Sleep in, then talk: After the participants in last week’s marathon meeting on the IPCC Synthesis Report caught up on their sleep, we spoke with some of them about the deals, details and background of the document that would otherwise be lost behind the headlines. And we took the current UN Water Conference in New York as an opportunity to talk to an IPCC author about water supply in climate change. The IPCC report, which is, after all, the current scientific state of affairs and has received political approval, will keep us busy for the foreseeable future.
Plus, as always, news from around the world: From Korea, India, the USA and about global emissions trading. And we introduce the boss of asset manager Blackrock, Larry Fink. He authored his famous investor letter – in which he suddenly distances himself somewhat from his role as the supreme climate capitalist.
If you enjoy this issue, please forward us. If this mail was forwarded to you: You can test the briefing free of charge here.
And finally, I am looking forward to Thursday, where I will be speaking with Jennifer Morgan, Special Envoy for International Climate Action at the German Foreign Office, about global and German climate policy for 2023 – and certainly about the IPCC report. Feel free to join us here and spread the word!
The “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM) in the 6th IPCC Report’s Synthesis Report, which was presented to the public in Interlaken on Monday, “summarises the state of knowledge of climate change”. That is what the first sentence of the document says. But the report also reveals the individual economic and political interests of the 135 IPCC states, their fears, views and egoisms.
The exact formulations in the SPM are extremely important. For they are now considered scientifically and politically approved and form the foundation of global climate policy. Relatively unnoticed, the IPCC is breaking important ground here.
With the warning that the 1.5-degree global warming limit will be missed, it is trying to better reach the public.
In a surprising coup, it sets a previously unprecedented global emissions target for 2035. In addition, it helps the controversial CCS technology to achieve unusually high popularity. It advocates ending fossil energies without explicitly mentioning the term – and shows how painstakingly governments safeguard their climate diplomacy positions.
The internal negotiations of the IPCC and its documents are confidential. Climate.Table has nevertheless spoken to insiders and negotiators and analyzed documents to get some background information. In addition to these unofficial interlocutors, the specialist service of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) serves as a source of information.
This all shows that the negotiations were difficult and tough. At the start of the week, a lot of time was wasted on technical discussions. Time was missing at the end for more concrete issues – a frequently used stonewalling strategy. The extension until Sunday evening (instead of Friday evening) is not unusual for conferences. But it meant that from Saturday onwards, mainly smaller delegations had to leave the conference due to their flights home. One delegate complained that this was “not an inclusive process. Those who are struggling to survive are now leaving the conference.”
In terms of content, it was very important to the authors to document the risk to the 1.5 target, because it has not found enough recognition so far: They warn that this limit, which was set in the Paris Agreement, will be exceeded already between 2030 and 2035. This is not new: In August 2021, the reports of Working Group I already warned that the limit would soon be hit. But shortly afterward, at COP26 in Glasgow, the maxim of “keeping 1.5 degrees alive”, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, was nevertheless maintained.
Now the authors explicitly included it in the text – but they had not reckoned with the government delegations. They were not really convinced by the arguments and models presented by the scientists for such a concrete warning: The passage mentioning the years 2030-2035 was removed from the text and moved to a footnote. In the text itself, the date is now only “near term” – that is, 2021 to 2040.
The setting of a new global climate target for 2035 led to unrest and hours of delay in the conference proceedings. According to negotiators, China in particular objected to the new target of minus 60 percent greenhouse gases and minus 65 percent carbon (CO2). The background: According to UN rules, countries must submit new national climate plans (“NDC”) in 2025, which run until 2035. So far, there has been no fixed global target for this year. Now it will be easier to determine success or failure.
As insiders confirm, China was not happy with the mention of a specific number in the text. After much back and forth, it was removed from the text – and put in a separate table. This table is now much more visible than the mere number on page 22 of the report. If China wanted to prevent the figure from receiving attention, its intervention has probably achieved the opposite.
Something similar happened to the German delegation. The German delegation insisted that a footnote be added to the text on the controversial CCS technology for carbon storage: It states that “CCS currently faces technological, economic, institutional, ecological environmental and socio-cultural barriers”. Moreover, the global deployment is “far below those in modelled pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C to 2°C”.
