Green bonds fall short in biodiversity and sustainable land-use finance
https://news.globallandscapesforum.org/...odiversity-and-sustainable-land-use-finance-says-research/

How can Green Bonds catalyse investments in biodiversity and sustainable land-use projects? - Global Landscapes Forum
https://www.globallandscapesforum.org/...estments-in-biodiversity-and-sustainable-land-use-projects/

Despite their significance to life on Earth, biodiversity and sustainable land-use sectors attracted a mere three percent of the USD 257.7 billion raised through green bonds issued last year, says a new paper. Dominant sectors, including energy and transportation, absorbed almost 80 percent of green bond proceeds in the past three years.

...

Overall, the green bond market is “rapidly scaling up” in value, according to the paper, but biodiversity and sustainable land use have been less appealing to investors because these can be under-developed in terms of information reporting, measurement and impact metrics. Yet the need is great: some 2 billion hectares of degraded land worldwide require restoration – a figure growing by about 12 million hectares annually, says the paper, citing figures from the World Resources Institutes (WRI) and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Forest and landscape restoration will require no less than USD 40 billion annually in each of the next 10 years to achieve the world’s commitments made through the Bonn Challenge, Initiative 20×20, AFR100 and the New York Declaration on Forests.

...

There is a significant need for finance for the landscape approach and for biodiversity protection,” says Chahine. Landscape approaches balance competing land use demands in a way that is best for human well-being as well as the environment.

“Green bonds might represent a good, innovative tool for these sectors, which hasn’t been receiving much attention within the broader green bond allocation,” he says.

Furthermore, the European Union Sustainable Finance Taxonomy, now in development, could be a “game-changer” in terms of boosting interest in green bonds, by setting clear definitions of what economic activities and investments can be sold as genuinely “green” and that contribute to sustainable land use, biodiversity and other critical sectors, says Liagre.

zpatky k plastum. ktery klima sice nezachrani, ale aspon se usetri naka ropa a skladkovani

Můžeme se nějak zbavit záplavy jednorázových plastových obalů? Britský startup sází na překvapivý materiál - Ekolist.cz
https://ekolist.cz/...avy-jednorazovych-plastovych-obalu-britsky-startup-sazi-na-prekvapivy-material

Výhodou takových obalů je, že se po vyhození rozloží za 4-6 týdnů. V porovnání s normálním plastovým obalem, kterému to trvá několik set let, jde o zanedbatelný čas. Chaluhy jsou oproti jiným alternativám klasického plastu založených například na škrobu ekologičtější – na jejich pěstování není zapotřebí žádná půda a rostou velmi rychle.
„Je to jeden ze zdrojů, kterého je opravdu hodně,“ říká spoluzakladatel společnosti Rodrigo Garcia. „Jedna z chaluh, kterou používáme, roste metr za den. Dokážete si představit něco takového? Přitom nepotřebujete žádné hnojivo. A navíc je to zdroj, který můžete používat opravdu dlouhodobě.“

Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3281045

Thread by @mmildenberger on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1321858069827973125.html

Exciting news! @MichaelAklin and my new provocation is out in @GepJournal. We make a simple but far-reaching claim. **Empirically, climate politics is NOT primarily about collective action or free-riding**. A quick on why we've all been prisoners of the wrong dilemma

For decades now, we've all assumed that free-riding is the binding constraint on global climate politics. Google "climate change" and "free-riding", and it generates 18000+ unique hits. Economists mince few words about this.

The logic of free-riding seems powerful. No country can solve climate change alone. But acting is costly. So every country wants to free-ride off of other country's action. But then no-one has an incentive to act

It's a fabulous idea. And you literally cannot overstate its influence. We've structured decades of climate negotiations on the assumption it is true. But is it? Do the empirics match this reality we've constructed? The surprising answer: not really!

In our article, @MichaelAklin and I review the empirical evidence to evaluate whether it's consistent with our dominant collective-action flavored theory of climate politics. Shocking fact: we can't find ANY empirical evidence that shows it to be clearly correct.

Instead, our review points to three things:

1⃣National policy action occurs in the absence of institutions to manage free-riding. For example, US leaving Kyoto did not alter pace of reforms in other countries

2⃣The public behaves like an unconditional climate cooperator! Most experiments and surveys do not find evidence that public support for action goes down in the presence of free-riding.

