Why tackling biodiversity loss could solve the climate crisis

Posted on October 5, 2023September 18, 2023 by Shield Insurance Agency

Positive News | Martin Wright | September 13, 2023 | biodiversity | Shield Insurance Agency Blog

Is tackling biodiversity loss or climate change more important? The beautiful thing that many people don’t realize is that doing the first will fix the second, writes Martin Wright

Can a grey wolf calm the climate? Can a whale tame the skies?

No, those aren’t the chorus lines of some whimsical 70s folk song. Rather, they’re the sort of legitimate questions arising from a fascinating new study into a previously overlooked, but potentially crucial, benefit of rewilding.

It found that maintaining healthy populations of just nine key wild species (or groups of species) – including elephants and wolves, but also wildebeest, musk ox, and bison, as well as marine fish, whales, sharks, and sea otters – can play a vital role in controlling the carbon cycle on land and sea. How? Because in order for such creatures to thrive, they need a viable habitat. And if that’s conserved, whether in the oceans, forests, grasslands, or swamps, so are the many ways in which its natural properties of sequestering and storing carbon are maintained, too.

The overall impact could be, to put it mildly, massive. Compiled by 15 scientists from eight different countries, the study concluded that it could collectively enable the capture of 6.41 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. This is equivalent to a cool 95 percent of the total needed to meet the Paris Agreement target of removing enough carbon from the atmosphere to keep global temperature rises below the 1.5C threshold.

The mechanisms by which this can happen are many and varied. Whales, for example, directly store carbon in their bodies, while the (substantial) quantity of whale poo is thought to stimulate the growth of phytoplankton. These in turn sequester shedloads of CO2 – as much as 1.7tn trees, or four Amazon rainforests’ worth.

Other creatures have a less dramatic, but no less beneficial impact. Take wolves. When they were reintroduced into Yellowstone Park in the US in the mid-90s, they triggered an extraordinary array of changes, from the recovery of local woodlands to the revival of populations of beavers, swans, and wildflowers, regenerating a climate-friendly ecosystem.

The study’s leader, Yale School of the Environment’s Professor Oswald Schultz, commented that “wildlife species, throughout their interaction with the environment, are the missing link between biodiversity and climate. This interaction means rewilding can be among the best nature-based climate solutions available to humankind.”

This news couldn’t come at a better time for advocates of a wilder world. Because rewilding’s had a mixed press of late. While many applaud the progress made in places like the Knepp Estate in Sussex, or Wild Ken Hill in Norfolk, others are skeptical. Much, but not all, of that skepticism is unfounded.

Fears that rewilding would harm food security are largely groundless: most nature recovery projects are happening on relatively unproductive land, and the benefits they bring, such as reducing floods, boosting populations of natural pest controllers, and conserving soil, can actually have positive impacts on food production in fields nearby.

At various times, though, sweeping efforts to rewild land or sea, in places as diverse as Wales, Scotland, the Netherlands, and Tanzania, without bringing local people on board, have drawn some understandable criticism. This is why the best nature recovery projects make sure to put humans at the heart of it all.

Read the full story at Positive News

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U.S. saw its 4th-warmest year on record, fueled by a record-warm December

Posted on January 21, 2022May 11, 2023 by Shield Insurance Agency

Nation struck with 20 separate billion-dollar disasters in 2021

NOAA.gov | January 10, 2022 | Warmest year on record | Shield Insurance | Start a quote today!

On September 4, 2021, the Joint Base Lewis-McChord Soldiers and the Bureau of Land Management-California’s Folsom Lake Veterans Hand Crew constructed a handline, cleared brush, and dealt with hot spots north of Lake Davis and Portola during the largest wildfire of 2021–California’s Dixie Fire. The western wildfires of 2021 were one of 20 separate billion-dollar disasters that struck the United States last year. (Joe Bradshaw/Bureau of Land Management)

The year 2021 was marked by extremes across the U.S., including exceptional warmth, devastating severe weather and the second-highest number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters on record.

The nation also saw an active wildfire year across the West as the north Atlantic Basin stayed busy with its third most-active Atlantic hurricane season on record, according to scientists from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

Here’s a recap of the climate and extreme weather events across the U.S. in 2021:

Climate by the numbers

December 2021 | Full year 2021 | 4th-warmest year on record

The December contiguous U.S. temperature was 39.3 degrees F, 6.7 degrees above average, making it the warmest December on record and exceeding the previous warmest December in 2015.

Ten states — Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas — also had their warmest Decembers on record.

For 2021, the average contiguous U.S. temperature was 54.5 degrees F, 2.5 degrees above the 20th-century average and ranked as the fourth-warmest year in the 127-year period of record. The six warmest years on record have all occurred since 2012.

