Tag Archives: Climate Change

Mercury released by permafrost thaw puts Yukon River fish at risk: study

By Yereth Rosen

ANCHORAGE (Reuters) – If carbon emissions continue at current rates, so much mercury will leach from thawing permafrost that fish in the Yukon River could become dangerous to eat within a few decades, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications.

Current emissions rates threaten to trigger enough thaw release to drive mercury levels in Yukon River fish above federal safety guidelines by 2050, according to the study.

Mercury concentration in the Yukon is expected to double by the end of the century if carbon emissions continue at present rates, according to the study.

But if emissions are reduced in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement, mercury concentrations will increase by only 14% by the end of the century, keeping levels in fish at or below safety guidelines, according to the study.

“A lot will depend on what we do in terms of response to climate change,” said Kevin Schaefer of the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center, the study’s lead author.

The study has implications beyond the indigenous communities in Alaska and Canada that depend on Yukon River fish for their income, diets and culture, Schaefer said.

The nearly 2,000-mile river is “a bellwether or a canary-in-the-coal mine kind of thing, an indicator of what might happen over the whole Arctic,” he said. Thaw-released mercury will work its way from the land to the river and ultimately, into the oceans, and thaw-released mercury in gaseous form will encircle the world, he said.

“What happens in the Yukon is going to affect the entire globe, not just the people who live on or around the Yukon River,” he said.

A 2018 study co-authored by Schaefer, in collaboration with partners from the U.S. Geological Survey and other institutions, estimated that Northern Hemisphere’s permafrost soils hold nearly twice as much stored mercury as is in all the rest of the world’s soils, the oceans and the atmosphere combined.

(Reporting by Yereth Rosen; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Christopher Cushing)

Sea of Slush: Arctic sea ice lows mark a new polar climate regime

By Natalie Thomas and Cassandra Garrison

ARCTIC OCEAN (Reuters) – At the edge of the ice blanketing part of the Arctic Ocean, the ice on Monday looked sickly. Where thick sheets of ice once sat atop the water, now a layer of soft, spongy slush slid and bobbed atop the waves.

From the deck of a research ship under a bright, clear sky, “ice pilot” Paul Ruzycki mused over how quickly the region was changing since he began helping ships spot and navigate between icebergs in 1996.

“Not so long ago, I heard that we had 100 years before the Arctic would be ice free in the summer,” he said. “Then I heard 75 years, 25 years, and just recently I heard 15 years. It’s accelerating.”

As if on cue, scientists on Monday said the vast and ancient ice sheet sitting atop Greenland had sloughed off a 113 square kilometer chunk of ice last month. The section of the Spalte Glacier at the northwest corner of the Arctic island had been cracking for several years before finally breaking free on Aug. 27, clearing the way inland ice loss to the sea, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland reported.

With climate change driving up Arctic temperatures, the once-solid sea ice cover has been shrinking to stark, new lows in recent years. This year’s minimum, still a few days from being declared, is expected to be the second-lowest expanse in four decades of record-keeping. The record low of 3.41 million square kilometers – reached in September 2012 after a late-season cyclonic storm broke up the remaining ice – is not much below what we see today.

“We haven’t gone back at all to anything from 30 to 40 years ago,” said climatologist Julienne Stroeve at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. And as climate change continues, scientists say the sea ice is unlikely to recover to past levels.

In fact, the long-frozen region is already shifting to an entirely new climate regime, marked by the escalating trends in ice melt, temperature rise and rainfall days, according to new research published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Those findings, climate scientist Laura Landrum said, were “unnerving.”

All three variables – sea ice, temperatures and rainfall – are now being measured well beyond the range of past observations. That makes the future of the Arctic more of a mystery.

“The new climate can’t be predicted by the previous climate,” Landrum explained. “The year-to-year variability, the change in many of these parameters, is moving outside the bounds of past fluctuations.”

