UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Thursday, June 15, that countries must start phasing out oil, coal and gas – not just emissions – and demanded that fossil fuel companies “cease and desist” measures that aim to hobble progress on the issue.

Some Western governments and climate-afflicted island nations agree, but the oil-producing United Arab Emirates, host of COP28, says the talks should focus on phasing out emissions. Nevertheless, the UAE’s incoming COP28 president said last week the phasedown of the fuels themselves was inevitable.

The United Nations climate change body said the Bonn talks closed on Thursday with progress on the issues of financing measures to mitigate climate change; the question of liability for the loss and damage it has caused; and funding for measures to adapt to its effects. But it did not specify what had been decided.

The meeting is seen as a mid-way check-in to prepare decisions for adoption at COP28, which begins on November 30.

The landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement set a 1.5ºC increase in the global surface temperature as a limit for averting the most catastrophic effects of global warming in the industrial era – a threshold already close to being crossed.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) said delegates in Bonn had laid the groundwork for more ambitious action.

“From what I have seen and heard, there are bridges that can be built to realize the common ground we know exists,” UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said late on Thursday.

But activists accused the US, Britain and the European Union of trying to divert discussions away from their legal accountability for climate change.

And they said rich industrialized countries were pushing developing countries to commit to measures such as expanding renewable sources of power without taking into account their inability to pay for them.

The UNFCCC said climate finance was among the topics heavily discussed in Bonn.

Environmentalists did, however, welcome new UNFCCC requirements for participants in the UN process to disclose their affiliation, a step aimed at curbing the influence of fossil fuel industry lobbyists. – Rappler.com

After raising 113,000 pounds ($141,000), partly through crowdfunding publicized by sleeping on their roof for three cold, winter weeks, artist couple Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell have arranged for solar panels to be installed on dozens of houses on their street.

“If you can create an offer where you actually are saying: ‘Look, let’s just bypass a broken political system and let’s do something directly ourselves together,’ that’s quite an attractive offer to make to people,” said Edelstyn. Together with Powell, he spent a year convincing neighbors to join the project.

In Waltham Forest, the London borough where the artist couple lives, fuel poverty – meaning households cannot afford to keep their homes at an adequate temperature – is at the third highest level in the capital.

That makes the project particularly valuable for its residents, many of whom live in Victorian-era housing that can be poorly insulated and use more energy.

Ejaz Hussein, who has lived on the street for 45 years, said he was “quite delighted” by the project that he estimates will cut his electricity bill by 70%.

“First of all, it’s good for the environment. And second thing, I can’t afford electricity anymore,” the father of two said. “So that will really help as I’m struggling.”

Households powered by solar panel-derived electricity draw less power from the national grid, cutting energy bills, and they can also sell any excess energy back.

Industry analysts say community projects tend to be more efficient than individual solar installations as costs fall with scale.

‘Big changes need to happen’

The solar panels are being installed by Octopus Energy, which says it is doing the work at cost rather than at any profit, to help raise awareness of the need for adaption to renewable energy, which is carbon-free but is intermittent, meaning it can causes problems for the grid.

“It’s not just a UK problem. This is a global problem: how we move to renewables. Big changes need to happen,” Rebecca Dibb-Simkin, chief product officer at Octopus Energy, said.

“Communities are kind of almost forcing the hand of grids…. This is people coming together and saying we want power in this way.”

Britain’s energy regulator Ofgem said last month it was launching a policy review to speed up the connection of low-carbon energy schemes to the electricity transmission grid.

Edelstyn and Powell said they want their street to inspire others, not just to bring down bills and reduce carbon emissions, but to help drive community action, which in Britain has lost momentum.

Community projects growth slowed to 2.4% in 2022, after doubling in size each year between 2014 and 2017, according to advocacy group Community Energy England.

“We just want people to be able to access the finance that they need if they want to try and retrofit their house and decarbonize their street, and we want it to be simple and straightforward,” Edelstyn said. – Rappler.com

$1 = 0.7879 pounds

Aviation, which produces around 2% of the world’s emissions, is considered one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize and the International Air Transport Association (IATA), grouping 300 airlines and representing about 80% of global traffic, said governments, planemakers, and regulators must all help.

“We are totally committed to achieving our net zero targets in 2050,” IATA director general Willie Walsh said at the end of a three-day summit in Istanbul.

