[TheClimate.Vote] October 13, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*October 13, 2020*/

[study results]
*Fifth of countries at risk of ecosystem collapse, analysis finds*
Trillions of dollars of GDP depend on biodiversity, according to Swiss 
Re report
One-fifth of the world's countries are at risk of their ecosystems 
collapsing because of the destruction of wildlife and their habitats, 
according to an analysis by the insurance firm Swiss Re.

Natural "services" such as food, clean water and air, and flood 
protection have already been damaged by human activity.

More than half of global GDP - $42tn ... depends on high-functioning 
biodiversity, according to the report, but the risk of tipping points is 
growing.

Countries including Australia, Israel and South Africa rank near the top 
of Swiss Re's index of risk to biodiversity and ecosystem services, with 
India, Spain and Belgium also highlighted. Countries with fragile 
ecosystems and large farming sectors, such as Pakistan and Nigeria, are 
also flagged up.

Countries including Brazil and Indonesia had large areas of intact 
ecosystems but had a strong economic dependence on natural resources, 
which showed the importance of protecting their wild places, Swiss Re said.

"A staggering fifth of countries globally are at risk of their 
ecosystems collapsing due to a decline in biodiversity and related 
beneficial services," said Swiss Re, one of the world's biggest 
reinsurers and a linchpin of the global insurance industry.

"If the ecosystem service decline goes on [in countries at risk], you 
would see then scarcities unfolding even more strongly, up to tipping 
points," said Oliver Schelske, lead author of the research.

Jeffrey Bohn, Swiss Re's chief research officer, said: "This is the 
first index to our knowledge that pulls together indicators of 
biodiversity and ecosystems to cross-compare around the world, and then 
specifically link back to the economies of those locations."

The index was designed to help insurers assess ecosystem risks when 
setting premiums for businesses but Bohn said it could have a wider use 
as it "allows businesses and governments to factor biodiversity and 
ecosystems into their economic decision-making".
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/12/fifth-of-nations-at-risk-of-ecosystem-collapse-analysis-finds

- -

[SwissRE]
*A fifth of countries worldwide at risk from ecosystem collapse as 
biodiversity declines, reveals pioneering Swiss Re index*
23 Sep 2020, Zurich
39 countries have ecosystems in a fragile state on more than a third of 
their land - Malta, Israel, Cyprus, Bahrain and Kazakhstan have the 
lowest Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services (BES) ranking
55% of global GDP depends on high-functioning BES
Major economies in Southeast Asia, Europe and the US exposed to BES decline
Swiss Re Institute BES Index enables businesses and governments to 
factor in biodiversity and ecosystem issues into economic decision-making
Countries across the world are reliant on a range of services that are 
based around their natural ecosystems. Biodiversity and Ecosystem 
Services (BES) include such necessities as food provision, water 
security and regulation of air quality that are vital to maintaining the 
health and stability of communities and economies.

Over half (55%) of global GDP, equal to USD 41.7 trillion 1, is 
dependent on high-functioning biodiversity and ecosystem services. 
However, a staggering fifth of countries globally (20%) are at risk of 
their ecosystems collapsing due to a decline in biodiversity and related 
beneficial services, reveals a new study by Swiss Re Institute.

The study, which is based on Swiss Re Institute's new Biodiversity and 
Ecosystem Services Index, shows that both developing and advanced 
economies are at risk. The report finds developing countries that have a 
heavy dependence on agricultural sectors, such as Kenya or Nigeria, are 
susceptible to BES shocks from a range of biodiversity and ecosystem issues.

Among G20 economies, South Africa and Australia top the rankings of 
fragile BES. The well-known impact of water scarcity is a driver for 
these countries, alongside factors such as costal protection and 
pollination. Brazil and Indonesia enjoy the highest percentage of intact 
ecosystems within the G20, however, the countries' strong economic 
dependency on natural resources highlights the importance of sustainable 
development and conservation to the long-term sustainability of their 
economies.

