- Why the Regenerative movement is sometimes at odds with the Climate Change movement – and what we can do about it
- What is climate change?
- How United Nations conventions narrowed the focus of climate research on greenhouse gases
- How Global Warming became Climate Change
As regeneration activist and practitioner, I am finding myself increasingly at odds with Climate Activism. I have studied the science of climate change, advocated around climate change, and worked at one of the world’s leading climate impact research centre – I even participated in a United Nations conference. I am not a climate denier – but what went wrong? Why am I at odds with the narrow focus on carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases?
This blog is the first in a series of blogs that lays out the paradigmatic chasm between regeneration and climate action and provides suggestions how to reconcile these two synergistically. This blog revisits the early history of the climate change politics, especially the UN mandate given within the Agenda 21 process that continues to frame the climate narrative.
What drives climate change?
My own study of Climate Change started in high school in 1994, when I read a book about global warming and another book about how we could react. Factor Four by E. U. v Weizäcker & Armory Lovins ([1]) lays out how humankind could double everyone’s well-being while cutting down our environmental footprint by half, by applying (then) existing technology and smart design. Indeed, many new technologies have been developed since the 90s, exceeding optimistic predictions of science fiction authors. But climate change somehow seems more threatening than ever – what went wrong?
I continued studying Climate Change in University, first in an environmental engineering undergrad, then in a four-year Master program of Earth System Sciences. We studied the climate in all its facets – global warming, the role of oceans, paleo-climateology, geochemistry, microbiology, laser optics for advanced monitoring, system dynamics, and lots of computer simulation models (I later did my PhD in watershed-level irrigation modelling). The scientific approach always started with recognizing four fundamental dynamics within the Earth’s climate system:
- Natural climate variability, driven by the Earth’s rotation that drives ocean currents and the meandering low- and high-pressure waves that control our weather. Other natural climate patterns include recurring planetary oscillations like El Niño/El Niña. If natural climate variability was our only concern, “butterfly effect” would limit our ability to predict the weather beyond a few days;
- Natural climate changes slowly shift average climate conditions, e.g. with changes in solar radiation, or the wobbles in the Earth’s orbit around the sun and in the rotation axis. These “Milankovitch cycles” have triggered ice ages for almost 2 Million years;
- Direct climate impacts from human activities such as land use, forestry and water management. Examples include heat island effects in cities, vegetation cooling via the terrestrial water cycle, and rural heating after vegetation was converted into bare soil;
- Indirect climate impacts from human activities, from global warming due to human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Whenever climatologists interpret data and observations, we need to take into consideration these four dynamic drivers of our climate.
During the late 90s and early 2000s, the main academic focus was on finding scientific proof for indirect climate impacts from humankind’s modifications of the atmosphere’s gases. Theory predicted that the increase in greenhouse gases would cause global warming – a scary predicament for humankind. Finding proof for the greenhouse effect was like finding a needle in a haystack – scientists had to find the “GHG climate signal” within natural variability and delineate it from the signals of natural forcing and direct climate impacts due to human landuse. For example, the Potsdam weather station provides a 150-year data series, the longest one available in Germany. The data clearly shows a warming trend – but this trend can be fully explained by an intensifying Urban Heat island caused by a growing city. So on closer inspection, what seemed like a clear sign for global warming actually just shows a direct climate impact due to human land use change. Remember: until 2003, the greenhouse gas effect was merely a hypothesis based on computer simulations. Back then, global warming could not yet be demonstrated in measurement data! So methods focused on finding the “global warming signal” by “removing” our significant direct climate impacts from weather measurements.
How United Nations conventions narrowed the focus of climate research on greenhouse gases
The scientific focus on “the greenhouse effect” was underpinned by an international legal mandate. In 1992, governments of the United Nations came together and committed to the Agenda 21 in Rio, Brazil. Leaders had noted increasing pressures on Earth. Governments agreed to work on three separate issues of environmental destruction: Biodiversity loss (addressed through the Convention on Biological Diversity, UNCBD), desertification (addressed through the Convention to Combat Desertification,UNCCD), and the battle against global warming (addressed through the Framework Convention on Climate Change or UNFCCC). After nations ratified the Agenda 21, the world found itself in three separate battles against the environmental impacts of human lifestyle and decision making. With separate UN bodies, separate reporting, and separate funding mechanisms. Within its member nations, the three separate UN bodies were mirrored by “implementing” separate departments/ministries on these three topics. The human response to the planetary crisis was scattered across several departments, each tasked with reporting and on-the-ground implementation of an particular process.
