Equilibrium/Sustainability — Presented by Delta — An Ice Age plan to save Arctic permafrost

Today is Thursday. Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. Subscribe here: digital-staging.thehill.com/newsletter-signup.

A renegade ex-Soviet scientist and his son are engaged in an unconventional — but effective — plan to stop Russia’s permafrost from melting: reintroducing the kinds of megafauna, or giant animals, that once roamed the country’s frozen North during the Ice Age, Reuters reported.

The 200 animals that call Sergey and Nikita Zimov’s Pleistocene Park home — bison, horses and perhaps one day resurrected woolly mammoths — crunch down the snow beneath their feet, slowing its melting and allowing winter cold to re-freeze the marshy ground below.

A paper by the Zimovs in Nature’s Scientific Reports found that the presence of animals dropped ground temperatures 1.79 Celsius, and suggested that a population density of 114 animals per square kilometer could keep 37 percent of the permafrost from melting — staving off a potentially catastrophic “natural” release of carbon and methane.

“We’re working to prove that these ecosystems will help in the fight, but, of course, our efforts alone are not enough,” Nikita Zimov told Reuters. 

Today we’ll hear about a new pledge signed this morning at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26),  focused on cutting emissions generated by the tourism industry. Then talk to a GOP congressman who is on his way to COP26 about how he’s building shared ground with his colleagues and constituents on climate. 

For Equilibrium, we are Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Please send tips or comments to Saul at selbein@digital-staging.thehill.com or Sharon at sudasin@digital-staging.thehill.com. Follow us on Twitter: @saul_elbein and @sharonudasin. 

Let’s get to it.

 

A push to cut tourism emissions 

Global tourism leaders on Thursday called upon governments, destinations and businesses to cut tourism-related emissions in half by 2030 and achieve net-zero by 2050.

Recognizing an urgent need for a consistent worldwide plan to implement climate action in tourism, leaders at the Glasgow U.N. climate conference launched the Glasgow Declaration for Climate Action in Tourism, which requires signatories to commit to measuring emissions, decarbonizing and unlocking finance.

It also commits them to deliver concrete climate action plans within 12 months of signing, according to a news release from the U.N. World Tourism Organization (UNWTO).

First words: “Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time,” Zurab Pololikashvili, secretary-general of the UNWTO, said at a Declaration signing ceremony on Thursday. 

“It’s also a challenge to tourists, for the natural wonders people travel to see,” he continued. “The window of opportunity to rethink and reform our sector is closing.” 

More than 300 tourism stakeholders have already signed the Declaration developed by the UNWTO in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Visit Scotland, the Travel Foundation and Tourism Declares a Climate Emergency. It was developed within the framework of the U.N.’s One Planet Sustainable Tourism Program.

Return to pre-pandemic travel: As the tourism sector continues recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, Pololikashvili acknowledged his own privilege in being able to attend COP26 amid such a “positive atmosphere,” adding that the UNWTO expects a gradual return to pre-pandemic travel levels by 2024 at the latest.

“And hand-in-hand with this comes the possibility of emissions rebounding rapidly making it hard for tourists to stay aligned with the international goals,” he said, stressing that without immediate action, emissions from tourism alone could grow by 25 percent in 2030.

Although the Glasgow Declaration already has more than 300 launch partners, only one in four stakeholders has a climate action in place at this point, according to Pololikashvili. He therefore emphasized the importance of mandating climate action plans among signatories within a year’s time.

 

A MESSAGE FROM DELTA

Because we believe you shouldn’t have to choose between seeing the world and saving the world. Learn more.

 

A ‘JOURNEY TOWARDS NET ZERO’

Rethinking tourism: The pandemic, according to Micronesia President David Panuelo, has given leaders a chance “to reset and rethink the way we plan, develop and manage tourism.”

“We have recognized the gem hidden in our own backyards — the natural resources which have always been our source of livelihood,” Panuelo said.

As the first Pacific Island country to become a signatory to the Declaration, Micronesia is urging both its neighbors and Pacific tourism organizations to join the efforts as well, he added.

Community empowerment: Iván Eskildsen, Minister of Tourism in Panama — one of only three carbon-negative countries in the world — stressed the “need to revise the way of life we have,” by reevaluating tourism’s role in decarbonization, wildlife protection, carbon sink preservation and local community empowerment.

Because more than 30 percent of Panama’s land contains preserved national park zones, the country needs to involve local communities in active management of these areas — which is a win-win situation to those communities due to the economic benefits, Eskildsen said.

Recruiting businesses, big and small: As far as businesses are concerned, Pololikashvili applauded the World Travel & Tourism Council, a London-based tourism industry association, for partnering on the Glasgow Declaration launch. The council, he said, includes more than 500 of the strongest global companies in the sector.

Pololikashvili stressed that 80 percent of the world’s tourism sector includes small and medium-sized enterprises. The UNWTO is therefore engaging with international financial institutions, with the goal of creating a new net-zero tourist fund, he said.

Last words: Those smaller tourism ventures, Pololikashvili explained, need capacity and financing to “join us in the journey towards net zero.” 

To read the full story, please click here.

GOP lawmaker seeks climate common ground 

A group of climate-focused Republicans are headed to Glasgow on Friday for COP26, where they aim to gain an audience for their ideas to combat climate change.

Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah), who launched the Conservative Climate Caucus earlier this year, told Equilibrium there are some areas where progressives and conservatives agree on climate.

