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The effects of accelerating man-made climate change create investing opportunities that aim to improve consumer behavior, advance green technology and promote a rethink of resource use. Here are select reports from the news media and academia focusing on the solution-focused companies, ESG investors and their advisers, as well as the policy-makers, enterprising individuals and scientists preparing for tomorrow.
‘Reality check’ helps restore Nevada’s Lake Mead. The largest reservoir in the Western U.S., Nevada’s Lake Mead near Las Vegas, is rising again after more than a decade of decline, the Wall Street Journal reports. Some of the credit for the revival can be given to promotions from the National Hockey League expansion team, the Vegas Golden Knights. “Reality check!” the team’s Ryan Reaves yells as he body-slams a man against a plate-glass window for excessive lawn watering in a television ad. “Vegas is enforcing water waste big time,” he says.
The campaign by the Southern Nevada Water Authority aims to persuade the more than 2 million residents of the sprawling desert metropolis to use less water. Using a carrot-and-stick approach, including paying landowners to remove grass and fining for overuse, the agency said it has cut total Colorado River water consumption by 25% over the past two decades, even as the population it serves has grown around 50%, the report said.
Coronavirus has temporarily reduced China’s CO2 emissions. Measures in China to contain coronavirus have resulted in reductions of 15% to 40% in output across key industrial sectors. This is likely to have wiped out a quarter or more of the country’s CO2 emissions over the past four weeks, through early March, the period when economic activity would normally have resumed after the Chinese new-year holiday, Carbon Brief reports.
Over the same period in 2019, China released around 800 million metric tons of CO2 (MtCO2), meaning the virus could have cut global emissions by 200 million metric tons of CO2 to date. The key question is whether the impacts are sustained, or if they will be offset – or even reversed – by the government response to the crisis, the report said. Initial analysis from the International Energy Agency and Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries suggests the repercussions of the outbreak could shave up to half a percent off global oil demand in January-September this year.
However, the Chinese government’s coming stimulus measures in response to the disruption could outweigh these shorter-term impacts on energy and emissions, as it did after the global financial crisis and the 2015 domestic economic downturn, the reports said.
‘Time is running out,’ warns World Meteorological Organization. This intergovernmental organization has sized up 2019’s land temperatures, ocean temperatures, greenhouse gas emissions, sea-level rise and melting ice. Their report finds that most of these indicators are increasing, which means the planet is off course in trying to control the pace of global warming. For instance, two severe heat waves in Europe last summer led to 1,462 deaths in the affected regions, according to the report. The study also estimated that 22 million people were displaced by flooding and other extreme weather events in 2019, up from 17.2 million in 2018.
“Climate change is the defining challenge of our time,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement in response. “Time is fast running out for us to avert the worst impacts of climate disruption and protect our societies from the inevitable impacts to come.”
When is the ‘point of no return’ for the Amazon rainforest? The Amazon rainforest could turn into a grassy savannah within 49 years of reaching an ecological tipping point, a study published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications said.
“A forest that is 100 times bigger than another one does take longer to collapse, but it will take much less than 100 times the time … what this means is that the biggest ecosystems that we have in the world are likely to collapse much quicker than we think, in a matter of decades,” said John Dearing, professor of physical geography, who was part of the research team along with scientists from Bangor University in Wales and London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, according to CNN.
The big challenge: scientists have not yet figured out how to predict when a tipping point — the threshold that, once exceeded, leads to a change in ecosystems — is coming, or even recognize with certainty that it has been reached.
Read: This controversial energy stance splits top Democrats — and likely the country
