With the available data, can the scientific community and policymakers truly know if they are making progress toward international biodiversity targets, even if their efforts were effective? The research says that without a better picture of how and why biodiversity is changing in most countries, it is difficult to evaluate the effect of national plans outlined in the GBF.

“Even if policies stopped the decline of animal populations, we show mathematically that it will be hard to detect improvements with high certainty, in many places for various types of species (48 of 62 countries and species groups),” explains Prof. Brian Leung from McGill’s Department of Biology and Bieler School of Environment and lead author of the study. “This is because detecting progress is limited by the current levels of uncertainty in the data (the records are either too sparse or too variable) describing animal population trends.”

To further this point, co-author Prof. Andrew Gonzalez compares this issue with monitoring recovery in heart health after an illness. “This would not be easy to do if a doctor had not kept good historical records about a person’s heart health and without good past records, it would be difficult to know if the heart is recovering because of the treatment it is receiving. Now, imagine trying to detect if heart health was improving on average across all Canadians (perhaps by following government recommendations on diet) if data on national heart health was not collected in the past or measured into the future.”

Prof. Gonzalez continues: “instead of heart health we assessed the health of animal populations — how fast they are declining or recovering — and whether we can conclude if populations are recovering worldwide. Tracking biodiversity targets and evaluating progress cannot be done well without filling the gaps in the information at hand and reducing the uncertainty that hinders our ability to evaluate if current trends are improving.”

Measuring efforts across the board

In light of these findings, how should the scientific community and policy makers evaluate their efforts to meet such ambitious goals like preserving 30% of land and water by 2030 and slowing the rate of human-caused species extinctions? The researchers make several suggestions, including proposing a risk framework that would establish unacceptable thresholds for biodiversity decline, which are easier to detect. Also, the authors suggest investment in a national and international biodiversity monitoring systems to improve trend estimates worldwide.

As Prof. Leung concludes: “Our results highlight that care must be taken to structure how we gather knowledge about biodiversity, so that we will be able to report whether we have succeeded in meeting our global targets given international investment in nature conservation or alternatively, whether we need to re-orient our actions.”

In summary, these recommendations put forward a more rigorous approach to interpreting biodiversity trends, incorporating risk considerations, boosting investment in monitoring, explicitly deciding thresholds for success, and the use of reference benchmarks to make informed conservation decisions. If implemented, many countries potentially could benefit, given the international reach of the GBF.

About the study

“Global monitoring for biodiversity: uncertainty, risk and power analyses to support trend change detection” by Brian Leung and Andrew Gonzalez was published in Sciences Advances.

A critical question is how warmer oceans might cause glaciers to break apart more quickly. University of Washington researchers have demonstrated the fastest-known large-scale breakage along an Antarctic ice shelf. The study, recently published in AGU Advances, shows that a 6.5-mile (10.5 kilometer) crack formed in 2012 on Pine Island Glacier — a retreating ice shelf that holds back the larger West Antarctic ice sheet — in about 5 and a half minutes. That means the rift opened at about 115 feet (35 meters) per second, or about 80 miles per hour.

“This is to our knowledge the fastest rift-opening event that’s ever been observed,” said lead author Stephanie Olinger, who did the work as part of her doctoral research at the UW and Harvard University, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. “This shows that under certain circumstances, an ice shelf can shatter. It tells us we need to look out for this type of behavior in the future, and it informs how we might go about describing these fractures in large-scale ice sheet models.”

A rift is a crack that passes all the way through the roughly 1,000 feet (300 meters) of floating ice for a typical Antarctic ice shelf. These cracks are the precursor to ice shelf calving, in which large chunks of ice break off a glacier and fall into the sea. Such events happen often at Pine Island Glacier — the iceberg observed in the study has long since separated from the continent.

“Ice shelves exert a really important stabilizing influence on the rest of the Antarctic ice sheet. If an ice shelf breaks up, the glacier ice behind really speeds up,” Olinger said. “This rifting process is essentially how Antarctic ice shelves calve large icebergs.”

In other parts of Antarctica, rifts often develop over months or years. But it can happen more quickly in a fast-evolving landscape like Pine Island Glacier, where researchers believe the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has already passed a tipping point on its collapse into the ocean.

Satellite images provide ongoing observations. But orbiting satellites pass by each point on Earth only every three days. What happens during those three days is harder to pin down, especially in the dangerous landscape of a fragile Antarctic ice shelf.

For the new study, the researchers combined tools to understand the rift’s formation. They used seismic data recorded by instruments placed on the ice shelf by other researchers in 2012 with radar observations from satellites.

Glacier ice acts like a solid on short timescales, but it’s more like a viscous liquid on long timescales.

“Is rift formation more like glass breaking or like Silly Putty being pulled apart? That was the question,” Olinger said. “Our calculations for this event show that it’s a lot more like glass breaking.”

