Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new record last year. The planet hasn’t had this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in more than 3 million years.

The U.S., China and the European Union are responsible for the majority of global carbon emissions. Given the long life of CO2, high global temperatures will persist for several decades after carbon emissions reach net zero. This means more weather extremes and more forced migrations of communities and cities.

“We are way off track,” said Petteri Taalas of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). “At the current rate of increase in GHG concentrations, we will see a temperature increase by the end of this century far in excess of the Paris Agreement targets of 1.5C to 2C. Rising levels of GHGs have major negative repercussions for our daily lives and wellbeing, and for the future of our children and grandchildren. It is hoped COP26 will see a dramatic increase in commitments.”

Negotiators seek to end GHG emissions by 2050, which they hope will help the planet avert the worst climate impacts. Stopping emissions will stabilize the planet eventually, but not immediately.

Burning coal, oil and gas is the biggest source of CO2, which causes 66 percent of global warming.

CO2 emissions fell by about 5 percent in 2020 due to COVID restrictions, compared to 2019, but the pandemic slowdown had little impact on the atmospheric levels of GHG.

The WMO also warned that global warming is damaging the ability of the natural world to absorb carbon emissions. Deforestation has decimated the greenbelts of the world. The Amazon basin once absorbed tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. Thanks to the fires and droughts associated with expanding agriculture, this critical ecosystem—and others around the world—is vanishing.

The climate report comes ahead of next week’s international climate meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP, which is seeks to cut GHG emissions. One way to pay for climate action is to redirect more than $400 billion in public subsidies that governments give to fossil fuel companies every year. Subsidies must be cut. Unfortunately, they are increasing.

The Biden administration released several reports about climate change and national security, warning that a warming world will challenge global stability. The documents, issued by the departments of Homeland Security and Defense as well as the National Security Council and director of national intelligence, mark the first time that the nation’s security agencies collectively described the climate risks that they face.

The reports include warnings from the intelligence community about how climate change can work on numerous levels to sap the strength of a nation. For example, countries like Iraq and Algeria could be hit by lost revenue from fossil fuels, even as their region faces worsening heat and drought. The Pentagon warned that food shortages could lead to unrest, along with fights between countries over water.

The Department of Homeland Security, which includes the U.S. Coast Guard, warned that as ice melts in Arctic Ocean, competition will increase for fish, minerals and other resources. Another report warned that tens of millions of people are likely to be displaced by 2050 because of climate change, including as many as 143 million people in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

The national security warnings came on the same day that top financial regulators for the first time warned that climate change was “an emerging threat” to the American economy and the world economy. 

The suggestion that climate change is a national security threat isn’t new. But taken together, the reports signal a new stage in U.S. policy that places climate change at the center of the country’s security planning. The intelligence community made three predictions:

• Global tensions will rise as countries argue about how to accelerate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions;
• Climate change will exacerbate cross-border flash points and amplify strategic competition in the Arctic; and
• The effects of climate change will be felt most acutely in developing countries that are least equipped to adapt.

China and India will largely determine how quickly global temperatures rise, the report stated. It predicts that most nations will not meet their pledges to the Paris Agreement.

“Given current government policies and trends in technology development, we judge that collectively countries are unlikely to meet the Paris goals,” the report said. “High-emitting countries would have to make rapid progress toward decarbonizing their energy systems by transitioning away from fossil fuels within the next decade, whereas developing countries would need to rely on low-carbon energy sources for their economic development.”

The intelligence report identified several countries as being particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and challenged to cope with its effects. That list includes Afghanistan, Guatemala, Haiti, Iraq, India, North Korea and Pakistan.

“From extreme weather events to record heat, our work force is on the front lines of the climate emergency every day,” Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security.

The National Security Council released its own report, which analyzed how climate change is already forcing people to leave their homes. One forecast suggests that climate change could lead to almost three percent of the populations of Latin America, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa moving within their countries by 2050 — more than 143 million people.

The race to respond to climate change could benefit some countries, particularly those that are leaders in renewable-energy technologies or the raw materials needed to produce them. China controls much of the world’s processing capacity for cobalt, lithium and other minerals needed for electric vehicle batteries, as well as rare earth minerals used in wind turbines and electric vehicles. Other countries, such as Norway and the United Kingdom, have an advantage in meeting the growing demand to remove carbon dioxide from the air, because those nations have put a price on carbon, which promotes alternative energy.

