Climate Resilience:How forward-looking organisations are taking action to mitigate the impact of climate change

Professor Jeremy B. Williams

Acting Director

Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise

Griffith Business School

South Bank Graduate Centre, 19 February 2013

Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise @APCSE

#climateresilience @APCSE

facebook.com/profjeremybwilliams

Presentation slides and Twitter back channel

1. The anthropocene

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Welcome to the Anthropocene

http://www.anthropocene.info/

https://vimeo.com/39048998

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/

August 22nd

(World Biocapacity/ World Ecological Footprint) x 365 = Ecological Debt Day

2. Defining a safe operating space for human existence

Source: Daly, H.E. (2005) ‘Economics in a full world’, Scientific American, September, p. 102.

Chinese proverb: “Better to give a man a rod than a fish”

… the supply of fishing rods is no longer the problem

It is a shortage of trees, not chainsaws, that threatens timber production

15 football pitches per day

Image source: nationalgeographic.com

• Water itself has become scarce relative to the powerful pumping technologies used to access it

The Aral Sea once the fourth largest lake in the world, continues to shrink and is now 10 percent of its original size

Examples of ecosystem services (Costanza et al 1997)

Ecosystem service Examples

Climate regulation Greenhouse gas regulation, dimethyl sulfide production affecting cloud formation.

Disturbance regulation Storm protection, flood control, drought recovery and other aspects of habitat response to environmental variability mainly controlled by vegetation structure.

Water regulation Provisioning of water for agriculture (e.g. irrigation) or industrial (e.g. milling) processes or transportation.

Water supply Provision of water by watersheds, reservoirs and aquifers.

Soil formation Weathering of rock and the accumulation of organic material.

Nutrient cycling Nitrogen fixation, nitrogen, phosphorous and other elemental or nutrient cycles.

Waste treatment Waste treatment, pollution control, and detoxification.

Pollination Provision of pollinators for the reproduction of plant populations.

Biological control Keystone predator control of prey species, reduction of herbivory (plant eating by insects) by top predators.

Food production Production of fish, game, crops, nuts, fruits etc. by hunting, gathering, subsistence farming or fishing.

Raw materials Production of lumber, fuel or fodder.

Genetic resources Medicine, products for materials science, genes for resistance to plant pathogens and crop pests, ornamental species (pets and horticultural varieties of plants).

Recreation Eco-tourism, sport fishing and other outdoor recreational activities.

Cultural Aesthetic, artistic, education, spiritual and/or scientific values of ecosystems.

Paul Hawken

‘We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it.

You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet.

At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.’

Johan Rockström, Executive Director, Stockholm Resilience Centre

http://www.ted.com/talks/johan_rockstrom_let_the_environment_guide_our_development.html

3. The climate change ‘debate’

Source: nationaljournal.tumblr.com

Sir Nicholas Stern

October 2006:“The greatest market failure the world has ever seen”

January 2013:

IPCC Fourth Assessment Report

February, 2007: Evidence of Human-caused Global Warming is ... “Unequivocal”

New colours on the temperature map

December 2012:

December 2012 was the 36th consecutive December and 334th consecutive month with global temperature higher than the 20th century average.

Source: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the US Department of Commerce

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/12

31

James L. Powell (author of The Inquisition of Climate Science) reviewed 13,950 peer-reviewed papers published between January 1991 and early November 2012, and only 24 (0.17%) clearly reject global warming or endorse a cause other than CO2 emissions for observed warming.

4. The implications of business as usual

2005: CO2 = 379ppm

350.org

36

Source: http://www.21school.ox.ac.uk/news/archive/200702_inaugural_lecture.cfm

Dr. Malte Meinshausen

Meeting the Cancun Agreement commitment

International commitment to limit global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels

Meinshausen et al calculated that to reduce the chance of exceeding 2°C warming to 20%, the global carbon budget for 2000-2050 is 886Gt CO2

Deducting emissions from the first decade of this century, leaves a budget of 565Gt CO2 for the 40 years to 2050

July 2011

The carbon budget for the 40 years to 2050 is 565Gt CO2

All of the proven reserves owned by private and public companies and governments are equivalent to 2,795Gt CO2

Only 20% of the total reserves can be burned unabated, leaving up to

80% of assets technically unburnable

http://www.carbontracker.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/08/Unburnable-Carbon-Full1.pdf

At the present rate of consumption, the 2000-2050 carbon budget will be exceeded around 2024

Bill McKibben

In 1750 (before the growth of fossil fuels) there was 2 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere. If we extracted it from the air, this the total volume of that gas. (At standard pressure and 15°C the cube is over 65 miles across.)

Since 1750 we have added another 1.5 trillion tons

Nearly 1 trillion tons of the carbon dioxide we have added is still in the atmosphere. The rest has dissolved in the oceans or been absorbed by plants and microbes.

Warming the planet by more than 2°C risks run-away climate change, and catastrophe for life on Earth. If we add any more than half a trillion tons we will exceed 2°C.

When we add up the declared reserves of fossil fuel companies, it turns out they are equivalent to 2.8 trillion tons of carbon dioxide. This is fuel we cannot afford to use.

“This shows that the fossil fuel companies have five times more carbon in their reserves than even the most conservative governments think would be safe to burn” – Bill McKibben

12 February 2013

5. Becoming climate resilient

The reaction to the Meinshausen et al (2009) paper

Web of Science: 262 citations in scientific articles

More than 600 citations in Google Scholar

Top 0.1% of cited environmental papers

Overall results widely accepted by scientific community

Silence from fossil fuel industry

Paul Gilding

Creating the next industrial revolution

Radical resource productivity

Biomimicry

Service and flow economy

Investing in natural capital

See, also by Paul Hawken, (1994) The Ecology of Commercewww.naturalcapitalism.org

Paul Hawken, Amory and L. Hunter Lovins propose 4 central strategies of natural capitalism:

Nick Robins, Head of the Climate Change Centre at HSBC Bank, London, on the impact in Europe of a deflating carbon bubble:

Could nearly halve the value of coal assets on the London exchange, and knock three-fifths from the value of oil and gas companies.

“At the moment this risk is not being priced at all”

“The average pension fund invests about 55 per cent of its portfolio in high-carbon intensive industries and only 2 per cent in their low carbon counterparts.

How are they going to manage the risk of catastrophic climate change going forward? The best way is to put a higher percentage of their funds in low carbon-intensive industries.”

John Hewson

Asset Owners Disclosure Project (AODP)

http://www.kpmg.com/AU/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Documents/is-natural-capital-a-material-issue.pdf

http://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/files/prep-value-chain-climate-resilience.pdf

http://www.greenbiz.com/research/report/2013/02/state-green-business-report-2013

‘For the purpose of attaining freedom in the world of nature, man must use natural science to understand, conquer and change nature and thus attain freedom from nature.’

Speech at the inaugural meeting of the Natural Science Research Society of the Border Region (February 5, 1940).

Chairman Mao

Gaia 1-0 China

January 2013: Beijing air pollution off the scale

Gaia 1-0 USA

October 2012: Superstorm Sandy

Long term prosperity needs resilience not just efficiency

The key to sustainability lies in enhancing the resilience of communities, not in optimising isolated parts of the system

Need to think in terms of social-ecological systems

Build in redundancy to stay within known thresholds

Walker & Salt (2006)

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