In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, we are experiencing a potential shift in the political tides on climate change. Mayor Bloomberg’s endorsement of President Obama Thursday, citing climate change, thrust climate issues into the political debate. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy have also made strong statements calling climate change a reality and calling for more preparedness and reforms in its wake. The media is becoming more willing to connect the dots and call a spade a spade.

Let’s not forget that climate change has ushered in a “new normal” for many communities around the world. Up and down the east coast, many Americans are experiencing the same sense of helplessness, and maybe some level of solidarity with people who are more vulnerable to extreme weather events than those of us who have the resources to cope and institutions able to support us through crisis. The startling images of Sandy remind us of how these crises must feel in places without the kind of support we are able to provide our fellow Americans. Places like Bangladesh, a least developed country with most of its population living in poverty, the majority living in low-lying areas highly vulnerable to floods, storms, and saltwater intrusion. Let’s not forget that Hurricane Sandy itself claimed more than 50 lives in Haiti where cholera is an acute public health threat and communities are still recovering from the earthquake that devastated that country less than two years ago.

So we should seize this temporary moment of realization about the threats all of us face to push forward towards a global response to climate change to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions levels and to direct resources those who need it most to build their preparedness. With the US election tomorrow and the next round of UN climate negotiations happening later this month, we have an opportunity to usher in a new political dynamic on this issue. The onus is now on the American public to hold our political leaders accountable for demonstrating new and sustained leadership on this global crisis. We owe it to the people who lost their lives in this awful storm, and to the estimated 400,000 people who lose their lives every year due to climate-related disasters.

In the early morning hours on Saturday, the Senate caved to industry pressure and dealt a blow to the planet. This action comes at a time designed to avoid public attention and as many Senators head out to the campaign trail to save their jobs.

The Senate passed the “Thune Bill” (S.1956) by unanimous consent making it illegal for the US airline industry to comply with EU regulations that cut carbon emissions. See previous posts for more details.

The airline industry has been lobbying hard for Thune to pass the Senate for months after gaining a victory in the House last year and climate advocates have had little resources to compete. The vote represents only the third time in history that the US government has made it illegal under US law to comply with the law of another country—putting the European climate change law on par with South Africa’s racist apartheid laws and the anti-Israel boycott by Arab nations.

All along, governments, industry groups, and climate advocates have agreed on one thing: the optimal solution is a global scheme to be implemented by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). It’s now in the administration’s hands to proactively seek a global solution in ICAO that generates meaningful emissions reductions with fair provisions for developing countries’ airlines, including finance from the scheme being channeled to developing countries.

Unlike Congress, the administration needs to spend less time stirring up trade wars and kowtowing to industry, and more time leading the way towards an international solution.

I’m thrilled to (finally) have some positive news to report on the climate change front.

Last year, we wrote about a shareholder proposal that Trillium Asset Management (Trillium) and Calvert Investment Management (Calvert) filed with the J.M. Smucker Company urging the company to disclose climate-related risks in their coffee supply chain. Nearly a year later, and after organized pressure urging the company to act, Smucker’s has taken promising first steps to address climate risks.

Smucker’s, better known for their jelly and jams, is a lead distributor of Folgers and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee brands with coffee accounting for nearly half of its profits. Coffee is particularly susceptible to climate-related risks, such as temperature variability and weather extremes, and coffee farmers often lack the resources to support their families in the face of increased unpredictability in crop yield.

In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted guidance for publicly traded companies, requiring them to disclose climate change risks, such as physical risks to a company’s assets and supply chains. Smucker’s reported on some climate risks in its 10-K filings, but had failed to demonstrate to shareholders how they were managing these risks.