Sea ice coverage minimums, in particular, are now about 31% lower than in the decade after 1979, when satellite observations began. The ice has also lost about two-thirds of its bulk, as much of the thicker ice layer built up over years has long since melted away. The current ice regime actually began about two decades ago, the study found.

This vanishing of sea ice also contributes to the region’s warming, as the icy white expanse is replaced by patches of dark water that absorb solar radiation rather than reflecting it back out of the atmosphere. The process, referred to as Arctic amplification, helps to explain why the Arctic has warmed more than twice as fast as the rest of the world over the last four decades.

The polar north will also likely see more days of rain rather than snow, which would further eat into the ice. For the new research, Landrum and her colleague Marika Holland at the National Center for Atmospheric Research analyzed sea ice, air temperature and precipitation data since 1950 to project climate scenarios up to the end of the century. They used computer simulations in the analysis and assumed the world’s release of greenhouse gas emissions would continue at a high trajectory.

Back in the Arctic Ocean aboard the Greenpeace Ship Arctic Sunrise research ship, biologist Kirsten Thompson of the University of Exeter said the new study was important in underlining “how fast and how profoundly the Arctic is changing.”

For Thompson, that means big change for the region’s wildlife, from polar bears and insects to the whales she focuses on studying. “All their distributions are changing,” Thompson said. “We might find in the Arctic there will be winners and losers,” as new species enter the region and out compete indigenous animals.

“Other species certainly will not be able to survive in the future.”

(Reporting by Natalie Thomas in the Arctic Ocean and Cassandra Garrison in Buenos Aires; Editing by Katy Daigle and Lisa Shumaker)

‘All gone:’ Residents return to burned-out Oregon towns as many West Coast wildfires keep burning

By Adrees Latif and Patrick Fallon

TALENT, Ore. (Reuters) – Search-and-rescue teams, with dogs in tow, were deployed across the blackened ruins of southern Oregon towns on Sunday as smoldering wildfires still ravaged U.S. Pacific Coast states after causing widespread destruction.

A blitz of wildfires across Oregon, California and Washington has destroyed thousands of homes and a half dozen small towns this summer, scorching more than 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares) and killing more than two dozen people since early August.

Tracy Koa, a high school teacher, returned to Talent, Oregon, on Saturday after evacuating with her partner, Dave Tanksle, and 13-year-old daughter to find her house and neighborhood reduced to heaps of ash and rubble.

“We knew that it was gone,” Koa said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “But then you pull up, and the devastation of just every home, you think of every family and every situation and every burnt-down car, and there are just no words for it.”

Crews in Jackson County, Oregon, where Talent is located, were hoping to venture into rural areas where the Almeda Fire has abated slightly with slowing winds, sending up thick plumes of smoke as the embers burned. From Medford through the neighboring communities of Phoenix and Talent, an apocalyptic scene of charred residential subdivisions and trailer parks stretched for miles along Highway 99.

Community donation centers popped up around Jackson County over the weekend, including one in the parking lot of Home Depot in Phoenix, where farmers brought a pickup truck bed full of watermelons and people brought water and other supplies.

Farther north in Clackamas County, Dane Valentine, 28, showed a Reuters journalist the remains of his house.

“This is my home,” he said. “Yep. All gone.”

Down the road, a woman with a Trump 2020 sign on her home, pointed a shotgun at the journalist and shouted at him to leave.

“You’re the reason they’re setting fires up here,” she said, perhaps referring to false rumors that left-wing activists had sparked the wildfires.

After four days of brutally hot, windy weather, the weekend brought calmer winds blowing inland from the Pacific Ocean, and cooler, moister conditions that helped crews make headway against blazes that had burned unchecked last week.

Still, emergency officials worried that the shifting weather might not be enough to quell the fires.

“We’re concerned that the incoming front is not going to provide a lot of rain here in the Medford region and it’s going to bring increased winds,” Bureau of Land Management spokesman Kyle Sullivan told Reuters in a telephone interview on Sunday.

