Month: June 2015

Is climate change increasing the risk of armed conflict?

By Dr Flora Whitmarsh, Grantham Institute

The recently published 2015 Global Peace Indexsoldier, produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace, said that although OECD countries became more peaceful in 2014, there has been substantial increase in annual war-related deaths since 2010, and there are now more refugees than at any time since the Second World War. It is currently difficult to give a definitive answer as to whether climate change could exacerbate these problems.

Climate change is likely to exacerbate a range of environmental problems including heat waves, water shortages, and extreme weather and flooding, but whether or not this will lead to increased rates of armed conflict is still the subject of research. According to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, some of the factors that increase the risk of conflict – recession, low per capita incomes, and inconsistent state institutions – are sensitive to climate change, but this does not necessarily mean that climate change will lead directly to higher rates of war and unrest.

Environmental factors more generally do play a key role in triggering unrest. An example of this is the role of water shortages in causing the recent Syrian war: farmers who had lost their livelihoods were forced to migrate to the cities, where they struggled to integrate and find work. The resulting uprisings then played a part in triggering war. Although conflict is sometimes triggered by a single environmental problem which acts as a tipping point, environmental factors usually combine with other factors to exacerbate war and unrest.

Linking historical conflicts to environmental change

In his book, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, Geoffrey Parker argues that the unusually cool conditions (a 3 degree lower global temperature) during the seventeenth century “Little Ice Age” played a key role in sparking the steep rise in conflict sometimes referred to as the General Crisis. Surviving records from Europe and Asia paint a picture of extremely widespread famine and instability. In Europe for example, almost no country avoided war during the 1640s, and between 1618 and 1678, “Poland was at peace for only 27 years, the Dutch Republic for only 14, France for only 11, and Spain for only 3.”

Parker argues that the seventeenth century environmental deterioration caused by a decrease in solar energy reaching Earth and an increase in volcanic and El Niño activity has had “few parallels” and that “the frequency of wars and state breakdown created unprecedented political, social and economic instability.” Although the modern world is more integrated than the world of the seventeenth century, the argument linking periods of environmental instability with increased rates of conflict is potentially applicable to human induced climate change.

Dr Mark Workman of Imperial College London said, “The hypothesis for the causes of the General Crisis is very compelling”, but cautioned that “in the modern globalised and increasingly interconnected world the causative mechanisms are very controversial and I think the jury’s still out as to the degree to which environmental impacts are important as a cause in contemporary conflict.”

Drought
Dwindling water resources could lead to conflict – or cooperation

But environmental problems don’t always lead to conflict. “One thing that’s been missing from the current narrative is that there are opportunities for confidence building measures and co-operation,” says Dr Workman.  Disputes over trans-boundary rivers often lead to increased cooperation because neighbouring regions or countries have an incentive to work together to make sure water is distributed fairly. “As history has demonstrated, through confidence building measures and sensible mechanisms of water allocation or resource allocation you can actually find ways to make one plus one equal two”, continued Dr Workman.

Future research

More research is needed to explain the precise mechanisms by which environmental factors spark conflict, and how this relates to climate change. Key to this is acquiring more and better data. Relevant data can be hard to obtain at present; for example the global FAO food price index is of little use in evaluating stressors in Tunisia and Syria, both of which have very localised food markets. In addition, research has tended to centre on the Middle East and North Africa Region, so there is a need for more widely applicable research.

A high proportion of global conflicts currently occur within, rather than between, countries, which would also apply to conflicts involving environmental problems, so future work is likely to focus especially on this area. Dr Workman says, “Environmental enhanced conflict will be more a subnational manifestation, because there is world trade at a national level, whereas within fragile conflict-affected states, which are home to nearly 20% of the world’s population, there are limited trade and transport mechanisms to address the resource arbitrage.”

With its wealth of technical expertise, the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London is well placed to bring together the fragmented work and carry out new research in this area. There will be three key steps involved in taking this forward. First, knowledge gaps need to be identified. Second, theories about how conflict interacts with environmental factors need to be verified using case studies. The third and most challenging step is developing ways of predicting how environmental factors may exacerbate or cause conflict in the future.

A publication released last week has highlighted an agenda for research.

