In today’s edition: |
🇧🇷 A new Brazilian president
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⛵️ A shipping milestone |
🌍 COP27 Update
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💼 Big Business (1-minute read) |
Indonesia to pay fishers to collect plastic rubbish at sea |
Indonesia is one of the world’s biggest contributors to marine plastic pollution, with 10% of the nation’s 6.8mn tonnes of plastic waste produced annually ending up in the ocean. To cut marine plastic waste by 70%, the Indonesian government launched a program paying individual fishers to collect rubbish every day throughout October. The government will pay each fisher around 150,000 rupiahs ($10) per week to compensate for not fishing during the period - slightly above the $9 per week estimate they earn from fishing. |
No silver bullet: The bottom-up approach to ocean clean-up is uniquely suited to Indonesia, where 95% of all fishing activities are small-scale. However, these interventions won’t be effective in regions where large-scale fisheries are the norm (due to a lack of participation), so additional taxes related to ocean pollution are likely a more effective intervention in these circumstances. |
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What a new Brazilian President means for the Amazon |
What happened: The climate implications of Sunday's Brazilian runoff election, which will return leftist former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) to office, defeating the hard right Jair Bolsonaro, are set to reverberate worldwide - with the potential for deforestation to fall 89% over a decade. |
Why it matters: Bolsonaro has presided over the highest Amazon deforestation rates, while Lula had enacted policies to protect the Amazon. The world's largest tropical rainforest is home to an astonishingly diverse species mix and is one of the planet's most important carbon sinks. However, studies show that human activities have pushed parts of the rainforest from a net carbon sink to a source. |
The details: This assumes that Lula would follow through on a pledge to address illegal deforestation in the Amazon while Bolsonaro would continue to oversee weak environmental governance. It also assumes these conditions would remain the same out to 2030. |
India's first solar-powered village |
Last week, we took a deep dive into India’s green energy revolution, and there’s been more attention on this with the launch of a $97.mn project by the Indian government to create the country’s first village, Modhera, that runs purely on solar power. The importance: Modhera is a demonstration project to provide learnings on setting up rural, localised renewable energy systems. If the project proves economically viable, it will be replicated across other rural areas. |
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🤖 Future of Tech (1-minute read) |
Global Shipping - Sail Away, Sail Away, Sail Away |
A maritime company has declared a "milestone" by installing the first automated, retractable, inflatable wing sail technology on a merchant ship. Quite the mouthful. The container ship MN Pélican owned by Compagnie Maritime Nantaise, had the 100 sqm wing prototype installed in the hopes that by using wind energy, the technology may reduce fuel use by up to 20% per ship. |
Potential impact: The roll-out of fleet-wide wind propulsion by 2050 could unlock U.S. $1 trillion in fuel savings. Each year, container ships emit about one billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere (3% of all greenhouse gas emissions). |
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Carbon capture tech being trialled by steelmaker |
Steel manufacturer ArcelorMittal is collaborating with Mitsibushi Heavy Industrial Engineering on a multi-year trial of carbon capture technology in Belgium. The trial will focus on “steelanol” - capturing carbon-based gases from blast furnaces and converting them into ethanol-based biofuel for the transport sector. The trial’s first phase will focus on separating and capturing CO2 from furnaces alongside feasibility studies to support full-scale deployment. |
Hard-to-abate: Steel accounts for around 7% of global emissions and analysts predict carbon capture tech will need to be used in 53% of steel production by 2050 under a net-zero scenario - this trial could be key for the industry to scale adoption. |
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💡 Deep Dive (1-minute read) |
COP27 - Dividing lines are taking place |
This time Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt is ready to take action to tame the world’s fire as host of the 27th Conference of Parties on Climate Change – COP27 |
A look back to COP 26: The conference last year reaffirmed the need to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius, it was estimated that COP26 pledges put us on track for between 1.8 degrees Celsius and 2.4 degrees Celsius of warming. Progress made on COP26 commitments since Glasgow is mixed at best (and an article in itself), but the WRI has done a great job of summarising how we’ve progressed against pledges. This year there are a couple of hot topics. |
1. Loss and Damage - The average person in the least developed country (LDC) has 23x fewer emissions than a developed country, but they often bear the brunt of climate impacts. Loss and damage centres around additional climate finance commitments to help developing countries on the front lines of climate emergencies respond to the ‘losses and damages’ they are already experiencing. |
- Opposition: The U.S. and the E.U., historically the world’s biggest emitters, argue that agreeing to such terms would open them up to never-ending litigation. Instead, they say it’s enough to utilise existing finance mechanisms. Additional costs, they add, could be covered by humanitarian aid or private insurance schemes.
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- Now or never: At last year’s climate conference in Glasgow, developing nations called for a discussion on loss and damage. It never happened, primarily because of strong opposition from the U.S. and the E.U. But with the mounting toll of climate disaster in vulnerable countries, from Pakistan to Somalia to small island nations, pressure is growing.
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- Watch out for: The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) has developed its proposals for a Loss and Damage Response Fund, which would represent an evolution of the “facility” offered by developing countries last year.
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2. Promoting Accountability Amidst Geopolitical Strain - COP 26 ended with a call for international leaders to review their 2030 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and ensure they align with the UN’s goal of cutting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. |
- Looking ahead: At COP 27, countries will be under pressure to show evidence of progress toward their climate commitments and funding targets. Ahead of COP 27, only 23 nations have proposed updated plans reflecting the UN’s global temperature goal. Worse, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destabilised the energy market, causing many major players to increase their reliance on fossil fuels. A key criticism of the Paris Agreement remains: the majority of its commitments are voluntary.
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Giving countries a voice Critics have argued that the prospects of this meeting yielding any meaningful results are remote at best, for all their flaws, the COPs are the only forum on the climate crisis in which the opinions and concerns of the poorest countries carry equal weight to that of the biggest economies. Considering that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) recently found that the impacts of climate change are worsening - it’s once again a climate crunch point. |
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💭 Little Bytes |
Quote: “Given the cascade of benefits that tackling food waste on farms could bring – from bolstering our food security to helping address the climate crisis…the food sector must take urgent action to support farmers in slashing food loss and waste on farms” WWF’s executive director of advocacy and campaigns Kate Norgrove. |
Stat: The UK’s wind farms set a new generation record last week. Windfarms provided 19,936MW of electricity, accounting for over 52% of total energy demand - National Grid ESO |
Watch: How engineers build wooden skyscrapers |
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🗞 In other news… |
- A report from Carbon Brief states that deforestation rates could fall by around 90% with Ex Brazilian President Bolsonaro out.
- France has announced a new ambition to plant one billion trees by 2030 – equivalent to a 10% increase in its existing stock.
- The EU has confirmed plans to table a “strategic vision” for carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) technologies in 2023 to give investors certainty as the nascent industry scales.
- Tesco and WWF call for mandatory food waste reporting on British farms to stem the equivalent of 18 million meals a day going to waste.
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