REVERSE THE ‘INDIVIDUALISING IMAGINARY’ ON CLIMATE CHANGE, by Maurizio Fratta

IN DUE LINGUE (Inglese, Italiano)
IN TWO LANGUAGES (English, Italian)

University of Chicago Press, 2016

The data collected by climatologists speak clearly: the summer of 2017 in Italy was the second hottest since 1880 – when surveys began; the month of August recorded an average thermal excess of 2.5 °C, with the fourth day of the month the hottest in the last sixty years in many cities of central Italy.

That 2017 turned out to be Italy’s second hottest year ever (after 2016) is full confirmation of global warming scenarios.

The Italian summer of 2017, the fourth driest ever, will also be remembered for the serious water crisis caused by a dramatic reduction in rainfall throughout the country (-41% compared with seasonal averages), with serious repercussions on the leaking network of Italian aqueducts.

A season that will go down in history also and above all for fires: between June 15 and September 14 about one hundred thousand flared up (there were fifty thousand in 2016), one every 100 seconds, more than a thousand a day: from that of the Castel Fusano pinewood on the Roman coast – near the estate of the President of the Republic located in Castelporziano – to that of Vesuvius and its park, from the blaze in Sulmona to that of Monte Morrone, the peak of Celestino V.

On some days it seemed that the whole country was on fire. At the first rains – with the humus gone up in smoke – ashes consequently turned into mud, contributing to an increase in hydrogeological instability.

The effects of climate change are now visible to all: no living being has contributed to alter the life of our planet so deeply – and so quickly – as man.

Overheating of the Earth, determined by the greenhouse effect and related to the increase in CO2 emissions, is only one of the factors behind the planetary environmental crisis. Taking into account ocean acidification, the disproportionate use of fresh water, the overproduction of waste, fishing, deforestation and the vertical fall of biodiversity, it should be clear that in many natural processes the limits have already been exceeded.

Beyond the necessary change in lifestyles, the battle to reverse this trend would require a collective action, but politicians are unable to propose any credible alternative.

Worthy of note here, among others, is the contribution of physicist Gianni Mattioli on the occasion of the l’altrapagina magazine’s 29th Convention entitled “The parabola of food”, which was held in Città di Castello in September 2015.

Starting from the fact that some parameters – for example of CO2 – have been exceeded, Mattioli pointed out how this could cause a rupturing of the stability of the planet’s physical-climatic system, altering and upsetting periodic phenomena such as seasons, winds and sea currents, with the risk of giving rise to unpredictable chaos.

That meeting was also attended by the UPM (Un Punto Macrobiotico) national and international association – founded by Mario Pianesi –, which has been working in the field of agriculture and food for over thirty years with full respect for the environment and promotion of the health of the human being.

Reflecting on this joint work with Chiara Giallorenzo, president of the UPM Centre in Città di Castello, and with the adhesion of the “Mario Pancrazi” Study Centre – an association that pursues “the enhancement of the culture of mathematics” –, a conference was organised to tackle the issue of climate change starting from the effects found in Umbria and in Alta Valtiberina, and that did so by highlighting the relationships among environment, agriculture, food and health.

In order to reach an overall vision, naturalists, farmers and doctors were asked for their assessment with the aim of proposing a multidisciplinary approach that is able to identify a possible path of mitigation of the consequences of global warming.

In a territory where the abuse of pesticides used in industrial agriculture has severely contaminated surface water and groundwater, where the widespread presence of landfills and composting plants has poisoned soil and air and where rail transport has been marginalised irresponsibly – and finally suppressed in favour of vehicular (individual) transport, the primary source, along with that caused by animal breeding, of CO2 emissions – it is no longer possible to continue to look the other way, considering in particular the high rates of incidence of some types of cancer found both in the adult population and in childhood and youth in general.

If it is true – as Amitav Ghosh writes in The great derangement: climate change and the unthinkable – that indifference towards current catastrophes is the result of our individualism and our adherence to the dominant model of life and consumption, it will only be possible to face this challenge by becoming aware of what has happened and what is happening, thus finding “a way out of the individualizing imaginary in which we are trapped”.