Transforming climate change from a threat to an opportunity: Lancet Commission on Health and Climate report launch

by Dr Kris Murray, Grantham Lecturer in Global Change Ecology

Woman wearing a face mask, ChinaToday the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate announced the release of their new report “2015 Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change: Policy Responses to Protect Public Health”.

Following a first report released in 2009, which concluded that “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”, today’s report has a proactive, positive take-home:  “tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century.”

Strategically released following the 68th World Health Assembly held last month and in the lead up to the UNFCCC’s COP21, to be held in Paris later this year, the report is the culmination of a second international (predominantly Chinese-European) working group assembled to assess the health impacts of climate change and to identify and accelerate effective mitigation and adaptation policies over the next 5 years.

 

The report provides 9 recommendations and delivers 1 promise:

  1. Research, monitor and surveil: improve understanding of adaptation needs and the co-benefits of mitigation actions
  1. Finance: spend more to create world-wide climate resilient health systems, with richer countries helping the poor to adapt and minimise other impacts
  1. Energy: reduce cardiovascular and respiratory health impacts from particulate matter and pollutants by phasing out coal, switching to cleaner alternatives (renewables with gas transition phase) and reducing air pollution from the transport, agriculture and energy sectors
  1. Healthy cities: develop energy efficient buildings, promote low-cost active transport (e.g., biking, walking), create and increase access to green spaces
  1. Carbon pricing mechanism: get one, a strong, predictable and international one.
  1. Reliable renewables: increase access to renewables in low and middle –income countries to unlock economic gains and promote health equity
  1. Count the avoided costs: accurately quantify reduced burden of disease and health care costs and track economic productivity on the path towards a healthy, low-carbon future
  1. Collaborate: build more and better links between Ministries of Health and other government departments and embed health and climate considerations into all government environmental strategies, e.g., those addressing deforestation, biodiversity loss and ocean acidification
  1. Global low-carbon agreement: get one, agree on ambitious and enforceable mitigation targets that also allow sustainable development
  1. Develop a Global Health and Climate Action Countdown to 2030 (a promise from the Commission): provide expertise to help implement mitigation and adaptation policies and monitor, support and communicate progress using appropriate indicators.

 

Accompanying the launch of the report, the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate are holding a number of events around the world (including London, New York and Canberra), which will include speakers, panel discussions and an opportunity for Q&A from participants. The Health and Environment Alliance will also host a virtual launch event.

While the recommendations are not exactly breaking radical new ground, they do represent a welcome synthesis of the front-line evidence on the health impacts of climate change with a clear focus on solutions (the details of which make up the bulk of the report).

Perhaps more critically, they also crank up the volume of the voice of the health community at a critical time in the climate change arena – a voice that has a formidable track record of achievement in confronting other highly complex, trans-national, politically charged threats to health.

 

For further comment on the report, see the Lancet website.

Investing in institutional ‘software’ to build climate resilience

by Camilla Toulmin, Ced Hesse, Daoud Tari and Caroline King–Okumu, International Institute for Environment and Development

Building resilience to extreme weather needs a systems approach, including institutional ‘software’ as well as technical, financial, and physical infrastructure – or ‘hardware’. Designing, financing, achieving and evaluating success in the intangible aspects of resilience is challenging. Illustrating the systems approach to this challenge, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has been supporting the government of Kenya to invest in social software as a means to manage variable resource availability in the northern drylands.

Between 1980 and 2012, it is estimated that the annual damage from extreme-weather related events rose from $20b to 150b, totalling close to US$2 trillion, of which only ¼ was insured. Examples include floods in Bangladesh and Thailand, typhoons in the Caribbean and droughts in the West African Sahel and Horn of Africa. Poor people and nations have been particularly vulnerable to the impacts of these events; people living in countries with a low Human Development Index make up only 11% of those exposed to hazards but account for 53% of disaster mortality.

Even if we manage to cut greenhouse gas emissions rapidly and effectively from today, we must anticipate 20-30 years of growing impacts from climate change due to lags in the global atmospheric system. Drought, floods, and heat waves are all likely to increase in both frequency and intensity. The impact of tropical storms and associated sea surges will be amplified by sea-level rise. Disaster preparedness is key to help minimise loss of life and property, as well as speeding recovery post-disaster. ‘Resilience’ has become a widely used term to describe the quality of human-environment systems and their response to disaster. More than merely coping with individual extreme weather events, however, it means “looking at the capacity of individuals, communities and systems to not only survive, but also adapt and grow in the face of stress and shocks.”