While last year’s shareholder resolution received a strong vote of support, the company did not commit to any meaningful actions in response, leading Trillium and Calvert to file a similar resolution this year. Oxfam America, a Smucker’s shareholder, supported this resolution and in June of 2012, our President Raymond Offenheiser sent a letter to Mark Smucker, Director and President of US Retail Coffee for Smucker’s, urging the company “to adopt a strategic plan which addresses temperature changes, changes in rainfall patterns, and the company’s responsibility to the coffee farming families in its supply chain.”

In response to the growing pressure, the company recently announced a set of new initiatives in their 2012 corporate responsibility report ahead of the company’s annual meeting. The move has lead Trillium and Calvert to withdraw their shareholder proposal. Smucker’s coffee sustainability initiatives include:

• A goal for certified coffee purchases to reach 10 percent of its total retail purchases by 2016.
• A partnership with the Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung Foundation to focus on agronomy training, organizational development, and climate change adaptation strategies in order to improve the farming conditions, yields, and incomes of small-scale coffee farming families.
• A partnership with World Coffee Research with a focus on the science of coffee in order to develop hybrid varieties using classic breeding techniques.

While these actions only represent a first step, it’s critical that the company is beginning to publicly recognize climate change risks in their coffee supply chain. It is a sign that corporate pressure can pay off and that that extreme weather events, like the devastating drought that’s currently gripping much of the US and threatening global food security, are serving as a wake-up call to companies about the economic realities of a changing climate.

Public disclosure of climate risks and the development of a strategic plan to address these risks are important next steps that the company should take to ensure that the company is held accountable and that small-scale farmers in Smucker’s supply chain have adequate resources to prepare for and respond to climate threats. Not only will such resources protect farming communities, they will surely benefit global companies, like Smucker’s, who rely on a stable supply of high-quality coffee beans.

Extreme weather is putting climate change back on the radar this summer. Record high heat in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic, raging wildfires in the Rockies, deadly wind and thunder storms, and a drought covering more than half of the country have people connecting the dots between climate change and extreme weather events.

But it’s not just weather reports that are telling the story.  Now businesses are also connecting extreme weather and climate change to their bottom lines.

It’s no wonder that some businesses have noticed the seriousness of what’s happening on the climate front.  Nine of out ten companies have suffered weather-related impacts in the past three years and most have seen an intensification of such impacts. The 2011 record-setting drought in Texas, for example, cost the agricultural sector at least $7.6 billion dollars. In the words of the CEO of Duke Energy, “If we’re not ready, we’re in trouble.”

But while some businesses recognize the impact that climate change is having on their supply chains and operations, many say they do not feel sufficiently informed to take action, especially when it comes to how they relate to vulnerable communities. Today, leading companies from the food and beverage, insurance, investment, technology, and energy industries are hoping to fill that gap with a new guide and tool-kit.

The companies engaged in PREP (Partnership for Resilience and Environmental Preparedness) have just released a first-of-its-kind step-by-step guide—the Value Chain Climate Resilience Guide—to spur corporate executives and senior managers to integrate climate resilience throughout their value chains, including how they address climate impacts that are harming vulnerable communities.

The guide includes Business ADAPT, a step-by-step tool designed for businesses to assess and prepare for the risks and opportunities posed by climate change. The tool follows five basic steps to help companies understand the risks they face, take into account the needs of vulnerable communities, identify emerging market opportunities, and effectively manage threats to their bottom line. Each step includes a series of guiding questions that are inspired by existing good practice and are designed to focus on the connection between value chains and community and ecosystem vulnerabilities.

More detailed guidance is provided for sectors that are considered highly vulnerable, including water and energy utilities and companies in the food, beverage, agriculture, and general manufacturing industries.

The Value Chain Climate Resilience guide marks an important step forward in corporate sustainability. By helping businesses manage risks and tap into market opportunities associated with climate change, these businesses are paving the way towards addressing the impacts of a changing climate on companies and communities.

