Tuesday, January 14th - 2025

Author: Sam Rubinstein

Your weekly guide to Sustainable Investment


 

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TBLI Radical Truth Podcast

 

Could children's books inspire a hopeful era by addressing present-day challenges?

 

Fleur Rossdale's Woodland Sprite series tackles climate issues, food security, wellbeing, and plastic waste through a fantasy world where fairies protect nature with courage and authenticity. Instead of proposals, Fleur conveys her ideas through storytelling, aiming to inspire adults to act. She also organizes events in Brussels and Westminster, uniting changemakers, specialists, and scientists to drive solutions.

A fine art background earned Fleur the title "The Queen of the Decorators" in the 1980s and ’90s, where her design exhibitions drew 30,000 visitors and launched a thriving industry. In 2020, she shifted focus to ecology, fundraising for climate charities, and developing impact investment projects, some featured in her upcoming book, The Farm. Her books inspire young readers to embrace sustainability through fairy sprites guided by a wise goblin, leprechaun, and pixie prince. The first book, Taken by Storm, builds confidence and explores themes from COP26. The Journey adds surrealism and fosters critical thinking, with real-life inspiration drawn from events Fleur hosted. The Farm, releasing in 2025, continues the story with practical solutions. Fleur seeks global support to develop her ideas collaboratively for a sustainable future. What we will cover:

  • What I aim to achieve through writing my books.
  • How do I intend to bring about change?
  • How could I speed up the process and gain support without using a sledgehammer?

Listen to the podcast

 

‘It’s ironic’: how climate crisis is driving Trump push on Greenland and Panama

an aerial view of a melting glacier

By:  - The Guardian

What the president-elect calls a ‘giant hoax’ is changing the strategic calculus in the Arctic and for the Panama canal

Donald Trump’s desire to seize control of Greenland and the Panama canal is being shaped in part by a force that he has sought to deny even exists – the climate crisis.

Last week, Trump ramped up his demands that the United States annex both Greenland and the Panama canal, refusing to rule out economic or even military interventions to take them and threatening “very high” tariffs upon Denmark, of which Greenland is an autonomous territory, if it opposes him.

“We need them for economic security,” Trump said. “The Panama canal is vital to our country, it’s being operated by China. China! We gave the Panama canal to Panama, not China.” The US president-elect added that Greenland was required for “national security purposes” and that Denmark “should give it up”.

Trump’s rhetoric has been denounced by other world leaders but the rationale for this expansionism is being influenced, experts say, by something affecting both Greenland and Panama – rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

Even though the incoming US president has called climate change a “giant hoax”, his son Donald Jr acknowledged the value of mining rare minerals in Greenland that are being uncovered as the ice rapidly retreats from the vast Arctic island. Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour due to the climate crisis, raising sea levels and potentially collapsing vital ocean currents.

Donald Jr said on a trip to the island last week that he wanted to “make Greenland great again”, accusing Denmark of blocking its self-governing territory from developing “the great natural resources that they have, whether that’s coal, whether that’s uranium, whether that’s other rare minerals, whether that’s gold or diamonds”.

As sea ice dwindles in the Arctic Ocean, meanwhile, new shipping routes through the far northern latitudes are becoming more viable. Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former national security adviser, said that Greenland, which has had a US military base since 1941, is key to counter the threat of China and Russia but it is also “very important to the Arctic, which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe cuts down on the usage of the Panama canal”.

While global heating is causing Greenland to shed its ice, in Panama it has helped spur a severe drought that has gripped the country since 2023. This drought has caused the human-made Gatún Lake, which supplies the water for the canal, to plummet by several feet, limiting traffic through the famed shipping thoroughfare.

Last year, shipping entering the canal slumped by nearly a third due to these restrictions. The US reasserting dominion over the Panama canal, which it handed over to Panama via a treaty in 1999, would, like in Greenland, give it opportunistic control over resources increasingly strained by the climate crisis.

“Greenland has lost massive amounts of ice, making it more attractive for rare earth mining and oil drilling, while we are already seeing more traffic through the Arctic Ocean as it becomes ice free for longer,” said Alice Hill, a former climate adviser to Barack Obama and now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“In Panama, climate change impacts how the canal operates and puts pressure on the US to find different routes or try to get priority over China for the canal itself.

“Climate change is altering the fundamental calculus of the strategic importance of the Arctic as well as the Panama canal,” Hill added. “It’s ironic that we are getting a president who famously called climate change a hoax but is now expressing interest in taking over areas gaining greater importance because of climate change.”

The impacts of a superheated planet are helping refashion geopolitics in a variety of ways, as droughts and storms cause people to migrate, conflicts erupt over resources such as water and borders are even redrawn between some countries as snow and ice dwindle.

