Energy Innovation partners with the independent nonprofit Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) to provide climate and energy research updates. The research synopsis below comes from AGCI Executive Director James C. Arnott. A full list of AGCI’s updates is available online. 

For many climate advocates preparing for this year’s COP29 in Baku, it might be a surprise to learn that a different annual Conference of Parties (COP) just wrapped in Cali, Columbia. This recent COP, also a pillar of global progress on sustainability, focused not primarily on climate change but on biological diversity.

Unfortunately, the climate crisis and biodiversity loss are too often considered separately from one another. As a result, the science about and potential solutions for each are typically explored through distinct channels, sometimes even competing with one another for attention and resources rather than navigating toward a more holistic path to sustainability.

Climate change presents a growing threat to biodiversity. Yet healthy and diverse living systems can play an important role in reducing future climate impacts by drawing down carbon in the atmosphere or helping communities build resilience. Accordingly, it’s worth looking at recent research for fresh insights on climate change and biodiversity, which can demonstrate the value of more integrated solutions.

At the most basic level, greater awareness of climate change impacts on nature heightens the case for urgency on reducing emissions. Some long-considered policies for biodiversity protection, like land use protections, may be emboldened or tweaked to capture benefits for climate solutions. But moving in this direction will require a more integrated approach to both policy and research. Though this has been largely missing in recent decades, there are glimmers of hope on the horizon.

Pinning down the magnitude of climate impacts on biodiversity

Historically, humans have impacted biodiversity in myriad ways, from land use change (e.g., clearing natural habitats for cropland) and resource extraction (e.g., fishing or logging) to the spread of invasive species (e.g., Burmese pythons in Florida overconsuming local fauna) and the introduction of pollution and toxins (e.g., PFAS and other “forever chemicals”).

Climate change aside, the consequences of these impacts on biodiversity is profound: The rate of species extinctions in the 20th century alone has been estimated at 30 to 120 times the rate in the previous 66 million years (based on the fossil record), on par with past mass extinction events.

Climate change now presents an added threat to the diverse web of life. Rising temperatures can shrink suitable habitats, drought can spur tree mortality, imperiling forest health, and ocean acidification, driven by elevated ocean uptake of CO2 emissions, intensifies damage to coral reefs and other marine species around the globe.

Studies attempting to quantify how much climate change will affect species extinction –– just one aspect of biodiversity –– have a hard time finding agreement or high confidence owing to the underlying difficulties in monitoring, let alone predicting, the health and interactions between the estimated nine million species on Earth. However, a new review by John J. Wiens and Joseph Zelinka from the University of Arizona examined a range of studies over the past several decades that estimated the climate impacts on species loss for plant and animal species.

Considering a worst-case, high-end climate change scenario, Wiens and Zelinka estimate a potential 16 percent of species loss due to climate change (Figure 1). But even if the planet avoids worst case projections or if species manage to be more climate-resilient than current models anticipate, nearly any magnitude of species loss is sobering given the finality that accompanies extinction and the oftentimes unknown ripple effects that the removal of even a single species can have on the web of life.

Combining existing tools yields fresh insights

Thinking about climate change and biodiversity together can help us transcend the bleak tally of potential damages. Modeling tools developed to explore climate change and biodiversity loss can be combined and compared to assess the issues as a more dynamic problem set, thus illuminating the connections.

An important study led by Portuguese conservation biologist Henrique Pereira and published earlier this year in Science conducted an extensive comparison of climate and biodiversity models. This analysis covered the period from 1900 to 2050, allowing for both historical and future-oriented exploration.

To simplify matters, the authors compared biodiversity impacts solely due to land use change (a predominant historical driver of biodiversity loss) with the combined impacts of land use change and climate change. The comparison included three different emissions and socioeconomic scenarios representing different storylines of global progress on sustainability and climate action. Unlike the Wiens and Zelinka review, this study looked across multiple aspects of biodiversity, not just the total number of different species. Other metrics of biodiversity included the intactness of habitat and the extent of habitat per species, offering a more multidimensional picture of biodiversity.