Building resilience to extreme weather needs a systems approach, which involves investing in a combination of technical, economic/financial, and institutional dimensions. When faced with a threat such as drought or flooding, the first instinct is to invest in hardware – such as dams to capture and store water for dry periods, or sea-walls to protect from floodwater. And such tangible infrastructure is clearly very important. But alongside such investment in the physical hardware of protection, there are a range of vital intangible investments needed in the software of institutions for managing variable resources, and sharing risk. Institutions may be invisible, but their strength can make a big difference in how societies cope with disaster. Building resilience also requires shared action and responsibility at local, national and international levels, by the public and private sectors, local communities and non-governmental organisations. We will use the case of northern Kenya to illustrate this systems approach, and the role that different actors need to play.

Evolution of total herd size and the number of adult females under two scenarios of climate variability: (1) a drought every five years, and (2) a drought every three years.

Investing in local institutions in Northern Kenya

With funding from the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), IIED has been supporting the government of Kenya to build resilience in the northern drylands. Over the last 15-20 years, this large drought prone region has suffered more intense and frequent drought events. Climate predictions for Kenya anticipate increasing frequency and severity of droughts and floods.7 The extended drought of 2008-11 caused livestock losses estimated at around 40-60% in some parts of Isiolo County. With an expectation of five years or less between drought events, there is not enough time for herds to recover from losses of such magnitude. This has a devastating impact on people’s livelihoods, since 80% of the population are dependent on livestock.

The new Constitution of Kenya affirms a strong decentralised approach, better to address the priorities of local people through putting decision-making into their hands. Equally, the government has recognised the long-standing marginalisation of pastoral livestock keepers in this large northern region, and the need for a revised approach which understands the rationale for herd mobility. Keeping animals mobile makes the best use of seasonally variable grazing and water resources, as well as helping people manage with unexpected rainfall and pasture change. This means having collective management of large areas of grazing, and the ability of different groups to move herds between areas. Key elements to support this mobility include recognised ownership and management rights, co-ordinated by community groups, and flexible access arrangements. Working with traditional institutions to invest in water points is frequently the key-stone to better management of surrounding grazing.

Amongst the Boran people of Northern Kenya, the Dedha is a customary neighbourhood institution for management of natural resources. Local Dedha councils identify which grazing areas need to be set aside for drought reserves – in these areas no one should graze their animals except during drought periods. The Dedha decide when these rules should apply and ensure such decisions are respected by herders. Young men are trained to patrol pasture and water areas to make sure people adhere to the rules.

Since 2011, IIED has been working to help establish the Isiolo County Adaptation Fund, as a pilot to be managed at the county level, ensuring funds are prioritised by vulnerable communities to build their own resilience. The fund has supported a range of investments, which include rehabilitating sand dams, digging new boreholes, fencing of critical areas and setting up a radio station.16 In particular, the fund has supported activities to strengthen the Dedha. By designating and directing herds to areas of seasonal grazing during the wet season, these customary bodies conserve high value grazing and water for use over the dry season.

Evaluating the benefits of investing in institutions

By the middle of 2014, drought conditions had worsened across the north of Kenya and the National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) was reporting a rapid decline in climatic, vegetation and socio-economic indicators across Marsabit, Wajir and Garissa counties. But in Isiolo alone, animal health, child nutrition, and livelihoods seemed to have been less affected by the worsening drought.

It can be difficult to estimate the impacts of such efforts to strengthen the Dedha vis-à-vis what might have happened had these interventions not been undertaken. Working with the Dedha in an effort to conduct such an analysis, IIED carried out a participatory assessment to estimate the benefits gained from better management of dry season grazing and drought preparedness, in terms of livestock survival rates, milk production, and reduced disease incidence.

Shortly after this assessment with the Dedha was carried out, rains arrived in most parts of the county and fortunately a full-blown drought emergency did not develop.Nevertheless, the Dedha members argued that by October 2014, livestock mortality rates would have been as high as in previous drought years, if they had not set aside drought reserve areas.