This year’s G20 Summit in Mexico just wrapped up with hugely disappointing results on the issues that Oxfam cares about, including food security and price volatility, innovative financing, and reducing inequality. G20 leaders were fixated on the ongoing European financial crisis and managed to barely skim the surface on critical environment and development issues. It’s a shame, given that there was a real opportunity to link these issues and associated outcomes to the ongoing Rio+20 conference on sustainable development in Brazil.

We originally held out some hope that the Mexican presidency would make progress on identifying innovative sources of climate finance as they established a study group on the issue chaired by France. But all that made it into the final communiqué was the reassertion of a commitment to the UNFCCC outcomes in Cancun and Durban, neither of which identified new sources of finance to meet the goal of $100 billion per year to be delivered to developing countries.

The G20 Summit failed to identify any new sources of climate finance.

One promising source of climate finance is the international shipping sector. Last month, Oxfam participated in an event at the Brookings Institution that featured new analysis, soon to be released by Brookings, finding that the economic impacts of a market-based mechanism (levy or emissions trading scheme) in the sector will likely have minimal impacts on price and demand for US imports and exports.

The G20 should take note of these findings and identify the shipping sector as a key source of innovative finance. The US economic analysis mirrors similar analyses conducted at the international level on the price impacts of a global shipping mechanism.

Funding to support vulnerable communities in developing countries as they struggle to prepare for and respond to a changing climate has to come from somewhere. The shipping sector is a source that makes sense. Its emissions are some of the fastest growing on the planet and the sector has been let off the hook for too long in delivering meaningful greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

The study group will continue its work until November 2012 when Mexico turns over the G20 Presidency to Russia. There is potential for the group to make progress on identifying sources of innovative finance as France and South Africa, co-chairs of the group, have expressed support for sources like shipping in the past.

Let’s hope that countries step up the pressure on the G20 to deliver something meaningful on innovative climate finance in the coming months.

What if world leaders had an opportunity to set the world on track towards a sustainable future, uniting development and environment efforts, but nobody really knew it? That’s the situation Secretary Clinton is facing as she sets out to lead the US delegation at the Rio+20 Summit next week.

While the world still produces more than enough food to feed everyone, there are more hungry people today than twenty years ago. Photo: Sokunthea Chor/Oxfam America

Since the Rio ‘Earth Summit’ in 1992, progress towards achieving sustainable global development without exceeding ecological limits has stalled. While the world still produces more than enough food to feed everyone, there are more hungry people today than twenty years ago. Eighty percent of people live in areas with high levels of threats to water security, including 3.4 billion people in the most severe threat category. Globally, greenhouse gas emissions increased by 36 percent between 1992 and 2008, from around 22 to just over 30 gigatonnes.

It is vital that governments, and the US, in particular, demonstrate resolve at Rio+20 to get things back on track. While we know that binding agreements won’t be achieved or new significant sources of financing agreed to, governments can make progress towards addressing a series of critical development and environmental priorities. Here are three concrete outcomes that Secretary Clinton could help achieve at the summit:

1. Commit to establish a single set of ‘global development goals’ to guide development efforts of all countries in the post-2015 period that brings together environmental and social themes. These would build off the current UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

2. Develop high-level, time-bound goals towards achieving a sustainable, resilient, and equitable food system that provides sufficient, nutritious food for all through fair shares of limited natural resources, including land and water, along with a safe climate.

3. Provide concrete pledges of technical and financial support to developing countries to deliver sustainable energy access that puts poor people first and help cut greenhouse gas pollution, and a rapid phase-out of environmentally and socially harmful energy subsidies.

Oxfam is part of a large and growing movement of inspired citizens who are choosing to build an economy that serves the people and preserves the environment. We need the US government to support and lead the way towards this vision by re-focusing economic development so that poverty can be eradicated and economic growth no longer depends on rising volumes of natural resources.

On behalf of the Obama administration, Secretary Clinton can help jumpstart this shift and provide the leadership needed to secure broad-based international consensus around this agenda in Rio. Maybe if she does, more people will start to take notice.