The US isn’t the only power attempting to capitalize upon the upending of a stable climate, with China hatching plans for a “polar silk road” that will connect Chinese ports to Europe and beyond via a northern shipping route as the Arctic becomes less dominated by ice.

“Climate change is shaping geopolitics even if leaders don’t want to admit it,” said Sherri Goodman, an author and expert on the polar region at the Wilson Center. “China is clear-eyed about the climate threat and they will take advantage of that in access to resources and infrastructure. We ignore this climate threat at our peril.

“Trump, I think, sees this rush for resources and climate change is making them more accessible. It’s interesting to see how isolationist he was in his first term, now he seems almost imperialist. It’s hard to know where this will end up.”

This scramble for resources, and the rise of nationalist leaders in several countries including the US, has stoked fears of a sort of rightwing environmentalism taking hold where wealthier countries trample over those in vulnerable nations as climate disasters escalate. Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s foreign minister, warned last week: “We have entered an era that is seeing the return of the law of the strongest.”

Read full article 

A secret weapon in agriculture’s climate fight: Ants

Ant on an apple

By: Ayurella Horn-Muller

Ants — yes, ants — could protect apples, nuts, cocoa, and other beloved crops from disease and climate change.

The ant scurries along on six nimble legs. It catches up to its peers, a line of antennaed bugs roaming the winding surface of a tree, perpetually hunting for food. While doing so, each unknowingly leaves antibiotic microorganisms secreted from its feet. 

That trail of tiny footprints, indiscernible to the naked eye, is remarkably effective at protecting the tree from pathogens and pests. That makes ants, in the eyes of Ida Cecilie Jensen, a legion of unlikely warriors — one humans should consider enlisting in the fight to grow food in a warming world. “Ants are a Swiss Army knife,” said Jensen, a biologist who studies the symbiotic relationship between ants and agriculture at Aarhus University in Denmark. “Kind of like a multitool for farmers.” 

With an estimated 20 quadrillion ants on Earth at any given time, the bugs are found just about everywhere on the planet. They are also among the species that humans, which they outnumber at least 2.5 million to one, have most in common with. Ants have extraordinary collective intelligence, their colonies weaving robust community networks and dividing labor. The social insects even wage war with one another and build complex agricultural systems. 

Ants also have “so many of the same problems and challenges that we have,” Jensen said. “Luckily for us, they already found a lot of great solutions.” One such challenge is how to grow food while confronting climate-wrought consequences — such as an influx of spreading plant pathogens caused by warming

Plant diseases cost the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars every year, with between 20 to 40 percent of global crop production lost to crop diseases and pests. Climate change is ramping up outbreak risks by morphing how pathogens evolve, facilitating the emergence of new strains, and making crops more susceptible to infection. Most farmers and growers increasingly rely on chemical pesticides to combat these emerging issues, but the widespread use of such substances has created problems of its own. Synthetic pesticides can be harmful to humans and animals, and lose their efficacy as pathogens build up resistance to them. The production and use of synthetic pesticides also contribute to climate change, as some are derived from planet-warming fossil fuels. 

Instead of chemicals, an army of ants may march right in. Though most people view the small insects as little more than a nuisance, colonies of them are being deployed in orchards across a handful of countries to stave off the spread of crippling infestation and disease. 

In a body of recently published and forthcoming research, Jensen examined the antimicrobial effects of wood ants, a European field ant known for building dome-shaped nests in fields and open woodlands, and weaver ants, which live in ball-shaped nests within tropical tree canopies across Asia, Africa, and Australia. Her team looked at how the microbes influenced apple brown rot and apple scab in two orchards in Denmark — one commercial and one experimental — and found that wood ants effectively reduce apple scab, which can cause serious yield losses, by an average of 61 percent. The scientists also found that the number of disease-free apples more than doubled compared to when ants weren’t wielded as an alternative biological pesticide. For another experiment in Senegal, they collected weaver ants from mango orchards to investigate the bacterial communities associated with ants, discovering that they also leave microbial footprints that may inhibit fungal diseases such as mango anthracnose, which can lead to extensive yield losses. 

Past studies have found that for crops from cocoa to citrusants could replace insecticides in a multitude of climates and locations, reducing incidences of pear scab in pear trees, coffee leaf rust in coffee shrubs, and leaf fungal attacks in oak seedlings. Weaver ant nests used as an alternative pesticide in mango, cashew, and citrus trees have all been shown to lower pest damage and produce yields on par with several chemical pesticide treatments. For more than a millennia, the species was embraced as a natural insecticide in countries like China but never quite made its way into the agricultural mainstream in North America or Europe. The method would eventually be replaced by the dawn of synthetic solutions. Still, despite that legacy, exactly how ants take on disease has remained a scientific mystery. 