“Everybody’s going to have to play their part,” Walsh told a news conference, listing players from governments to planemakers and airports who would have to “raise the bar to work with us to ensure that we can achieve what is an absolute critical goal.”

IATA’s annual meeting also brought stark evidence of a consumer recovery as many airlines voiced interest in ordering new jets to lock in scarce production slots and meet higher-than-expected demand with modern fleets.

Environmental groups say such rapid growth is at odds with the industry’s commitments on emissions, but suppliers say the most recent available jetliners provide the most efficient starting point to take advantage of alternative new fuels.

‘We’re serious’

Pressure is growing on aviation to limit carbon emissions amid low supplies of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), currently accounting for only 0.1% of airline consumption.

Airlines are relying for 62% of their emissions reduction target on the fuel, which is currently between two to four times more expensive than kerosene.

But they oppose EU-style mandates and are calling for output incentives like those introduced by the United States.

“It’s hard to take IATA’s environmental targets seriously when they have a track record of criticizing…policies that will enable clean technologies like the EU’s SAF mandate,” Jo Dardenne of environmental group Transport and Environment said.

Tim Clark, president of Dubai’s Emirates, which recently announced a $200-million aviation sustainability fund, insisted the industry was taking commitments seriously.

“We’re serious, we’re putting money into it. We’re not technologists. We will operate our fleet as best, as efficiently as we can,” he told reporters.

But Clark, whose airline will host the next IATA meeting in Dubai next June, warned other carriers against complacency.

“We need to do something more than moan and groan and say ‘it’s not fair, we can only do what we are doing,'” Clark said.

Walsh said airlines were not afraid to confront the fact that their share of total emissions will rise as other industries with fewer technological hurdles decarbonize.

“It’s not about moaning. It’s about the reality…it is not good enough for everybody else to join us and say yes, we agree. They need to join us and say yes, we agree and here’s what we’re going to do.”

But Walsh hinted airlines needed more time to reach consensus on interim targets, after their emissions pledge in 2021 was clouded by disagreements seen as an echo of wider climate talks.

“Different parts of the world are moving at different paces and for us, representing global airlines, we’ve got to factor all of that into account.”

One thing airlines agreed on was frustration at aircraft delays, which have disrupted their schedules, with chief executives asking IATA to lobby planemakers.

In practice, a senior aircraft industry source told Reuters, airlines with the biggest order books and clout would be able to cut the best deals and shortest additional waiting times. – Rappler.com

Its announcement has led to death threats to local representatives, burning of street poles, and shouting town hall meetings, while fake news about “climate confinement” circulated by anti-vaccinationists, an anti-feminist Canadian psychologist, 1990s British pop idols, and a former Trump adviser and ringleader of the climate change denialist movement. 

The debate over “traffic filters” – restrictions on private cars on certain streets at specific times – began as an ordinary public dispute between shopkeepers, councilors, and transport experts over how to ease traffic and limit carbon emissions in a university city of 150,000 people, with almost no pedestrian crossings and narrow streets built before cars existed. But in recent months the tone and scope of the controversy have turned Oxford into an unexpectedly dark battlefront that shows how climate change misinformation travels.

“Hello, guinea pig,” reads a leaflet handed out a few days ago through Oxford’s letterboxes, with a coat of arms like the city’s but with a guinea pig in the center instead of an ox. A three-page text claims that because of a “United Nations” plan in Oxford, it will be very difficult to “visit your mother in residence” or “take your children to a nice park on the other side of the city on a sunny day.” “Say goodbye to meals on the go at the pub by the river or to spontaneous surprise visits to a sick friend to walk their dog,” says the climate change denial letter, which is signed by a group called Not Our Future.

The leaflets have been distributed by local musicians and reality TV stars Fred and Richard Fairbrass, among others. The denialist group is made up of activists who started out protesting against pandemic health measures, moved on to anti-vaccine messages, and are now focused on what they call “climate lock-in.” Some also often repeat the Kremlin’s arguments “against Western domination” to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The distribution of the guinea pig shield leaflets was filmed by Rebel News, a Canadian streaming channel that was born in 2015.

The plan

Oxford’s traffic filters will mean that – in the middle of the day on key roads into and out of the city center – only a few private cars will be allowed to circulate. The plan is to install cameras that can read number plates, detect if cars without exceptions are breaking the rules, and send them home with a £70 fine (about 80 euros).