At least 10 people have been killed in Oregon, according to the office of emergency management. Oregon Governor Kate Brown has said dozens of people remain missing across three counties.

There were 34 active fires burning in Oregon as of Sunday morning, according to the state’s office of emergency management website.

CLIMATE CHANGE ‘WAKE-UP CALL’

Thick smoke and ash from the fires have darkened skies over the Pacific Northwest since Labor Day last Monday, creating some of the world’s worst air-quality levels and driving residents indoors. Satellite images showed the smoke was wafting inland in an easterly direction, the Bureau of Land Management said on Twitter on Sunday.

Drought conditions, extreme temperatures and high winds in Oregon created the “perfect firestorm” for the blazes to grow, Brown told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

“This is a wake-up call for all of us that we’ve got to do everything in our power to tackle climate change,” the Democratic governor said.

President Donald Trump was scheduled to travel to California and meet with federal and state officials on Monday. He has said that Western governors bear some of the blame for intense fire seasons in recent years, as opposed to warming temperatures, and has accused them of poor forest management.

In California, evacuations were ordered for the northern tip of the San Gabriel Valley suburb of Arcadia as the Bobcat Fire threatened communities.

At Wilderness Park in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, firefighters prepared to stave off the blaze as it worked its way downhill.

Steep terrain and dry hills that have not burned for 60 years are providing fuel for the blaze, which started over the Labor Day weekend.

As the smoke that has been clogging the air and blocking heat from the sun begins to lift, firefighters expect the weather to heat up and fire activity could increase, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.

All told in California, nearly 17,000 firefighters were battling 29 major wildfires on Sunday, Cal Fire said.

Improving weather conditions had helped them gain a measure of containment over blazes in many parts of the state, and some evacuated residents in Madera County near where the massive Creek Fire was burning, were allowed to go back home.

More than 4,000 homes and other structures have been incinerated in California alone over the past three weeks. About 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) of land have been burned in the state, according to Cal Fire.

(Reporting by Adrees Latif in Ashland, Oregon, and Patrick Fallon in Arcadia, California; Additional reporting by Sharon Bernstein, Gabriella Borter, Dan Whitcomb, Doina Chiacu, Shannon Stapleton and Aishwarya Nair; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Nick Zieminski and Peter Cooney)

How California’s wildfires could spark a financial crisis

By Ann Saphir

(Reuters) – Wildfires across the U.S. West are among the sparks from climate change that could ignite a U.S. financial crisis by damaging home values, state tourism and local government budgets, an advisory panel to a U.S. markets regulator found.

Those effects could set off a cascade of events including defaults and market disruptions, undermining the U.S. economy and sparking a crisis. Here’s how:

MORE FREQUENT AND INTENSE FIRES

Global warming is making the U.S. West hotter and drier, with wildfires more frequent and intense, scientists say.

Economists have traditionally seen natural disasters like wildfires as localized shocks. That’s changing, according to the report, produced by a 35-member panel for the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. The group included representatives of major oil companies, banks and asset managers.

LOWER HOME VALUES

CalFire, California’s fire-fighting agency, says about 3 million of the state’s 12 million homes are at high risk from wildfires.

That designation hurts home values, which in turn increases mortgage default risk, research cited by the report suggested. More defaults would damage banks, mortgage holders and markets where mortgages are sold. Securities based on mortgages were a trigger for the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

INSURERS RETREAT FROM COVERAGE

After 2018, California’s worst fire season in terms of loss of life and property, some insurers balked at renewing homeowner policies, forcing a record number of owners to turn to pricey policies from the state’s insurer of last resort.

Expensive insurance also depresses home prices, said former California insurance regulator Dave Jones, a contributor to the CFTC report.

“You can tell the same story in terms of sea level rise and flooding and more intense storms and their impact on residential real estate value,” said Jones, now a senior director at The Nature Conservancy.

LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

Lower home values reduce cities’ real estate tax revenue and impair their ability to repay debt, potentially leading to bond defaults, according to the report.