“There’s far more we agree on than we disagree on,” he said. “But if we start with the areas where we disagree, we’re never even going to get to those [other areas].”

As lawmakers in Congress wrangle over President Biden’s social and climate policy package, Equilibrium sat down with Curtis to discuss the left-right divide on climate and what it would take to mend it.

Equilibrium: What are some of those issues where there are shared interests?

Curtis: We’re all in on [energy] storage. That’s a great, great discussion that we can have. Let’s go over to that fossil fuel one. We have a problem with methane. Republicans need to acknowledge that we have a problem with methane and we need to step up and meet our Democratic colleagues and their efforts with methane. 

The first president to talk seriously about climate action was a Republican — George H.W. Bush. How did this get so divisive?

I think it’s the branding. The best analogy I know is [former President Trump’s border] wall. When I say ‘the wall,’ most people’s chests tighten up, they start seeing a little bit of red, and all they can see is Donald Trump and they’re angry, right? The word encompasses all the Trump agenda; it encompasses separating kids at the border. 

And what happened is that “climate” became the same way to Republicans.

What do Republicans hear when they hear “climate”?

They hear extremism. They hear, “no more airplane travel,” “no more beef,” right? “Totally change your way of life.” It just turns us off. 

This is a year or so ago, but we started a weekly video where we talked about climate: #CurtisClimateChat, “Come join me for a conversation about stewardship.”

And the very next morning at my wife’s tennis practice, she was accosted by a woman who said, “Is your husband going off the deep end? He must be in league with AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)] because he used the ‘climate’ word.”

 

CROSS-PARTY MESSAGING

How did you bridge that gap?

When I’m in a town hall meeting, I don’t jump right into, you know, a climate agenda. 

I’ll talk about, look at this amazing place we have in Utah: our mountains or lakes or rivers, there is not a soul in Utah who doesn’t want to preserve and protect those. Not a soul in Utah who doesn’t care about leaving this planet better for their kids than they found it. 

And now we have an entry into a conversation about climate.

Has that changed in the years you’ve done it?

For the last four months Utahns have not been able to see their mountains because of the smoke from forest fires coming from California and Oregon. We’re in the state’s longest drought. Republicans have been a little bit slow to talk about climate — but I’m telling you, that mood is changing, I’m hearing more and more, “This is unacceptable.”

I have to be less and less careful because it’s becoming more and more evident.

What can progressives do to bring Republicans to agreement on shared priorities?

We need to be embraced and not pushed back. There are some, I’m convinced, who will feel bad that they’ll lose this political wedge and the ability to beat us up. Those aren’t the people who care most about the environment. 

But I’m convinced there are many who care deeply about the environment — who are glad to see us engaging at the table, who are who are ready to sit down and talk about how we move this forward.

 

A MESSAGE FROM DELTA

Because we believe you shouldn’t have to choose between seeing the world and saving the world. Learn more.

 

Thirsty Thursday

‘Flash droughts’ dry up farmlands; Kenyan women suffer drought’s deadly consequences; dunes emerge from a desiccated lake to threaten surrounding villages.

Researchers identify ‘flash drought’ hotspots

• Scientists have identified global hotspots for “flash droughts,” or droughts that develop with unusual quickness and rapidly dry up land, Nature reported.
• During flash droughts, affected regions experience little precipitation and above-average evaporation, causing crops to fail and leaving both livestock and people with little to eat, according to Nature.
• Researchers at the University of Oklahoma analyzed four global datasets in different regions of the world, covering 1980 to 2015, to understand this phenomenon — finding that flash droughts most frequently happen in the tropics and subtropics including Brazil, Indian and the Sahel region of Africa, Nature reported.
• These hotspots endured flash droughts in more than 30 percent of the years studied, and the researchers said they expected that such droughts would become more frequent in some locations, such as Brazil.

Kenyan women experience deadly consequences of prolonged drought

• Scores of women and girls in Umoja — a Kenyan village that has become a rescue center for women — feel that they have escaped domestic violence only to confront “drought-instigated violence,” The Guardian reported.
• During long treks for water, they are at great risk of sexual molestation and attacks by bandits, as tribal conflicts ensue over dwindling resources, according to The Guardian.
• One woman, Paulina Lekureiya, who took The Guardian on a 25-minute walk to a dry riverbed to search for water underground, warned that both a 14-year-old boy was killed and a woman was attacked by a crocodile at this spot.
• “She was five months pregnant,” Lekureiya told The Guardian. “We run away from men only to meet crocodiles.”

As the lakes dried out, the dunes came calling

• Dunes are advancing out of the dried-out corpse of what was once one of West Africa’s largest lakes, burying schoolyards and buildings, Reuters reported.
• Once Mali’s Lake Faguibine was the largest in West Africa and a breadbasket of the region, fed by annual floods from the Niger River — until droughts in the 1970s dried it up, and a years-long Islamic insurgency upended plans to restore the region’s wetlands, according to Reuters.
• Now with average temperatures expected to rise 4.7 Celsius (8.46 Fahrenheit) in Northern Mali, villagers struggle to find water for their animals, and “build barriers out of sticks in an effort to keep the dunes at bay,” Reuters reported
• In Bintangoungou, the village under assault by dunes, mayor Hama Abacrene lamented “a lost generation,” that was “condemned to flee or be recruited” by the Islamists.

 

Please visit The Hill’s sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you on Friday. {mosads}