Indonesia – Page 2 – Desdemona Despair

Map showing global climate risk as an Aggregated Damage Ratio, projected to the year 2050. Graphic: XDI

February 28, 2023

Florida’s projected sea level rise by 2100 is bad news for sunshine state – Outside of China, Florida is the most at-risk state/province in the world for economic damage caused by climate change

By Pandora Dewan 24 February 2023 (Newsweek) – By 2100, Florida could see sea levels rise by up to 6 feet, with over 900,000 properties at risk of being underwater. “By 2050, Florida sea levels, like much of the US, are headed for a 1-foot rise on average (above 2020 levels),” William Sweet, an Oceanographer for the […]

Maasai children stand beside a zebra that local residents say died due to drought, as they graze their cattle at Ilangeruani village, near Lake Magadi, in Kenya, on 9 November 2022. Photo: Brian Inganga / AP Photo

December 31, 2022

In 2022, AP photographers captured pain of a changing planet

By Peter Prengaman 16 December 2022 (AP) – In 2022, Associated Press photographers captured signs of a planet in distress as climate change reshaped many lives. That distress was seen in the scarred landscapes in places where the rains failed to come. It was felt in walloping storms, land-engulfing floods, suffocating heat and wildfires no […]

Global excess and reported COVID-19 deaths and death rates per 100,000 population, January 2020-January 2022. (a) Cumulative global excess death estimates and the cumulative reported COVID-19 deaths by month from January 2020 to December 2021. (b) Global excess death rates per 100,000 population and the reported COVID-19 death rates per 100,000 population, also by month, from January 2020 to December 2021. On both plots, the central lines of the excess mortality series show the mean estimates, and the shaded regions indicate the 95 percent uncertainty intervals. Graphic: Msemburi, et al., 2022 / Nature

December 30, 2022

WHO study reports global Covid death toll likely three times higher than official records – Pandemic may have claimed nearly 15 million lives, more than 2.7 times official reports of 5.4 million – India mortality alone may be 6.45 million dead

By Robert Hart 14 December 2022 (Forbes) – The Covid-19 pandemic may have claimed nearly 15 million around the world in 2020 and 2021, according to World Health Organization estimates published in Nature on Wednesday, almost three times what was reported in official records and underscoring the devastating and far-reaching impact of the disease as countries strive to return […]

A heavy vehicle loads coal from the barge into a truck to be distributed, at the Karya Citra Nusantara port in North Jakarta, Indonesia, 13 January 2022. Photo: Willy Kurniawan / REUTERS

December 23, 2022

Drops of climate finance start to fill an ocean of need – “When you see the announcements, it never feels significant enough”

By Simon Jessop and Aidan Lewis 22 November 2022 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) – The biggest deal to date to forge the kind of private-public sector low-carbon collaboration sought at U.N. climate talks promises $20 billion to shut down Indonesian coal-fired power plants – and it’s a drop in the ocean. Estimates of how much external funding […]

A person wearing a carved wooden mask takes part with other people in a march during COP15, the two-week U.N. Biodiversity summit in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on 10 December 2022. Photo: Christinne Muschi / REUTERS

December 10, 2022

Activists dressed as birds and trees rally for nature at COP15 in Montreal – “We see what is happening and it is clearly not sufficient compared to our ambitions and our priorities”

By Gloria Dickie 10 December 2022 MONTREAL (Reuters) – Hundreds of people on Saturday braved sub-zero temperatures to march the streets of Montreal, the host city of this year’s U.N. biodiversity summit, demanding a strong new deal to protect nature worldwide. Wearing costumes to look like birds, trees, and caribou, activists said the COP15 summit could fail […]

Landsat images from 21 February 2000 (left) and 27 July 2019 (right) illustrating glacier retreat on top of Mount Kilimanjaro (United Republic of Tanzania). Photo: U.S. Geological Survey

November 19, 2022

Kilimanjaro’s and Africa’s last glaciers to go by 2050, says UN – “What is quite unprecedented in the historical record is how quickly this is happening”

By Patrick Hughes 3 November 2022 (BBC News) – Glaciers across the globe – including the last ones in Africa – will be unavoidably lost by 2050 due to climate change, the UN says in a report [UNESCO finds that some iconic World Heritage glaciers will disappear by 2050 –Des]. Glaciers in a third of […]

Components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties, 1960-2021 and projected to 2022. Components are presented individually for (a) fossil CO2 and cement carbonation emissions (EFOS), (b) growth rate in atmospheric CO2 concentration (GATM), (c) emissions from land-use change (ELUC), (d) the land CO2 sink (SLAND), (e) the ocean CO2 sink (SOCEAN), and (f) the budget imbalance that is not accounted for by the other terms. Positive values of SLAND and SOCEAN represent a flux from the atmosphere to land or the ocean. All data are in GtC yr−1 with the uncertainty bounds representing ±1 standard deviation in shaded colour. Data sources are as in Fig. 3. The red dots indicate our projections for the year 2022, and the red error bars the uncertainty in the projections. Graphic: Friedlingstein, et al., 2022 / Earth System Science Data

November 19, 2022

Global Carbon Budget 2022: Global carbon emissions in 2022 remain at record levels – No sign of decrease in global CO2 emissions – “This year we see yet another rise in global fossil CO2 emissions, when we need a rapid decline”

11 November 2022 (Global Carbon Project) – Global carbon emissions in 2022 remain at record levels – with no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed to limit warming to 1.5°C, according to the Global Carbon Project science team (Global Carbon Budget 2022). If current emissions levels persist, there is now a 50% chance […]

Projections of GHG emissions under different scenarios to 2050 and indications of emissions gap and global warming implications over this century (medians only). Looking beyond 2030, this figure projects global GHG emissions out to 2050 under different scenarios and indicates the associated global warming implications over this century. The figure illustrates the substantial increase in the emissions gap for 2050 if climate efforts implied by current policies and NDC scenarios are continued without further strengthening. Implementation of net-zero targets by around mid-century would significantly reduce these gaps, but even then, gaps with the 1.5°C scenarios would remain. Graphic: UNEP

November 1, 2022

UN: Inadequate progress on climate action makes rapid transformation of societies only option – “It is a tall, and some would say impossible, order to reform the global economy and almost halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but we must try”

NAIROBI, 27 October 2022 – As intensifying climate impacts across the globe hammer home the message that greenhouse gas emissions must fall rapidly, a new UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report finds that the international community is still falling far short of the Paris goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place. However, the Emissions Gap Report […]

Map showing Biodiversity Intactness Index for the year 2020 at 0.25° resolution. The global average is 77 percent. Data: Natural History Museum, 2022. Graphic: WWF / ZSL

October 27, 2022

WWF’s Living Planet Report 2022 reveals devastating 69 percent average drop in wildlife populations since 1970 – “We have cut away the very foundation of life and the situation continues to worsen”

TORONTO, 12 October 2022 (WWF-Canada) – Monitored wildlife populations — mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish — have seen a devastating 69 per cent drop on average since 1970 according to WWF’s Living Planet Report (LPR) 2022. The report highlights the stark outlook of the state of nature and urgently warns governments, businesses and the public to take […]

Colombian natives and activists during a protest in Bogotá, Colombia, on 23 August 2019. Photo: RAUL ARBOLEDA / AFP / Getty Images

October 21, 2022

Countries where the most people are killed defending the environment

By Angelo Young 15 October 2022 (24/7 Wall St.) – As the world comes to the realization of the profound damages human beings are causing to natural environments worldwide, groups across the globe have long been trying to protect the local land and environment. In some places, these struggles are not always peaceful, and last […]