A WAIT-AND-SEE CONFERENCE ON CLIMATE CHANGE, by Andrea Vento (GIGA – Self-organised Geography Teachers Group)

IN DUE LINGUE (Inglese, Italiano)
IN TWO LANGUAGES (English, Italian)

© World Meteorological Organization

The great hopes for a historical understanding to contain global warming, caused by the proclamations of world leaders prior to the recent UN Climate Change Conference, have evaporated.

The ‘climate’ of confidence surrounding the conference – held in Bonn from November 6 to 17, officially known as the 23rd session of the Conference of the Parties (COP23) and presided over by Fiji – soon disappeared into thin air as environmental experts looked at what had been achieved.

Criticism has centred on the failure to establish a “compliance control committee” and a “sanctioning mechanism” against countries which do not respect the commitments they have entered into.

In practice, these are legally non-binding agreements, implementation of which is linked only to the environmental sensitivity and political determination of the various governments, but which are often however heavily influenced by enormous economic interests, primarily those of the multinationals in the energy and automotive industries.

The Bonn Conference, which many believed should have accelerated action and set more stringent rules on measures to combat climate change, ended without any major decision, so that a kind “supplementary session” will take place at the Paris summit in December.

This was a partially announced failure which was confirmed by the absence of the most important world leaders (except Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron) and the great international media circus, which largely deserted the event.

However, despite their low profile, four decisions were worthy of note:

• approval of a Gender Action Plan (certainly appreciable, but which does not contain significant relevance for climatic problems);

• recognition of the role of “indigenous peoples” (officially considered a resource, not an obstacle) in combating climate change, conserving biodiversity and protecting the environment;

• activation of the Thematic Working Group – TWG – on Agriculture, Food Security and Land Use (after six years of evanescent negotiations, it was recognised at COP23 that climate change aggravates the food insecurity of the most fragile populations and that, at the same time, today’s “agro-industrial” agricultural practices account for about 21% of total greenhouse gas emissions, necessitating a radical rethinking of the agribusiness sector);

• sanctions for “exceeding” by local entities – regions, cities, municipalities, indigenous communities, etc. – on the official representations of States (the case of California is emblematic: despite Trump ignoring the Paris Agreement, in Bonn its governor Jerry Brown announced that he would honour the commitments made).

For all the rest we are at a complete impasse.

In real terms, no significant decisions were made regarding the following:

• a compensation mechanism for loss and damage;

• funding of compensation measures designed to induce developing countries to reduce emissions;

• transparency of the funding to be granted for implementation of mitigation and adaptation measures.

Responsibility for failure is mainly due to the national selfishness of the most industrialised countries, which, although they claim to want to move forward regardless of Trump’s positions, have distinguished themselves by their absence or “vague” declarations. Take German Chancellor Merkel, for example, who first said that “climate change is an issue determining our destiny as mankind – it will determine the wellbeing of all of us”, before carefully changing tack: “it is not easy” to meet the commitments to end coal-fired power stations due to “social and job issues”, de facto postponing the decarbonisation of energy in her country to an unspecified date.

According to Merkel, doing so now would lead to an increase in the cost of energy.

The failure of the work of the climate conference is summarised in the concluding document, which explicitly calls on UN Secretary-General António Guterres to take care that Member States actually put in practice what has been decided.

The present state of the atmosphere

While the ritual comedy of wait-and-see and inconsistency took to the stage in Germany, reports on the subject published by various research institutes were photographing an alarming evolution of both the chemical composition of the atmosphere and global weather and climate conditions.

According to the climate report issued at the beginning of November by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the concentration of CO2 (the main greenhouse gas) in the atmosphere has now stabilised at well over four hundred parts per million – rising, in fact, from the 400 recorded in 2015 to 403.3 at the end of the following year.

This represents a structural overrun of the safety threshold set at 350, beyond which the possibilities of reduction become extremely complex.

Indeed, even if we were able to completely eliminate pollutant emissions today, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would continue to increase for a few decades – because of the inertia of the phenomenon –, making it difficult to return to under this threshold.

This particularity, typical of complex systems, has been confirmed by the annual report of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (NEAA), which shows that in 2016 – for the third consecutive year – global CO2 emissions remained unchanged, but this has not, however, served to contain the increase of concentration in the atmosphere.