If the ice were a simple brittle material, it should have shattered even faster, Olinger said. Further investigation pointed to the role of seawater. Seawater in the rifts holds the space open against the inward forces of the glacier. And since seawater has viscosity, surface tension and mass, it can’t just instantly fill the void. Instead, the pace at which seawater fills the opening crack helps slow the rift’s spread.

“Before we can improve the performance of large-scale ice sheet models and projections of future sea-level rise, we have to have a good, physics-based understanding of the many different processes that influence ice shelf stability,” Olinger said.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation. Co-authors are Brad Lipovsky and Marine Denolle, both UW faculty members in Earth and space sciences who began advising the work while at Harvard University.

To better understand how African great apes will be affected by climate change, researchers investigated past and future climate for 363 sites across Africa. They estimated temperature and rainfall at each site between 1981 and 2010. Using two climate change scenarios, they projected how frequently apes would be exposed to climate change impacts in the near future (2021 — 2050) and the long term (2071 — 2099). They estimated the likelihood of extreme events that could impact apes directly or indirectly, such as droughts, flooding, wildfires, and crop failure.

Between 2007 and 2016, almost half of the sites had experienced higher than average temperatures, and eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) experienced the most extreme temperatures. Under both climate scenarios, temperatures were projected to increase at all sites, and almost all sites will be affected by frequent wildfires and crop failures in the near future. Under a scenario where mitigations limit warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, 84% of sites were exposed to frequent heatwaves and 78% of sites to infrequent flooding in the next 30 years. Under an alternative scenario where global temperatures rise 3°C, the number of affected sites and the frequency of events was higher.

The study is the first to show that African apes are already experiencing the effects of climate change, and that extreme events are likely to become more frequent in the near future. Conservation action plans should aim to increase the resilience of ape populations to climate change, the authors say.

The authors add: “Our study indicates an urgent need to incorporate adaptation to climate change impacts into conservation planning for African great apes.”

China land use policies will also have to be more coordinated and focused on a nation-wide scale rather than be left to ad hoc decisions by local governments. That’s because 80% of solar power and 55% of wind power will have to be built within 100 miles of major population centers.

These are the conclusions of a new study from researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing and at the University of California San Diego. The team publishes their findings in the Feb. 26, 2024 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We know China has a very ambitious pathway to achieve carbon neutrality. We wanted to find out exactly what that entails,” said Michael Davidson, a senior author of that study and a professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.

One of the goals of the study is to inform renewable energy planning and policy in China. But the information is also crucial because China is currently the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter. So the country’s policies impact the global climate change picture and the planet’s future. Other countries can also learn from China’s successes and failures.

The study is based on an ambitious model that simulated China’s carbon neutral power grid in 2060 and what it would take to get there. The model looks at power generation resources and transmission line installations at an unprecedented resolution, considering parcels of land as small as 20 to 30 square kilometers. The model can also be applied to other countries.

As the researchers built and ran the model, the importance of land use became clearer. For example, China’s east, near the coast, will run out of land that can be used for renewable energy plants. As a result, any solar installations in that area need to be built on a smaller scale, on residential and commercial buildings, for example.

The model shows that China will need to build two to four terawatts each of solar and wind capacity. Construction of terawatt-level energy storage will also be required. Ultra-high voltage transmission between the country’s provinces should double or triple to ensure power supplies are delivered where they are needed.

Next steps include building in flexible demand in the model; considering a larger range of land use factors such as conservation priorities; and examining the implication of large changes in the mix of power resources and emissions reduction activities in sectors other than electricity.

The study was partially supported by the National Nature and Science Foundation of China, the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program and the U.S. Department of Energy.

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More than a third of these frozen moorings, known as pinning points, have decreased in size since the turn of the century, experts say.

Further deterioration of pinning points, which hold in place the floating ice sheets that fortify Antarctica’s land ice, would accelerate the continent’s contribution to rising sea levels, scientists warn.

Floating ice sheets fringe 75 per cent of Antarctica’s coastline and cover an area equivalent to the size of Greenland.

The findings are part of the first ever study of changes in the thickness of Antarctic ice shelves — extensions of land ice that float on the ocean — stretching back to 1973. Previous observations only date from 1992.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh used satellite imagery from the NASA/United States Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat program’s fifty-year-old archive to track variations in the appearances pinning points on the ice’s surface.

Pinning points form when part of a floating ice sheet anchors itself to an elevation on the ocean floor, creating a visible bump on the otherwise smooth ice shelf surface.

Using changes in pinning points as a reliable proxy for variations in the thickness of ice shelves, the team measured changes in these features during three periods: from 1973 to 1989, 1990 to 2000 and from 2000 to 2022.

The scientists found that only 15 per cent of pinning points reduced in size from 1973 to 1989, leading to small localised pockets of thinning ice shelves.

However, a widespread acceleration and unanchoring of ice shelves from pinning points began in the 1990s in the western Antarctic Peninsula and the Amundsen Sea.