Government interventions under the UNFCCC convention were laid out in 1997 in the Kyoto Protocol, which specifies mechanisms for government action. In 2001, the Marrakesh Accords provided regulatory & technical details to the protocol [2]. Convention, protocol and accord were all focused on reducing global warming by reducing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to “a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” (Kyoto Protocol, §2). Indeed, the Protocol restricts itself to six greenhouse gases (Kyoto Protocol, Annex A): carbon dioxide (CO2), Methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6).
The following decades, climate research across academia worked on carefully distinguishing the four driving forces of the climate – natural variability, change in the natural climate forcing, direct and indirect climate impacts of human activities.
How Global Warming became Climate Change
Notably, the UN does not consider “desertification” – the transformation of a lush green landscape into a sandy dry area that is devoid of biological activity – within its definition of climate. Desertification certainly modifies the climate of a region – moisture changes entirely, temperatures fluctuations between day and night are drastically larger in a desert than in green landscape. In desertified regions, rainfall tends to evaporate and run off at the surface, in green environments water infiltrates into the soil where it is available to plants that can transpire the moisture. Desertification degenerates soil and biodiversity and changes the weather and the local climate. However, desertification is not driven by global warming but by landscape management. Desertification is a “direct climate impact of human activities” that does not fall into the “box” of the UNFCCC process. The UNFCCC, and especially the Kyoto protocol, define “climate change” solely through the lens of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, an indirect climate impact at global scale.
The UN recognizes many overlaps between the conventions. For example, the Kyoto Protocol already addressed some aspects of landuse and forestry, again within the narrow lens of greenhouse gas effects. Countries were asked to report changes to carbon dioxide sources and sinks in the biosphere, namely afforestation, reforestation and deforestation (Art. 3.3, Kyoto Protocol). Again, direct climate effects remain outside of the scope of the protocol – the biosphere and its interaction with the water cycle, transpiration cooling, soil water retention, and urban heat islands. Governments believed that these “direct” climate issues are local issues and national affairs. And local issues should not be regulated by a UN body!
This pattern of focusing on greenhouse gases continues on today. In the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land, its narrow scope is to “address greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems and sustainable land management in relation to climate adaptation and mitigation, desertification, land degradation and food security” (page V, IPCC SRCCL 2019). Certainly, scientists have “high confidence” that direct climate effects influence regional climate. These direct climate effects are broadly defined as “any local land changes that redistribute energy and water vapour between the land and the atmosphere (biophysical effects)” (Ch 2, Summary for Policy Makers). Yet, these changes of the Earth’s biosphere – in particular changes in the hydrological cycle — “are less well known and are difficult to quantify”, and global climate models show “low agreement” on their climate effect (Ch. 2, p. 138). In short, at the scale of landscapes, the interconnected natural climate system is far more complex than even the best of our models can simulate. It is thus still not feasible to assess how the biosphere is self-regulating its climate at landscape scale, or predict how changes of the biosphere impact the regional climate. Yet from a farmer’s and community perspective, our climate at landscape scale is highly relevant for our economic prosperity and for the survival of human societies and the biosphere.
The words ‘climate change’ now mostly describes the greenhouse effect that causes global warming – humankind’s scariest indirect climate impact. Even as the UN is calling to integrate and link the three Rio conventions, IPCC’s scientific mandate continues to provide background for the UNFCCC, now under the Paris Climate Agreement. Meanwhile the media narrative was distracted by a fabricated never-ending dispute whether global warming is real or not, and has mostly forgotten about the direct impacts of humans on the climate. Only now, with the emergence of the regenerative movement, we hear again how our land use practices impact on the world’s soils, the terrestrial water cycle and the biosphere at large – and how we can regenerate degraded landscapes.
[1] Weizsäcker EU, Lovins AB, Lovins LH. Factor four: doubling wealth-halving resource use: the new report to the Club of Rome. Earthscan; 1998.
[2] After Canada’s Steven Harper withdrew from the Kyoto protocol and accord in 2011, it was replaced by the newer Paris Agreement in 2015.
Thanks Thorsten. I will re read your article today. Great to have this clarification. I have a degree in Environmental Studies from Te Herenga Waka, Aotearoa/NZ. I began it in 1993 and completed it in 2016. I have had the privilege of watching our education system gear up to cope with our “homo sapien speed”. I have followed this degree with some Horticulture papers and now concentrate on city landscapes, with the assistance of children, academics, family, friends , neighbours and online contacts.