Fire-related business disruptions such as a drop in tourism that slashed sales and lodging tax revenue could also hurt municipal finances. Stresses could build in the U.S. financial system in what the report termed “a systemic crisis in slow motion.”

MARKET PERCEPTIONS

Climate catastrophes can make investors aware of risks not priced into markets, the report said.

“A sudden revision of market participants’ perceptions about climate risk could trigger a disorderly repricing of assets, which could have cascading effects on portfolios and balance sheets and, therefore, systemic implications for financial stability,” the report said.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir in Berkeley, Calif.; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

U.S. regulator calls climate change a systemic risk

(Reuters) – Climate change poses a “slow motion” systemic threat to the stability of the U.S. financial system requiring urgent action from financial regulators, including the Federal Reserve and the Securities Exchange Commission.

That is one of the findings of a landmark report commissioned by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and put together by a panel convened about 10 months ago by Rostin Behnam, one of two Democrats on the five-member CFTC.

The panel’s 35 members, including representatives of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the Dairy Farmers of America, and The Nature Conservancy among others, approved the report on Tuesday.

“The physical impacts of climate change are already affecting the United States, and … the transition to net-zero emissions may also impact many segments of the economy,” the 196-page report said.

“Both physical and transition risks could give rise to systemic and sub-systemic financial shocks, potentially causing unprecedented disruption in the proper functioning of financial markets and institutions.”

A sudden shift in perceptions of the risks from frequent wildfires and intense hurricanes could bring a sudden drop in asset prices, for instance, that cascades through a community and spill more broadly into markets, the report said.

And because the COVID-19 pandemic has depleted household wealth, government budgets and business balance sheets, the economy is more vulnerable than before, it added, “increasing the probability of an overall shock with systemic implications.”

The report’s release comes less than two months ahead of a national election that pits Republican President Donald Trump, who says climate change is a hoax, against Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who calls climate change an “existential threat.”

Its first recommendation is to “establish a price on carbon” that is hefty enough to push businesses and markets to cut use of carbon dioxide-producing fuels such as oil and gas. Taxing carbon would require action by Congress.

But the report’s dozens of other recommendations amount to a call for a sweeping rewrite of financial market rules and norms that could go forward without any new laws and no matter who wins the presidency.

Among the proposals: requiring banks to address climate-related financial risks and listed companies to disclose emissions, and to stress test community banks for their resilience to climate change.

Regulators in Europe have worked for years on efforts to calibrate and mitigate climate risks to financial markets.

Regulators in the United States, where politicians regularly cast doubt on the fact that burning fossil fuels is affecting the earth’s climate, have lagged far behind on such work.

Only recently has the Federal Reserve begun to acknowledge the potential for climate change to destabilize the financial system, and to think about possible responses.

The report urges financial authorities to integrate climate risk “into their balance sheet management and asset purchases, particularly relating to corporate and municipal debt.”

It also calls for them to do research into the financial implications of climate change and join international climate-focused groups, such as the Network for Greening the Financial System, all of which appear to specifically apply to the Fed.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir in Berkeley, Calif.; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Alaska’s salmon are shrinking, and climate change may be to blame

By Yereth Rosen

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Alaska’s highly prized salmon – a favorite of seafood lovers the world over – are getting smaller, and climate change is a suspected culprit, a new study reported, documenting a trend that may pose a risk to a valuable fishery, indigenous people and wildlife.

The study, led by University of Alaska at Fairbanks (UAF) scientists, found that four of Alaska’s five wild salmon species have shrunk in average fish size over the past six decades, with stunted growth becoming more pronounced since 2010.

Hardest hit is Alaska’s official state fish, the Chinook salmon, also known as king salmon.

Chinooks on average are 8 percent smaller than they were before 1990, according to the study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications. Also shrinking are Alaska’s sockeye, coho and chum salmon, the report said. The findings are based on data from 12.5 million samples collected over six decades.