An upcoming United Nations Summit on biodiversity on 30 September 2020 
is set to call for "urgent action on biodiversity for sustainable 
development" as global efforts to improve in this vital area have fallen 
well below UN targets to halt biodiversity loss.

To build understanding around this global issue, Swiss Re Institute 
developed the BES Index, enabling governments and business leaders 
worldwide to cross-compare and benchmark the state of local ecosystems 
that underpin their economies. Insurers can also use this data to 
develop relevant insurance solutions that protect communities at risk 
from poor-functioning BES.

Christian Mumenthaler, Swiss Re's Group Chief Executive Officer, said: 
"There is a clear need to assess the state of ecosystems so that the 
global community can minimise further negative impact on economies 
across the world. This important piece of work provides a data-driven 
foundation for understanding the economic risks of deteriorating 
biodiversity and ecosystems. In turn, we can inform governmental 
decision-making to help improve ecosystem restoration and preservation. 
We can also support corporations and investors as they fortify 
themselves against environmental shocks. Armed with this information, we 
can also ensure the provision of stronger insurance services."
https://www.swissre.com/media-detail.html?image=jcr:b9705381-eba4-49b2-9403-a3ada84b932e&page=db58f40c-ecef-4009-9881-8bb70267c07a#MediaDetail
https://www.swissre.com/media/news-releases/nr-20200923-biodiversity-and-ecosystems-services.html 




[good to know]
*Climate change spurs doubling of disasters since 2000: UN*
Report by UN body says 6,681 climate-linked events recorded since the 
turn of the century, up from 3,656 during the previous 20 years.
Political and business leaders worldwide are failing to stop the planet 
turning into "an uninhabitable hell" for millions of people, the United 
Nations warned on Monday.

Climate change is largely to blame for a near doubling of natural 
disasters in the past 20 years, a UN report said.
The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) said 7,348 major 
disaster events occurred between 2000 and 2019, claiming 1.23 million 
lives, affecting 4.2 billion people, and costing the global economy some 
$2.97 trillion.

The figure far outstrips the 4,212 major natural disasters recorded 
between 1980 and 1999, the UN office said in the new report, The Human 
Cost of Disasters 2000-2019.

The sharp increase was largely attributable to a rise in climate-related 
disasters, including extreme weather events like floods, drought and 
storms, the report said, adding that extreme heat is proving especially 
deadly.

"We are willfully destructive," UNDRR chief Mami Mizutori told reporters 
in a virtual briefing. "That is the only conclusion one can come to when 
reviewing disaster events over the last 20 years."
'Very bleak'
In a joint foreword to the UN report, Mizutori and Debarati Guha-Sapir 
of Belgium's Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters noted 
developing nations continue to have the odds "stacked against them, in 
particular by industrial nations that are failing miserably on reducing 
greenhouse gas emissions".

"It is baffling that we willingly and knowingly continue to sow the 
seeds of our own destruction, despite the science and evidence that we 
are turning our only home into an uninhabitable hell for millions of 
people," it said.

Guha-Sapir warned if extreme weather events continue to grow at the same 
rate over the next 20 years, "the future of mankind looks very bleak 
indeed".

To avoid that happening, the world must act urgently to invest in 
prevention, climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction, 
Mizutori said.

She urged governments to show leadership and deliver on promises made in 
2015 under the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change, the Sendai 
Framework to manage disaster risk, and the global development goals set 
to be achieved by 2030.

UN member states agreed to put in place national and local strategies to 
reduce disaster risks by 2020, but so far just over 90 have delivered 
those, she noted.

"It really is all about governance if we want to deliver this planet 
from the scourge of poverty, further loss of species and biodiversity, 
the explosion of urban risk, and the worst consequences of global 
warming," she said.

'Uphill battle'
The report did not touch on biological hazards and disease-related 
disasters such as the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 
one million people and infected at least 37 million in the last nine months.

But Mizutori suggested coronavirus was "the latest proof that political 
and business leaders are yet to tune in to the world around them".

The report said 6,681 climate-linked events were recorded since the turn 
of the century, up from 3,656 during the previous 20-year period.