Although milk production usually stops in the long dry season and animals get sick more often, in 2014 these impacts did not occur. An estimate was made of the value of milk produced at this time and expenditures on medicines avoided, which were added to the estimated annual income to the Dedha from livestock sales. This partial identification of benefits from adaptation could then be compared with the costs of investment, both through the Isiolo County Adaptation Fund, and the contributions made by local people.

Because the NDMA datasets showed that the vegetation conditions during 2014 were not in fact as bad as they had been during the 2011 drought, this introduced doubt concerning the levels of avoided livestock mortality estimated by the Dedha. Since it was not possible to verify what level of livestock mortality would have occurred during 2014 without theDedha’s interventions, the value of all avoided mortalities that the Dedha members had identified was removed from the calculation of benefits achieved during 2014. Even on this basis, Dedha members had still secured a remarkable return on their investment of at least 24:1. But had the rains not arrived when they did, and a serious drought occurred, the value of the avoided mortalities would be included in the return on the investment. This would then have yielded returns almost as high as 90:1.

In addition to the local herds, livestock and people from neighbouring counties migrated into Isiolo. This helped them reduce their livestock losses and maintain milk production, and household nutrition – key benefits of particular value to women. The value of these additional benefits from the Dedha’s natural resource stewardship to the communities that they hosted from areas outside the county was even greater than the value of benefits received by Dedha members themselves. The market value of dry season milk produced by the animals belonging to the displaced pastoralists was 342 times the Isiolo CAF investment in strengthening the Dedha and 50 times the cost of the entire DFID program (£455,687, including all of its start-up, overhead costs, and all funds spent on all types adaptation projects, not just the institutional strengthening of the Dedha).

A broad range of other beneficial effects on the economy and society were noted but could not easily be valued. These included the reduced need to migrate long distances for water and pasture, resulting in reduced security risks and increased time spent at home with family and time spent taking care of local business. Strengthened local institutions enhanced the voice of local leaders and created employment for young men who played a key role in resource surveillance, as well as reducing dependence on food handouts and social assistance. If these benefits could also be quantified, they would demonstrate the very significant return on investment in natural resource management to both local families, and the public finances of Isiolo and the surrounding counties.

Building resilience for the future

In the coming years societies around the globe will need to find ways to build greater resilience to extreme climate events in this warming world. Investment in physical infrastructure, the hardware of disaster resilience, needs to be matched by strengthening of intangible but powerful institutions that help people manage risks and achieve collective agreement on how resources are best used. The example of the Dedha in northern Kenya shows the considerable returns gained from investing in social software, by re-establishing customary management systems, as a means to manage variable resource availability. While much of the work and investment is made locally, its ability to operate effectively relies on the national level framework to decentralise power and decision-making to county level. Equally, the funds from international donor agencies, such as the UK’s DFID, have helped make this pilot possible, from which it is hoped that many other such initiatives can learn.

Camilla Toulmin is Director of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Daoud Tari is a Visiting Fellow at IIED and leads the Resource Advocacy Programme (RAP), a community trust based in Isiolo County, Kenya. Caroline King-Okumu is a Senior Researcher working for IIED’s Climate Change Group. The work described in this article has been undertaken by IIED in collaboration with many colleagues from Kenya, especially Ibrahim Jarso, Hildah Kathare, Lordman Lekalkuli, Luigi Luminari, Nelson Mutanda, Nour Godana, Mumina Bonaya, Cynthia Awor, Jane Kiiru, Victor Orindi, and IIED colleagues Morgan Williams, and Kate Green.

 

This blog first appeared on ANGLE. View original for full references. 

A Global Village, Imperial College London’s science and policy journal, is relaunching as ANGLE, an online only journal focusing on the intersection of science, policy and politics in an evolving and complex world. Visit ANGLE

A New York take on Sustainable Development: Is it feasible?  

By Clea Kolster, PhD student, Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet

Columbia university
Columbia University Library

The term ‘sustainable development’ was first coined in 1987 in the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development report, Our Common Future. Almost 30 years later, the concept of sustainable development is more relevant than ever.

The definition given in the report is, to this date, the most widely accepted modern definition of the term: ‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ Climate and society, energy, water, ecosystem health and monitoring, global health, poverty, urbanization, natural disasters, food, ecology and nutrition – these are some of the main problems that need to be tackled when discussing the possibility of sustainable development. They are all complex problems that require an interdisciplinary and analytical approach. Earlier this year, I joined a group of people doing just that.

