We are living in a time of extraordinary ecological loss. Not only are human actions destabilising the very conditions that sustain life, but it is also increasingly clear that we are pushing the Earth into an entirely new geological era, often described as the Anthropocene.

Research shows that people increasingly feel the effects of these planetary changes and associated ecological losses in their daily lives, and that these changes present significant direct and indirect threats to mental health and well-being. Climate change, and the associated impacts to land and environment, for example, have recently been linked to a range of negative mental health impacts, including depression, suicidal ideation, post-traumatic stress, as well as feelings of anger, hopelessness, distress, and despair.

Not well represented in the literature, however, is an emotional response we term ‘ecological grief,’ which we have defined in a recent Nature Climate Change article: “The grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change.”

We believe ecological grief is a natural, though overlooked, response to ecological loss, and one that is likely to affect more of us into the future.

Understanding ecological grief

Grief takes many forms and differs greatly between individuals and cultures. Although grief is well understood in relation to human losses, ‘to grieve’ is rarely considered something that we do in relation to losses in the natural world.

The eminent American naturalist Aldo Leopold was among the first to describe the emotional toll of ecological loss in his 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac: “One of the penalties of an ecological education,” he wrote, “is to live alone in a world of wounds.”

More recently, many respected ecologists and climate scientists have expressed their feelings of grief and distress in response to climate change and the environmental destruction it entails in places like: “Climate scientists feel weight of the world on their shoulders” and “Is this how you feel?”

Photo: Jean Wimmerlin via Unsplash

Ecological grief is also a significant theme in our own work. In different research projects working with Inuit in Inuit Nunangat in Arctic Canada and farmers in the Western Australian Wheatbelt, both of us have spent a combined total of almost 20 years working with people living in areas experiencing significant climatic changes and environmental shifts.

Despite very different geographical and cultural contexts, our research revealed a surprising degree of commonality between Inuit and family farming communities as they struggled to cope, both emotionally and psychologically, with mounting ecological losses and the prospect of an uncertain future.

Voices of ecological grief

Our research shows that climate-related ecological losses can trigger grief experiences in several ways. Foremost, people grieve for lost landscapes, ecosystems, species, or places that carry personal or collective meaning.

For Inuit communities in the Inuit Land Claim Settlement Area of Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Canada, the land is foundational to mental health. In recent years, melting sea ice prevented travel to significant cultural sites and engagement in traditional cultural activities, such as hunting and fishing. These disruptions to an Inuit sense of place was accompanied by strong emotional reactions, including grief, anger, sadness, frustration and despair.

One male who grew up hunting and trapping on the land in the community of Rigolet, Nunatsiavut explained:

“People are not who they are. They’re not comfortable and can’t do the same things. If something is taken away from you, you don’t have it. If a way of life is taken away because of circumstances you have no control over, you lose control over your life.”

Chronic drought conditions in the Western Australian Wheatbelt elicited similar emotional reactions for some family farmers. As one long-time farmer described:

“There’s probably nothing worse than seeing your farm go in a dust storm. I reckon it’s probably one of the worst feelings […] I find that one of the most depressing things of the lot, seeing the farm blow away in a dust storm. That really gets up my nose, and a long way up too. If its blowing dust I come inside – I just come inside here. I can’t stand to watch it.”

Sweeping away the dust in the central Western Australian Wheatbelt Feb. 2013. Photo: Neville Ellis

In both cases, such experiences resonate strongly with the concept of “solastalgia,” described both as a form of homesickness while still in place, and as a type of grief over the loss of a healthy place or a thriving ecosystem.

People also grieve for lost environmental knowledge and associated identities. In these cases, people mourn the part of self-identity that is lost when the land upon which it is based changes or disappears.

For Australian family farmers, the inability to maintain a healthy landscape in the context of worsening seasonal variability and chronic dryness often elicited feelings of self-blame and shame:

“Farmers just hate seeing their farm lift; it somehow says to them ‘I’m a bad farmer’. And I think all farmers are good farmers. They all try their hardest to be. They all love their land.”