While major floods more than doubled to 3,254, there had been 2,034 
major storms, up from 1,457 in the prior period.

Mizutori said public health authorities and rescue workers were 
"fighting an uphill battle against an ever-rising tide of extreme 
weather events".

While better preparedness and early warning systems had helped bring 
down the number of deaths in many natural disaster settings, the UN 
official warned "more people are being affected by the expanding climate 
emergency".

Data showed that Asia suffered the highest number of disasters in the 
past 20 years with 3,068 such events, followed by the Americas with 
1,756 and Africa with 1,192.

In terms of affected countries, China topped the list with 577 events 
followed by the United States with 467.

The deadliest single disaster in the past 20 years was the 2004 Indian 
Ocean tsunami, with 226,400 deaths, followed by the Haiti earthquake in 
2010, which killed some 222,000 people
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/10/12/climate-change-spurs-doubling-of-disasters-since-2000-un



[NYTimes]
*Florida Sees Signals of a Climate-Driven Housing Crisis*
Home sales in areas most vulnerable to sea-level rise began falling 
around 2013, researchers found. Now, prices are following a similar 
downward path.
- -
The mayor of Hallandale Beach, Joy Cooper, acknowledged the pressure 
that climate change is putting on property values, but said coastal 
cities like hers can engineer their way out of the problem, protecting 
homeowners from worsening storms and floods. "We've been managing water 
for years," she said. "So we know it can be done."

The data tell a less optimistic story, Dr. Keys said: "The market 
already perceives that these substantial infrastructure projects won't 
be successful."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/climate/home-sales-florida.html



[from NPR]
*Medical Residents Learn To Treat The Growing Health Hazards Of Climate 
Change*
October 12, 2020
It was low tide on the north shore of Boston when Steve Kearns felt the 
mosquito bite that would land him in a hospital with West Nile Virus 
disease for a week.

"For at least six months after that, I felt like every five minutes I 
was being run over by a truck," Kearns says. "I couldn't work, I 
couldn't walk very well and I couldn't focus. I wondered for a bit if 
I'd ever get better."

Kearns, 71, recounted the experience during a check-up with his 
physician, Dr. Gaurab Basu, and Dr. Charlotte Rastas, a third year 
resident in primary care at a Cambridge Health Alliance clinic in 
Somerville, Mass.

Basu had never seen West Nile in a patient before Kearns. The first 
reported case in Massachusetts was in 2002. By 2018, the year a mosquito 
bit Kearns, there were 49.

"When someone comes in with a fever and is confused, it's not what my 
mind thinks of as the diagnosis right away," Basu says. "This case has 
really taught me how much I need to be informed about the ways in which 
climate change is changing the patterns of infectious disease around the 
United States."
As Basu learned, rising temperatures offer longer breeding seasons for 
mosquitos, boost the virus replication rate, and make mosquitos more 
active. Basu now teaches about these and other effects of climate change 
in an elective course he offers residents. Residents in this course get 
more than 100 hours of advocacy training including how to speak and 
write publicly about the intersection of health and climate change.

He's part of a nascent effort to make sure climate change is part of the 
curriculum in hospital residency programs across the country. There's 
already a push, backed by the American Medical Association, to teach 
medical students about health risks tied to a warming planet. Now some 
doctors say that education should continue during residency, when 
doctors tailor what they've learned to a specialty.

"What a pediatrician needs to know about climate risk is not the same as 
what a surgeon needs to know, or what a radiologist needs to know," says 
Dr. Aaron Bernstein, interim director of the Center for Climate, Health 
and the Global Environment at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

There is no designated curricula for hospitals that want to teach 
emerging lung specialists about longer pollen seasons as temperatures 
rise or guide new emergency room physicians to consider water-borne 
diseases for patients with fever and diarrhea. But Bernstein and 
co-author, Dr. Rebecca Philipsborn, have published a framework hospitals 
can use as a starting point.