Saudi Arabia, which is banking on CCS to extend its oil and gas sales, then intervened. The country managed to have the entire passage from the Working Group 3 summary added to this footnote. The result in the final version of the SPM of the synthesis report is now a long footnote which, before the CCS criticism brought forward by the Germans, first explains at great length the alleged advantages of CCS: It is a “mature technology” in the oil and gas industry. Its capacity is about 1,000 gigatons worldwide, “more than the CO2 storage requirements through 2100 to limit global warming to 1.5°C”, they say. Moreover, the CO2 could thus probably be “permanently isolated from the atmosphere” – the critical and classifying passage by the Germans then follows just at the end of the long text. “A classic own goal“, as one IPCC negotiator calls it – or a calculated risk to at least anchor the criticism of CCS in the document.
Finally, in order to meet climate targets, the SPM calls for “transitioning from fossil fuels [without CCS] to very low or zero carbon energy sources“. This effectively requires phasing out fossils without mentioning the politically controversial term “fossil phase-out”. The reason for the choice of words is not only the opposition from oil states. It is also due to the models used by the IPCC: Practically all of these calculation models foresee relatively high oil and gas consumption even in 2050 – offset by “negative emissions” that have yet to be realized.
In principle, the SPM of the Synthesis Report also showed the familiar fronts: The EU, the USA and Japan are pushing for far-reaching formulations – China, India and Saudi Arabia are leading the brake front. However, new constellations emerged repeatedly in Interlaken.
Among them: Norway and the Netherlands, both with big CCS plans, were very open to the issue – unlike the rest of Europe. India objected to a graph illustrating the health effects of global warming. It was said to be only based on one study from moderate climates. Health impacts of climate change are a heated topic in India: Last year, thousands of Indians died in a major heatwave.
Brazil and South Africa, on the other hand, are critical of the wording on “nature-based solutions” because they fear that the industrialized countries could buy their way out of their obligations. And Mexico opposed a partial allocation to “North America” in a complicated footnote – which is owed to the complicated IPCC rules and could become important for future “loss and damage” matters.
It also turned out that the IPCC calls the UN term for damage and loss in climate change “losses and damage“. Transposing this directly to the COP debates on loss and damage is difficult. And China insisted on using the wording that the Paris Agreement was adopted “under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” – an indication that China continues to insist on the different responsibilities between old and new industrialized countries – and continues to label itself as a developing country against possible claims, for example in the area of climate financing.
Mr. Garschagen, the UN Water Conference in New York will also discuss how to improve global cooperation in order to ensure that as many people as possible have access to water. What are the chances of this happening?
We can only solve the water crisis together. There is no other way. But I worry more that climate change will exacerbate existing water conflicts.
As a climate change adaptation expert, if you had only one wish for the conference: What would you wish for?
At the UN level, we are discussing major development goals: Clean water and sanitation for all. But I believe that more concrete goals are needed to stop the current waste of water. It is not that there is not enough water on earth, but that it is wasted, evaporates, leaks out of pipes and is distributed where it does not belong.
What would be a concrete goal to counter this?
For example, it could be stipulated how much water may be used in certain production processes. At the moment, this is relatively unregulated – and very intransparent. If, for example, we import a piece of fabric from Southeast Asia, then customers here can hardly find out how much water was used for production and how the wastewater is handled. We could develop a concrete goal for this in order to make water protection manageable.
You are an expert on how human societies can adapt to climate change. Where are the problems with water?
Water is key to adaptation. Climate change either brings too much water or too little, and when it comes to adaptation, you have to consider both at the same time. In cities, for example: How do you divert water during heavy precipitation so that it does not lead to flooding? And how do you simultaneously keep it in the city to such a degree that green areas get enough water and help people keep cool during hot summers?
You talk about sponge cities – but when we look at the global climate crisis, is it not much more about flooding like in Pakistan, or food shortages caused by withered or washed away crops?
Food crises can also be fundamentally linked to water. In Pakistan, for example, there were massive crop failures due to floods. And in Argentina, farmers are currently facing high losses due to heat and drought. Of course, the risks differ regionally. Developing and emerging countries in the tropics and subtropics are much more affected by droughts or floods than countries in moderate regions. People who already live in particularly precarious circumstances, and are therefore particularly vulnerable, suffer the most.
Water is also becoming scarcer in Germany, while the risk of heavy rainfall is increasing at the same time. To counteract both, the German government adopted a national water strategy in mid-March. It is intended to secure a steady supply of drinking water. Wetlands and forests are to be renaturalised to keep more water in the soil – at the same time, nature serves as a carbon sink. Cities are to become sponge towns, long-distance pipelines are to transport water over longer distances if necessary, and rivers and lakes are to be made cleaner. Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke presents the strategy at the UN conference in New York.