An initial encouraging insight from the Pereira et al. study is that declines in biodiversity from land use change alone may be expected to diminish, or even reverse, in the remaining first half of the century in response to land protection efforts assumed in the global sustainability scenario (see red bars Figure 2a). However, when climate change is added to the equation, all climate change scenarios continue to exacerbate biodiversity losses, with greater losses on higher emissions trajectories (see all color bars, Figure 2b).

What we can also glean from this kind of analysis is how increasingly dependent society is on nature, not just for resource extraction but also for nature’s healthy functioning. In Figure 3, under all scenarios, models show increased human demand for material ecosystem services — the things we depend on practically from nature, like timber, food, and bioenergy (notably, bioenergy dependence greatly increases in the more global, sustainability-oriented scenario). By contrast, the functions nature relies on to provide those services (so-called “regulating ecosystem services”) are expected to decline in almost every area, including coastal resilience, a growing area of concern.

Pereira et al.’s study helps to showcase how scientists and policymakers can draw upon existing modeling tools to better assess the impacts of climate change on biodiversity as well as the co-benefits (and tradeoffs) of pursuing solutions to both in tandem. The researchers’ results show the diminishing effects of land use change under the Global Sustainability scenario (see red bars in both Figures 2 and 3) and are encouraging in that sustainability policies aimed at a specific challenge, like land use conversion, can meaningfully impact that goal on a global scale, with co-benefits for climate. At the same time, the models show how sustainability pathways that include aggressive cuts to greenhouse gas emissions are necessary to stave off further impacts to biodiversity.

A glimmer of hope

As with mitigating climate change, reversing biodiversity loss is a daunting social task requiring well-designed policies, strong governance, and the more diffuse elements of social transformation, such as changes in norms, mindsets, and individual behavior. It’s easy to be discouraged that humans may fall short of achieving such a monumental undertaking. But what if lessons from human history show us the key to unlock our innate potential to rise to this challenge?

In a new perspective piece in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, ecologist and scholar of the Anthropocene Erle Ellis argues we underestimate the power of human aspirations to change how people relate to nature. As evidence, Ellis looks to humanity’s long history of dramatic interactions with nature, both for better and for worse. He cites examples from irrigation and granaries to the development of social norms to the more recent formation of environmental protection agencies and international environmental agreements.

For Ellis, the entry point to understanding how we can better relate to nature is recognizing these past examples where humans have devised and implemented transformational solutions to problems of our own making. “When these transformative capabilities to shape environments are coupled with sociocultural adaptations enabling societies to more effectively shape and live in transformed environments, the social–ecological scales and intensities of these transformations can accelerate,” Ellis wrote.

The underlying driver of successful transformation, for Ellis, is the power of culture and social learning, which in his view undergirds technological innovation (and adoption), good policy, and governance. Culture, then, becomes pivotal for progress at speed and scale.

Entry points

If Ellis is even partly correct about our latent potential, where are the most promising areas to focus attention? A team of scientists led by Brazilian ecologist Cássio Cardoso Pereira (2024) suggests six synergistic focus areas that would help to mitigate climate warming emissions while enhancing biodiversity.

Conserve carbon stocks and sinks. Land and ocean systems have naturally sequestered over half of humans’ historical emissions. Priorities for protection are likely in the Amazon, Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia, which have high levels of carbon storage and biodiversity.
Restore degraded lands. Marginal lands, or lands degraded from historical practices, can be repaired to enhance their carbon sequestration capacity. Designing restorations to repair ecosystem connectivity and cultivate rich, diverse native species can enhance biodiversity and associated ecosystem services.
Integrate conservation with local fauna and flora. Ecosystems that help sequester carbon and provide resilience depend on healthy interactions between plants and animals. Thus, climate-oriented conservation strategies should take these interactions into account.
Use only existing areas of agriculture, pasture, and silviculture. Although this area is in tension with other goals around livelihoods and food security, a direct path to avoiding additional emissions and biodiversity loss from land conversion is to establish strong policies that confine agriculture to already converted land.
Incorporate biodiversity into business models. While many companies promote values and goals around the protection of nature and are increasingly attaching themselves to science-based targets for climate action, corporate plans tend to lack specificity about biodiversity. Corporations can reduce the net impact of their activities by quantifying the impact of corporate activities on biodiversity loss and committing to measurable and verifiable actions to mitigate those impacts.
Convene joint biodiversity-climate COPs. Although both link to the pathbreaking 1992 Rio Conference on Sustainable Development, separate “Conference of Parties” currently address climate change and biodiversity issues on the international stage. Bringing these conversations together could further harness the synergies between them.

