthquakes that hit the country in February this year, killing more than 50,000 people and displacing millions. 

The CBD said discussions are being held with other potential host countries. But if no frontrunner emerges by this December, the summit will likely be held again in Montreal, where the CBD is based. 

David Cooper, the acting executive secretary of the CBD, said in a press release that the biodiversity framework is “well and truly on the way to implementation” following last week’s meetings. 

But Avaaz, the campaign group, said documents remain with “a substantial number of brackets to be sorted out and resolved” at COP16 and earlier discussions next May. 

The proposed indicators to measure implementation “risk being weak, especially for reviewing policies”, the Avaaz campaign director, Oscar Soria, said on Twitter.

§ News and views

VOICED OUT: An Australian referendum to set up an Indigenous advisory body to parliament failed with more than 60% of voters against the proposal, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. Indigenous groups described the outcome as “an unparalleled act of racism by white Australia”, according to the Guardian. The Central Land Council, one of four regional groups representing Indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory of the country, said: “We will keep fighting for equality, fighting for land, fighting for water, fighting for housing, infrastructure, good jobs, education, closing the gap – a future for our children.” (Indigenous peoples around the world play a key role in protecting as much as 80% of the world’s biodiversity.)

FOREST FOCUS: Civil-society groups are calling for “urgent” collective action to preserve three major tropical forest basins at a summit this week, Afrik 21 reported. The Three Basins summit – taking place over 26-28 October in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo – aims to bring together leaders from the Amazon, Congo and Borneo-Mekong-south-east Asia regions to form a “global coalition”. Afrik 21 said the Eboko Foundation, a Congolese organisation, posted an “online call to action” with five priority areas, including the conservation and restoration of biodiversity in these regions. Carbon Brief will publish an in-depth article on the summit after it concludes. 

‘CASH-FOR-CARBON HUSTLE’: The New Yorker has published a detailed long-read into how South Pole, the world’s largest carbon-offsetting firm based in Switzerland, “sold millions of credits for carbon reductions that weren’t real”. The article includes multiple interviews with the firm’s chief executive, Renat Heuberger, who told the publication: “We’re here to save the climate”. Previous media coverage investigating the practices of South Pole is included in Carbon Brief‘s map of the impacts of carbon-offsetting projects around the world.

‘ECO-CITY’ STAND-OFF: Around 7,500 Indigenous people could be forced off their land on the Indonesian island of Rempang to make way for a government-led “eco-city” project, BBC News reported. According to the publication, the government has secured Chinese investment to transform the island into an economic and tourist hub covering 7,000 of the island’s 17,000 hectares. The remaining 10,000 hectares will be protected forest cover, according to the plans. BBC News reported: “These ambitious plans require everyone who calls Rempang their home to leave. Many of them belong to seafaring Indigenous communities who have lived here for more than two centuries.” The broadcaster spoke to multiple families who are refusing to leave.

DELTA ‘EXTINCTION’: Coastal communities living in Nigeria’s low-lying Niger delta are at risk of “extinction” because of climate change, local civil-society groups have warned, according to a report in the Nigerian publication Business Day. It reported: “Godson Jim-Dorgu, executive director of Mac-Jim Foundation, said the coastal communities within the Niger delta would be wiped away sooner or later due to the effect of climate change.” The comments were made during a one-day meeting on climate change and gender in Port Harcourt, the capital of Nigeria’s Rivers State.

§ Watch, read, listen

MAYAN MISERY: An interactive feature from Reuters explored how climate change is contributing to hunger in Guatemala’s Mayan highlands. 

PLANET EARTH III: The first episode of the third series of Planet Earth, presented by Sir David Attenborough, is available for UK viewers on the BBC iPlayer. For those outside the UK, the trailer and other clips can be viewed on the BBC Earth YouTube channel. 

GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND: The Financial Times published an in-depth interactive exploring how the UK’s countryside might transform to meet its climate and nature goals.

FARMING WOES: Biman Mukherji, writing in the South China Morning Post, interviewed Himalayan farmers about the disruptive effects of climate change. 

§ New science

Climate casualties or human disturbance? Shrinking distribution of the three large carnivores in the Greater Himalaya
Climatic Change

A new study found that the distribution of three large animals in the Greater Himalayas has shrunk since the early 1990s. The researchers analysed the effects of habitat traits, human disturbances and climatic factors to understand the distribution changes of the common leopard, snow leopard and Asiatic black bear in an Indian national park from the early 1990s until 2016-17. They found distribution reductions for all three animals within this timeframe. Snow leopards moved upwards, away from human settlements, while the common leopard and Asiatic black bear “suffered higher rates of local extinctions at higher altitudes” and moved to lower areas with more vegetation – even if this meant they were closer to humans. 

Wilderness areas under threat from global redistribution of agriculture
Current Biology

As the climate warms, conditions suitable for growing crops are likely to shift into wilderness areas, potentially posing a new threat to these biodiversity-rich areas, new research suggested. Using climate model output and a crop suitability model, the study found that, over the next 40 years, 2.7m km2 of wilderness land will become newly suitable for agriculture – equivalent to 7% of all wilderness land outside of Antarctica. It added that the increase in potentially cultivable land in wilderness areas is “particularly acute” at higher latitudes in the global north, where 76% of wilderness areas will become suitable for growing crops. The researchers said: “Our results highlight an important and previously unidentified possible consequence of the disproportionate warming known…Without protection, the vital integrity of these valuable areas could be irreversibly lost.”

Increasing meteorological drought under climate change reduces terrestrial ecosystem productivity and carbon storage
One Earth

Increasing droughts with climate change may turn the world’s forests and plants from “a carbon sink into a carbon source [net emitter of CO2]”, a study found. The world’s “terrestrial biosphere” – plants and trees – currently absorbs around 30% of the emissions that humans release into the atmosphere, making it a carbon sink. However, increasing droughts under climate change could reduce the activity of plants, hence reducing their ability to absorb CO2. Using high-resolution climate models, the research found that drought-associated reductions in plant activity are projected to increase 2.3 times under a “sustainable development scenario” and 3.5 times under a “fossil-fuelled development scenario”. These losses are greater than the expected boost to plant growth from higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere (a phenomenon known as the “CO2 fertilisation effect”), according to the research.

§ In the diary

• 26-28 October: Three Basins Summit | Brazzaville
• 30 October-8 November: 3rd part of the 28th annual session of the International Seabed Authority | Kingston
• 31 October-2 November: World Hydropower Congress | Bali 

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]