So which regions are most affected?
This is difficult to compare, because personal evaluations always play a role.
But a great deal of damage can be measured, can it not?
But not all of it. It might still be possible to answer the question of where the regional hotspots of the climate crisis are. But how to compare the potential damage? Is the loss of cultural heritage more important than food shortages, and if so, how much more important? Which weighs more heavily: the loss of ecosystems, or the loss of home?
And in which regions do people feel the water crisis particularly strongly?
Two examples: Areas at the foot of mountains, for example in Asia and Latin America, are particularly affected. If the glaciers continue to melt and there is less and less snow, there will be a lack of drinking water on the one hand. On the other hand, floods may occur if it is raining instead of snowing, causing large amounts of water to run off too quickly.
And the second example?
In semi-arid zones, agriculture is very dependent on rainfall occurring at the right time. As soon as rainfall patterns change, farmers face difficulties. This affects large parts of sub-Saharan Africa. But make no mistake: In Southern Europe, too, water reserves are severely overstretched, and the irrigation systems used to adapt to increasing drought are taking far too much groundwater from the soil. In this way, we are destroying important water reservoirs that would actually be urgently needed in the future.
To achieve the UN development target of “clean water and sanitation for all” by 2030, progress would need to be four times faster than is currently the case, according to the UN. Last Friday, the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, a panel of renowned scientists and politicians, presented a report outlining recommendations for action.
Everyone must work together to tackle the global water crisis, they write. Water must be protected as a common good. It needs a higher price; at the same time, the poor must be supported so that they can pay for it. Subsidies of up to 700 billion US dollars per year must be abolished, and high levels of investment are needed. International water partnerships (“Just Water Partnerships”) could promote these investments.
Are there also examples of particularly successful adaptation?
Yes, nature-based measures are often particularly effective in both climate action and adaptation. For example, storing more water in the landscape, by renaturalizing river courses, wetlands and forests. In this way, they also strengthen important carbon sinks. Technology also helps, for example in agriculture, where irrigation is applied specifically at the roots of the plants and thus more efficiently, reducing the amount of water evaporating.
But sooner or later, limits will be reached.
Yes, the warmer the world gets, the more adaptation reaches its limits. And we cannot solve everything with money. We also need time, and we need to act much more proactively. Politicians still often seem to underestimate this.
Matthias Garschagen is Chair of Anthropogeography at LMU Munich with a focus on human-environment relations. He has worked as lead author on several IPCC reports, most recently on the Synthesis Report published Monday. In addition, he served as Scientific Director of the World Risk Report for several years.
Emissions Trading Systems (ETS) continue to grow in importance around the world. There are now 28 ETS systems, compared to just 13 a decade ago, and the global share of emissions covered by an ETS also doubled, according to the International Carbon Action Partnership (ICAP) Status Report presented on Wednesday.
Large economies like the EU and China have implemented trading systems. In the USA, too, several states trade CO2 allowances among themselves. Countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Turkey are currently developing their own ETS, which are expected to come into force in the next few years. Japan, India, Brazil, Nigeria and others are considering following suit.
But the subtleties matter. Emissions trading is only effective if certain key conditions are met. For example, allowances must be expensive enough to have a steering effect; there needs to be an absolute and decreasing cap on pollution rights; and as many sectors as possible need to be covered. In China, for example, a CO2 allowance costs the equivalent of around 8 euros, and the system does not have a fixed cap. nib
Over the past year, global production capacity for renewable electricity increased by 9.6 percent to 3372 gigawatts (GW). This was reported by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). This means that 83 percent of all newly installed capacity is renewable.
59 percent of renewable production capacity was installed in Asia. There were also particularly strong increases in Europe and the USA. Hydropower still accounts for the largest share of the renewables portfolio. But the expansion of solar and wind power was responsible for a total of 90 percent of the increase in 2022.
Despite the positive trend, IRENA’s Director General Francesco La Camera warns that “annual additions of renewable power capacity must grow three times the current level by 2030, if we want to stay on a pathway limiting global warming to 1.5 °C.”
Following the SolarPower Summit earlier this month, a wind power summit in Germany on Wednesday was expected to help accelerate the expansion of renewables in the country. “To more than quadruple the current rate of expansion, we really need to release all the brakes and continue to remove barriers to the expansion of wind energy,” said Robert Habeck, Germany’s minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection.
