Author Archives: Bruce Lowry

Investors and Climate Risk

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Despite continued roadblocks on real progress on climate change at the political level, there are growing signs the private sector understands the risks associated with climate variability.  The recent Investor Summit on Climate Risk and Energy Solutions at the United Nations brought together a wide range of financial players who share a deep concern that climate risks are not being appropriately priced into financial assets.  This 5-minute video provides a good overview of investor concerns, from folks who carry real credibility in the private sector. Worth watching.

Low Probability, High Consequence Events

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Chatham House, a leading global think-tank based in London, has just published new research, sponsored by the Skoll Global Threats Fund, on how well the world is prepared for low probability, high consequence events.  In looking at the global challenges we face, from pandemics to climate change to nuclear proliferation and more, each presents the potential of precipitating sudden events that could cause rapid, unanticipated disruption to the global system.  The report considers recent events like the Eyjafjallajökull volcano ash cloud, the BP oil spill, and the Japanese tsunami, to draw out issues that emerge during these types of crisis event and recommendations for business and policy makers.  Some key conclusions of the report include:

  • The frequency of high-impact, low-probability (HILP) events in the last decade such as Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and the nuclear crisis and tsunami in Japan, signals the emergence of a new ‘normal’ – the beginning of a crisis trend.
  • Governments and businesses remain insufficiently prepared to manage HILP crises and shoulder their economic, social and humanitarian consequences.
  • The report sets out the economic costs of HILP events and how the impacts of a shock spread across sectors and countries in today’s globalized world.
  • The report explores two critical dimensions of the decision-making environment during a crisis – omnipresent questions of scientific and technological uncertainty, and the competing economic and political interests of key stakeholders.
  • Effective messaging and communications have never been more important in the management of high-impact events. The report draws on systemic analysis of social media to understand how the public discourse is shaped; highlights the window of opportunity to influence media messaging; and draws lessons for how the media should handle scientific uncertainties.

 

Reuters, the Financial Times and the Guardian all covered the report’s release.  You can also listen to one of the report’s main authors, Bernice Lee, outline its main findings in this audio file.  You can download the full report here, or an executive summary here.

Security and Climate Change

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This short video, produced by the Center for American Progress, provides a nice overview of the security implications of climate change and highlights one of the key challenges of global threats in general: the inability of single countries or governments to tackle them effectively.  Worth watching.

Happy Holidays

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A good way to close out the year…  A video from Emmanuel Jah, an artist from the planet’s newest country, South Sudan, calling for peace, with cameos from a few well known figures.  Jah was recently recognized for his peace work by Search for Common Ground, a recipient of our sister organization’s Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.

Happy holidays, all.

Jeff Skoll Featured in New York Times Article on Philanthropy

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My colleagues at the Skoll Foundation have a blog post up today on a couple of New York Times pieces over the weekend on philanthropy that include references to the work of our founder, Jeff Skoll.  Read it here.

Hackergate Redux

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A slew of articles hit today reporting on the release of another batch of emails from climate scientists stolen from the University of East Anglia in the U.K. (See stories from the BBC, New York Times, and TIME Magazine).  Most reports suggest they are from the same period as the last bunch that surfaced in late 2009 and led to a manufactured scandal quickly dubbed “Climategate” by climate skeptics. A series of investigations since that time have all exonerated the scientists of any wrongdoing (beyond some pettiness in their discourse). Meanwhile, the real-world data continues to paint an increasingly dire picture on emissions.

What’s interesting this time around is that the framing of the issue in the media is very different. In fact, it reflects the frame that should have applied the first time around, but didn’t. Articles today focus on the fact that whoever stole the emails committed a criminal act, that they remain at large, and that the investigation into the hack has been cursory, at best.  Articles today also question the timing of this new release of emails, occurring, as in 2009, in the weeks leading up to an important international climate meeting in Durban, South Africa.  Whoever is behind the hacks clearly seeks to disrupt and distract from the work that’ll take place in Durban and hijack the discourse, which is what happened to some degree at the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009.

It’s too bad today’s framing didn’t prevail in 2009.  Instead of “Climategate,” we should have had “Hackergate,” with the focus not on the normal exchange of emails among climate scientists, but on the who and why behind an illegal, sophisticated and extensive hacking attack. Makes you wonder where the dysfunctional national political dialogue on climate might be today if that had been the case.

Water…Too much…Too little

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I was struck yesterday with three stories I read on severe water stress in three different regions. The current Economist magazine runs a piece on dams and proposed dams on the Mekong river, highlighting how the riparian countries seem largely blind to the risks of damming a river for which climate change is likely to significantly reduce the flow. Meanwhile, here in California, the Los Angeles Times published a story on the high economic and energy costs of getting water to Southern California, much of which is carried from quite distant sources.  Climate change is making its impact felt there, too. Finally, the Houston Chronicle had a detailed look at Texas’ water future, finding no obvious future supply to meet anticipated demand, even with huge investments in hard infrastructure like new dams, wells, and the like.

