Yellen Lays Down $3trn Climate Finance Marker, White House Publishes Resilience Game Changers, and More

Today in Climate Proof:

Finance:

• Yellen Calls for US$3trn in Annual Climate Finance

• White House Invests US$325mn in Environmental Justice

Policy:

• UN Sounds Alarm on Extreme Heat

• White House Debuts Climate Resilience Game Changers

• UK Adaptation Plan Faces Court Challenge

Tech:

• Google’s AI-Powered Extreme Weather Predictor

Research:

• Another round-up of papers and journal articles on all things climate adaptation

Yellen Calls for US$3trn in Annual Climate Finance

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said at least US$3trn of fresh climate finance is needed each year from now to 2050 to support the low-carbon transition and build resilience.

In a speech in Belém, Brazil, after a meeting of G20 finance ministers, Yellen said this capital should “be leveraged to support pathways to sustainable and inclusive growth, including for countries that have historically received less investment.”

The US$3trn figure exceeds the US$1.1-1.3trn annual amount floated as the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn earlier this year. However, the NCQG represents developing countries’ climate finance demands of rich nations — and doesn’t factor amounts needed by developed countries themselves to advance their climate transitions.

Yellen used her speech to highlight the Biden administration’s climate finance efforts to date, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the White House’s signature domestic accomplishment which has channeled billions toward mitigation and adaptation activities. On overseas initiatives, she touted the US’ US$50mn contribution to Brazil’s Amazon Fund, which is intended to combat deforestation throughout the Amazon biome.

She also recalled US efforts over the past three years to overhaul the international financial architecture so it is better able to support climate goals. Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) now have fighting climate change as part of their “DNAs”, she claimed.

“They are working towards aligning all projects with Paris Agreement goals and screening all projects for adaptation. Countries are benefitting from a broader suite of tools to respond to climate-related shocks and crises. And we see greater innovation and responsiveness across the system — from enabling exceptional access to financing for high income small island developing states to piloting climate resilient debt clauses,” Yellen said.

The Secretary’s acknowledgement of the sheer amount of capital needed to secure a resilient, low-carbon planet suggests the US is aware of the scale of the needed transformation. However, her speech did not go into specifics on how the US and other rich nations could do their part to increase their annual contributions from the US$116bn achieved in 2022, the last full year for which data is available.

White House Invests US$325mn in Environmental Justice

The climate finance spigot opened by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) continues to pour cash where it’s most needed to support adaptation and resilience.

Last Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced what it claims to be the largest single environmental justice investment in history, facilitated by the landmark climate legislation. This will funnel US$325mn into 21 projects located in poor and climate-vulnerable communities so that they can cut pollution, strengthen climate resilience, and build capacity.

The projects include a US$20mn investment to reinforce homes and improve energy efficiency for 35 tribal communities in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. There’s also US$14mn for Texas A&M University and the Black Belt Unincorporated Wastewater Program to provide onsite wastewater treatment systems for 17 Black Belt counties in Alabama. 

The wave of funding represents the first tranche of US$2bn authorized under the IRA for the Community Change Grants Program, which allocates money to community-driven projects that engage a wide range of stakeholders. Grant applications will be accepted through November 21 this year, and the EPA will review and approve applications on a rolling basis.

Other Stuff

Brazil endorses UAE Declaration of Leaders on a Global Climate Finance Framework (COP28 UAE)

India to develop climate finance taxonomy (Times of India)

Biden-Harris Administration, NOAA propose US$575 Million to increase coastal climate resilience (US Department of Commerce)

UK aid lacks focus on global urban climate adaptation, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact warns (ICAI)

US home insurers suffer worst loss this century (Financial Times)

UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband says Labour will honor pledge of £11.6bn in overseas climate aid (The Guardian)

Hong Kong government raises US$3.2 billion via multicurrency green bond (South China Morning Post)

South Sudan: The Government, World Bank and FAO scale up actions to build farmers’ climate resilience in the face of flooding and other disaster risks (Food and Agriculture Organization) 

IDB, EIB approve guarantees to support climate and fiscal resilience in Barbados (Inter-American Development Bank)

UN Sounds Alarm on Extreme Heat

It’s too darn hot — and the world needs protecting. That’s the gist of the UN Secretary-General’s call to action for extreme heat issued last Thursday.