The participants of the wind summit – representatives of the German government, federal states, municipalities, trade unions and other associations – identified a number of key fields of action and measures, for example, better financing conditions for contracts between energy producers and electricity consumers or faster transport of wind turbines.
The German Association of Energy and Water Industries believes this to be a step in the right direction. However, it would be particularly important to use two percent of the German land area for wind energy as early as 2025 and not only in 2032, as planned so far.
Germany’s federal states and the sector will now discuss the topics of the wind power summit until March 31. The “wind energy onshore strategy” will then be drafted and presented at a second wind power summit, expected to take place in April. kul
Larry Fink is considered the most powerful man in global finance. The US American is the founder and CEO of BlackRock – the world’s largest asset manager. With his annual, high-profile letters to CEOs, he branded himself as a champion for climate change. In recent years, he has drawn the attention of board members and managers to the seriousness of climate change, held them accountable, and emphasized the important role of the (financial) economy in overcoming the climate crisis.
In his newest letter, however, he takes BlackRock off the hook. Fink’s company, BlackRock, manages a good $8.6 trillion in assets and has stakes in almost every major company in the world. The way BlackRock invests has a significant influence on the energy and climate transition (Climate.Table reported).
In 2022, Fink still said that every company and industry “will be transformed by the transition to a net zero world. The question is, will you lead, or will you be led?” BlackRock is “focused on sustainability not because we’re environmentalists,” but because it has a fiduciary duty to clients to invest their money in the best way. In 2020, Fink warned that “every government, country and shareholder must confront climate change.”
In his most recent letter, from mid-March, there is barely a mention of this. Fink continues to emphasize that “climate risks are investment risks”. But there is hardly anything left of the former awareness of the need to protect the climate. Instead, the BlackRock boss emphasizes that the company is merely a steward of the money that clients entrust to it. The theme of his 2023 letter is: freedom of choice.
BlackRock wants to offer clients the greatest possible freedom of choice for their investments, he wrote. Some clients want their investments “to align with a particular transition path or to accelerate that transition. We have clients who choose not to. We offer choice to help clients reach their investment goals,” Fink writes. It is “not the role of an asset manager like BlackRock to engineer a particular outcome in the economy, and we don’t know the ultimate path and timing of the transition,” Fink said, referring to the climate and energy transition. There is no trace of “lead or be led” in the 2023 letter. The climate crisis takes a back seat to concerns about the economy and the prospects of pension funds.
Fink’s tame letter is a reaction to the harsh criticism of recent weeks and months. From the Right, BlackRock has been accused of exerting influence on companies. The asset manager was engaging in “Woke Capitalism,” some right-wing politicians accused. Republicans even pushed an anti-ESG bill through the Senate and Congress that would ban investments in ESG funds. Joe Biden was forced to use his first-ever presidential veto (see News).
The Left, on the other hand, complains that BlackRock is acting too reluctantly and not using its influence enough to steer companies toward a greener path. Former US Secretary of Labor, Robert B. Reich, even recently accused Wall Street ESG advocates of “soothing corporate and Wall Street talk” aimed at forestalling regulatory requirements, “by creating the false impression that corporations are already doing what needs to be done for the environment or social issues, so there’s no need for more laws or regulations.”
Fink himself is considered close to nature. Every August, the BlackRock CEO goes fly-fishing in Alaska for three days with friends and colleagues. Fink “has long worried about the effects of man-made climate change,” writes Financial Times journalist Robin Wigglesworth in his book “Trillions.” In Alaska and during a safari in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, Fink experienced the effects of climate change firsthand.
The now 70-year-old Fink grew up in Van Nuys, an unremarkable neighborhood in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. As a 10-year-old, he already helped out in his father’s shoe store. At the University of California, Fink majored in political theory. It was followed by an MBA in real estate and a stint on Wall Street. At Goldman Sachs, he blew the interview and went to the investment bank First Boston. After just two years, he was promoted to head of the bond department.
The “brilliant, aggressive and inventive” Fink (Robin Wigglesworth) was responsible for millions in profits. But the meteoric rise didn’t last forever. In 1986, a big bet went wrong. Fink and his team burned 100 million dollars. “I was treated like a leper at the company,” Fink later said. Shortly after, he and an investment banker friend founded Blackstone Financial Management, which would later become BlackRock. Fink is considered a workaholic, who shows up at the office as early as six in the morning. He is married and has three children. He is a big fan of the 80s band “Talk Talk.” His fortune is estimated at one billion US dollars. Nico Beckert
Sleep in, then talk: After the participants in last week’s marathon meeting on the IPCC Synthesis Report caught up on their sleep, we spoke with some of them about the deals, details and background of the document that would otherwise be lost behind the headlines. And we took the current UN Water Conference in New York as an opportunity to talk to an IPCC author about water supply in climate change. The IPCC report, which is, after all, the current scientific state of affairs and has received political approval, will keep us busy for the foreseeable future.