Maine and New Hampshire had their second-warmest year on record with 19 additional states across the Northeast, Great Lakes, Plains and West experiencing a top-five warmest year. Meanwhile, Alaska’s average annual temperature was 26.4 degrees F, 0.4 of a degree above the long-term average and the coldest year since 2012.

Precipitation across the contiguous U.S. totaled 30.48 inches (0.54 of an inch above average), which placed 2021 in the middle third of the climate record. Massachusetts had its ninth-wettest year on record, while Montana ranked ninth driest on record for 2021.

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, drought coverage remained fairly significant and steady throughout much of 2021, with a minimum extent of 43.4% occurring on May 25 and maximum coverage of 55.5% on December 7.

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The future of climate change disclosures: 4 critical risk areas boards should address

Posted on November 22, 2021February 14, 2025 by Shield Insurance Agency

Brian McLoughlin, claims officer, Complex Management Liability Claims, Ironshore | Climate Change

In a 2020 study on climate outlook in business, 78 percent of leaders at the world’s top 500 companies reported that managing climate-related risks will be critical in keeping their jobs over the next five years. They know that climate change is a vital business issue — and it’s particularly urgent for companies in the U.S., where experts anticipate that mandatory climate disclosure requirements are on the horizon.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has considered climate change a risk area since 2010, and many companies already voluntarily disclose information. But in July 2021, Gary Gensler, chair of the SEC, spoke about his plan to submit a proposed rule for mandatory climate disclosures — and based on an outpouring of public messages, that proposal will likely pass. Mandatory disclosures should make it easier for buyers and investors to access consistent, comparable data about climate impact, and for companies to showcase their positive work. However, these new regulations can feel daunting for board members, particularly at companies with less experience in this area.

“In July 2021, Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), spoke about his plan to submit a proposed rule for mandatory climate disclosures — and based on an outpouring of public messages, that proposal will likely pass.”

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Climate change anxiety: How to stop spiraling and make a difference

Posted on July 20, 2021January 22, 2025 by Shield Insurance Agency

Mashable.com | By Rebecca Ruiz on July 11, 2021

The monarch butterfly, known for its distinctive orange color, is now on the verge of extinction. Numbering in the millions in the 1980s, the monarch population has been in steep decline thanks to habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate change. So, in fall 2020, when I spied several monarch caterpillars feasting on a neighbor’s milkweed plant, I excitedly pointed them out to my young daughters. We soon noticed the caterpillars inching their way toward a neighbor’s garage door, where they spun chrysalises, preparing to transform.

They’d arrived at an uncertain time, two months after we’d woken up to a sky made orange by wildfire smoke, and at the beginning of the third COVID-19 surge in the U.S. I drew something altogether human from their presence: The world may be chaotic and unforgiving, but survival is still possible because nature insists on it.

We walked by each day, anticipating empty cocoons. But the days turned to weeks and the butterflies remained locked inside their husks. They would never emerge. The monarchs hanging delicately before us never had a shot.

In early December, looking for answers, I read about scientists tracking the monarch butterfly population. A yearly volunteer count found fewer than 2,000 monarchs, a figure that puts them closer to extinction. When I contacted one of the researchers with my own anecdote and asked if the butterflies’ demise might be related to climate change, the expert said that while nature is full of “small failures,” it’s also possible that warmer temperatures confused the female caterpillar into laying eggs too late in the season. In that scenario, the monarchs hanging delicately before us never had a shot.

I was crestfallen. I couldn’t bear the idea of my children growing up without monarch butterflies — or how that shift mirrors the catastrophes small and large happening on our planet because of climate change. With no way to meaningfully cope with that anxiety and grief, particularly during the bleak winter COVID-19 surge, I left those feelings to idle and fester. Of course, these emotions resurface stronger and more powerful each time I learn of ice sheets melting, heat domes forming, and wildfires blazing.

Burying negative emotions is commonplace in a culture that discourages pessimism about the future. It’s hard to be the downer who talks about a world that could turn apocalyptic in a few short decades. What makes that conversation doubly difficult is the feeling that individual action can seem futile when politicians hedge their bets and refuse to act, whittling away the precious time we have left to stop releasing carbon into the earth’s atmosphere. We are led to believe that our pain belongs to us alone, when in fact the systems we live in — a government and economy built for the wealthy — create the conditions for our suffering.

Yet, as I’ve learned recently, this cycle of reckoning with our rapidly changing planet, feeling overwhelmed by powerlessness, and then living in some form of denial or avoidance isn’t inevitable.

Experts who study mental health and climate change say there are ways to cope with emotions and experiences that can be otherwise debilitating. The goal is to calm the body and mind, make meaning out of confusion and tragedy, and transform our own understanding of what the future may hold so that we can act in meaningful ways, individually and collectively.