For older Inuit in Nunatsiavut, changes to weather and landscape are invalidating long-standing and multi-generational ecological knowledge, and with it, a coherent sense of culture and self. As one well-respected hunter shared:

“It’s hurting in a way. It’s hurting in a lot of ways. Because I kinda thinks I’m not going to show my grandkids the way we used to do it. It’s hurting me. It’s hurting me big time. And I just keep that to myself.”

Many Inuit and family farmers also worry about their futures, and express grief in anticipation of worsening ecological losses. As one woman explained from Rigolet, Nunatsiavut:

“I think that [the changes] will have an impact maybe on mental health, because it’s a depressing feeling when you’re stuck. I mean for us to go off [on the land] is just a part of life. If you don’t have it, then that part of your life is gone, and I think that’s very depressing.”

Similarly, a farmer in Australia worried about the future shared their thoughts on the possibility of losing their family farm:

“[It] would be like a death. Yeah, there would be a grieving process because the farm embodies everything that the family farm is … And I think if we were to lose it, it would be like losing a person … but it would be sadder than losing a person … I don’t know, it would be hard definitely.”

Ecological grief in a climate-changed future

Ecological grief reminds us that climate change is not just some abstract scientific concept or a distant environmental problem. Rather, it draws our attention to the personally experienced emotional and psychological losses suffered when there are changes or deaths in the natural world. In doing so, ecological grief also illuminates the ways in which more-than-humans are integral to our mental wellness, our communities, our cultures, and for our ability to thrive in a human-dominated world.

From what we have seen in our own research, although this type of grief is already being experienced, it often lacks an appropriate avenue for expression or for healing. Indeed, not only do we lack the rituals and practices to help address feelings of ecological grief, until recently we did not even have the language to give such feelings voice. And it is for these reasons that grief over losses in the natural world can feel, as American ecologist Phyllis Windle put it, ‘irrational, inappropriate, anthropomorphic.’

We argue that recognising ecological grief as a legitimate response to ecological loss is an important first step for humanising climate change and its related impacts, and for expanding our understanding of what it means to be human in the Anthropocene. How to grieve ecological losses well — particularly when they are ambiguous, cumulative and ongoing — is a question currently without answer. However, it is a question that we expect will become more pressing as further impacts from climate change, including loss, are experienced.

Moonrise of Rigolet, Nunavut. Photo: Ashlee Cunsolo

We do not see ecological grief as submitting to despair, and neither does it justify ‘switching off’ from the many environmental problems that confront humanity. Instead, we find great hope in the responses ecological grief is likely to invoke. Just as grief over the loss of a loved person puts into perspective what matters in our lives, collective experiences of ecological grief may coalesce into a strengthened sense of love and commitment to the places, ecosystems and species that inspire, nurture and sustain us. There is much grief work to be done, and much of it will be hard. However, being open to the pain of ecological loss may be what is needed to prevent such losses from occurring in the first place.

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First-time visitors to Australia are often drawn to the big city attractions of Sydney and Melbourne or the fabulous beaches of Queensland’s Gold Coast. I’ve always had a soft spot for Adelaide in South Australia, a city built more on a human scale, where downtown can be easily navigated on bike, foot or tram. For me, Adelaide’s greatest attraction is a huge market right in the city’s centre.

When I first visited Adelaide in 1993, I met Mike Rann, a young, charismatic aboriginal affairs minister in South Australia’s Labor government. His party lost the election that year, but Rann later became party leader and then state premier in a minority government in 2002. I met him again in 2003 when he outlined ambitious plans to address climate change by aggressively moving South Australia into renewable energy. Wind and solar were the obvious opportunities, but he was also enthusiastic about “hot rocks”, superheated pockets that could create steam to drive turbines for electricity.

Rann proudly introduced me to the Youth Conservation Corps. Young people in this program are trained to restore land overgrazed by sheep or cattle, plant trees and make wildlife inventories. Rann surprised me by dedicating 45 hectares of reforestation land as Suzuki Forest.