Plus, as always, news from around the world: From Korea, India, the USA and about global emissions trading. And we introduce the boss of asset manager Blackrock, Larry Fink. He authored his famous investor letter – in which he suddenly distances himself somewhat from his role as the supreme climate capitalist.
If you enjoy this issue, please forward us. If this mail was forwarded to you: You can test the briefing free of charge here.
And finally, I am looking forward to Thursday, where I will be speaking with Jennifer Morgan, Special Envoy for International Climate Action at the German Foreign Office, about global and German climate policy for 2023 – and certainly about the IPCC report. Feel free to join us here and spread the word!
The “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM) in the 6th IPCC Report’s Synthesis Report, which was presented to the public in Interlaken on Monday, “summarises the state of knowledge of climate change”. That is what the first sentence of the document says. But the report also reveals the individual economic and political interests of the 135 IPCC states, their fears, views and egoisms.
The exact formulations in the SPM are extremely important. For they are now considered scientifically and politically approved and form the foundation of global climate policy. Relatively unnoticed, the IPCC is breaking important ground here.
With the warning that the 1.5-degree global warming limit will be missed, it is trying to better reach the public.
In a surprising coup, it sets a previously unprecedented global emissions target for 2035. In addition, it helps the controversial CCS technology to achieve unusually high popularity. It advocates ending fossil energies without explicitly mentioning the term – and shows how painstakingly governments safeguard their climate diplomacy positions.
The internal negotiations of the IPCC and its documents are confidential. Climate.Table has nevertheless spoken to insiders and negotiators and analyzed documents to get some background information. In addition to these unofficial interlocutors, the specialist service of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) serves as a source of information.
This all shows that the negotiations were difficult and tough. At the start of the week, a lot of time was wasted on technical discussions. Time was missing at the end for more concrete issues – a frequently used stonewalling strategy. The extension until Sunday evening (instead of Friday evening) is not unusual for conferences. But it meant that from Saturday onwards, mainly smaller delegations had to leave the conference due to their flights home. One delegate complained that this was “not an inclusive process. Those who are struggling to survive are now leaving the conference.”
In terms of content, it was very important to the authors to document the risk to the 1.5 target, because it has not found enough recognition so far: They warn that this limit, which was set in the Paris Agreement, will be exceeded already between 2030 and 2035. This is not new: In August 2021, the reports of Working Group I already warned that the limit would soon be hit. But shortly afterward, at COP26 in Glasgow, the maxim of “keeping 1.5 degrees alive”, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, was nevertheless maintained.
Now the authors explicitly included it in the text – but they had not reckoned with the government delegations. They were not really convinced by the arguments and models presented by the scientists for such a concrete warning: The passage mentioning the years 2030-2035 was removed from the text and moved to a footnote. In the text itself, the date is now only “near term” – that is, 2021 to 2040.
The setting of a new global climate target for 2035 led to unrest and hours of delay in the conference proceedings. According to negotiators, China in particular objected to the new target of minus 60 percent greenhouse gases and minus 65 percent carbon (CO2). The background: According to UN rules, countries must submit new national climate plans (“NDC”) in 2025, which run until 2035. So far, there has been no fixed global target for this year. Now it will be easier to determine success or failure.
As insiders confirm, China was not happy with the mention of a specific number in the text. After much back and forth, it was removed from the text – and put in a separate table. This table is now much more visible than the mere number on page 22 of the report. If China wanted to prevent the figure from receiving attention, its intervention has probably achieved the opposite.
Something similar happened to the German delegation. The German delegation insisted that a footnote be added to the text on the controversial CCS technology for carbon storage: It states that “CCS currently faces technological, economic, institutional, ecological environmental and socio-cultural barriers”. Moreover, the global deployment is “far below those in modelled pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C to 2°C”.