“Billions of people are facing an extreme heat epidemic — wilting under increasingly deadly heatwaves, with temperatures topping 50°C around the world,” said António Guterres in a press statement on July 25. He cited data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change service, which showed that July 22 was the hottest day on record, and July 21 the second-hottest, to illustrate the growing threat of extreme temperatures to economies, communities, and individuals.

Guterres said extreme heat demanded an all-hands response to protect workers, the elderly, children, and other vulnerable populations. 

“We must respond by massively increasing access to low-carbon cooling; expanding passive cooling — such as natural solutions and urban design; and cleaning up cooling technologies while boosting their efficiency.  The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that, together, these measures could protect 3.5 billion people by 2050, while slashing emissions and saving consumers $1 trillion a year,” he said.

Guterres also promoted heat-health warning systems as an important adaptation. The World Health Organization and World Meteorological Organization claim that the scale-up of these systems in 57 countries could save almost 100,000 lives a year.

New and improved laws and regulations are needed to protect workers from punishing temperatures, Guterres added. “Excessive heat is the cause of almost 23 million workplace injuries worldwide.  And as daily temperatures rise above 34°C … labor productivity drops by 50 per cent.  Heat stress at work is projected to cost the global economy $2.4 trillion by 2030,” he said. 

The Secretary-General implored communities and economic sectors to develop “Heat Action Plans” to prepare for, and guard against, extreme temperature impacts — such as crop failures, water shortages, and infrastructure collapse.

Climate advocates applauded the call for action, though some said additional initiatives are needed. Eleni Myrivili, global chief heat officer at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht–Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, wrote that the world needed to set up a “dedicated trust fund for urban heat resilience initiatives” and champion more heat resilience departments around the world to spread information on, and provide solutions to, extreme heat events.

A group of deep-pocketed philanthropic funds have already swung into action to support the UN’s call. Last Thursday, ClimateWorks Foundation — a global philanthropy platform — said 12 foundations have pledged a collective US$50mn for climate adaptation and resilience efforts in regions most vulnerable to climate change impacts, including extreme heat. 

The initiative is part of the Adaptation and Resilience Funder Collaborative, set up in December last year to speed up action on adaptation and resilience in the public and private sectors alike.

White House Debuts Climate Resilience Game Changers

Well, this is cool.

The White House has published its own taxonomy of climate-proofing tools and technologies in a bid to channel more investment into adaptation and resilience.

The Climate Resilience Game Changers Assessment, released last Thursday, spotlights 28 technologies, activities, and practices that should help harden the US against escalating climate shocks — and create new, well-paid jobs to boot. On the hardware side, these include advanced electric grid control systems and smart water infrastructure. Featured tech innovations include early-warning systems for diseases and climate-informed scenario modeling. 

The 28 “game changers” are organized across eight sector-specific categories — covering buildings, transportation, health, and more — and four cross-cutting innovation groups: Nature-based Solutions, Information and Tools, Infrastructure, and Financing.

Summary of the 28 Climate Resilience Game Changers identified by the interagency Working Group

By defining these game changers, the White House aims to motivate “thoughtful, targeted investments” that prepare the US for current and future climate shocks. The assessment claims that the global market for climate resilience could be worth upwards of US$2trn by 2026.

The game changers were selected by a panel of federal agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Administration, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, Department of Energy, and Department of Defense, among others.

The assessment may herald the high watermark of the adaptation and resilience taxonomy craze. This year has borne witness to a slew of investment classification systems, from organizations including the Climate Bonds Initiative, UK bank Standard Chartered, and Tailwind Climate. While the game changers taxonomy iteration is not as detailed or focused as some of these, the imprimatur of the White House could spur all kinds of actors to get more engaged with adaptation and resilience solutions.

UK Adaptation Plan Faces Court Challenge

The UK government is contesting a lawsuit filed by Friends of the Earth which claims that the country’s adaptation plan is not fit for purpose.

The legal challenge argues that the Third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3), published under the last Conservative administration, is not fulfilling its purpose to protect people from the dangers of extreme weather, high temperatures, and coastal flooding. It therefore breaches the Climate Change Act of 2008 for failing to set out lawful ‘adaptation objectives’ and a proper risk assessment. 