Unfortunately, there are no silver bullets in the battle against global warming, but cutting subsidies to oil and coal companies is a critical first step to level the playing field and return to a free market economy, which can promote efficiency. The second critical strategy is to halt deforestation and promote reforestation and urban forestry immediately. Hopefully, COP26 will succeed on both of these fronts.

Read the full story about COP26 and climate action.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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By Mike Ives, The New York Times

The World Health Organization said Tuesday that 92 percent of people breathe what it classifies as unhealthy air, in another sign that atmospheric pollution is a significant threat to global public health.

A new report, the W.H.O.’s most comprehensive analysis so far of outdoor air quality worldwide, also said about three million deaths a year — mostly from cardiovascular, pulmonary and other noncommunicable diseases — were linked to outdoor air pollution. Nearly two-thirds of those deaths are in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific region, compared with 333,000 in Europe and the Americas, the report said.

“When you look out through the windows in your house or apartment, you don’t see the tiny little particles that are suspended in the air, so the usual perception is that the air is clean,” Rajasekhar Balasubramanian, an air quality expert at the National University of Singapore who was not involved in the study, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

“But the W.H.O. report is a clear indication that even in the absence of air pollution episodes, the concentrations of particles suspended in the air do exceed what’s considered to be acceptable from a health viewpoint,” he said.

In previous studies, the W.H.O. estimated that more than eight in 10 people in urban areas that monitored air pollution were breathing unhealthy air and that about seven million deaths a year were linked to indoor and outdoor pollution.

The new study reduced the second estimate to 6.5 million deaths. But María P. Neira, director of the W.H.O.’s Department of Public Health and Environment, said in a telephone interview that “the trends are still going in the wrong direction.”

“Somebody has to pay for those health systems to sustain the treatment and the care for those chronic patients, and this is something that countries need to balance when they make decisions about the sources of energy they are selecting or the choices they make in terms of public transport,” Dr. Neira said. “These economic costs of health have to be part of the equation.”

The W.H.O. study was conducted by dozens of scientists over 18 months and was based on data collected from satellites, air-transport models and ground monitors in more than 3,000 urban and rural locations, agency officials said Tuesday.

The agency defined unhealthy air as having concentrations of fine particulate matter, known as PM 2.5, above 10 micrograms per cubic meter, or 35.3 cubic feet, but it did not measure concentrations of ozone, nitrous oxide or other harmful pollutants.

The study said that major drivers of global air pollution included inefficient energy use and transportation but that nonhuman factors, such as dust storms, also played a role.

Professor Balasubramanian said it was an open question whether countries in Southeast Asia, a region that has densely packed cities and struggles to combat cross-border pollution, would choose to improve urban air quality by switching to cleaner fuels in their power plants, as Western European countries did several decades ago.

Prolonging the decisions will probably increase the health risk from air pollution, he said, because the region’s population is rising and demanding more energy.

About 300 million children in the world breathe highly toxic air, the United Nations Children’s Fund said in a new report. The vast majority of these children, about 220 million, live in South Asia, in places where air pollution is at least six times the level that the World Health Organization considers safe, Unicef said.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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Beijing has issued its first pollution red alert as smog shrouded the Chinese capital for the second time this month. The alert will begin at 7am on Tuesday and should see millions of vehicles forced off the roads, factories and construction sites shut down and schools and nurseries advised to close.

“It is history – this is a precedent set,” said Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public an Environmental Affairs in Beijing. “This is extremely important to stop children from being exposed to such a high level of pollution.”

Chinese authorities faced fierce criticism last week when they failed to issue a red alert even as Beijing’s residents choked on smog levels that in some areas rose to 40 times those considered safe by the World Health Organisation.

Greenpeace complained that the government’s insufficient alerting system compounded the effects of Beijing’s latest “airpocalypse,” in which readings of the hazardous airborne particle PM2.5 exceed 900 micrograms per cubic meter in some parts of the city.

Monday’s emergency announcement appeared in part to be a reaction to those criticisms. Ma Jun said it would have been a “very tough decision” for China’s leaders to declare the red alert in a city of about 23 million inhabitants.