I met young people working on “my” forest who enthusiastically told me about the number and variety of birds they’d seen that day, described plant species and talked about how many trees they had planted. Many were street kids, inspired by the chance to learn about nature and conservation and proud to be re-greening the area. I was impressed by their passion and eagerness. They believed in what they were doing and it provided a small income to get them off the streets.

My Adelaide visit that year ended at the World of Music and Dance festival, or WOMAD, a marvelous annual event where I heard the late Richie Havens sing his famous song “Freedom”. To top it off, I met Uncle Lewis O’Brien, a Kaurna elder who honoured me with the name Kaurna Mayu (mountain of a man).

I kept in touch with Mike Rann over the years. He was re-elected with majority governments in 2006 and 2010, then resigned in 2011. Last March, I returned as a guest of WOMADelaide. Although Rann was in Italy where he is now Australia’s ambassador, his wife Sasha welcomed me back. Again, the festival was a wonderful gathering of local and visiting musicians and dancers (including two groups from Canada), and to my delight, Uncle Lewis is alive and welcomed us to his country.

In Adelaide, I met Ian Hunter, South Australia’s environment minister, who boasted of his state’s tremendous progress in renewable energy. South Australia gets 40 per cent of its electricity from solar and wind and hopes to reach 50 to 60 per cent within a few years. The area is blessed with abundant sunlight, but few jurisdictions have committed to solar as aggressively and successfully as South Australia. From my hotel room, I looked down on a factory roof covered in rows of solar panels, which are now mounted on one of every four houses.

I also returned to Suzuki Forest. I was delighted and amazed at the variety and size of plants and trees, and the birds that now flourish among them. Perhaps my forest has been protected by neighbouring Schwarzenegger Forest!

Despite the impressive work in South Australia, most of the country is caught between the terrible reality of climate change — droughts, massive fires and dying reefs — and continued pressure to serve the economy by relying on fossil fuels, including recently approving the world’s largest coal mine.

Australia’s centre-right Liberal government under Prime Minister Tony Abbott gutted the previous government’s actions on climate change, disbanding the Climate Commission headed by world-renowned climate expert Tim Flannery in 2013 and cancelling Australia’s modest carbon price in 2014. Fortunately, the public started funding Flannery’s work, and the commission was reborn as the independent Climate Council. Abbott was booted by his own party after a short reign.

Nevertheless, the country — like much of the world — is in the throes of deciding whether to act seriously to reduce the threat of climate change. South Australia shows that many opportunities exist to do so.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

Image credit: Solar panels on the roof of the Powerhouse museum by Marinco Kojdanovski via Flickr CC

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It's not necessarily a competition you should be particularly keen to win, but which country in the world has the most climate change “sceptics”?

Most people would probably hazard a guess at the United States, what with its preponderance of climate science denialist think tanks, conservative television and radio hosts and politicians who think it’s all a hoax.

But a new study that analysed identical surveys carried out across 14 industrialised nations has found that when it comes to climate science denial, Australia tops the pile.

Published in the journal Global Environmental Change, the study found that 17 per cent of Australians were “climate sceptics”. 

Norwegians come in second at 15 per cent, followed by New Zealanders at 13 per cent and then Americans at 12 per cent. The UK was ranked joint fifth, together with Sweden and Finland, where 10 per cent of people were sceptics. The lowest ranked country for climate scepticism was Spain, where only two per cent of people were classified as climate sceptics. The authors wrote: 

Climate scepticism persists despite overwhelming scientific evidence that anthropogenic climate change is occurring.

The study, authored by two scientists at the University of Tasmania, used data from surveys carried out in 14 countries in 2010 and 2011.

While the survey did not directly ask people if they accepted the science linking climate change to human activities, the respondents were asked how dangerous rising temperatures would be for the environment.