On Friday April 3rd 2015, I entered the land of Ivy League elites of Columbia University to take part in the 5th Annual Interdisciplinary PhD Workshop on Sustainable Development. Having been on a year abroad at Columbia University during my undergraduate degree, I knew the spot pretty well and was thrilled about getting the chance to come back as a matured and informed PhD student ready and eager to present my work.

Arriving at the workshop, I struck up a conversation with some of the students around me. I quickly understood that a number of us had made the cross-Atlantic trip, with participants from Denmark, Italy, Sweden, France and even Australia. Students also came from Canada and Mexico, with a large majority attending world-renowned US universities, including Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, UC Berkeley and of course Columbia.

Tackling sustainable development

The highlight of the first day was a keynote speech by American economist  Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University., Sachs has an incredible track record: he is a Quetelet professor (honorary distinction given to Columbia University professors, awarded to only four professors since 1963) of Sustainable Development, special advisor to Ban Ki-Moon, youngest economics professor at Harvard University (age 28), author of three New York Times bestsellers – and the list goes on.

Jeffrey Sachs
Jeffrey Sachs. By Bluerasberry (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Sachs discussed how to approach the problem of sustainable development, the type of objectives needed for sustainable development, the issues economists have faced thus far in tackling this problem and finally the criticality of interdisciplinary collaboration. Sachs’ keynote speech was one of the best I have seen, he constantly interacted with the audience and, since it comprised mostly of enthusiastic and well informed students, the dialogue was flowing.

One of the things that engrossed me most  was his emphasis on planetary boundaries and the current ideological conflict between growth (mostly economic) and environmental sustainability. Sachs definitely got the whole room thinking about whether or not sustainable development is actually feasible and, for those like myself who desperately want that answer to be positive, what one can do to bring us closer to that goal: a world with sustainable economic, social and environmental objectives.

The rest of the afternoon featured sessions on a variety of topics from natural disasters – including the Venetian example of floods – to urban planning in China and development in India. After a long afternoon of presentations, I got the chance to network and socialize with the students. I met some very interesting individuals, most of whom, contrary to myself, feel as though they are economists before anything else, in spite of an earlier education in engineering.

On the second day, I was due to give my presentation as part of the Energy. In a small room filled with 10-15 other PhD students, all of whom were senior to me, and a few professors, I sat nervously waiting for my turn, beginning to realize that my presentation was clearly going to be one of the most “engineeringy” and technical of all.

I finally gave my 20 minute talk on the “Techno-Economic Analysis of the Link between Above Ground CO2 Capture, Transport, Usage for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) and Storage”. I was happy to take some interesting questions at the end of it (which I hoped meant that the audience was actually interested by my topic) and later on at the coffee reception engaged in some stimulating discussions with some of my peers. It was clear that in spite of our dissimilar approaches, we had all contributed to responding to the question of sustainable development and its feasibility.

A look forward

Did you know that 1.4 billion people currently live in a state of extreme poverty at below $1.25/day? In fact, it will take a 4 to 5 time increase in total global output by 2050 to get poor countries to meet the $40,000 per capita income of rich countries today. With figures like these, it isn’t surprising that large groups of individuals around the world dedicate their time to assessing and analyzing the best ways of achieving sustainable development encompassing economic, social and environmental goals.

In my view, sustainable development is feasible, we can tackle climate change, we can reduce our exploitation of natural capital while promoting economic growth, we can bridge the gap between poor and rich countries; the problem is – as Jeff Sachs pointed out – a lack of trust. A lack of trust leads to social and political instability and these will always impede sustainable development around the world.

 

References
World Commission on Environment and Development – Bruntland Commission. 1987. Our Common Future. s.l. : Oxford University Press, 1987.

 

Find out more about Clea’s research

Towards a Global Energy Internet

Professor Jo Haigh, Co-director of the Grantham Institute reports back from the Climate Parliament meeting in Lucerne, 12 June 2015.

Lucerne, SwitzerlandI have just found a seat on the train from Lucerne to Zurich airport. It is absolutely packed, I suppose, with people going away for the weekend.  Staring through the window at the snow-capped mountains, and having spent the day at an inspirational conference set by the beautiful lake, I am wondering quite why anyone would want to leave.