"At its heart, this is about preparing our resident physicians to 
provide the best care for patients and to safeguard health in our 
changing climate," says Philipsborn, an assistant professor of 
pediatrics at Emory University. "Patients want physicians to be able to 
provide guidance on things that affect their individual health. We have 
this accumulating body of evidence that climate change does just that. 
It changes what we see and it poses harms to our patients."

The framework has three parts: explaining the link between climate 
change and storms, fires, allergy seasons and other factors that affect 
health, suggesting ways doctors could adapt patient care in response to 
these changes, and preparing doctors for times climate change might 
interfere with care.

Rastas, who took Basu's elective course, says many residents seek such 
guidance.

"This is something that needs to be directly integrated into the 
curriculum," she says. "And [it] needs to become standard of practice 
because I think it's going to have such a huge impact on human health."

But some doctors worry about what will be left out of residency training 
to make room for climate change. Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, the former 
associate dean for curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania School 
of Medicine, says during the pandemic, for example, hospitals need to 
add training in intensive care medicine to more residency programs.

Goldfarb says hospitals should focus on training doctors, not advocates 
for social or political causes. He worries that discussing climate 
change with patients might create mistrust.

"There are concerns about getting into the political sphere," he says. 
"I'm against anything that's going to represent a barrier between 
patients and physicians being comfortable with each other."

But as wildfires sweep across Western states and hurricanes flood the 
Gulf Coast, other physicians are stepping up efforts to talk about the 
intersection of health and climate change.

"We want to impart this information to our residents as fast as we can 
because it's so important that they gain this information sooner rather 
than later," says Dr. Paul Dellaripa, one of the authors of a new 
climate change course for about 50 internal medicine residents at 
Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

In part one, earlier this month, Dellaripa showed residents heat island 
maps of Boston that he reviewed to understand why a particular patient 
experienced kidney failure related to dehydration. Dellaripa adjusted 
the patient's meds and other care after realizing the patient lived in 
one of the city's hottest neighborhoods.

"There are tools out there that can help us identify areas of 
vulnerability in the Boston area," Dellaripa says. "If we can put those 
together with our patients we can better understand who's at risk for 
what and make the appropriate clinical adjustments."

Dr. Evan Shannon, a chief medical resident in internal medicine at 
Brigham, says Dellaripa's lecture highlighted ways rising temperatures 
have a greater impact on low-income, often minority communities. Shannon 
says racial justice and climate change "should be integral to medical 
education, it's an intersection that needs to be explored."

Dellaripa says he's talking to residency leaders in surgery and 
emergency medicine at Brigham about integrating climate change into 
their training programs in the coming months.

Advocates say including climate change in residency training won't stick 
until doctors are tested on these health effects before they're licensed 
to practice medicine.

In the meantime, there's growing interest in some unlikely places.

"What's further than what you might link to climate change than 
neurosurgery?" asks Dr. Ann-Christine Duhaime, the director of pediatric 
neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. "But I've been asked to 
give neurosurgery grand rounds on health and climate change, at three 
institutions, in the past year."

Duhaime talks about her plan to create a green children's hospital and 
about broader impacts of climate change on medicine. She says many 
surgeons are disturbed, for example, about the vast amounts of plastic 
and other waste generated in an operating room.

Duhaime says she's approached by many residents who are looking for 
guidance as well as information about their role with regard to climate 
change. Finding mentors and realizing there are steps they can take to 
address climate change in and outside the hospital helps, she says.

"They go into medicine because they want to help people, they see this 
looming threat, and the conflict between how they spend their days," she 
says, "and this whole climate change disaster -- that conflict is really 
distressing to many of them."
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/10/12/918878683/medical-residents-learn-to-treat-the-growing-health-hazards-of-climate-change



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - October 13, 1988 *

In the second presidential debate, Republican candidate and Vice 
President George H. W. Bush declares himself an environmentalist and "an 
outdoorsman and a sportsman all my life," while Democratic candidate and 
Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis states that Bush was "[a] charter 
member of the environmental wrecking crew that went to Washington in the 
early '80s and did a job on the EPA."

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/4256-1 - (65:00--69:05)


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