Saudi Arabia, which is banking on CCS to extend its oil and gas sales, then intervened. The country managed to have the entire passage from the Working Group 3 summary added to this footnote. The result in the final version of the SPM of the synthesis report is now a long footnote which, before the CCS criticism brought forward by the Germans, first explains at great length the alleged advantages of CCS: It is a “mature technology” in the oil and gas industry. Its capacity is about 1,000 gigatons worldwide, “more than the CO2 storage requirements through 2100 to limit global warming to 1.5°C”, they say. Moreover, the CO2 could thus probably be “permanently isolated from the atmosphere” – the critical and classifying passage by the Germans then follows just at the end of the long text. “A classic own goal“, as one IPCC negotiator calls it – or a calculated risk to at least anchor the criticism of CCS in the document.
Finally, in order to meet climate targets, the SPM calls for “transitioning from fossil fuels [without CCS] to very low or zero carbon energy sources“. This effectively requires phasing out fossils without mentioning the politically controversial term “fossil phase-out”. The reason for the choice of words is not only the opposition from oil states. It is also due to the models used by the IPCC: Practically all of these calculation models foresee relatively high oil and gas consumption even in 2050 – offset by “negative emissions” that have yet to be realized.
In principle, the SPM of the Synthesis Report also showed the familiar fronts: The EU, the USA and Japan are pushing for far-reaching formulations – China, India and Saudi Arabia are leading the brake front. However, new constellations emerged repeatedly in Interlaken.
Among them: Norway and the Netherlands, both with big CCS plans, were very open to the issue – unlike the rest of Europe. India objected to a graph illustrating the health effects of global warming. It was said to be only based on one study from moderate climates. Health impacts of climate change are a heated topic in India: Last year, thousands of Indians died in a major heatwave.
Brazil and South Africa, on the other hand, are critical of the wording on “nature-based solutions” because they fear that the industrialized countries could buy their way out of their obligations. And Mexico opposed a partial allocation to “North America” in a complicated footnote – which is owed to the complicated IPCC rules and could become important for future “loss and damage” matters.
It also turned out that the IPCC calls the UN term for damage and loss in climate change “losses and damage“. Transposing this directly to the COP debates on loss and damage is difficult. And China insisted on using the wording that the Paris Agreement was adopted “under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” – an indication that China continues to insist on the different responsibilities between old and new industrialized countries – and continues to label itself as a developing country against possible claims, for example in the area of climate financing.
Mr. Garschagen, the UN Water Conference in New York will also discuss how to improve global cooperation in order to ensure that as many people as possible have access to water. What are the chances of this happening?
We can only solve the water crisis together. There is no other way. But I worry more that climate change will exacerbate existing water conflicts.
As a climate change adaptation expert, if you had only one wish for the conference: What would you wish for?
At the UN level, we are discussing major development goals: Clean water and sanitation for all. But I believe that more concrete goals are needed to stop the current waste of water. It is not that there is not enough water on earth, but that it is wasted, evaporates, leaks out of pipes and is distributed where it does not belong.
What would be a concrete goal to counter this?
For example, it could be stipulated how much water may be used in certain production processes. At the moment, this is relatively unregulated – and very intransparent. If, for example, we import a piece of fabric from Southeast Asia, then customers here can hardly find out how much water was used for production and how the wastewater is handled. We could develop a concrete goal for this in order to make water protection manageable.
You are an expert on how human societies can adapt to climate change. Where are the problems with water?
Water is key to adaptation. Climate change either brings too much water or too little, and when it comes to adaptation, you have to consider both at the same time. In cities, for example: How do you divert water during heavy precipitation so that it does not lead to flooding? And how do you simultaneously keep it in the city to such a degree that green areas get enough water and help people keep cool during hot summers?
You talk about sponge cities – but when we look at the global climate crisis, is it not much more about flooding like in Pakistan, or food shortages caused by withered or washed away crops?
Food crises can also be fundamentally linked to water. In Pakistan, for example, there were massive crop failures due to floods. And in Argentina, farmers are currently facing high losses due to heat and drought. Of course, the risks differ regionally. Developing and emerging countries in the tropics and subtropics are much more affected by droughts or floods than countries in moderate regions. People who already live in particularly precarious circumstances, and are therefore particularly vulnerable, suffer the most.
Water is also becoming scarcer in Germany, while the risk of heavy rainfall is increasing at the same time. To counteract both, the German government adopted a national water strategy in mid-March. It is intended to secure a steady supply of drinking water. Wetlands and forests are to be renaturalised to keep more water in the soil – at the same time, nature serves as a carbon sink. Cities are to become sponge towns, long-distance pipelines are to transport water over longer distances if necessary, and rivers and lakes are to be made cleaner. Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke presents the strategy at the UN conference in New York.