I have been at a meeting of the Climate Parliament. I only learned of this organisation recently but it is rather splendid – a group of legislators from across the world who are concerned about climate change and looking to influence governments to act.  Seventy attendees came together to discuss the potential for a Global Energy Internet: an international electricity grid based on regional renewable energy sources.

Attendees were diverse – including MPs from four continents, industrialists, academics and representatives from energy and climate agencies. Simultaneous translation was provided between French, Spanish, Chinese and English, although that can’t have covered all the first languages represented. Fortunately my talk was first up so I could then concentrate on the rest.

The challenges of a global energy grid

For me a highlight was Li Junfeng, Director General of the Chinese National Centre for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, who spoke on China’s energy demands, provision and ambitions for decarbonisation. He spoke of a “solar Silk Road for the 21st century” and noted the need for revolutions in energy production and for technical innovation with international cooperation on R&D in renewables: “Helping China is helping the World” he said.

Lei Xianzhang, of the State Grid Corporation of China, was up next discussing some of the technical issues and describing the construction of new wind and solar plants (grown by factors of 37 and 350 respectively since 2006) as well as very long (thousands of kilometres) high voltage DC transmission cables.

Electric pylonsThe political and technical challenges which have faced attempts to construct an energy grid across the Middle East and North Africa were elaborated by Tareq Emtairah, Director of the Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency in Cairo. In the absence of an electricity market there has been very little exchange coordinated to date, but the delegates from Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia remained upbeat.

National energy security concerns were foremost in the minds of colleagues from Senegal and Peru. Efforts to connect to international grids were seen as a second priority. I could see their point, but perhaps they were reassured that the proposed networks could be established to the advantage of all.

Damien Ernst, an energy economist from the University of Liège, delivered an inspirational message: his calculations suggest that large scale facilities of solar and wind energy, with long transnational interconnections can provide energy cheaper than fossil fuels.  Construct the grid first, he declares, and the incentive to develop renewables will follow.

It is a shame I have to miss tomorrow’s discussions, which will focus on finances and start to develop an action plan, but I have to attend my father’s 90th birthday party. If I live to 90, or 80, or even 75(?) perhaps I will see established an international energy internet. It is a fantastic vision.

 

The case of our missing trash

by Dr Erik van Sebille, Grantham Lecturer in Oceanography and Climate Change

Our oceans are filthy with plastic. Most attention so far has focused on the bottles, carrier bags and other junk floating in the middle of our oceans. Some say that we ought to go out there and clean the stuff up. But a series of recent high-profile studies suggest that this stuff is only 1% of all the plastic in our oceans. The question on this World Oceans Day 2015 is, where is the other 99%?

It’s hard to imagine a life without plastics, and this awesome material has greatly advanced our standard of living. However, some of this plastic ends up as waste in our ocean, where it clearly doesn’t belong.

A recent inventory in the journal Science estimated that around 10 million metric tons of plastic entered the ocean in 2010 alone.

However, two independent surveys have found that all the plastic bobbing around on the surface of the ocean weighs less than 100,000 metric tons.

So the amount of plastic at the ocean surface is two orders of magnitude lower than the amount of plastic that entered the ocean in 2010. Even with the large uncertainty margins on all these estimates, the conclusion must be that most of the plastic in the ocean has gone AWOL.

Finding the missing plastic

There are not too many places where the remaining plastic can be. It’s either on the seafloor, in the stomachs of animals, or on shorelines. The problem is that we don’t even have ballpark figures of how much plastic is in each of these places.

We know that there is probably a lot of plastic on the seafloor, where it impacts small critters crawling around. Not all plastic is buoyant enough to float, so some of the plastic will sink very quickly after it enters the ocean. Other plastic may float for a while but over time become so heavy with algal growth that it starts sinking. Unfortunately, we have only a few localised samples of plastic on the seafloor, and no idea how to scale these up to the entire ocean.

The second reservoir, inside animals, is probably the most worrisome of all. Most plastic that enters the ocean gets fragmented by wave action and sunlight, and after a few months to years ends up as tiny microplastic pellets. These tiny pellets might be quite easily ingested by large plankton and small fish. However, once again we have no clue how much plastic we are talking about globally.

plastic beachThe shorelines, finally, would be my personal bet on where most of the plastic ends up. My own research at the Grantham Institute has shown that currents move plastic around in complex ways and it can linger near the shore for months. Much of the plastic that enters the ocean could just wash up with the next big storm.

