COP27 long on pledges, short on funds for forests — Congo Basin at risk
The first big news of the COP27 climate conference was a forest promise: UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a 26-nation partnership to conserve woodland ecosystems as “one of the best ways of getting us back on track to 1.5 degrees” of warming.
This Forest and Climate Leaders Partnership is meant to martial efforts to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030, as 145 countries pledged in the Glasgow forests declaration at COP26.
But one year on, countries are lagging behind the pace needed to reach the Glasgow goal, experts said. Most worryingly, the funding pledged to fight deforestation is far from enough and has often failed to arrive.
The 30DayMapChallenge is a social media based mapmaking challenge open to everyone. Each November, participants from all over the world create a new and original map for 30 days, where each day has a unique theme. In 2022, Woodwell Climate Research Center participated as an organization, including as much of our work as possible while still adhering to the map categories.
Soil moisture impacts the tundra carbon balance in a changing climate
There is growing recognition that soil moisture plays a crucial role in regulating the response of tundra carbon cycling to climate warming.
Arctic tundra is Earth’s coldest terrestrial biome after glaciers, yet this far northern biome is warming three to four times faster than the global average (Rantanen et al., 2022). Importantly, the Arctic tundra biome stores ~160 Pg C in the top 1 m of permafrost soils (Loranty et al., 2016), which is equivalent to ~17 years of humanity’s fossil fuel emissions at current levels. Continued warming could cause a significant portion of this carbon to be released into the atmosphere over the coming century (Schuur et al., 2022), therefore it is crucial to better understand the carbon balance of tundra ecosystems including climate change impacts.
Read more in Global Change Biology.
Belching lakes, mystery craters, ‘zombie fires’: How the climate crisis is transforming the Arctic permafrost
Four years ago, Morris J. Alexie had to move out of the house his father built in Alaska in 1969 because it was sinking into the ground and water was beginning to seep into his home.
“The bogs are showing up in between houses, all over our community. There are currently seven houses that are occupied but very slanted and sinking into the ground as we speak,” Alexie said by phone from Nunapitchuk, a village of around 600 people. “Everywhere is bogging up.”
What was once grassy tundra is now riddled with water, he said. Their land is crisscrossed by 8-foot-wide boardwalks the community uses to get from place to place. And even some of the boardwalks have begun to sink.
A climate change report card for the world
Last year’s United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, had the same optimistic energy as the first day of a new school year. The United States — a truant since the nation withdrew from the Paris agreement under President Donald Trump — was back at the table. The cool kids (Leonardo DiCaprio, Prince William, Greta Thunberg) brushed shoulders with the nerds (everyone else). A parade of presidents and prime ministers pledged renewed climate efforts with all the fervor of students promising their parents that this semester would be different.
A warming Siberia, wracked by wildfires, nears a crucial threshold
Nearly 23 million acres burned from 1982 to 2020. But almost half of that occurred in 2019 and 2020, and the region may be near a threshold beyond which extreme fires become more common.
Rapid warming of the Arctic has led to the extreme wildfire seasons experienced in Siberia in recent years, scientists said Thursday, and such severe fires are likely to continue.
The researchers said that the Siberian Arctic, with its vast expanses of forest, tundra, peatlands and permafrost, was approaching a threshold beyond which even small temperature increases could result in sharp increases in the extent of fires.
Continue reading on The New York Times.