The aim is to ease traffic congestion and make it easier for buses and other forms of transport to pass. In London, these restrictions have been tested in 46 zones and more than 400 streets. They have reduced traffic and have not increased congestion in adjacent streets, according to a study, but some restrictions have been lifted because of complaints from neighbors and shops. In Oxford, some shopkeepers complain that fewer customers will come from the suburbs or other locations and that there has not been enough public consultation or reinforcement of services.

It is not yet clear when the scheme will be launched: it was planned for January 2024, but some works on a bridge near the railway station mean it is likely to be postponed. In any case, it is a pilot test for about six months before a more conclusive decision is made. 

Across the Atlantic

Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist, professor, and far-right “hero” for his crusades against feminism and vaccines, has called the plan a “fascist madness” that will stop the UK from being “a free country.” A few weeks ago, Peterson tweeted on his account of more than 3.7 million followers that the Oxford project was “a well-documented plot” whereby “tyrannical idiot bureaucrats can decide by decree where you are allowed to drive.” He described it as a plot by the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.

A few weeks earlier, Steve Milloy, an American lawyer and activist, spread the fake news that in Oxford “residents will be locked into their neighborhoods with no traffic allowed in or out” with a link to an article in the local Oxford Mail newspaper. He used the term “climate lock-in,” which he has helped to spread with negative connotations since 2021.

Milloy was part of Donald Trump’s transition team in 2016, has served as a commentator against “junk science” on Fox News, and is a board member of the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based far-right think-tank that worked for the tobacco company Philip Morris to discredit scientific studies on the harm of tobacco, and now questions climate change. 

Milloy is influential in a low-key fashion, according to Jennie King, an academic specialized in climate and vaccine disinformation at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an anti-polarisation research and activism organization based in London and Berlin.

“His own digital footprint has a fairly low impact – a few ‘likes’ and little else. But Milloy plays a very important role as a creator of content, which is then picked up by actors who have a much larger audience and the ability to attract a wider public. Milloy and the Heartland Institute originate part of the language that is then used by media outlets and other actors with verified accounts that can go viral.

King is surprised they got as far as the Oxford case. Still, she says these groups are disciplined in their pursuit of topical issues: “They seize the opportunity…. They’re always looking for entry points into the news cycle to convey this world view and their position to the widest possible audience.” 

In the UK, the closest thing to the Heartland Institute is called the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a group founded by Nigel Lawson, a Tory and finance minister under Margaret Thatcher, UK prime minister from 1979-1990, and which lobbies against the climate policy of his own party’s government.

“Both organizations play a central role in creating a semblance of credibility for climate denialism,” King explains. “They have a very well-developed media network within the UK, in particular, to present these views to a mainstream audience,” with outlets such as the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and the GB News streaming channel. “You don’t need to have a critical mass of MPs within the House of Commons who oppose the zero emissions agenda. All you need is a small cohort of actors who are very loquacious and skilled at getting press coverage. They will then dominate the news cycle and create the impression among the public that there is wider support for their position.”

Astounding reach

Tim Schwanen, professor and director of Transport Studies in the Faculty of Geography and Environment at Oxford University, has been studying urban transport policy for a decade, so the fact that there is controversy in the city doesn’t surprise him because “parking” is “one of the hot potatoes that quickly become explosive at a local level.” 

“What has surprised me is the wider traction the Oxford case has had beyond the local context with far-right groups,” Schwanen tells elDiario.es. “A lot of right-wing movements in the US have been involved, where people are talking and sharing misinformation about what is happening in Oxford.” 

The professor has attended a couple of briefings organized by the county as an independent expert and has also witnessed shouting among the public, although he says he has not received threats like local officials and representatives, who have reported “more extreme” attacks to the police.

In fact, it all started with an idea from the government of Boris Johnson, the British prime minister who resigned in 2022, where green transition aid was approved at the start of the pandemic. Oxford decided to try limiting traffic on some streets, encouraged by the availability of public money.

Professor Schwanen says that councils across the country rushed to take advantage of the funding available in 2020 and 2021 after a decade of Tory government cuts, and also that this funding was a waiver that has not solved the shortage. “There is hardly any money to do more than the bare minimum in terms of road maintenance and some basic transport interventions”, he says.