3⃣National political actors also behave in a mostly unconditional fashion. For example, we revisit the Byrd-Hagel resolution and Bush's decision to reject Kyoto. We show that free-riding concerns were largely rhetorical, not substantive

In short, we can't actually locate any empirical evidence to suggest that free-riding in practice constrains global climate politics, even though policymakers and academics have blindly assumed this fact for decades. Much more on this in paper (and more nuanced too!).

So what explains climate politics if not free-riding concerns? We think economic conflict between policy winners and losers is the real binding constraint on global climate politics. It can account for existing empirical evidence more completely *and* parsimoniously.

...

We've spent four decades assuming international institutions should primarily remedy free-riding. But maybe that's the wrong dilemma! Given the urgency of the threat, we can't risk our climate politics being a prisoner of the wrong theories. The stakes are too high.

Scientist Rebellion
https://www.facebook.com/101682751683302/posts/134971371687773/

We’ve just sent this letter to Nature, asking them to issue an editorial calling on their readers to engage in NVDA against governments, in defence of truth and life.

How the World Will Look if We Don't Address Climate Change | Time
https://time.com/5824295/climate-change-future-possibilities/

It is 2050. Beyond the emissions reductions registered in 2015, no further efforts were made to control emissions. We are heading for a world that will be more than 3 degrees warmer by 2100.

...

You try not to think about the 2 billion people who live in the hottest parts of the world, where, for upward of 45 days per year, temperatures skyrocket to 140°F (60°C) —a point at which the human body cannot be outside for longer than about six hours because it loses the ability to cool itself down. Places such as central India are becoming increasingly challenging to inhabit. For a while people tried to carry on, but when you can’t work outside, when you can fall asleep only at 4 a.m. for a couple of hours because that’s the coolest part of the day, there’s not much you can do but leave. Mass migrations to less hot rural areas are beset by a host of refugee problems, civil unrest, and bloodshed over diminished water availability.

Even in some parts of the United States, there are fiery conflicts over water, battles between the rich who are willing to pay for as much water as they want and everyone else demanding equal access to the life-enabling resource. The taps in nearly all public facilities are locked, and those in restrooms are coin-operated. At the federal level, Congress is in an uproar over water redistribution: states with less water demand what they see as their fair share from states that have more. Government leaders have been stymied on the issue for years, and with every passing month the Colorado River and the Rio Grande shrink further

Food production swings wildly from month to month, season to season, depending on where you live. More people are starving than ever before. Climate zones have shifted, so some new areas have become available for agriculture (Alaska, the Arctic), while others have dried up (Mexico, California). Still others are unstable because of the extreme heat, never mind flooding, wildfire, and tornadoes.

One thing hasn’t changed, though—if you have money, you have access. Global trade has slowed as countries such as China stop exporting and seek to hold on to their own resources. Disasters and wars rage, choking off trade routes. The tyranny of supply and demand is now unforgiving; because of its increasing scarcity, food can now be wildly expensive. Income inequality has never been this stark or this dangerous.

As committed as nations are to keeping wealth and resources within their borders, they’re determined to keep people out. Most countries’ armies are now just highly militarized border patrols. Lockdown is the goal, but it hasn’t been a total success. Desperate people will always find a way.

Ever since the equatorial belt started to become difficult to inhabit, an unending stream of migrants has been moving north from Central America toward Mexico and the United States. Others are moving south toward the tips of Chile and Argentina. The same scenes are playing out across Europe and Asia. Some countries have been better global Good Samaritans than others, but even they have now effectively shut their borders, their wallets, and their eyes.

Adapted from THE FUTURE WE CHOOSE: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac

https://globaloptimism.com/the-future-we-choose-book

In the end, the story of their minds opening up came down to three key things: The first was they began to understand how the key landscape functions and the entire ecological system worked, and how all were indivisibly connected: that none could function in isolation. The second was they got out of the way to let nature repair, self-organize and regenerate these functions. And the third and vital factor was they had the humility to “listen to their land”, to then change but also continue to learn with that same openness.

- Charles Massy, Call of the Reed Warbler

Call of the Reed Warbler by Charles Massy | Chelsea Green Publishing
https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/call-of-the-reed-warbler/

The End of the Megamachine - The End of the Megamachine
https://www.megamaschine.org/en/

End of the Megamachine - P2P Foundation
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/End_of_the_Megamachine

Library Genesis: Fabian Scheidler - The End of the Megamachine
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=7B25D025762E8FABADEF24C878D1A318

The End of the Megamachine shifts the point of view from a “history of the winners” to a “people’s history”. It highlights the key role of the “metallurgical complex” linking military and financial systems and fostering the evolution of technocratic visions of the world from antiquity to modernity. A particular focus is the history of “apocalyptic thinking” that has been formative for Western culture, both for capitalist projections of a “New World” and for anti-systemic movements.