People who thought rising temperatures were “not very dangerous” or “not dangerous at all” and who also thought claims about environmental issues were exaggerated were classed as “climate sceptics”. While the authors accept in the paper that their approach was limited, they argue that the method enables them to do a valuable comparison of scepticism across countries.

Generally, the study found that climate scepticism tended to be associated with a lack of trust in governments and “positive attitudes” towards private enterprise.  Sceptics also tended to be male and tended to vote conservative.

The researchers also tried to test the idea that climate sceptics tended to also be generally unconcerned about environmental issues, but found those two measures were only modestly linked with each other.

Across all countries, the authors wrote that only three factors — “political orientations (conservative), gender (male) and being unconcerned about environmental issues” — were “relatively consistent predictors” climate change scepticism.

The findings tend to support other studies that have found that conservative ideologies and support for private enterprise are strong indicators of climate scepticism and denial. The authors of the Global Environmental Change study concluded:

Low levels of trust in ‘the people in government’ is associated with climate scepticism, as is valuing private enterprise to solve economic problems. Rejecting government intervention in the reduction of income inequality also reflects laissez-faire attitudes towards ‘big government’ among climate sceptics.

But the finding that Australians, Norwegians and New Zealanders are more sceptical the Americans is surprising.

Last year, a survey from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication found that only 66 per cent of US voters thought that climate change was happening. 

Only 51 per cent of registered voters thought that global warming was mostly caused by climate change. But like the Global Environmental Change study, the Yale survey also found that conservatives tended to reject the evidence of human caused climate change. Among the most conservative Republicans, only 22 per cent were willing to accept that climate change was mostly caused by human activities.  

Image credit: Flickr/Jo Christian Oterhals

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Canada ranks among the world’s countries least likely to agree that climate change is a result of human activity, according to recently released Ipsos MORI research. The study, “Global Trends 2014,” posed a number of survey questions to individuals in 20 countries and discovered agreement with climate science is lowest in the U.S., Great Britain, Australia, Russia, Poland, Japan and Canada, respectively.

Agreement with climate science was highest in China, of all the countries surveyed, a fact that Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos MORI, attributes to high environmental concerns in China as a result of alarming environmental pollution in the country. “In many surveys in China, environment is top concern,” he said. “In contrast, in the west, it’s a long way down the list behind the economy and crime.”

Science and political journalist Chris Mooney, points out the survey results show an interesting correlation between climate denial or skepticism and speaking English.

He writes: “Not only is the United States clearly the worst in its climate denial, but Great Britain and Australia are second and third worst, respectively. Canada, meanwhile is the seventh worst. What do these four nations have in common? They all speak the language of Shakespeare.”

Mooney outlines two possible explanations for the pattern: political ideology and media ownership.

Ipsos MORI, Global Trends 2014.

Sowing seeds of climate denial

A recent study published in Climatic Change showed the U.S. hosts a surprisingly high number of organizations that actively deny or dispute climate science.

This “climate change counter-movement” is comprised of 91 different groups including oil and gas-funded think tanks like the Heartland Institute (which hosts the world’s most established climate denial conference each year), astro-turf groups, and trade associations like the Chamber of Commerce.

In total, these groups bring in more than $900 million each year, some of which is used to cast doubt on the science of climate change.

Naomi Oreskes, history professor at Harvard and author of Merchants of Doubt, a book outlining the history, strategies and organizations behind climate denial, says denier groups are winning in the U.S. and beyond.

In her book, Oreskes made a strong connection between the individuals, groups and ideologies behind the attack on not only climate science, but also the research linking tobacco to cancer, pollution and acid rain and the role CFCs played in creating the ozone hole.

Even after ‘outing’ these groups and their tactics, Oreskes recently told The Guardian things haven’t really changed.

“There are some new faces on the horizon, but recruiting ‘fresh voices’ has been a tactic for a long time. So even the things that may look new are in fact old,” she said.

“The Heartland Institute has become more visible, and the George Marshall Institute a bit less, but the overall picture continues: these groups continue to dismiss or disparage the science, attack scientists, and sow doubt.”