Traffic is Oxford’s most immediate focus. “The road capacity simply cannot cope with the current traffic,” explains the professor, who highlights the physical problem beyond pollutant emissions, as the typical family car is 40 centimeters wider than it was back in 1980 for streets that are the same. “Even if all cars became electric overnight and the carbon problems caused by traffic largely disappeared, all the other problems would remain. The city would be just as congested as it is now. Road safety, especially for pedestrians and cyclists, would not improve”, says the professor.

But Schwanen also says retailers are correct that the city and county have not made enough of an effort to listen to their complaints or explain the incentives. “If you just reduce car use without providing people with adequate alternatives for travel, you make life more difficult for businesses,” he says. He also points out that, from experience in other cities, businesses often overestimate the negative impacts of these measures and then “nine out of 10” are happy with changes that bring more customers when the streets are nicer. 

The reasoned complaints from shopkeepers have been mixed with misinformation about climate confinement, coming not only from distant campaigners but also from local deniers, such as Piers Corbyn, a 75-year-old meteorologist, brother of former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and organizer of protests against the pandemic and vaccine restrictions. 

Corbyn’s case is no exception, as many anti-vaccine campaigners have now turned to the fight against climate policies. King, the fake news expert, blames the growth of these groups on the pandemic: “It had the effect of boosting an already well-developed disinformation ecosystem. Disinformation thrives in times of public crisis. And the pandemic has had profound collateral effects, not just the economic downturn, but also changes in the workforce, in health, in people’s relationships…. It acted as a crucible that caused a series of online harms, such as misinformation and the radicalization of people who believe in conspiracy theories.” 

The craziest meeting

Piers Corbyn was one of the speakers at the full council meeting that approved the plan in November 2022 after hectic sessions often punctuated by shouts from the attendants and fights for the microphone. 

Zuhura Plummer, a graphic designer who lives in Oxford and is now campaigns director for Oxfordshire Liveable Streets, an organization that advocates for public spaces with fewer cars, recalls one such meeting that left her shocked in a city where Greens and Labour win elections by a landslide and there is not a single Conservative councilor.

“I thought I would arrive and find people asking for more traffic limits and more spaces for cyclists. Instead, it was full of people against it,” she tells elDiario.es. “It was the craziest public meeting I’ve ever been to. People were shouting and screaming, taking off their microphones and shouting at the councilors, who had to be escorted out the back”. Some of the attendees repeated messages about dystopia, totalitarianism, and globalism found on networks.

“This whole conspiracy theory to me clearly demonstrates that city councils have to change the way they communicate. When there is an emptiness of information, or people hear bits and pieces of things and don’t hear it all, or don’t understand it, that gives a lot of space for lies and conspiracy to grow. And once those lies and conspiracies are out there, it’s very difficult to undo them,” says Plummer. 

Following the death threats against local representatives, the fake news campaign that has reached as far as Australia and the burning of poles in protest, Oxfordshire County has published a question-and-answer guide and an explanatory video focused on debunking the falsehoods about the “confinement” of Oxford into “six boroughs,” which was a description that appeared in The Sunday Times newspaper and became popular because it was reminiscent of the sci-fi saga The Hunger Games. But many feel it has been too little too late.

Shopkeepers complaints

Among the small traders who have voiced their opposition is Fraser Lloyd Jones, owner of Barefoot, a cake shop with wooden seats, vases of tulips, and hand-written messages encouraging people to drink water on the walls.

“The filters will create chaos in the ring road and outlying areas, so the city center will become a ‘no-go’ zone. Many of our customers live in Oxford, but use the car to pick up cakes,” Jones tells elDiario.es. One of his two cake shops is on a pedestrianized street since 2021, but he says that in this case it has had no discouraging effect on visitors because it is not an essential thoroughfare and there are places nearby to park and pick up cakes. Jones stresses that he is in favor of measures to promote cycling and public transport, and suggests making parking cheaper for drivers to leave their cars before entering the center.

“Bike, bus, and pedestrian routes have to be in place before any restrictions are implemented. Simply closing roads doesn’t work,” says Jones. He also says he is wary of “militant avenues,” such as guinea pig leaflets, and prefers “intelligent arguments.”

Burning poles

There are no physical barriers in the Oxford plan, but, since one of the fake news stories says there will be, one of the ways of protesting has focused on burning street poles or stealing them.

The burning of poles has occurred in Cowley Road, a neighborhood heavily populated by student flats, a destination for immigrants in the last century, and home to Oxford’s largest mosque, which has complained that it has not been sufficiently consulted about plans that may affect its visitors. 

