Poor nations need say in geoengineering use

Tuna quotas ‘step backward’

LONDON, Nov 22, (Agencies): Poor countries are most likely to be negatively affected by efforts to reverse climate change using global-scale technologies — but they remain largely unaware of the potential unintended consequences, researchers said Tuesday.

Developing countries’ involvement in global discussion about “geoengineering” projects has so far been limited, as most have more immediate priorities and limited scientific capacity to engage on the topic, noted a report by the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

As the world continues to battle to cut the use of fossil fuels fast enough to hold global warming to relatively safe levels, governments are exploring not just ways to ratchet up carbon-cutting ambitions but also ways to suck some of the carbon that is already there back out of the atmosphere, or to reflect more warming sunlight away from the planet.

“Although most of the dialogue about geoengineering is taking place among researchers and NGOs, it’s likely to get more attention at the policy level as climate change intensifies,” said Andrew Scott, one of the report’s authors and an energy researcher at ODI.

Geoengineering proposals are increasingly being discussed as efforts to cut the world’s carbon emissions fall short of what is needed to hold global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, in line with the Paris Agreement to deal with climate change.

The planet has already seen about 1 degree Celsius of warming, and is on a track to at least 3 degrees unless carbon-cutting efforts become more ambitious, officials at the UN climate talks in Bonn said last week.

But critics warn that poor countries — who might see lowered disaster risk from the use of geoengineering measures — also risk bearing the brunt of unintended consequences, such as shifts in global rainfall patterns.

For example, spraying aerosol into the atmosphere to mimic the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions could potentially shift monsoons that billions of Asians rely on to grow food, geoengineering experts say.

“But research in the developing world into those effects is mainly limited to countries with strong science and technology capacity like India and China,” Scott told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Scott

Changes

Experts also worry that discussion of using carbonsucking technologies could reduce the pressure to cut emissions now.

Douglas MacMartin, a senior researcher at Cornell University, said in a webinar Monday that “nothing in geoengineering technologies changes the fact that we must cut our carbon emissions aggressively” to limit global warming.

Scott agreed that “there is plenty we can do with known technologies to tackle climate change.”

“But whether we like it or not, geoengineering is going to happen,” he predicted.

“So our focus should be on making all countries aware of its costs and benefits, including the potential for unintended consequences, so they can have a say in the global debate.”

The 51-nation tuna fisheries body for the Atlantic and Mediterranean boosted quotas for highly prized bluefin despite scientific findings that doing so could threaten the species’ recovery, delegates and observers at a key meeting said Tuesday.

Country quotas for eastern bluefin tuna are to increase 50 percent, by increments, to 36,000 tonnes in 2020, sources told AFP at the conclusion of the closed-door meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT).

The warm-blooded, fatty fish — which can grow to the size of a small car and swim nearly as fast — underpins a billion-dollar business, and is a culinary mainstay in Japan.

ICCAT also gave the go-ahead for bigger catches of western bluefin tuna, as well as so-called tropical tunas, despite evidence of declining stocks and over the objections of some members.

ICCAT’s scientific committee, meeting last month in Madrid, approved the higher catch figures for the iconic eastern bluefin.

At the same time, however, it concluded that — for bluefin stocks to have even a coin’s toss chance of continued growth — total allowable catch should be held to 28,000 tonnes.

The contradictory findings point to a breach in the “firewall” between the scientific committee and the political body to which it reports, members of both groups said.

“This year was an enormous step backwards for sustainable tuna fisheries,” said Paulus Tak, a senior officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts, and an official observer at the ICCAT talks.

“In the vast majority of ICCAT decisions this year, the status of the stocks was ignored.” The new quotas — allocated mostly to the European Union, which pushed hard for the increase — “further undermine the credibility of the Commission,” he added.

Industrial-scale tuna fisheries in Spain, Italy and France all have outsized political influence in shaping policy, analysts say.

A decade ago, eastern bluefin was on the brink of collapse. In 2010, the UN body governing trade in endangered species considered a motion to outlaw international sales of the fish, which can fetch tens of thousands of dollars for a single specimen.

Illegal

The motion failed, but prompted ICCAT to lower quotas and crack down on illegal fishing.

The measures worked, but not well enough to declare the stocks fully recovered in 2016.

Quotas for western Atlantic bluefin were also increased, to 2,350 tonnes, despite the fact that stocks are only 18 percent of 1950 levels after a 20-year “rebuilding plan”.

“This is likely to result in further declines of biomass,” Tak told AFP.

ICCAT also shot down a proposal to slow the harvest of bigeye, skipjack and yellow tail.

The $3.4 billion (2.9 billion euro) market for these so-called tropical tunas is several times bigger than for bluefin, but gets far less attention.

The proposal from South Africa — backed by Brazil, Japan and several other African nations — would have reined in industrial purse seine fishing, in which factory ships cast enormous nets that scoop up hundreds of fish at a time.