“They continue to try to block action by confusing us about the facts. And the arguments, the tactics, and the overall strategy has remained the same. And, they’ve been extremely successful. CO2 has reached 400 ppm, meaningful action is still not in sight, and people who really understand the science – understand what is at stake – are getting worried.”

Recently in Canada, long-time skeptic group Friends of Science bought billboard space in Calgary to display posters claiming global warming is due to the sun, rather than human activity like deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels (as the majority of the world’s scientists agree).

As Oreskes points out, politicians have done the public a disservice by parroting climate skeptic lines, or linking back to anti-science organizations like the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation.

Last month the Prime Ministers of both Canada and Australia publicly announced their countries wouldn’t take steps to prevent climate change at any cost to the economy. Both Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Prime Minister Tony Abbott disparaged the carbon tax.

Weeks later, Abbott announced Australia would repeal the carbon tax.

Media does matter 

The media, as DeSmog Canada pointed out after Harper and Abbott’s meeting, is no help in the matter. Harper’s suggested conflict between the environment and economy, for example, was met with zero pushback in traditional Canadian media coverage.

And the English-speaking world, as Mooney points out, is at a particular disadvantage with major media outlets linked together by Rupert Murdoch, a media magnate with an apparent tendency towards climate skepticism.

Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia are all home to Murdoch-owned news outlets NewsCorp and 21st Century Fox.

Mooney writes:

In the US, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal lead the way; research shows that Fox watching increases distrust of climate scientists. (You can also catch Fox News in Canada.) In Australia, a recent study found that slightly under a third of climate-related articles in 10 top Australian newspapers "did not accept" the scientific consensus on climate change, and that News Corp papers—the Australian, the Herald Sun, and the Daily Telegraph—were particular hotbeds of skepticism. "The Australian represents climate science as matter of opinion or debate rather than as a field for inquiry and investigation like all scientific fields," noted the study.

And then there's the UK. A 2010 academic study found that while News Corp outlets in this country from 1997 to 2007 did not produce as much strident climate skepticism as did their counterparts in the US and Australia, "the Sun newspaper offered a place for scornful skeptics on its opinion pages as did The Times and Sunday Times to a lesser extent." (There are also other outlets in the UK, such as the Daily Mail, that feature plenty of skepticism but aren't owned by News Corp.)

Mistrust runs deeper than climate

Although Canada is among the surveyed nations least likely to agree climate change is the result of human activity, Canadians still expressed some concern over the environment.

Canadians largely agreed (79 per cent) that companies do not pay enough attention to the environment and agreed (66.9 per cent) that society at large needs to change its bad habits if we are to avoid evironmental disaster.

Ipsos MORI, Global Trends 2014.

Ipsos MORI, Global Trends 2014.

Yet Canadians along with many other nationalities expressed concern that governments are using environmental issues to raise taxes. Canadians were also basically split over the issue of whether scientists really even know what they’re talking about when it comes to the environment.

Ipsos MORI, Global Trends 2014.

Ipsos MORI, Global Trends 2014.

And interestingly the majority of Canadians report being okay with the "fuss" being made about the environment. The only countries that did express this majority green-fatigue were Brazil, India and Poland.*

Ipsos MORI, Global Trends 2014.

The general problem of fatigue and mistrust is something scientists, policy-makers, environmental advocates and climate change communicators are growing more aware of.

Recent research from the Environics Institute shows the majority of Canadians, although convinced of man-made climate change, are not convinced governments will do anything about it. In this situation Canadians believe governments bear the responsibility for taking climate action but – for political or ideological reasons – will not. If Canada’s absence of climate legislation is any indicator, Canadians have every reason to retain their skepticism about the current federal government’s climate capabilities.

Without a government prepared to make meaningful progress when it comes to emissions and fossil fuel consumption, society really finds itself between a rock and a…hot place.

*An earlier version of this post stated the majority of Canadians were 'tired of the fuss' but has since been corrected.