The answer, Jensen said, lies in how ants function. All species of the arthropod possess a body that is essentially hostile for bacteria because they produce formic acid, which they use to constantly disinfect themselves. Ants are also perpetually hungry little things that will feast on the spores of plant pathogens, among other things, and their secretion of formic acid and highly territorial nature tends to deter a medley of other insects that could be transmitting diseases or making lunch of some farmers’ crops. Ultimately, their greatest trick is what Jensen’s newest research reveals: Ants also inherently have antimicrobial bacteria and fungi on their bodies and feet, which can reduce plant diseases in afflicted crops, with these microorganisms deposited as the critters walk. When the bugs are cultivated in fruit orchards, they march all over trees, their feet coating the plants in microbial organisms that can curb emerging pathogens. 

Read full article 

Fueling Innovation to Navigate the Wildfire Challenge Ahead


 

By: Chris Anthony, et al

The climate-driven wildfire crisis calls for a comprehensive, cross-sector approach to funding, research, and action.

One glimpse at the August 2024 wildfire incident map of Western North America and one might have thought half the continent was on fire. Oregon had declared a statewide wildfire state of emergency through September. California was grappling with the Park Fire, the fourth largest in the state’s history. New Mexico was recovering from flash floods exacerbated by the South Fork and Salt fires. The National Interagency Fire Center was reporting 85 large wildfires requiring active management, with nearly 30,000 wildland firefighters and support staff deployed, and evacuation orders in place for 20 fires. Meanwhile, Canada dealt with the incineration of the scenic and popular tourist town of Jasper and the evacuation of Saddle Hills County in Alberta, also requiring emergency measures to sustain incident operations including needing to mobilize international support through the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. Fire services worldwide are increasingly engaged in protecting communities and natural resources, in geographies as diverse as North America, Chile, Siberia, Greece, Australia, and South Africa.

The 2024 fires in Western North America are not an anomaly; rather they reflect a global trend. The science is consistent and clear: Extreme wildfires have more than doubled in both frequency and magnitude over the past two decades, and this trend is expected to continue. Fires are a natural phenomenon across biomes, affecting just about every continent. However, in the context of unfolding climate change trends, including extreme heat and wind conditions, the risk of wildfire impacts is drastically increasing. Extreme wildfire impacts now span geopolitical boundaries, affecting diverse communities and ecosystems each year. Fires can burn wherever fuel is available, without regard for a community’s resources, politics, or development. While the challenge is complex, it is also unifying. We share the burden of catastrophic wildfires, and the potentially irreversible consequences they can cause.

The urgency is high, as extreme wildfires could increase by up to 30 percent by 2050 and 50 percent by 2100. In Western North America, as we grapple with the consequences of a century of policy and practice suppressing natural fire regimes and disturbing ecosystem function, and the removal of Indigenous land stewardship, we have to recognize and come to terms with the ways we have contributed to this crisis. Yet, with aligned goals and coordinated action, the wildfire crisis is still a manageable challenge—if, that is, we can shift from outdated methods and legacy mindsets.

We are 17 authors from 17 different organizations across sectors—government, science, business, and philanthropy—who have come together to share how we understand our roles in building the path forward. We cannot address 21st-century fires with 20th-century approaches. Resilient communities and ecosystems cannot rely on the reactive methods of the past. By adopting a comprehensive approach that meets the modern moment, we can combat catastrophic wildfires and even co-exist with beneficial fire.

Upstream Solutions

To solve the wildfire challenge, we need to systematically invest in the following activities and technologies to reduce risk before wildfires ignite, prevent destruction as they burn, and adapt so we are resilient when the next wildfires burn:

1. Mitigations that matter for communities: Researchers, (re)insurers, land use planners, builders, and others must work with citizens and fire agencies to reduce the vulnerability of communities to extreme wildfires and facilitate coexistence with ecologically beneficial fire, by disrupting fire pathways into communities and between structures, particularly in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). Although only 4.7 percent of land is WUI, it houses 45 percent of the world’s population—including 50 million homes in the United States (more than 30 percent of all housing). Advances in fire behavior modeling help us understand how fires spread in the built environment and determine which ones are most at risk. Research by Colorado State University and the University of California, Berkeley and AI-powered tools like Xyloplan help homeowners and communities prioritize highest-impact mitigation. Further work to understand how fire moves among fuel mediums (vegetation to vegetation, vegetation to structure, and structure to structure) are also being done by Cal Poly’s WUI FIRE Institute. With these advancements, the insurance industry’s catastrophe (CAT) modeling can more accurately capture and reflect the investments that individual landowners and communities have made in high-priority, evidence-based mitigations, incentivizing them at scale.

Read full article 

US supreme court allows Hawaii lawsuit against fossil fuel firms’ misinformation


white columned building


By: Dharna Noor - The Guardian

Honolulu officials had filed a lawsuit against the companies for an alleged decades long misinformation campaign

 
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