The study confirms first-hand anecdotal accounts from Alaskans with generations of salmon tradition, said co-author Peter Westley of UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences

“People are walking into their smokehouses and not having to duck anymore,” he said. “The fish are just smaller. ”

Warmer seas attributed to climate change and increased competition among all species of salmon are the likeliest factors behind the fish shrinkage, he said.

Salmon are maturing in the ocean at earlier ages and returning to fresh water younger and smaller than in the past, the study found.

In waterways like the Yukon River, famous for its Chinooks, the “really big whoppers” that spend seven or eight years in the ocean are no longer seen, Westley said. Instead, many returning Chinooks are only four years old, he said.

Alaska produces nearly all of the nation’s wild salmon. Last year, commercial fishermen harvested over 206 million salmon and sold them for $657.6 million, according to state officials. Salmon are also a dietary staple for some indigenous people of Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory.

The red-fleshed fish are also eaten by Alaska’s bears and other wildlife. Smaller fish mean fewer nutrients for those animals – and fewer salmon eggs, which can have long-term consequences for wildlife that feed on them, said UAF’s Krista Oke, the study’s lead author.

“It is impacting things that eat eggs, but it also impacts the salmon population itself,” Oke said.

The findings show the need to manage salmon not just for the size of their runs but for the size of individual fish, Westley said. “If you lose the diversity of fish and only have small fish, then you’re in troubled waters,” he said.

(Reporting by Yereth Rosen in Anchorage, Alaska; Editing by Steve Gorman and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Greenland’s ice sheet saw record mass loss in 2019, study finds

By Cassandra Garrison

(Reuters) – Greenland’s ice sheet lost a record amount of mass last year, according to a study published on Thursday, a finding that could prompt scientists to redefine their worst-case scenario as they assess the effects of climate change.

The rate of ice loss had slowed for a two-year period amid cooler summers and higher snowfall in western Greenland through 2018. But last year, as warm air flowed northward from lower latitudes, the frozen island experienced a record loss in its ice mass, geoscientist and glaciologist Ingo Sasgen of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany said.

That loss of 532 gigatons of ice – equivalent to about 66 tons of ice for each person on Earth – was 15% more than the previous record in 2012.

Greenland’s ice melt is of particular concern, as the ancient ice sheet holds enough water to raise sea levels by at least 20 feet (6 meters) if it were to melt away entirely.

The study adds to evidence that Greenland’s icy bulk is melting more quickly than anticipated amid climate warming. Another study last week indicated the island was no longer getting enough annual snowfall to replace ice lost to melting and calving at the glaciers’ edges.

“We are likely on the path of accelerated sea level rise,” Sasgen told Reuters. “More melting of the ice sheet is not compensated by periods when we have extreme snowfall.”

The study, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, used data collected by satellites to the gravitational force of the ice mass, which scientists can use to calculate how much snow and ice is locked within.

Other research has shown the melting is being helped by water pooling atop the ice and at meltwater streaming between the ice sheet and the bedrock beneath.

These studies are helping scientists refine their projections of how climate change will impact the Arctic, and how quickly. Sasgen compared the sobering process to getting difficult news from a doctor.

“It’s always depressing to see a new record,” Sasgen said.

But the studies offer insight into “where the problem is, and you also know to some extent what the treatment is,” Sasgen added.

“It is hard to tell if these (weather) patterns will be the new normal, and which pattern will occur with which frequency,” Sasgen said.

The Arctic already has been warming at least twice as quickly as the rest of the world for the past 30 years, as the amount of greenhouse gases accumulated in the atmosphere continues to rise. That warming has also affected the Arctic sea ice, which shrank to its lowest extent this July in 40 years of record keeping.

In terms of Greenland’s fate, “I would argue that we’ve been in a new normal for the past couple decades of accelerating mass loss,” said Laura Andrews, a glaciologist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center not involved in the new study. “Greenland is going to continue to lose mass.”