Incidents in the streets with traffic restrictions are recurring. Recently, a group of mothers reported the theft of a plastic pole by a man in a van as students were leaving school. 

Just at the beginning of Cowley, there is a giant banner on the building of the CoCo restaurant, which has a terrace on a pedestrian street and whose owner is protesting against the future restrictions, which he calls “the last nail in the coffin” of the neighborhood. Clinton Pugh, who owns three restaurants on the street, says his business is in crisis, and he has had to ask his daughter, actress Florence Pugh (star of Little Women), for money. According to him, fewer customers will come if there are limits on cars.

Two of the city’s major employers, Oxford University and the Oxford Bus Company, have supported the plan. But some prominent businessmen are campaigning against it. 

Jeremy Mogford, owner of two five-star hotels and three restaurants, is raising money to go to court. The bill at one of his restaurants comes with a poster inviting donations to the cause against traffic restrictions, which Mogford has likened to the Berlin Wall. 

In a statement in November, he said he supports emission reduction measures and public transport, but asks for more time and help. He complains, for example, that tourists staying at his hotel in central Oxford and arriving by car from Heathrow Airport (the main London Airport, which is an hour and a half away by road and connected to the city by train and bus) will have to take an alternative route which he says will add traffic to another already congested street. Mogford did not respond to the questions from elDiario.es. 

Zuhura Plummer, the Oxfordshire Livable Streets campaigner, says Mogford is quieter since the leafleting and transnational campaigning by far-right and anti-vaccine groups. “I think he doesn’t want to be associated with these sorts of people. There may also be an element of class…. It’s a problem for a well-established business,” he says. 

One of the effects of the more aggressive campaign is that neighbors who didn’t have an opinion on the issue or Labour politicians who advocated the use of the car have moved to support the restrictions because they don’t want to be associated with the more extreme. “It’s become an identity thing. Like, ‘If all these horrible people are against traffic filters, then I’m for it,’” says Plummer.

In the meantime, he says his organization has received more money from big donors as well: “They’ve realized what’s in all this climate change denial, and they’ve seen Oxford as a place on the front line.”

This story was originally published on elDiario.es and is republished within the Human Journalism Network program, supported by the ICFJ (International Center for Journalists).

María Ramírez is deputy editor of elDiario.es and an international correspondent based in the UK. Co-founder of El Español and Politibot. She has collaborated with the Washington Post, Nieman Reports, and the Atlantic.

The plan, which has not previously been reported, was sent to the world’s governments ahead of the “Summit for a New Global Financing Pact” in Paris in June by the Bridgetown Initiative spearheaded by Barbados leader Mia Mottley.

The idea, in a consultation document dated April 2023, would rely on the firepower of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other multilateral development banks (MDBs), and forms part of growing efforts to reform the international financial system.

It would see the IMF and other MDBs “cut the excessive macro-risk premia on developing countries with $100 billion per year of foreign exchange guarantees,” for financing in more volatile domestic currencies rather than the dollar or euro.

The guarantees would be for “just green transition investments,” which one source involved in the plans said could include “green” bonds focused on environmentally friendly projects as a well as others such as ocean-focused “blue” bonds and sustainability-linked bonds.

Their benefit is that the MDBs would step in and compensate international buyers of those bonds if the country involved devalued its currency and effectively cut the dollar-value of its bond payments.

By removing that risk for investors, it should significantly reduce the rates of interest the governments have to pay. For some it could even be the boost needed to regain access to global capital markets lost during the COVID pandemic.

A report released at the COP27 climate talks suggested developing countries would need $1 trillion a year in public and private money annually by 2030 to tackle global warming, yet to-date capital flows are just a fraction of what is needed.

A report by the World Bank and other big multilateral lenders said they gave $51 billion in 2021 alongside $13 billion from private finance.

The Paris summit, hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron on June 22 to 23, will be attended by a number of world leaders and representatives from flagship global institutions such as the IMF and United Nations.

Outlines of the proposals have been sent to the key groups preparing the discussions over the last couple of weeks.

Call to arms

As well as the currency idea, the document also gives more detail on the main objectives of Version 2.0 of the Bridgetown Initiative, which has become a heavyweight voice over the last 18 months in global climate and sustainability discussions.

“This is a call to arms” the source said, referring to the document and its intention to galvanize more concrete action from the IMF and multilateral lenders.