So which regions are most affected?
This is difficult to compare, because personal evaluations always play a role.
But a great deal of damage can be measured, can it not?
But not all of it. It might still be possible to answer the question of where the regional hotspots of the climate crisis are. But how to compare the potential damage? Is the loss of cultural heritage more important than food shortages, and if so, how much more important? Which weighs more heavily: the loss of ecosystems, or the loss of home?
And in which regions do people feel the water crisis particularly strongly?
Two examples: Areas at the foot of mountains, for example in Asia and Latin America, are particularly affected. If the glaciers continue to melt and there is less and less snow, there will be a lack of drinking water on the one hand. On the other hand, floods may occur if it is raining instead of snowing, causing large amounts of water to run off too quickly.
And the second example?
In semi-arid zones, agriculture is very dependent on rainfall occurring at the right time. As soon as rainfall patterns change, farmers face difficulties. This affects large parts of sub-Saharan Africa. But make no mistake: In Southern Europe, too, water reserves are severely overstretched, and the irrigation systems used to adapt to increasing drought are taking far too much groundwater from the soil. In this way, we are destroying important water reservoirs that would actually be urgently needed in the future.
To achieve the UN development target of “clean water and sanitation for all” by 2030, progress would need to be four times faster than is currently the case, according to the UN. Last Friday, the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, a panel of renowned scientists and politicians, presented a report outlining recommendations for action.
Everyone must work together to tackle the global water crisis, they write. Water must be protected as a common good. It needs a higher price; at the same time, the poor must be supported so that they can pay for it. Subsidies of up to 700 billion US dollars per year must be abolished, and high levels of investment are needed. International water partnerships (“Just Water Partnerships”) could promote these investments.
Are there also examples of particularly successful adaptation?
Yes, nature-based measures are often particularly effective in both climate action and adaptation. For example, storing more water in the landscape, by renaturalizing river courses, wetlands and forests. In this way, they also strengthen important carbon sinks. Technology also helps, for example in agriculture, where irrigation is applied specifically at the roots of the plants and thus more efficiently, reducing the amount of water evaporating.
But sooner or later, limits will be reached.
Yes, the warmer the world gets, the more adaptation reaches its limits. And we cannot solve everything with money. We also need time, and we need to act much more proactively. Politicians still often seem to underestimate this.
Matthias Garschagen is Chair of Anthropogeography at LMU Munich with a focus on human-environment relations. He has worked as lead author on several IPCC reports, most recently on the Synthesis Report published Monday. In addition, he served as Scientific Director of the World Risk Report for several years.
Emissions Trading Systems (ETS) continue to grow in importance around the world. There are now 28 ETS systems, compared to just 13 a decade ago, and the global share of emissions covered by an ETS also doubled, according to the International Carbon Action Partnership (ICAP) Status Report presented on Wednesday.
Large economies like the EU and China have implemented trading systems. In the USA, too, several states trade CO2 allowances among themselves. Countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Turkey are currently developing their own ETS, which are expected to come into force in the next few years. Japan, India, Brazil, Nigeria and others are considering following suit.
But the subtleties matter. Emissions trading is only effective if certain key conditions are met. For example, allowances must be expensive enough to have a steering effect; there needs to be an absolute and decreasing cap on pollution rights; and as many sectors as possible need to be covered. In China, for example, a CO2 allowance costs the equivalent of around 8 euros, and the system does not have a fixed cap. nib
Over the past year, global production capacity for renewable electricity increased by 9.6 percent to 3372 gigawatts (GW). This was reported by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). This means that 83 percent of all newly installed capacity is renewable.
59 percent of renewable production capacity was installed in Asia. There were also particularly strong increases in Europe and the USA. Hydropower still accounts for the largest share of the renewables portfolio. But the expansion of solar and wind power was responsible for a total of 90 percent of the increase in 2022.
Despite the positive trend, IRENA’s Director General Francesco La Camera warns that “annual additions of renewable power capacity must grow three times the current level by 2030, if we want to stay on a pathway limiting global warming to 1.5 °C.”
Following the SolarPower Summit earlier this month, a wind power summit in Germany on Wednesday was expected to help accelerate the expansion of renewables in the country. “To more than quadruple the current rate of expansion, we really need to release all the brakes and continue to remove barriers to the expansion of wind energy,” said Robert Habeck, Germany’s minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection.