Such areas of attention require actionable science to inform good decisions where the details matter. One upcoming effort along these lines in North America is the Biodiversity and Climate Chang­­e Assessment. This report, with participation from Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, will be released sometime next year. Importantly, it will help to bridge communities of researchers who have previously contributed to either climate change-specific or biodiversity-specific assessment processes.

Ultimately, the systems that regulate both climate and life on Earth are deeply interwoven, and it’s impossible to consider the sustainability of either without looking at them together.

Featured research

Pereira, H. M., Martins, I. S., Rosa, I. M. D., Kim, H. J., Leadley, P., Popp, A., … Alkemade, R. (2024). Global trends and scenarios for terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services from 1900 to 2050. Science, 384(6694), 458–465. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adn3441

Wiens, J. J., & Zelinka, J. (2024). How many species will Earth lose to climate change? Global Change Biology, 30(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.17125

Ellis, E. C. (2024). The Anthropocene condition: Evolving through social-ecological transformations. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 379(1893). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0255

Pereira, C. C., Kenedy-Siqueira, W., Negreiros, D., Fernandes, S., Barbosa, M., Goulart, F. F., … Fernandes, G. W. (2024). Scientists’ warning: six key points where biodiversity can improve climate change mitigation. BioScience, 74(5), 315–318. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biae035

The post Understanding Biodiversity Loss In A Changing Climate appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.

Energy Innovation partners with the independent nonprofit Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) to provide climate and energy research updates. The research synopsis below comes from AGCI Executive Director James C. Arnott. A full list of AGCI’s updates is available online.  For many…
The post Understanding Biodiversity Loss In A Changing Climate appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.[#item_full_content]

This post is part of an ongoing “What Is” series from Energy Innovation that answers some of today’s most pressing climate policy questions. The first in this series answered the question–What is Net-Zero?, and the second answered the question What is The Inflation Reduction Act?.

What is Clean Energy?

Fighting climate change is the challenge of our time—cutting emissions at the speed and scale science deems necessary will determine the future of nearly all living things on the planet for generations. It’s an overarching problem that impacts every corner of our society and economy, and it requires.

However, as complicated as the problem seems, the solution to cleaning up climate pollution is straightforward: Use clean energy to make electricity and use that clean electricity to power equipment like vehicles, factories, and appliances that currently burn fossil fuels.

But what counts as clean energy?

The answer to that question varies depending on who is responding, muddying the landscape, diverting resources from the best solutions, and costing precious time in the effort to cut climate pollution. But the bottom line is clear – energy isn’t clean if it generates greenhouse gas emissions or air pollution.

To set the record straight, here’s a guide that walks through the clearly clean energy technologies and those requiring more nuance.

The obvious candidates: Renewable energy

 Renewables—wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower—are universally recognized as clean energy. To generate electricity, they harness natural processes like wind, the sun’s rays, the earth’s heat, and the flow of water. And because they don’t burn any feedstock like coal or natural gas, they emit no air or climate pollution, qualifying them as clean energy. These sources currently generate about 20 percent of U.S. electricity.

Renewables are a bedrock climate solution, they’re the cheapest form of power today and will keep getting cheaper over time, and we know how to reliably manage an electric grid with a high share of renewable energy.