In addition, two individual co-plaintiffs say their lives have been upended, and their human rights violated, by the programme’s failure.

“I was told my house would be safe for a century, but 14 years after moving in it had to be demolished due to the accelerating rate of coastal erosion,” said Kevin Jordan, one of the plaintiffs who was made homeless in 2023 after his Norfolk home was destroyed. “The government’s adaptation plans are completely inadequate for dealing with the threat of climate change to people and the economy. The National Adaptation Programme should be ripped up and replaced with a new plan that better protects us all from the escalating impacts of the climate crisis,” he added.

Doug Paulley, the other plaintiff, says a number of his health conditions have been made worse by extreme heat in the summer — putting him at risk of harm. “The lack of planning makes me fearful that in an emergency disabled people won’t be properly protected. We urgently need a new adaptation programme that recognizes the acute threat disabled people face and includes proper planning to protect them, such as mandatory care home procedures for protecting residents from flooding and extreme heatwaves,” he said.

Other Stuff

Historic cooperation between Brasil and the US on climate change announced at the G20 (G20.org)

Serbia: Climate change adaptation programme for the period 2023-2030 (Republic of Serbia)

Since launch of landmark state program, 900,000 more Californians have access to safe, affordable drinking water (CalEPA)

Democrats introduce the Safeguarding America’s Future and Environment (SAFE) Act to protect America’s natural resources and wildlife from the effects of climate change and increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events (Senator Sheldon Whitehouse)

South Africa passes its first sweeping climate change law (Reuters)

Economic Survey 2024: India’s climate adaptation expenditure 5.6% of GDP in 2021-2022 (Down To Earth)

Floods and climate change blamed for surge in dengue in the Emirates as WHO warns of global spike (AP News)

A new framework to improve communication and collaboration in US fire management (US Geological Survey)

Google’s AI-Powered Extreme Weather Predictor

Want faster, more reliable, extreme weather forecasts? Google it!

Scientists at Google Research have a paper in Nature claiming that an AI-infused, hybrid model of their own design can produce extreme weather forecasts and longer-term climate predictions on a par with established climate models — but much faster and using less computational heft. 

Their NeuralGCM model combines AI components with aspects of traditional general circulation climate models (GCMs), which are used to simulate how the Earth’s physical processes may change under different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. The authors claim NeuralGCM is “the first machine-learning-based model to make accurate ensemble weather forecasts” with better continuous ranked probability scores (CRPS) than the best GCMs. A CRPS is a measure of how good forecasts are in matching observed outcomes.

Structure of the NeuralGCM model

The researchers say NeuralGCM can “accurately track climate metrics for multiple decades” and produced realistic frequencies and trajectories of tropical cyclone events vis-a-vis comparators. However, they cautioned that the model “does not extrapolate to substantially different future climates,” suggesting its forecasts could be off-base in a hotter world.

The researchers say NeuralGCM’s performance shows that marrying machine learning techniques with GCMs is “a viable alternative to building increasingly detailed physical models.”

However, some readers have highlighted a confusion of terminology in the Nature paper that casts doubt on its assertions. As Professor Andrew Pitman, climate scientist at the University of New South Wales pointed out on LinkedIn, GCMs are not used to predict the weather but focused on longer-term climatic trends.

“I strongly suspect combining physical models with machine learning and AI will lead to major advances but note the future tense and note that most advances are in the weather forecasting world. For future climate projections, and for projections of major extremes that have material impact on systems, it’s very unclear if AI and machine learning will add a little bit or a lot,” he wrote.

Other Stuff

Scaling growth stage climate tech companies (Barclays)

RESEARCH

Projecting future tropical cyclone frequencies by combining uncertain empirical estimates of baseline frequencies with climate model estimates of change (Journal of Catastrophe Risk and Intelligence)

National-Scale Flood Hazard Data Unfit for Urban Risk Management (Earth’s Future)

Storylines: a science-based method for assessing and measuring future physical climate-related financial risk (Accounting & Finance)

The State of the World’s Forests 2024 (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations)

Businesses face lost sales due to wildfire smoke (Moody’s)

Thanks for reading!

Louie Woodall
Editor