“It is going to involve some very challenging actions like stopping half of the cars. In a city with more than five million cars you can imagine that is going to be a big challenge,” he said. “It is not about the political or financial cost, first and foremost it is about the great difficulty in trying to organize such an emergency response.

“But this will definitely help protect people’s health. With the red alert, primary schools, middle schools and kindergartens will be advised to stop having class. This will be very helpful in preventing extra exposure of the most vulnerable group of people to the air pollution hazards.”

Chinese state media said the latest bout of pollution would linger over Beijing until Thursday, when rain is expected to clear away the toxic smog. “Coal-fired power plants are the major culprit at this point,” said Xinhua, China’s official news agency.

Last year the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, vowed to declare war on pollution, but despite such pledges smog continues to blight cities right across the country. Scientists blame air pollution for about 4,000 deaths a day.

Ma Jun said Beijing’s first red alert underlined how serious the smog problem remained. “It just shows that air pollution is still a very big challenge to the city of Beijing and that the government has paid greater attention to this issue,” he said.

The crisis is even more severe in the regions surrounding Beijing, where hundreds of millions of tons of coal are still being burned each year even as the capital tries to slash its use of the fossil fuel.

Ma Jun said government action in those places was also needed in order to solve Beijing’s smog problem. “Beijing actually isn’t even in the top 10 polluting cities in the region [any more]. There are others which are significantly more polluting,” he said.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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Beijing’s air pollution reached 11 times World Health Organization-recommended levels today, as the country’s meteorological department forecast smog in north and central China to continue. 

The concentration of PM2.5, fine particulates that pose the greatest risk to human health, was 290 micrograms per cubic meter at 3 p.m. near the city’s Tiananmen Square, the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center said on its website. The WHO recommends levels of no higher than 25 micrograms per cubic meter in 24 hours.

Beijing raised its air pollution alert to orange yesterday as smog levels were projected to stay hazardous this weekend, triggering orders for some enterprises to limit production and a ban on outdoor barbecues and fireworks. Pollution in Beijing and Shanghai placed them among the least hospitable of 40 international cities listed in a report by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, which ranked China’s capital second from bottom, ahead of Moscow.

When the air gets really bad, Beijing says it has an emergency plan to yank half the city’s cars off the road. The only problem is: It may be difficult to ever set that extreme plan in motion. It wasn’t triggered in January, when the city recorded extremely poisonous air pollution. And not this week, when pollution was expected to continue for several days at hazardous levels.

A rare alert issued Friday was an “orange” one – the second-highest of the four levels of urgency – prompting health advisories and bans on barbeques, fireworks and demolition work, but no order to pull cars from the streets.

“Yesterday, I thought it was bad enough when I went out to eat. But this morning I was hacking,” a Beijing pedestrian who gave her name as Li said Friday, as a thick haze shrouded the city.

Still, the government did not issue the red alert. Beijing’s alert system requires a forecast of three days in a row of severe pollution for the highest level. Days of extreme pollution or polluted skies that are expected to clear in less than three days do not trigger the most stringent measures.

A period of pollution in January that saw density readings of PM 2.5 particles exceeding 500 micrograms per cubic meter prompted only the mildest, blue-level alert. That density is about 20 times as high as the 25 micrograms considered safe by the World Health Organization. PM refers to “particulate matter,” a mixture of extremely small particles and liquid droplets, the size of which is linked to their potential for causing health problems.

The measures that went into effect Friday also ask members of the public to use public transportation and to turn off their cars rather than let them run idle, as well as call for water sprinkling on the street and dust-control measures at building sites.  The most stringent level, red, would order half of Beijing’s 5 million cars off the road – based on the last digit of their license plate.

Ma Jun, of the non-governmental Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing, said that accurately forecasting three days of heavy pollution is technically difficult. But in any case, he said, the government is reluctant to adopt the most disruptive measures, because it would be nearly impossible to notify all drivers of the rules and to adequately boost the capacity of public transportation to accommodate the extra passengers.

“When the alert is at a low level, the measures are not effective, but those for the high-level alert are not feasible,” Ma said. “The government is reluctant to raise the alert level.”

However, Ma credited the government with becoming more open in recent months about air pollution levels, and noted that many people receive real-time government updates about Beijing’s air quality on their mobile phones, so that they can take protective measures.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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