The number of pinning points that shrank increased to 25 per cent from 1990 to 2000 and 37 per cent from 2000 to 2022.

The paper, published in Nature, was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Lead author, Dr Bertie Miles, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, said: “The switch over the past 50 years from relatively limited and regionally concentrated ice shelf melt, to much more widespread unanchoring, is striking. The ongoing concern is how many more of these vitally important pinning points will begin to melt away in the coming 50 years.”

Co-lead author, Professor Robert Bingham, Professor of Glaciology and Geophysics, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, said: “What we are seeing around Antarctica is a sustained attack by climate warming to the buttresses, that slow the conversion of ice melting, into global sea-level rise. This reinforces the need for us to take action where we can to reduce global carbon emissions.”

This portrayal, described by Debra Javeline, associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and lead author on the recently published study “Russia in a changing climate,” was debated by her 16 co-authors — all Russia specialists and members of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS), a multinational cohort of academics from North America, Europe and post-soviet Eurasia.

The PONARS scholars, including Susanne Wengle, also an associate professor of political science at Notre Dame, studied the effects of climate change on Russia and Russia’s role in global efforts to combat climate change or obstruct climate action.

“We asked ourselves,” Javeline said of her research team, “does Russia stand to benefit from climate change? Are the claims made by the Russian government officials accurate in that it does benefit them?”

The PONARS network includes social scientists of different disciplinary backgrounds, allowing each co-author to contribute analysis of Russia in their respective fields, including agriculture, international affairs, the changing Arctic, public health, civil society and governance.

Drawing on their collective expertise and a comprehensive literature review, the researchers found that Russia is already suffering from a variety of climate change impacts — despite the government’s positive spin — and is ill-prepared to mitigate or adapt to those climate impacts. And, as the rest of the world transitions to renewable energy sources, Russia’s fossil-fuel-dependent government is not willing or ready to make alternative plans for the country, changes that could potentially benefit the whole of their society.

“The future of Russia is politically and economically interdependent with the future of the climate,” she said. “If we have any hope of seeing a peaceful Russia that can rejoin the international community with a more responsive government, then we can’t talk about one without the other.”

But while Russia continues to wage a carbon-intensive war in Ukraine after a full two years, it remains “increasingly isolated from the international community and its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” the researchers wrote.

The cause for concern lies in the fact that not only is Russia considered the world’s largest country, occupying more than half the Arctic Ocean coastline, but it is also warming four times faster than Earth as a whole and is a primary emitter of greenhouse gases, according to the PONARS study.

Environmental impacts already occurring in Russia include flooding, heat waves, drought and wildfires that affect not only communities, but agriculture, forestry and water resources as well. “Russia is one of the world’s most important producers and exporters of grains,” said Wengle, an expert on Russian agriculture. “What this means is that the effects of climate change on Russian farms are a concern not only for Russians, but for everyone concerned with global markets for commodity crops and global food security.”

Global warming has had a huge influence on Russia’s permafrost, which is now thawing at alarming rates. What was once considered permanently frozen, stable ground is now defrosting, shifting and causing tremendous damage. The study pointed to increased flooding, landslides, caving or sinking of ground that supports existing infrastructures — resulting in cracked foundations and compromised shelters.

“Some Russian cities in high-latitude regions report infrastructure damage from thawing permafrost and soil instability for up to 80 percent of buildings and for pipelines,” the researchers discovered.

Russian leadership, however, interprets these climate impacts self-servingly and encourages its citizens to accept them as benefits, according to the PONARS scholars. For example, while Russian scientists warn about extreme temperatures and decreased Arctic sea ice, the Russian government touts a year-round Arctic sea route and a more livable climate overall. And although Russian climatologists study the effect of climate change, there are limited policies in place to reduce the vulnerability of some regions to climate impacts, and generally little adaptation planning and even less implementation of actual adaptations.

The researchers found that there is also a real climate leadership deficit in Russia and an absence of commitment to mitigate and adapt. “No top political leader champions a climate agenda,” they proclaimed. “Those in the highest positions of power demonstrate silence or denial.”

Furthermore, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated the climate emergency. “The humanitarian disaster is of the utmost importance — the number of deaths and structures that were destroyed — but the collateral damage is intense destruction to the atmosphere,” Javeline noted.

The war has brought irreparable damage to the global climate from increased military emissions, which the researchers explain as taking the form of “potentially several million extra tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.” Military operations have all had a harmful effect on the environment by adding toxic chemicals and hazardous waste into the air and water supplies.

The PONARS study serves as a framework to identify gaps in research. In particular, the scientists believe that more research is needed on the political dimensions of Russia in our changing climate — namely, taking a closer look at the country’s centralized political system and how it handles policy challenges related to climate change.

Javeline and Wengle added that the researchers hope to improve understanding of climate issues affecting Russia so that when Russian leadership does decide to acknowledge the country’s precarious position in a changing climate, there will be a reliable base of knowledge to assist them with efforts to mitigate and adapt.