Politico ran a story last week highlighting what they called the “rebranding” of global warming. Organizers and pollsters from across the country have concluded that the terms “global warming” and “climate change” have been politicized. The case pollsters and communicators make is that campaigners working on these issues need to know their audience – they need to get savvy and avoid the polarizing politics of climate change.

But the key question needs to be: what are the implications of this approach? Are organizations working on issues related to climate change sacrificing the long-term fight for short-term wins? (By the way, the group of organizations in the climate community continues to expand despite the political setbacks of recent years. The most recent members of the US Climate Action Network are the NAACP, Population Action International, and the Humane Society.) Are we perpetuating the myth that there is a debate out there about the science?

The pollsters and communicators are only getting half the story right. Yes, we need to know our audience, but we also need to know and cultivate our messengers and I don’t see that happening at levels necessary to combat catastrophic climate change. A clean air campaign focused on healthy air makes sense to defend and promote EPA carbon pollution standards—it will deliver near-term wins that are critical for the US to meet our international climate commitments— but it will not set the stage for transformational change and that is what is needed to address this issue head on.

Sustained and adequate investments need to be made in movement building organizations (e.g., 350.org) that are unafraid to talk climate change and that are unequivocally talking about the implications of climate change on communities, especially those most vulnerable who lack the resources to prepare for and respond to climate shocks. New leaders need to be cultivated (see Climate Reality Project) who are willing to get real with the American public (and those people are most likely not scientists).

We need to spend more time, energy, and money rebuilding this movement and speaking the truth to those who will listen. In the words of KC Golden, a leader in the national climate movement at Climate Solutions: “If we won’t tell more than a small fraction of the truth, how can we expect our leaders to have the political space to act on the truth? How can we even believe in ourselves enough to have any power? We can’t just be an Etch a Sketch, running from jobs to health to whatever we think will get us a little bump in the polls.” Amen to that.

At the tail end of one of the most dramatic spring heat waves in US history, businesses from across sectors addressed a bipartisan audience on Capitol Hill to discuss escalating risks to their global supply chain resulting from shifting climate patterns and severe weather events. The forum comes at a time when more companies are identifying climate change as a risk that needs to be managed and an opportunity for new market investment.

Greg Douglas, Director of Business Development for Earth Networks, a company specializing in weather and environmental observation (they’re best known for their “WeatherBug” app), highlighted the need for data and information to help local industries around the world anticipate and respond to changing weather patterns. Governments are turning to companies like Earth Networks to provide the systems necessary to collect and disseminate new weather and climate observation information and to help support disaster risk management in communities.

Earth Networks recently joined the Partnership for Resilience and Environmental Preparedness (PREP) a group of companies that have joined together to promote practices and economic growth that help both vulnerable communities and business adapt to the impacts of climate change, and to promote public policies that facilitate efforts to prepare for and respond to the consequences of a changing climate. The companies currently engaged in PREP include: Calvert Investments, Earth Networks, Entergy, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Levi Strauss & Co, Starbucks, and Swiss Re.

The forum was cosponsored by BICEP—Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy. BICEP is an advocacy coalition of businesses committed to working with policy makers to pass meaningful energy and climate legislation.

Anna Walker, Senior Manager of Worldwide Government Affairs at Levi Strauss & Co. and Claude Fontheim, CEO of Fontheim International LLC, representing Limited Brands, highlighted the impacts of extreme weather events and climate change on cotton supply chains. Both retailers rely heavily on cotton to produce clothing like blue jeans and lingerie and are concerned about price volatility in the global cotton market, volatility which is at least partially driven by extreme weather events in vulnerable cotton producing regions. Some of the countries, such as Vietnam and Cambodia, where companies like Levi Strauss and Limited Brands manufacture their products, are also “hotspots for climate migration” and other climate-related impacts such as flooding and disease.