Shorelines come in many forms, from beaches to rocky outcrops to mangroves, and most of them are very remote and littered with plastic. Even the seemingly clean ones here in the UK might actually receive a lot of plastic, but volunteers and local councils clean them up at such a rate that we don’t realise just how filthy they are. There are great apps to report plastic on beaches, and widespread use of them would really help science.

What’s the solution?

We need to know where our plastic ends up if we want to understand its impacts on marine animals and ecosystems. And crucially, we need to stop polluting and remove plastic waste as close to the source as possible. Engineers are starting to think about how to do this with contraptions such as the Baltimore Waterwheel, but more bright ideas are needed.

If the case of our missing trash shows us anything, it’s that plans to clean up the floating plastic in the middle of the ocean do not really address the biggest problem. It would be far more effective to make sure no plastic ever enters the ocean in the first place. A stitch in time saves nine.

 

Making it pay by simple addition: win-win solutions for health and the environment

Dr Kris Murray, Grantham Lecturer in Global Change Ecology

Our planet is ill. Ongoing loss and endangerment of species, degradation of marine and terrestrial ecosystems and their services, and manmade changes to the global climate are dramatic symptoms of a major decline in the planet’s environmental health.

In glaring contrast, human health has improved, in some cases radically. Decreases in malnutrition, mortality due to infectious diseases and infant mortality rates, accompanied by substantial increases in life expectancy, can be observed in every major region of the world.

So why is health winning a war, while the environment is losing one?

At a fundamental level, there is a huge difference in investment. Human health is a global priority and survival, healthiness and well-being are personal objectives for almost everyone. Preservation of the environment simply isn’t. Spending on global health, for example, is at least an order of magnitude greater than for environmental conservation.

Don’t bet on it: The Environmentalist’s Paradox

But surely it’s not that simple. Ecosystem services and human health and well-being are supposed to be deeply interconnected, right? So how can we observe declining ecosystem services on the one hand and improving health and well-being on the other?

This question, sometimes referred to as “The Environmentalist’s Paradox”, has been used to suggest that the connections between environment and health are really not that important for the future of human welfare, despite some examples (such as the emergence of novel infectious diseases) that might suggest otherwise.

Alternative explanations for the Paradox do, however, exist.

One is that while total ecosystem services value may be falling, some services on which health is more fundamentally dependent continue to increase (e.g., provision of food).

Another is the suggestion that technological advances can and have resulted in a degree of de-coupling of health from nature.

Finally, time lags could mean that accrued and ongoing losses of ecosystem services and natural capital may yet toll health and well-being on much larger scales in the future, a factor that is thought to have contributed to previous civilization collapse.

At least one review of the evidence suggests that elements of each of these explanations remain plausible, while others are also presumably possible.

Knowing this, how do we tackle the world’s environmental challenges?

WED rainforestTo my mind, this means that compiling old and discovering new efficiencies in those areas of potential overlap between environmental and human health is looking increasingly like a very sensible strategy. In other words, there are still huge opportunities and a pressing need to identify and leverage health gains to help stem environmental losses. And vice versa.

In fact, from global targets on climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation to disaster risk reduction and sustainable development, identifying potential and demonstrating genuine health ‘co-benefits’ is a growth industry. This approach is increasingly being used to find, and fund, mitigation and adaptation actions to address global environmental challenges.

The New Climate Institute, for example, estimates that more ambitious emissions reductions targets in the EU could prevent around 40,000 premature deaths per year from air pollution and create around 350,000 jobs in the domestic renewables sector.

Similarly, the UK’s Natural Capital Committee reports that investing in equitable access to green spaces would pay off with improved physical and mental health, generating savings of around £2.1 billion per year.

And perhaps a tad more abstractly, the Centre of Global Health Security highlights how successes in global environmental governance could be leveraged for better global health governance. This illustrates not only the potential breadth of co-beneficial links between environment and human health, but that not all of them necessarily require a natural capital accounting framework to take seriously (although this is clearly helping!).

So while the pursuit of win-win solutions for the environment and health in isolation is potentially an unhealthy obsession, when better to try than on World Environment Day? Working through the costs and trade-offs that typically follow can wait, at least until tomorrow.

 

Find out more on Grantham research on environmental change and health