Image Credit: Prime Minister Stephen Harper attends the Calgary Stampede from the Prime Minister of Canada press gallery.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Australian Prime Mininster Tony Abbott took turns Monday criticizing efforts by governments to make polluters pay for greenhouse gas emissions.

Abbott, who is visiting North America, and Harper, both said their respective governments weren’t trying to avoid dealing with the problem, but suggested they were trying to avoid damaging the economy.

The comments were immediately challenged by one of the Harper government’s former political advisers, David McLaughlin, who headed a panel that warned Canada would pay an economic price by not taking action to address climate change.

McLaughlin wrote on his Twitter account that the message from Harper and Abbott was reinforcing a “meme” that dealing with the environment, comes at the expense of the economy.

‘Either/or’ construct on combatting climate change heard today reinforces meme that dealing with environment comes at expense of economy.

— David McLaughlin (@DavidMcLA) June 9, 2014

@mikedesouza Economic impacts on Canada from NOT arresting climate change. Other side of coin we heard today in Ottawa. #cdnpoli

— David McLaughlin (@DavidMcLA) June 9, 2014

McLaughlin, a former chief of staff to the finance minister, is now a strategic advisor on sustainability at Waterloo University’s Faculty of Environment.

Harper’s government abolished the panel headed by McLaughlin, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, in its 2012 budget, stating that it no longer needed its advice since it believed it could find the expertise elsewhere. The cut was projected to generate savings of about $5 million per year.

The government later deleted the panel’s website, but moved its reports and research over to a website hosted by Library and Archives Canada.

Harper also said that President Barack Obama’s proposal last week to limit carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants “do not go nearly as far” as actions already proposed by Canada in the electricity sector.

Coal plants are one of the most challenging and significant sources of carbon pollution in the U.S. economy.

Harper’s government hasn’t yet taken action to address carbon emissions from the oil and gas industry, including in the oilsands which are the fastest growing source of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the country.

Here’s a transcript (edited for grammar) of the comments by Abbott and Harper at a joint news conference in Ottawa in response to a question from an Australian reporter who asked whether Obama’s recent announcement to crack down on carbon pollution from coal plants was putting pressure on their own governments to do more to fight climate change:

Tony Abbott:

“As you know, the Australian government believes in strong action to deal with climate change. We think that climate change is a significant problem. It’s not the only, or even the most important problem that the world faces. But it is a significant problem and it’s important that every country should take the action that it thinks is best to reduce emissions because we should rest lightly on the planet.”

“I am encouraged that President Obama is taking what I would regard as direct action measures to reduce emissions. This is very similar to the actions that my government proposes to take in Australia. We should do what we reasonably can to limit emissions and avoid climate change – man-made climate change. But we shouldn’t clobber the economy and that’s why I’ve always been against a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme because it harms our economy, without necessarily helping the environment.”

Stephen Harper:

“Look, I don’t feel any additional pressure other than the pressure we all feel to make progress on this important issue. I think it’s important to lay out the facts here and certainly our officials can give you more of the facts. The measures outlined by President Obama, as important as they are, do not go nearly as far, in the electricity sector, as the actions Canada has already taken, ahead of the United States, in that particular sector. Now that particular sector is obviously, and the effects of climate change regulations in that particular sector in the United States, are obviously more sensitive to the overall American economy than they are in Canada. The reason I mention these things, is just to make the point that, as I think Tony has also made, that it’s not that we don’t seek to deal with climate change. But we seek to deal with it in a way that will protect and enhance our ability to create jobs and growth, not destroy jobs and growth in our countries. And frankly, every single country in the world: This is their position.”

“No country is going to undertake actions on climate change, no matter what they say, no country is going to [take] actions that are going to deliberately destroy jobs and growth in their country. We are just a little more frank about that, but that is the approach that every country is seeking.”

This article originally appeared on mikedesouza.com and was republished here with permission.

Image Credit: Prime Ministers Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott via Twitter

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This past week was, in the continually escalating climate change war, one of great disconnect, confusion and uncertainty.