Clean but not pollution-free: Nuclear power 

Nuclear power currently supplies 20 percent of the United States’s electricity, making it one of our largest sources of power free from climate pollution. Nuclear plants can provide around-the-clock zero-carbon power, meaning they’re an important part of a clean grid. While constructing new nuclear plants is a timely and expensive process, maintaining the operating nuclear fleet is critical to meeting climate goals, because if they aren’t online, fossil fuel power could fill that required generation capacity.

We consider nuclear power to be “clean” on the basis that it does not emit pollution, although it must be acknowledged nuclear plants do create nuclear waste, which has complicated storage requirements and can be hazardous. The lack of greenhouse gas emissions is the key distinction in this analysis.

Hydrogen: It’s complicated

 Hydrogen has long been discussed as a potential climate solution, and it has certain use cases where it will be needed to provide energy free from climate pollution in a way electrified processes cannot like steel production, aviation, and long-haul maritime shipping.

However, even though burning hydrogen only emits water vapor, it’s complicated from a climate perspective. Hydrogen on its own scarcely exists in nature—generally it must be separated from other molecules using energy-intensive equipment called electrolyzers. If electrolyzers are powered by fossil fuels, the hydrogen they produce isn’t considered clean, since pollution occurs during the creation of that hydrogen, even if it only water vapor is emitted when the hydrogen itself is subsequently burned.

To be considered clean, hydrogen must be produced by electrolyzers powered by another clean energy source, ideally wind or solar. This is called green hydrogen.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS): Theoretically clean, absent in the real world

 CCS entails burning fossil fuels at a facility like a coal power plant or steel mill, and then sequestering the resulting climate pollution in an underground geologic formation or substance like limestone. While theoretically possible, this process is not and has not been used anywhere in the world at scale. Failures and cost overruns have plagued CCS demonstration projects. And while CCS captures carbon dioxide, it doesn’t capture traditional air pollution like soot, NOx, or Sox, all of which harms human health.

Natural gas: A bridge to nowhere

 Many industry groups have worked for years to brand natural gas as clean with the narrative of gas as a “bridge fuel” to a clean energy future often pushed by fossil fuel interest groups. But this is resoundingly false. Although natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, it still generates substantial amounts of climate pollution when burned.

And natural gas wells, pipelines, and appliances often leak methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas in terms of trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide and is responsible for an estimated 20-30 percent of global warming since the Industrial Revolution.

There is no credible scenario in which natural gas can be considered clean from a climate perspective.

How policy can bring more clean energy online, faster

Because of clean energy’s superior economics, state and federal policy, and corporate climate goals, nearly all new additions to the U.S. electric grid are now clean.

In 2024, 96 percent of the new capacity added in the U.S. will consist of wind, solar, storage, and nuclear, all free from climate pollution. While this is a hopeful development, we’re still not adding clean energy fast enough.

Headwinds such as high interest rates, local siting challenges, supply chain constraints, and long wait times to connect to the grid are among the factors adding sand to the gears of the clean transition. Instituting smart policy can help ease the friction, including:

Improving regional and interregional transmission planning.
Accelerating interconnection by reducing the requirements on interconnection studies to only those necessary to connect the project to the grid.
Upgrading transmission lines using affordable technology to get big capacity increases in short timelines.
Implementing state and national clean electricity standards to mandate the transition to clean energy.
Improving regional sharing of electricity to improve reliability and resiliency.
And enabling demand-side solutions to meet peak loads quickly and affordably.

Clean energy is foundational to the fight against climate change—other solutions like electrification of transportation, buildings, and industry will only reach their fullest potential if clean energy supplies the electricity those technologies run on, rather than coal and natural gas.

Therefore, it’s crucial that policymakers, regulators, advocates, and businesses understand what energy sources are truly clean and which are imposters. Otherwise, they risk offering incentives, investments, and support to the wrong technologies that might only make our climate progress worse.

The post What Is Clean Energy? appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.

This post is part of an ongoing “What Is” series from Energy Innovation that answers some of today’s most pressing climate policy questions. The first in this series answered the question–What is Net-Zero?, and the second answered the question What is…
The post What Is Clean Energy? appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.[#item_full_content]