If the rate of ice loss experienced in 2019 were to continue, the annual impact on sea levels could cause increasing coastal flooding that affects up to 30 million more people each year by the end of the century, said Andrew Shepherd, a polar scientist at University of Leeds who specializes in ice sheet observation. Shepherd was not involved in the new research.

The new findings underline that “we need to prepare for an extra 10 centimeters (4 inches) of global sea level rise by 2100 from Greenland alone,” Shepherd said. “We have to invent a new worst-case climate warming scenario, because Greenland is already tracking the current one.”

(Reporting by Cassandra Garrison; Editing by Katy Daigle and Will Dunham)

Lockdown, leftovers and how food frugality is a climate boon

By Christopher Walljasper and Nigel Hunt

CHICAGO/LONDON (Reuters) – Clint Parry ransacked every kitchen cupboard and scoured all corners of his fridge during lockdown in Detroit, hunting for lost ingredients and leftovers to whip up meals.

The 33-year-old is one of many people across the world to have embraced thriftiness and cut down on food waste during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to experts. They say the new habits, if maintained, will provide a major boost in tackling another global crisis: climate change.

“We are using virtually all of our leftovers, where we used to waste food because we would forget to pack it and just pick up fast food on a lunch break,” said Parry, who is married and works as a master model builder at Legoland in Michigan.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that a third of the world’s food is wasted every year. Forests are cleared, fuel is burnt and packaging in produced just to provide food which is thrown away. Meanwhile, rotting food in landfills releases more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

As a result, food waste is responsible for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a similar amount to road transportation.

“The next crisis will be the climate crisis and the best thing you can do as a consumer is reduce food waste,” said Toine Timmermans, program manager for sustainable food chains at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

Household food waste in Britain, to take one country, fell significantly in the early phase of the lockdown in April with just 14% of four key items – bread, chicken, milk and potatoes – thrown away, according to research by environmental group WRAP, which conducted thousands of interviews.

Pre-lockdown, an average of 24% had been wasted.

Waste had begun to rebound by June, with a second WRAP survey putting waste of those products at 18%, but remained significantly below pre-lockdown levels.

“Although people are reporting wasting more food as restrictions lift … the positive news is that 70% of people want to maintain their new-found food management behaviors in the long term,” said Richard Swannell, director at WRAP Global which works with governments to reduce food waste.

“This is an encouraging sign that people are taking this opportunity to adopt less wasteful habits in life after lockdown.”

PLAN MORE, COOK MORE

Food security has been a major concern during the pandemic as consumers panic-bought basic goods, migrant workers struggled to get to the fields, meat-packing plants shut, and farm goods produced for shuttered restaurants rotted.

But the lower household food waste has been one bright spot.

Out of necessity, consumers have become more organized in planning menus, developed new cooking skills, checked their cupboards and fridges more before they shop and found better ways to use up leftovers, according to food waste experts.

“What people have been forced to do during the pandemic is plan ahead because they’re now shopping less frequently,” said Dana Gunders, executive director at ReFED, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing wasted food across the United States.

“They’re being forced to cook more and build those cooking skills.”

Laura Brooks, a stay-at-home mother of five in Weymouth, Massachusetts, said she had developed useful habits during the lockdown that she would keep.

“I think as things go back to normal, I may continue with less frequent shopping trips. When I go more often, I find that the new produce pushes the old produce out of sight and things get wasted more easily,” she added.

Increased frugality could prove a valuable habit in the economic and unemployment crisis caused by the pandemic; Gunders said a family of four in the United States was estimated to throw out food worth about $1,800 a year.

TOO GOOD FOR THE BIN

A survey from Germany’s Food and Agriculture Ministry also showed consumers had started to show more concern about wasting food during the coronavirus crisis.

The government had launched an anti-food waste campaign called “Too good for the bin” before the crisis, urging the public not to automatically throw food away after the sell-by date but to smell and taste it to see if it was still in good condition.

The ministry’s survey, undertaken during the pandemic, found that 91% of German consumers questioned were now checking food after its sell-by date and not automatically throwing it away.

This compared to only 76% in a similar survey in 2016.