On the flip side, I saw a short piece in the Bangkok Post today on a group of parliamentarians in Thailand putting forward a proposal to move the capital away from Bangkok because of the high flood risks there.

Too little water, too much water.  Consistent with climate change models.

Faith Communities and Global Threats

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One of the shorthands we use when looking at global threats here at the Skoll Global Threats Fund is that they are caused in part by “too many people living unconsciously.” We don’t work on the population side of that equation, but do believe raising public consciousness about the reality of global challenges like climate change, nuclear proliferation and other issues is critical. These threats all surface important equity and ethical issues. Those most affected by them don’t tend to cause them. The poor are disproportionally hit. Intergenerationally, we’re leaving our kids holding the bag on these issues.

Given this moral dimension, we see faith communities as potential allies in tackling these threats. Last week, several of us on the team participated in a workshop we helped support bringing leaders in the Catholic and evangelical communities together to talk about three issues:  climate change, nuclear proliferation and poverty.

Interesting takeaways included:

  • The church can and does have authenticity and a distinctive role in addressing these issues.
  • You need ongoing dialogue with faith communities on these issues.  “Rent a constituency” approaches around specific policy options rarely work.
  • You have to engage around individual responsibilities.  You need to integrate concerns on these global threats with touch-points that are already deeply engrained in individuals of faith (i.e., helping the poor).
  • You need to tell human stories.  One great quote from the meeting:  “Churches don’t do issues.  Churches do people.”
  • Understanding the moral or ethical dimensions of these issues makes people of faith more inclined to act on them.
  • Churches can arrive at the same policy position as, say, environmentalists on climate change, but often get there for different motivations, with different language.
  • There’s work to be done on the theology around many global threats.  Concepts of just war and poverty alleviation have long and deep theological underpinnings.  This isn’t yet true on emerging global threats (although concepts like stewardship and creation care are becoming more theologically robust).

New Climate Study Finds Concerns on Earth Temperature Measurements Unfounded

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Last week, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project published the preliminary results of a study to assess whether models that indicate warming of the earth’s surface temperatures are accurate. This effort emerged following the East Anglia University email hacking incident of early 2010 and was aimed, in part, to explore critiques that the methodology of obtaining temperatures from around the world were overestimating global warming. The initiative was led by Richard Muller, a professor of physics at UC Berkeley, who has expressed concern over some elements of past climate science. It was funded in part by a $150,000 grant from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. Charles Koch is one of the Koch Brothers, who’ve been identified as leading funders of institutions opposed to action on climate change.

Preliminary results of the BEST study (four papers have been put out for peer-review, but they’ve also been made public) indicate that the conclusions of warming from existing models are, in effect, accurate. It is yet another independent confirmation of the scientific consensus on global warming. Muller has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal’s European edition that’s worth reading. A key segment:

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

The BEST study is a pretty big deal. It was picked up by a number of leading global news outlets. You can read that coverage here:

The Economist
New York Times Dot.earth blog
The Guardian
The BBC

Global Zero Summit at Reagan Library Talks Nuclear Disarmament

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The Skoll family of organizations had good representation at the Global Zero Summit last week at the Reagan Presidential Library, with Jeff Skoll participating on a panel on the costs of nuclear weapons, Skoll Global Threats Fund President Larry Brilliant and I attending, and Jenna Briand of TakePart.com, the digital division of Participant Media, also participating. The Skoll Global Threats Fund supports Global Zero in its efforts to build public and policy support for the gradual reduction – and eventual elimination – of nuclear weapons. This sounds like pie in the sky stuff, until you realize some of the biggest supporters of this goal are key players from the Cold War. George Schultz, Reagan’s Secretary of State, kicked off the conference, and James Baker, George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, also spoke. So did recently retired General James Cartwright, the former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command. These aren’t idealistic doves. Here’s a short video with an overview of the Summit, including segments with Jeff Skoll and George Shultz:

Global Zero Summit from TakePart on Vimeo.

Here’s Larry Brilliant with his take on the nuclear issue.

The next step in the Global Zero Action Plan (pdf) is to push for multilateral negotiations on nuclear weapons reduction. The largest weapons holders – the U.S. and Russia – continue to engage on driving their numbers down, so the idea of extending the discussion to all the nuclear players isn’t as much of a stretch as it might seem. The broad range of players that participated at the Summit – including all nuclear weapons states except North Korea – certainly show broad momentum for the goal.