Identifying Gaps Between Climate Science and Policy Implementation
A series of workshops hosted by the COP26 Presidency and Woodwell Climate aims to increase climate risk understanding at highest levels of government
The UK hosted the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow on 1–12 November 2021. The COP26 summit brought together parties from across the globe to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Thus far, policy progress has not matched the severe impending climate change impacts predicted by models.
Leading up to COP26, the COP Presidency and Woodwell Climate Research Center organized country-specific workshops for 13 countries. These guided discussions attempted to identify how best to deliver climate risk science to heads of government in a way that will influence national policy.
“It is critically important that policymakers understand the severity of climate change risks, and that they match their policy ambition to the scope and scale of those risks,” said Woodwell Acting Deputy Director and Senior Scientist Dr. Jennifer Francis. “We worked with the COP26 Presidency to organize these workshops because we need to deliver this information more effectively, so that governments can take the urgent action that is needed now.”
Working with the UK’s Science and Innovation Network, Woodwell convened cross-sectoral experts, advisors and advocates on risk to collect and share best practices. Countries involved in the workshops include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, South Korea, South Africa, United States, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.
Over two hours, workshop participants discussed successes and failures of policies to address climate risk, as well as the challenges to tackling emissions reduction and adaptation in their country. The conversations covered a spectrum of climate issues— from vested interests in agriculture in Brazil, to warming Arctic concerns in Russia, to intractable national governments and the question of whether more information would be enough to spur action.
“A better understanding of the full scale of the risks which climate change poses to our way of life and national economies is essential to inform commitments to climate action at COP26 and beyond,” COP26 President-Designate Alok Sharma said.
The workshop outcomes were summarized in a report released at COP26. Recurring themes across countries included the desire for expanded, more detailed datasets, research conducted with policy in mind, pairing risk information with solutions, and using an interdisciplinary approach to risk assessment. Woodwell’s Chief of External Affairs, Dave McGlinchey, said that the workshops have shown a clear way forward to improve climate risk assessments and make them more relevant to national political leaders.
“These workshops are the first step toward delivering this risk information more effectively and motivating more ambitious national policy,” McGlinchey said. “We’ve learned that policy questions and communication strategies need to be incorporated at the outset and throughout the risk assessment process. We’ve learned that risk assessments need to be localized and interdisciplinary, in order to resonate with policymakers. The next phase of our work is to help make these changes.”
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announces Dr. Philip Duffy as Climate Science Advisor
Duffy’s hire underscores urgency of Administration’s science-based efforts to tackle climate change
Today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced the addition of Dr. Philip Duffy as Climate Science Advisor to its first-ever Climate and Environment Division, reinforcing the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to using science-based approaches to rapidly reducing carbon emissions and preparing for the unavoidable consequences of climate change. This key hire comes at a critical time, following the recent release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report which makes clear the urgent need for greater global action on climate change and the upcoming 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in November.
Trained in physics and astrophysics, Dr. Duffy is a highly-regarded climate scientist whose career has focused on understanding the socioeconomic consequences of climate change, and using that understanding to inform societal decisions and policies. He comes to OSTP from the Woodwell Climate Research Center (formerly Woods Hole Research Center) where he served as President and Executive Director. In his role at Woodwell Climate, he led partnerships with groups including Indigenous groups, social justice organizations, under-resourced municipalities, conservation organizations, asset managers, and other leaders in the world of business and finance to understand how risks resulting from climate change affect their work and livelihoods, now and in the future, and how to manage those risks.
Dr. Duffy has served in government before, as a Senior Policy Analyst in OSTP and a Senior Advisor in the U.S. Global Change Research Program, both in the Obama-Biden administration.
Read the full press release.
The major emitter that’s missing from climate negotiations
A new analysis from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) office finds that pending infrastructure and budget bills would put the U.S. on track to hit the Biden administration’s targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions over the next decade. That’s good news. But what if we’re aiming for the wrong target?
There’s a major source of greenhouse gas emissions that could derail international efforts to limit climate change, yet most people have never heard of it. It isn’t included in most climate models, nor in the calculations of how quickly we need to curtail fossil fuel emissions. It’s called permafrost, and its carbon footprint this century could be on par with unchecked emissions by the likes of Japan, India, the U.S., or even more than all these nations. Excluding such a player from international calculations and negotiations would be unthinkable. And yet, that is precisely what we’ve been doing with permafrost emissions.
Permafrost is long-frozen soil that has stockpiled immense amounts of carbon over thousands of years. It covers an area almost twice the size of the United States and holds twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere. As the Arctic warms (something it is doing at three times the rate of the rest of the globe). permafrost is thawing—sometimes abruptly and dramatically—and beginning to release carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. As in other parts of the world, Arctic wildfires are increasing in size and intensity, releasing yet more greenhouse gases and thawing more permafrost. The warmer it gets, the more carbon is emitted. And because those greenhouse gases drive even more warming, it can set off a vicious cycle of self-propelled warming.
Read the full opinion piece by Dr. Sue Natali and Dr. Brendan Rogers in The Hill.
Why New England rarely sees hurricane threats like Henri
For the first time in 30 years, a hurricane is set to make landfall in coastal New England. Not since Hurricane Bob struck the region in 1991 have New Englanders been directly struck by a storm of this magnitude.