After a slow start, the idea that fundamental change is needed to help more money flow to developing countries in the fight against climate change has picked up steam in the last year and was a key focus of global climate talks in November.

Since then, the World Bank has appointed a new President, former Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga, and released a reform plan that would boost lending by $5 billion a year, although Mottley and others want the system to go much further.

The proposals put forward in the April document, which also include redistributing other IMF money, are likely to form a key part of the negotiating position of developing countries at the next round of annual climate talks in Dubai later this year. – Rappler.com

The meeting on Tuesday, May 23, highlighted the growing tension Shell and its peers face as they try to navigate growing investor pressure to accelerate their shift away from oil and gas while other shareholders focus on profit after record earnings last year.

Shell’s climate strategy resolution won 80% support from voting shareholders, according to preliminary results, in line with last year.

A shareholder resolution filed by activist group Follow This, calling on Shell to set more ambitious targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, won support from a fifth of the voters, also unchanged from a similar resolution last year.

The activist resolution echoes a Dutch court ruling demanding that Shell ramp up its climate targets. Shell has launched an appeal against the ruling.

“The silent majority is being very clear with us as to their expectations…[to] find a balanced transition,” chief executive Wael Sawan told reporters after the meeting.

Shell aims to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 and has set several short- and medium-term emission targets but has so far rejected calls to set 2030 goals to reduce absolute emissions.

Sawan, who has signaled that Shell is reviewing plans to reduce oil output, is set to announce a strategy update next month.

Stage storming

The meeting started after an hour’s delay caused by repeated disruptions by protesters who were carried out by dozens of security staff.

Security staff formed a human chain on stage to shield Sawan, chairman Andrew Mackenzie, and company directors after a group of protesters attempted to storm the stage.

“Go to hell, Shell, and don’t you come back no more,” a choir of about a dozen protesters sang as they called for Shell to stop producing fossil fuels, with Sawan and Mackenzie watching.

“We’ve heard this point many times now,” Mackenzie told the protesters. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have this debate rather than saying the same thing over and over again.”

He added that Shell’s investment in lower-carbon solutions that earn smaller returns than oil and gas projects shows it is taking climate change seriously.

Shell, which reported a record $40-billion profit last year, and other major hydrocarbon producers argue that they have to help cover ever-increasing demand for oil and gas.

A company spokesperson said the protesters were “not interested in constructive engagement.”

Scientists say the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 43% from 2019 levels by 2030 to stand a chance of meeting the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping warming to less than 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels. – Rappler.com

When the heat rises, the metal blackens. Plastic pearls become unglued.

“The color of the jewel starts to fade as it becomes hotter, making it worthless and akin to junk,” said the 56-year-old mother of four, on a late April day when temperatures simmered around 38 Celsius (100F) in the western city of Ahmedabad.

Climate change drove heat in the city to a record-breaking 48ºC (118F) in 2016. Last year, it peaked at nearly 46ºC (114.8F).

Such high temperatures could mean a hit to business. But Patni is now among 21,000 self-employed women in Gujarat state enrolled in one of the world’s first insurance schemes for extreme heat, launched this month by nonprofit Arsht-Rock Foundation Resilience Center in partnership with microinsurance startup Blue Marble and a trade union.

If temperatures climb high enough above historical averages and linger there for three days, she’ll receive a small payout to help cope and compensate lost income.

While traditional insurance can take months to pay, with so-called “parametric” insurance there is no need to prove losses. It can pay within days of a trigger being reached – a predetermined threshold beyond which conditions are considered extreme. Payments can be set to things like wind speeds or rainfall.

This form of disaster assistance is on the rise across the developing world, as vulnerable communities are hammered by worsening drought, storms and heatwaves.

But with climate change happening faster and causing more damage than scientists had predicted – and too little money being spent on protecting populations – such projects could struggle over the longer-term, according to more than 20 industry experts consulted by Reuters.

Reinsurer Swiss RE reported that sales of parametric product jumped 40% between 2021 and August 2022. Insurance analysts at Allied Market Research estimate the market, valued at $11.7 billion in 2021, could reach $29.3 billion by 2031.

At annual climate talks in Egypt last year, nonprofits urged richer nations to help finance parametric insurance as a way of compensating victims of worsening weather extremes.

It is still somewhat niche “but it’s growing,” said Ekhosuehi Iyahen, secretary general of the Insurance Development Forum, an industry-led group that promotes insurance for non-traditional markets.