...

the “neoliberal” (in fact conservative) rollback since 1973, amounting to a global “corporate coup d’état in slow motion” (Chris Hedges) destabilizing societies around the world; and finally the economic, social, and ecological limits that the world-system is facing in the first half of the 21st century. This chapter argues that the combination of social, financial, and ecological crises on a planetary scale is about to lead into a hyper-complex, “chaotic” transformation that makes global governance impossible, eventually dismantling the global Megamachine. However, the outcomes of this process are inherently unpredictable. At the same time, the military machines continue to build up in order to defend the way of life and the property rights of the privileged

...

What does it mean to break with the logics of the four tyrannies und to learn from the errors of failed utopian dreams in the 20th century? Chapter eleven points out that this learning process is already under way. In contrast to many of the former advocates of state socialism who countered the tyranny of markets with an extension of the other three tyrannies – militarism, ideological conformity, and technocracy –, ecological and social movements today aim at all four tyrannies. Protests against the nuclear and fossil fuel industries, large dams, genetic engineering, and other technocratic projects do not only challenge the power of states and market players but also the ideologies of growth and mastery of nature. Ranging from the Zapatistas, indigenous and landless movements in Latin America to Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, people all over the world are searching – sometimes successfully, sometimes helplessly – for new ways of democratic self-organization beyond the ossified and corrupted forms of representation. They do not only aim at political structures but at economic foundations as well: by reclaiming public goods and creating enterprises and banks dedicated to the common good instead of private profit; or by developing technologies focusing on cooperation with nature instead of dominance. However, all these approaches are facing a huge power complex constituted by fossil fuel corporations, banks, media corporations, and militarized states who seem determined to continue their path even at the cost of a devastated planet. The End of the Megamachine points out that the fight for a livable future cannot be won without confronting these power structures and the four tyrannies mirrored in our own minds."

Vancouver just endorsed the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Who’s next? | Ricochet
https://ricochet.media/...vancouver-just-endorsed-the-fossil-fuel-non-proliferation-treaty-whos-next

“Climate change now, like nuclear weapons for many of us who grew up in the ’60s or ’70s, is an existential threat. … We need to reframe the fossil fuel industry and its infrastructure as weapons of mass destruction.”

...
Three pillars form the basis of the initiative, borrowed from the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

The first, non-proliferation, calls for commitments to end the exploration for and expansion of fossil fuel reserves. Slowly, and in an uncoordinated way, this is starting already. In 2017, France banned new oil and gas extraction (existing licences will not last past 2040). In 2018, Belize announced an indefinite moratorium on oil development in its waters. In 2018, New Zealand stopped issuing new offshore oil and gas exploration permits (existing licences are good until 2030). Ireland banned new licences for offshore oil exploration in 2019 and its new government coalition has proposed doing the same for gas. In May of this year, Spain produced a draft bill that, if it passes, would bring an immediate halt to new exploration for oil and gas (existing licences would end by 2042).

The second pillar, global disarmament, demands the planned phase-out of existing fossil fuel projects in line with the 1.5 C warming target. It follows from the recognition that oil and gas reserves currently in development already contain more than enough carbon to exceed that target.

Finally, a peaceful transition refers to rapid adoption of green technologies while protecting workers and promoting economic diversification. It also stresses the need for countries in the Global South to be able to acquire clean energy technologies for their development. That could involve shifting fossil fuel subsidies and any revenues from a prospective global carbon tax to a global transition fund.

Greta Thunberg reflects on living through multiple crises in a 'post-truth society'
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/...reflects-on-living-through-multiple-crises-post-truth-society/

”That we live in a post-truth society today, and that we don't care, that we have lost empathy. We have stopped caring for each other in a way. We have stopped thinking long-term and sustainable. And that's something that goes much deeper than just climate crisis deniers.”

”But I mean the climate crisis is not the only problem here. It is just a symptom of a larger crisis. Like the loss of biodiversity, acidification of the oceans, and loss of fertile soil, and so on. And these things will not just be solved by stopping our emissions of greenhouse gases. The earth is a very complex system. If you take one thing and put it out of balance then that will have an impact on things beyond our comprehension. And that goes for equality as well. Humans are part of nature, and if we are not doing well, then nature is not doing well, because we are nature.”