These companies are not just waiting around for government support to take action, although they are calling for strengthened public investment in climate resilience. Levi Strauss, for example, has launched the new Water< Less collection in 2011, which reduces the water used in the product finishing process for jeans from an average of 42 liters per pair to as little as 1.5 liters for some products. PREP is also developing guidance for companies on risk management throughout the corporate value chain. This guidance will be the first of its kind to advise companies from multiple industries on how to manage climate risks in a way that simultaneously builds community preparedness.

Bennett Freeman, Senior vice President of Sustainability and Research Policy at Calvert Investments, concluded the event by noting the risk to investors regarding the costs of physical damage associated with climate change, estimates at around $4 trillion by 2030 according to a recent Mercer analysis, and the potential benefit to investments in technologies and services that improve climate resilience.

We had mixed feelings coming out of the Durban climate talks about the state of global climate policy. Some important steps were taken but there remains a significant gap between what the science tells us is necessary to avoid catastrophic climate impacts and the emissions reduction commitments that have been made. Additionally, although we now have an operational Green Climate Fund, it remains to be seen where the money will come from to build climate resilience in the poorest, most vulnerable communities in the world. 

But news today coming out of Europe gives us hope that the world may be moving in the right direction. The Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg ruled in a lawsuit brought by the Air Transport Association of America, American Airlines and United Continental that aviation can be included in the EU’s emissions trading system (ETS). The decision cannot be appealed. 

The US Airline industry has been for years fighting a provision in the EU ETS to cap carbon pollution generated from flights to and from the EU countries. They even succeeded at passing legislation in the US House of Representatives calling on the airline industry to break another country’s law by prohibiting US airlines from complying with the EU regulations. And late last week, in yet another demonstration of the airline industry’s influence over Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood sent a letter to EU Ministers objecting to the law. 

Ultimately, serious global solutions are necessary in the international aviation and shipping industries that both reduce emissions and generate climate finance for developing countries. This ruling, however, represents a critical first step in moving us towards that goal and beginning to reign in a powerful industry that has gone unregulated for far too long. 

Happy holidays!

My colleague Tim Gore, climate change policy advisor at Oxfam International, wrote this blog laying out what governments can achieve at UN Climate talks which are starting this week in Durban, South Africa. We’ve adapted the blog to the US context and are reposting it here.

It’s now two years since the frantic campaigning and manic diplomacy that led to the Copenhagen climate change conference, and the blame games that followed its inadequate result. As the next UN climate talks get under way this week in Durban, South Africa, we need a new script to explain what has been achieved since 2009 and what must come next in the fight to tackle climate change.

The good news is that the UN talks on climate change are not a re-run of the zombie negotiating process in the World Trade Organization. But the ten year anniversary of the launch of the ‘Doha development round’ should give us pause for thought about where we want the multilateral climate change regime to be ten years after Copenhagen, and whether we are on track to get there.

The agreements struck last year in Cancún did not deliver everything needed to address the perils of our warming world, but they are leading to action.

New targets for emissions cuts have been set by an unprecedented range of countries, and for the first time developing countries have pledged greater reductions than developed countries against projected emissions levels. New institutions—most notably the Green Climate Fund—are being created to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change.

In no small part as a result, China is leading the race to invest in renewable energy, Brazil and Indonesia are serious about tackling deforestation, Australia has finally put a price on carbon, and the EU is planning for near complete decarbonization of its economy by 2050. Poor countries in all continents are starting to build the need for adaptation to climate change into their development plans, and facing up to the grave implications of doing so.

The problem is that none of this is going far enough nor happening fast enough. Global emissions are growing faster than ever, despite the economic crisis. The International Energy Agency recently warned we have five years left to change course before the lock-in effect of carbon-intensive infrastructure pushes out of reach the 2°C limit to global warming set by governments in Cancún. The gap between projected emissions in 2020 and the levels scientists say are needed to have a chance at staying within the 2°C target—let alone the 1.5°C needed—is actually widening.

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