The past year has seen new products rolled out across Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. The UN Capital Development Fund, for example, recently developed parametric policies for Vanuatu, Tonga, and Fiji covering cyclone damage.

Limits

While parametric insurance has been around since the 1990s, recent advances in satellite technologies have opened up areas that were previously difficult to assess for damage, such as distant islands or mountain communities.

However, some industry experts question whether the products will be financially viable in the long-run, in part because of too-frequent payouts due to climate risks escalating faster than predicted less than a decade ago. This could drive up premiums.

Some schemes have already fizzled. The Kenya Livestock Insurance Program, for example, supported pastoralists hit by drought with 1.2 billion Kenyan shillings ($8.8 million) in payouts between 2015 and 2021. But with just 1.1 billion ($8.1 million) shillings collected in premiums, the scheme operated at a loss and was replaced this year with another that offers other financial savings products alongside insurance.

At the moment, insurance schemes in the developing world are largely subsidized by nonprofit groups, national governments, or wealthy countries.

Many of the programs aspire to have policyholders eventually cover more if not all of the premium. But worsening extremes could make that difficult, said resilience researcher Viktor Roezer of the London School of Economics, noting the programs could just become a “different channel for aid.”

Interviews with more than a dozen groups involved in such insurance found that most products launched in the last five years had already paid out.

The products need to “geographically diversify – we have to have schemes spread out in different areas” to dilute the risk, said Jaime de Pinies, CEO of the Blue Marble group that developed the Gujarat heat program, as well as others in Colombia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

Adapt

One way of avoiding constant payouts, industry analysts say, is for governments to implement better strategies to defend against weather extremes, for example by planting crops more resilient to drought or building cooler homes to protect against rising heat, thus slashing losses. This could allow insurers to set triggers higher.

“The beauty of the parametric is that it pays so quickly and it’s incredibly flexible,” said Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Arsht-Rock Foundation Resilience Center which is covering the $10.30 per person premium in Gujarat.

“But it needs to be paired with actions or tools that reduce the risk.”

Investment in boosting resilience remains marginal in most developing economies, with financing promised by richer countries not yet fully materializing.

Donor nations mobilized just $29 billion in 2020 to help poorer countries adapt to a warmer world — far below the $340 billion estimated by the UN Environment Programme to be needed each year by 2030.

“In most cases, there is zero adaptation spend,” said CEO Jonathan Gonzales of parametric start-up Raincoat, which has deployed five projects in Colombia, Mexico, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.

Heat impacts

Across the world, heatwaves that once had a 1-in-10 chance of occurring in any given year prior to the industrial revolution are now nearly three times as likely, and 1.2ºC (2.2F) hotter, according to a 2022 study in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Scientists expect things to get worse, with such heatwaves becoming nearly six times as likely if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated and the world reaches 2ºC (3.6F) of warming, the study found.

In the case of the Gujarat heat scheme, insured by ICICI Bank with the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) as the group policyholder, the calculation determining the trigger varies across five districts. It is based on temperature expectations from historical trends over six 10-day assessment cycles.

In Ahmedabad, for example, payouts occur when temperatures add up to between 134ºC (273ºF) and 138ºC (280ºF) over the course of three days, assessed using satellite data. The policy can pay out multiple times, to a maximum of $85.

“For vulnerable women on the margins, enduring extreme temperatures for three days directly amplifies the chances of sickness or death,” said Sahil Hebbar, a physician attending to the women in SEWA who work jobs in construction, trash collecting and shipbreaking.

Insurance payouts allow them to buy things like gloves to protect their hands from scorching hot metal tools, or fans to stay cool and avoid heat exhaustion.

Had the insurance scheme been in place last year, it would have led to averaged payouts of $28 per person, said Blue Marble’s de Pinies.

Sitting with her jewel in the market, Patni said if temperatures climbed higher she would put payout money toward medicine to help with heat-related headaches.

“I spend 15 hours at the stall everyday…in summers it becomes difficult to stay here,” she said.

Across the city, Heena Kamlesh Parmar, 26, works as a daily wage laborer at a construction site where she is building a high-rise residential complex, earning 350 rupees ($4.25) per day.

The heat makes her want to take a break from hauling bricks to rest in shade, she said, but she fears that could lead to a pay cut.

