Climate Live – Tree variety crucial for small insects in the city

Halfway into the UN Conference on Biological Diversity, only a few of the 22 points have achieved success. Now there is only a week left for the countries of the world to agree on what is called a Paris agreement for nature.

The most important goals during the ongoing UN meeting COP15 in Montreal are to protect 30 percent of the earth’s surface by 2030 and to find a plan for financing that will support biodiversity in developing countries.

But it’s slow. It is not until Thursday that 196 environment ministers, including Romina Pourmokhtari (L), are due to join, but it was hoped that the negotiations would have reached a good point before then.

– We have a long way to go. But we see small glimmers of light at the end of the tunnel, says Marco Lambertini, head of WWF International to AFP.

Over the weekend, Brazil announced, on behalf of Africa and 14 other countries, a call for financial support of at least $100 billion a year or 1 percent of world GDP until 2030.

That demand is considered unrealistic by the rich countries, which in 2020 earmarked around 10 billion dollars.

The EU has also opposed the establishment of a new global biodiversity fund, which many other countries want to see done by COP16 in 2024.

The United States, which is not participating in the negotiations and has not signed the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, will play a decisive role when it comes to financing. (TT)

75 percent of the world’s population lives in the southern hemisphere, but only a third of the IPCC researchers come from there. In a new book from Cambridge University, scientists from 13 countries evaluate the UN climate panel IPCC. Three Örebro researchers each contribute a chapter – with the common denominator that the IPCC needs to change. The UN climate panel IPCC is tasked with making overall summaries of the research that describes climate change, how it affects our societies and the earth’s ecosystems and how climate change can be limited. – The IPCC is careful to seek consensus and only present what the science says. They want to avoid being controversial. Natural scientists have described what happens when the climate gets warmer, but now it’s time for the next step – to describe how we must change society, says Rolf Lidskog, environmental sociologist at Örebro University and one of the authors, in a press release.

The book Making Climate Knowledge Globally: A Critical Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is published by Cambridge University Press and researchers at Örebro University contribute the most chapters, 3 out of 28. The book in its entirety and individual chapters can be downloaded for free here.

The idea of ​​climate compensation is that whoever causes emissions pays for the corresponding amount of emissions to be reduced elsewhere. This can be done by using the money to buy emission rights, plant forests or develop renewable energy.

But the question is whether the choice to compensate for the climate is only governed by the amount of emissions, or whether there may be other underlying reasons.

In a new study published in the scientific journal Frontiers of Psychology researchers at the University of Gävle have investigated the psychological mechanisms and motives behind climate compensation through two experiments.

In the first experiment, the 500 subjects had to decide how many trees are needed to compensate for a flight with a certain amount of emissions. For half of the participants, it was described that the purpose of the trip was to send refugee children to a war zone, while for the other half it was described as the opposite purpose – to save the refugee children from the same war zone. The emissions for the trips were the same.

Those who had to take a stand on the trip with the immoral purpose of transporting children to a war zone thought that the compensation then needed to be greater than when the purpose of the trip was good – despite the same amount of emissions.

In the second experiment, the participants’ knowledge of climate and emissions was weighed, and the researchers added a neutral purpose for the trip, in addition to the moral and the immoral.

“This shows that compassion determines when and how much we compensate for the climate, even though it should really be pure mathematics how much and if we should compensate for a certain trip, writes Patrik Sörqvist, professor of psychology and one of the researchers behind the study, in a press release .

The study strengthens the thesis from previous research, that people strive for balance in a moral account.