Food waste is not restricted to the home but it is the biggest source in many countries.

The European Union has published a study estimating that 53% of food waste was in households and 11% in production, with the balance in areas such as processing and retailing.

China’s President Xi Jingping said this month that the amount of food wasted in China was “shocking”, prompting many local governments to launch related campaigns.

For Parry in Detroit, and many others, thrift is here to stay.

“Our food costs have definitely gone way down, since we are not buying out when we have perfectly consumable leftovers in the fridge at home,” he said.

(Reporting by Christopher Walljasper and Nigel Hunt; Editing by Veronica Brown and Pravin Char)

Climate change, COVID-19 stoke wildfire’s economic risk, Fed says

(Reuters) – Wildfires threaten the economy of the western United States to a greater extent than the rest of the country, and the coronavirus pandemic and climate change will only make that worse, according to research from the San Francisco Fed on Monday.

Some 52% of economic output in Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington originates in counties with elevated wildfire hazard, putting the economies of the region in jeopardy as wildfires become more frequent and more destructive, the researchers found. By 2040 that proportion will have risen to 56%, they estimate. By comparison, about 25% to 30% of the Southeast’s economy faces elevated wildfire risk.

The states together account for a bit more than one-fifth of U.S. economic output.

“The portion of real output produced in (the counties of these states) with elevated exposure increases from $2.1 trillion in 2018 to $4.0 trillion in 2040 in the baseline scenario,” the researchers wrote in the regional Fed’s latest Economic Letter. The economic output under particular wildfire threat rises to $4.4 trillion under a more severe climate change scenario, they said.

Wildfire risk is a combination of the likelihood of a big fire happening – which climate scientists have shown has been rising as the planet warms – and the economic destruction, in terms of lives and livelihoods destroyed that it could cause.

The coronavirus pandemic is increasing the latter risk because the fiscal pinch to states and local governments from the drop in sales tax and other revenue means cuts to wildfire suppression and prevention spending, the researchers said.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Tom Brown)

Plant a trillion trees: Republicans offer fossil-friendly climate fix

By Valerie Volcovici

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican lawmakers on Wednesday will propose legislation setting a goal for the United States to plant a trillion trees by 2050 to fight global warming, a plan intended to address climate change by sucking carbon out of the air instead of by cutting emissions.

The proposed legislation reflects an acknowledgement in the Republican party of rising voter demand for action on climate change, even as it seeks to preserve the economic benefits of an historic drilling boom that has made the United States the world’s biggest oil and gas producer.

President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly cast doubt on the science of climate change, had expressed support for the idea of a massive tree-planting campaign during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month.

“I’m working on legislation that would do just this: plant 1 trillion trees by 2050, with the goal of sequestering carbon and incentivizing the use of wood products,” said Arkansas Congressman Bruce Westerman, a member of the House natural resources committee, which is expected to unveil the bill.

Other elements of the plan, which will be released in additional bills over the coming weeks, will focus on sequestering carbon from power plants, recycling plastics and boosting “clean” energy, including natural gas and nuclear, according to congressional staff.

Democrats, including all the top presidential hopefuls in this year’s election, have made proposals for a rapid shift away from fossil fuels to help the United States and other countries avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Environmentalists argue that focusing on planting trees while ignoring emission cuts from fossil fuels is counterproductive. An overwhelming majority of scientists believe emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels are the main driver of climate change.

“Planting trees is good of course, but it is nowhere near enough of what is needed, and it cannot replace real mitigation and rewilding nature,” Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg said in Davos last month.

Nature-based carbon removal measures like tree planting have gained traction globally. Last July, for example, Ethiopia set a world record by planting over 350 million trees in 12 hours as part of a green campaign by Prime Minister Aiby Ahmed.

James Mulligan, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute, said mass tree planting could reduce 180 million–360 million tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2040 if implemented correctly.

“Funding is key,” he said, adding that the program needs a “smart governance system.”

(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Dan Grebler)