The participants of the wind summit – representatives of the German government, federal states, municipalities, trade unions and other associations – identified a number of key fields of action and measures, for example, better financing conditions for contracts between energy producers and electricity consumers or faster transport of wind turbines.
The German Association of Energy and Water Industries believes this to be a step in the right direction. However, it would be particularly important to use two percent of the German land area for wind energy as early as 2025 and not only in 2032, as planned so far.
Germany’s federal states and the sector will now discuss the topics of the wind power summit until March 31. The “wind energy onshore strategy” will then be drafted and presented at a second wind power summit, expected to take place in April. kul
Larry Fink is considered the most powerful man in global finance. The US American is the founder and CEO of BlackRock – the world’s largest asset manager. With his annual, high-profile letters to CEOs, he branded himself as a champion for climate change. In recent years, he has drawn the attention of board members and managers to the seriousness of climate change, held them accountable, and emphasized the important role of the (financial) economy in overcoming the climate crisis.
In his newest letter, however, he takes BlackRock off the hook. Fink’s company, BlackRock, manages a good $8.6 trillion in assets and has stakes in almost every major company in the world. The way BlackRock invests has a significant influence on the energy and climate transition (Climate.Table reported).
In 2022, Fink still said that every company and industry “will be transformed by the transition to a net zero world. The question is, will you lead, or will you be led?” BlackRock is “focused on sustainability not because we’re environmentalists,” but because it has a fiduciary duty to clients to invest their money in the best way. In 2020, Fink warned that “every government, country and shareholder must confront climate change.”
In his most recent letter, from mid-March, there is barely a mention of this. Fink continues to emphasize that “climate risks are investment risks”. But there is hardly anything left of the former awareness of the need to protect the climate. Instead, the BlackRock boss emphasizes that the company is merely a steward of the money that clients entrust to it. The theme of his 2023 letter is: freedom of choice.
BlackRock wants to offer clients the greatest possible freedom of choice for their investments, he wrote. Some clients want their investments “to align with a particular transition path or to accelerate that transition. We have clients who choose not to. We offer choice to help clients reach their investment goals,” Fink writes. It is “not the role of an asset manager like BlackRock to engineer a particular outcome in the economy, and we don’t know the ultimate path and timing of the transition,” Fink said, referring to the climate and energy transition. There is no trace of “lead or be led” in the 2023 letter. The climate crisis takes a back seat to concerns about the economy and the prospects of pension funds.
Fink’s tame letter is a reaction to the harsh criticism of recent weeks and months. From the Right, BlackRock has been accused of exerting influence on companies. The asset manager was engaging in “Woke Capitalism,” some right-wing politicians accused. Republicans even pushed an anti-ESG bill through the Senate and Congress that would ban investments in ESG funds. Joe Biden was forced to use his first-ever presidential veto (see News).
The Left, on the other hand, complains that BlackRock is acting too reluctantly and not using its influence enough to steer companies toward a greener path. Former US Secretary of Labor, Robert B. Reich, even recently accused Wall Street ESG advocates of “soothing corporate and Wall Street talk” aimed at forestalling regulatory requirements, “by creating the false impression that corporations are already doing what needs to be done for the environment or social issues, so there’s no need for more laws or regulations.”
Fink himself is considered close to nature. Every August, the BlackRock CEO goes fly-fishing in Alaska for three days with friends and colleagues. Fink “has long worried about the effects of man-made climate change,” writes Financial Times journalist Robin Wigglesworth in his book “Trillions.” In Alaska and during a safari in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, Fink experienced the effects of climate change firsthand.
The now 70-year-old Fink grew up in Van Nuys, an unremarkable neighborhood in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. As a 10-year-old, he already helped out in his father’s shoe store. At the University of California, Fink majored in political theory. It was followed by an MBA in real estate and a stint on Wall Street. At Goldman Sachs, he blew the interview and went to the investment bank First Boston. After just two years, he was promoted to head of the bond department.
The “brilliant, aggressive and inventive” Fink (Robin Wigglesworth) was responsible for millions in profits. But the meteoric rise didn’t last forever. In 1986, a big bet went wrong. Fink and his team burned 100 million dollars. “I was treated like a leper at the company,” Fink later said. Shortly after, he and an investment banker friend founded Blackstone Financial Management, which would later become BlackRock. Fink is considered a workaholic, who shows up at the office as early as six in the morning. He is married and has three children. He is a big fan of the 80s band “Talk Talk.” His fortune is estimated at one billion US dollars. Nico Beckert