If she receives a payout, Parmar says, she’ll “use it to buy things for my house, things to eat.” – Rappler.com

A team of international researchers reported that some of the world’s most important freshwater sources – from the Caspian Sea between Europe and Asia to South America’s Lake Titicaca – lost water at a cumulative rate of around 22 gigatonnes per year for nearly three decades. That’s about 17 times the volume of Lake Mead, the United States’ largest reservoir.

Fangfang Yao, a surface hydrologist at the University of Virginia who led the study in the journal Science, said 56% of the decline in natural lakes was driven by climate warming and human consumption, with warming “the larger share of that.”

Climate scientists generally think that the world’s arid areas will become drier under climate change, and wet areas will get wetter, but the study found significant water loss even in humid regions. “This should not be overlooked,” Yao said.

Scientists assessed almost 2,000 large lakes using satellite measurements combined with climate and hydrological models.

They found that unsustainable human use, changes in rainfall and run-off, sedimentation, and rising temperatures have driven lake levels down globally, with 53% of lakes showing a decline from 1992 to 2020.

Nearly 2 billion people, who live in a drying lake basin, are directly affected and many regions have faced shortages in recent years.

Scientists and campaigners have long said it is necessary to prevent global warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change. The world is currently warming at a rate of around 1.1ºC (1.9ºF).

Thursday’s study found unsustainable human use dried up lakes, such as the Aral Sea in Central Asia and the Dead Sea in the Middle East, while lakes in Afghanistan, Egypt and Mongolia were hit by rising temperatures, which can increase water loss to the atmosphere.

Water levels rose in a quarter of the lakes, often as a result of dam construction in remote areas such as the Inner Tibetan Plateau. – Rappler.com

This does not mean the world would cross the long-term warming threshold of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

But a year of warming at 1.5°C could offer a glimpse of what crossing that longer term threshold, based on the 30-year global average, would be like.

With a 66% chance of temporarily reaching 1.5°C by 2027, “it’s the first time in history that it’s more likely than not that we will exceed 1.5°C,” said Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at Britain’s Met Office Hadley Centre, who worked on the WMO’s latest Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update.

Last year’s report put the odds at about 50-50.

Even temporarily reaching 1.5°C is “an indication that as we start having these years with 1.5°C happening more and more often, than we are getting closer to having the actual long-term climate be on that threshold,” said Leon Hermanson, also of the Met Office Hadley Centre.

It also means the world has failed to make sufficient progress on slashing climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Partially responsible for boosting the chance of soon hitting 1.5°C is an El Niño weather pattern expected to develop in the coming months. During El Niño, warmer waters in the tropical Pacific heat the atmosphere above, lifting global temperatures.

The El Niño “will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a press statement. (READ: EXPLAINER: What’s the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C of global warming?)

A mid-year switch to El Niño is worrying scientists across the world. The weather phenomenon, while distinct from climate change, is likely to boost extremes and bring warmer weather to North America and drought to South America, with the Amazon at greater risk of bad fires.

The likelihood of temporarily exceeding 1.5°C has increased over time. Scientists had estimated just a 10% chance of hitting 1.5°C between 2017 and 2021, for example.

Unlike the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s climate projections, which are based on future greenhouse gas emissions, the WMO update provides more of a prediction-based long-range weather forecast.

The WMO also found a 98% chance that one of the next five years will be the hottest on record, surpassing 2016 which saw a global temperature impacted by about 1.3°C (2.3°F) of warming.

“This report must be a rallying cry to intensify global efforts to tackle the climate crisis,” said Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace UK. – Rappler.com

More than 100 sheep and a few goats graze twice a week at the Rogane solar farm near the small town of Kamenica in eastern Kosovo where more than 12,000 photovoltaic panels are installed.

“The workers realized that mowing the fields was very hard, they asked me whether I could bring my sheep,” said 72-year-old shepherd Rexhep Rrudhani as he ordered his sheepdogs to maneuver the flock grazing under the panels.”The sheep eat all kind of grass here, good or bad grass, and they clean everything. We are all benefiting.”

Kosovo has between 12-14 billion tons of proven low-grade lignite coal reserves, the fifth largest in the world. More than 90% of its electricity is produced from coal and the rest is from renewables, mainly wind and solar.

The country aims to phase out coal by 2050.

“We are not spending any petrol running lawnmowers,” said Arber Maliqi, manager of the solar plant. “Producing power from the sun and cutting grass with sheep means things here go green twice.” – Rappler.com