As of Friday afternoon, as Tropical Storm Henri crawled toward eastern New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, its wind speeds were just a few miles per hour shy of the 74 mph that would qualify it as a hurricane.
Read the full article in National Geographic.
How the climate crisis could further destabilize North Korea
Last week, the UN released its sixth assessment of the causes and consequences of climate change, stating unequivocally that human activities are driving an unprecedented rate of warming that is impacting life in every part of the globe. From wildfires to floods, the impact of such events can extend far beyond the areas that are directly affected, and policymakers should not ignore politically volatile, nuclear-armed states, where the cascading effects of climate change can have dramatic consequences. One key example is North Korea.
A recent study by the Woodwell Climate Research Center and the Council on Strategic Risks shows that climate extremes like heat, drought, and flooding will constrain the nation’s already precarious ability to provide public goods for its population, compounding persistent security concerns and threatening to ignite intersecting crises on the Korean peninsula.
One primary issue of concern will be the effect of climate change on food security, which has been an issue for the country for years because of long-standing poor policy choices. At present, North Korea is facing a food crisis so severe that the government has been forced to release army rations. A perfect storm of back-to-back typhoons last fall, persistent drought this spring, an ongoing summer heatwave, and recent heavy rains have led to the current state of severe food insecurity, even prompting the Kim regime to issue a rare famine warning this spring.
Climate projections on agricultural yields indicate that rice and maize crop failures will become more likely along the Western coast (where the majority of these crops are currently grown) over the next decade. The overall effect is added stress on the food system.
Read the full opinion piece co-authored by Dr. Alex Naegele on Newsweek.
How much worse will thawing Arctic permafrost make climate change?
Global warming is setting free carbon from life buried long ago in the Arctic’s frozen soils, but its impact on the climate crisis is unclear
The permanence of frozen ground in the Arctic is no longer guaranteed as Earth’s temperatures continue to climb. But how much the degradation of so-called permafrost will worsen climate change is still unclear, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Sixth Assessment Report, released this week. The uncertainty leaves researchers with a frustrating hole in their climate projections.
Permafrost covers a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere’s land and stores around 1.5 trillion metric tons of organic carbon, twice as much as Earth’s atmosphere currently holds. Most of this carbon is the remains of ancient life encased in the frozen soil for up to hundreds of thousands of years.
In recent decades, permafrost has thawed because of global warming from heat trapped primarily by carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. Arctic warming is rising at twice the global average rate since 2000, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As that increase accelerates the thaw of permafrost, the organic carbon contained within it breaks down and releases carbon dioxide, exacerbating climate change.
Read the full article on Scientific American.
Takeaways from the latest IPCC report
AR6 is a resounding affirmation of what has become increasingly clear not only with each new study but through everyday experience.
Today, the IPCC released the first volume of its latest climate science assessment report (AR6). It is a resounding affirmation of what has become increasingly clear not only with each new study but through everyday experience: our efforts to date have not been nearly enough to alter the disastrous trajectory that rising greenhouse gas emissions have put us on–one of rapid warming, worsening ecological disruption, and increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events that threaten the health, safety, and well-being of people around the globe.
These reports present no new research. Rather, they are massive syntheses of the ever-growing body of climate science. And, thus, their findings should come as no surprise. Even so, they are important indicators of where we are in understanding and addressing the climate crisis, and there are four aspects of this report that are particularly salient to our work at Woodwell Climate Research Center:
- In a departure from previous IPCC reports, this one notes the importance of considering the full range of climate risks, “including low-likelihood, high impact outcomes,” in decision-making. This, of course, is fully in line with the work of Woodwell’s Risk Program, whether assessing risks to the global economy or helping under-resourced communities plan for greater resiliency.
- Greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost thaw, are not fully taken into account in this report, but at least the issue is explicitly acknowledged. This also represents an improvement over previous IPCC reports, which were based upon models which omitted entirely this potentially important source of emissions. Understanding these emissions and including them in models, carbon budgets, and climate policy discussions generally is an important focus of Woodwell’s Arctic Program.
- All of the scenarios considered in this report show global warming exceeding 1.5ºC by roughly 2030 and highlight the importance of large-scale removal of CO2 from the atmosphere for keeping that exceedance minimal and temporary. Woodwell’s work on natural climate solutions focuses on the best means we have at present for achieving the needed level of CO2 removal.
- However, the report notes with high confidence that land and ocean ecosystems’ are expected to become less effective at absorbing emissions at higher levels of CO2. Our own work has pointed in this sobering direction, which makes it even more important to prioritize forest protection now over reforestation at some future date.
The good news is that as science illuminates the problem, it also points to solutions. And today, as we also observe the UN’s International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, it is appropriate that we recognize the important role that Indigenous communities around the globe play in protecting the forests that protect our climate. Two new analyses involving Woodwell Climate scientists show that Indigenous territories in Brazil experience far less carbon loss from deforestation and forest degradation than other lands, adding to the evidence that strengthening Indigenous land rights is both a just social policy and an effective climate policy.
Of course, this is just one piece of the puzzle. Decision-makers at all levels and across all sectors must take bold action to advance rapid decarbonization, preserve essential ecosystems, and foster resilience in the face of inevitable impacts. At Woodwell Climate Research Center, we’re working with Indigenous leaders and business leaders, local officials and national policymakers, to generate scientific insights that drive the changes our situation demands.
Thank you, as always, for your support and interest in this important work.