It’s the first Wednesday of September which means that we’re going to look at climate- and nature related events that took place in August. Aside from massive, deadly fire blazes in ravaged Greece, Japan’s much criticised plan to dump treated waters from Fukushima into the ocean took place as intended, leading to bans on Japanese products in other Asian countries, as well as activist-led protests… But, there’s more, good and bad, that happened last month. Here are some more news from the past few weeks:
To start off, officials have shared that India had cut its emissions rate by 33 percent in 14 years. According to a report up for submission to the United Nations, the country had the fastest reduction seen so far, by going down between 1.5C to 3 percent annually between 2005 and 2019. India managed to do so by significantly increasing its forest cover and schemes promoting non-fossil energy and targeting industries rather than private households first. With this, India is on its way to reach the 45% cut it targeted for 2030.
In Nairobi, Kenya, the first Africa Climate Summit is currently taking place. The event running from the 4 of September to the 8th is offering a platform to African leaders to exchange on the issue–especially when climate change has been wreaking havoc and causing natural disasters all across the continent. Kenya’s president, William Ruto, on the opening day set the tone by underlining that climate change is causing the continent to lose 5% to 15% of its GDP every year due to disasters. He also stated that “those who produce the garbage refuse to pay their bills”, referring to the US, China and the EU, some of the world’s largest greenhouse gas producers. We’ll keep our eyes peeled for any pledge that could come out of this summit.
This month’s number is 1 billion. That is how many deaths over the next century could occur if Earth’s temperature increases by 2C. A joint study by universities in England and Austria found that if climate heating cannot be curbed–through immediate and substantive actions–billions of lives could be impacted, and one billion lives could be lost. Poorer people especially would be affected, as news site EcoWatch underlines.
And lastly, the European Union saw its greenhouse gas emissions go down by 3% in the first quarter of 2023, European statistics bureau Eurostat shared in August. Numbers went down compared to the first quarter of 2022–that is, at the cusp of when the war in Ukraine began. The economic sectors in which emissions went down the most were electricity and gas supply–where they went down by 12.3%--while emissions in the transportation and storage sector went up by 7.2%.