While there is no doubt that humankind finds itself in the middle of a much-needed transition away from the business-as-usual model of burning fossil fuels, powerful and manipulative forces continue to resist a growing movement to use greener, cleaner energy.

Many of those sinister forces are headquartered, or operate in, the United States which boasts the world’s greatest economy while being the second worst emitter of greenhouse gasses after China.

So it came as a shock to many mainstream media outlets this week when the third U.S. National Climate Assessment report said Tuesday that climate change is already negatively affecting the United States and the future looks even more dismal if coordinated mitigation and adaptation efforts are not immediately pursued.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” notes the massive NCA report.

Looking at impacts on human health, water, energy, transportation, agriculture, forests, and ecosystems across the country’s eight major regions, the report painted a bleak picture for the U.S. and the rest of the world if governments don’t quickly agree to aggressively fight climate change at the domestic and international level.

After all, the saying goes, an atmosphere overheated and polluted by emissions from oil, coal and gas doesn’t respect national borders. This is one fight we all share and the chickens are coming home to roost.

An urgency to act did not escape the eye of The New York Times editorial board which, after reading the NCA report, zeroed in on just three regional climate change catastrophes in the making.

Singling out the “the climate-change deniers in Congress and industry allies” for contributing to climate change, the editorial noted the southwestern part of the country is expected to get drier, see increased wildfires and reduced agricultural harvests. The eastern seaboard, meanwhile, will have more destructive storms and higher sea levels. And forests will die in Alaska while more permafrost melts, speeding up the release of greenhouse gasses such as methane.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom.

Observers were saying the report may give President Barack Obama more power to deal with climate change, the environment and energy issues through administrative amendments during his last 2.5 years in office. Indeed, the White House issued a media release saying the report underscores “the need for urgent action to combat the threats from climate change, protect American citizens and communities today, and build a sustainable future for our kids and grandkids.”

Two days later, the Carbon Tracker Initiative said investors could lose more than $1.1 trillion worth of investments to potentially unburnable fossil fuel deposits if governments act to fight climate change by agreeing the deposits need to stay in the ground.

The report identifies oil reserves in the Arctic, oilsands and in deepwater deposits at the high end of the carbon/capital cost curve. Projects in this category “make neither economic nor climate sense” and won’t fit into a carbon-constrained world looking to limit oil-related emissions, Carbon Tracker stated in a press release.

In addition, the report emphasized the high risk of Alberta oilsands investment, noting the reserves “remain the prime candidate for avoiding high cost projects” due to the region’s landlocked position and limited access to market.

“Our analysis also shows that if demand for oil is not substantially reduced we are clearly heading for a level of warming far in excess of 2°C,” the report said, “which reveals that there is no free lunch here for investors.

“Either policy and technological tipping points will reduce demand in line with our analysis or we will face levels of warming described as catastrophic by many.”

Speaking of potential catastrophes, Queensland on Thursday approved what would become the largest coal mine in Australia despite fears that an accompanying port could damage the Great Barrier Reef which is already seeing corals dying from climate change developments.

If that approval — which still needs to be given the go-ahead by the national government before the $16-billion mine can be built — seems strange, it’s also worth knowing that almost 80 per cent of Queensland is now dealing with a prolonged drought that some are linking to climate change caused by burning fossil fuels.

Lastly, but certainly not least, Lloyd’s of London, the world’s oldest insurance company, now wants insurers to incorporate future climate change scenarios into their business models since damage from extreme weather-related events have cost a reported $200 billion over the past 10 years.

On Thursday, Lloyd’s released a report saying that extreme weather cost the insurance industry more than $127 billion in 2011 alone, making it the record year for natural catastrophe.

Trevor Maynard, leader of Lloyd’s exposure management and reinsurance team, said climate change is expected to continue to happen even if strong action is taken to cut greenhouse gases.

“The urgent need to mitigate carbon emissions remains as critical now as before,” Maynard added.

Image Credit: Tim J Keegan via Flickr

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