AFP UK

Spanish officials on Tuesday ordered hundreds more residents to leave their homes on La Palma in the Canary Islands, as lava continues to ooze from its volcano. 

La Cumbre Vieja began erupting on September 19 and has already forced more than 6,000 people from their homes, with lava wrecking 1,200 buildings and scorching 600 hectares (1,400 acres) on the Atlantic island off Morocco’s coast. 

Emergency services wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that a new evacuation order had been issued “owing to the forecast of the advance of the lava flow”.

“The 700 to 800 people affected by this evacuation order should leave their homes, with their belongings and pets,” the services tweeted, telling the residents to go to a meeting point in the western town of Los Llanos de Aridane.

On Monday, about 3,000 people were ordered to stay indoors after lava destroyed a cement works and raised fears that toxic gases might be released.

Despite the massive damage caused by the eruption on La Palma, home to 85,000 people, nobody has been killed or injured.

It is the island’s third volcanic eruption in a century, the last one taking place in 1971.

Satellite data provider Planet announced Tuesday that it plans to launch a new fleet of orbiting eyes so powerful they can distinguish road markings on the ground.

Planet, which already operates 200 Earth observation satellites from space, wants to make the new function available in 2023.

The new satellites, called Pelican, could be used for mapping services, such as Google maps; in environmental tasks, such as spotting illegal forest clearers or observing crops; and in defense to monitor troop movements and airport activity.

“The data is faster, it’s higher resolution, it’s lower latency, it’s more on demand,” Robbie Schingler, a former NASA engineer who co-founded Planet in 2010, told AFP. “It’s a whole new satellite.”

The announcement, made at the company’s annual conference, underlines the dynamism of the booming nanosatellite market.

The Pelican satellites could also help support rescue operations, for example by observing the spread of a fire, the company said.

Planet already has a fleet of 180 satellites, called Dove, which take a picture of the entire planet every day, as well as 21 satellites that can be used to photograph a particular location up to 10 times a day.

The new fleet is a modernized version of those 21 satellites, which were first launched in 2014 and have a lifespan of five to six years.

The Pelican satellites, designed and manufactured by Planet, will also feature a reduced lag period between when a photo is taken and when it’s sent from the current two hours, Schingler said. “Pelican will be better.”

The Pelican satellites will also be able to take more than the current 10 photographs a day.

“We’re going to launch our first one next year. Then in 2023 (we) launch more of a constellation,” Schingler told AFP, adding that the company can deploy “dozens and dozens, even hundreds,” of satellites depending on how many contracts it gets.

Planet also announced a new service that facilitates data processing and interpretation for subscribers.

Planet currently has around 700 clients, government and private, and produces more than three million images daily.

Changing rain patterns caused by the El Nino warming phenomenon frequently drives millions of children into malnutrition and saddles them with life-long health issues, researchers said Tuesday, calling for action against the “predictable” impact.

El Nino is a periodic event that affects global weather patterns, occurring every few years when eastern Pacific Ocean waters get unusually warm, leading to heavy rain in some regions but relative drought in others.

US-based researchers examined 40 years worth of data for more than one million children across all developing country regions and compared their weight in El Nino with non-El Nino years.

They found that warmer and drier El Nino conditions increased childhood malnutrition across the tropics — a part of the world where 20 percent of children are already severely underweight.

Crucially, while the children’s weight appeared to rebound following an El Nino, the shock to their nutrition caused by the phenomenon led to stunted growth for years.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team found that a typical El Nino event saw childhood malnutrition rates soar as much as three times higher than that witnessed during the coronavirus pandemic.

“It would have been very difficult to prepare the world for a pandemic that few saw coming,” said co-author Amir Jina, from the Harris School of Public Policy.

“But we can’t say the same about El Nino events that have a potentially much greater impact on the long-term growth and health of children.”

In 2015, a particularly strong El Nino year, the team found that an additional six million children were driven into malnutrition.

While it is unclear if global heating will increase the frequency of El Nino years, it is already making hot and dry areas hotter and drier. 

The authors of Tuesday’s paper said that El Nino had contributed heavily in holding back the developing world’s efforts to reduce hunger.

But since the event can be predicted by climatologists at least six months in advance, they called for governments to integrate El Nino into their humanitarian plans.

“These are routine events in the climate that lead to real tragedy around the world,” said Jesse Anttila-Hughes, from the University of San Francisco.

Anttila-Hughes said that further study of how El Nino affects crop cycles on a regional level could provide insight into how food systems globally are likely to adapt to a warming world. 

“But the fact that we live through an El Nino every few years, we know they’re coming, and we still don’t act is a bad sign since many of these climate shifts… will be a lot less predictable as the climate changes,” he said.

Changing rain patterns caused by the El Nino warming phenomenon frequently drives millions of children into malnutrition and saddles them with life-long health issues, researchers said Tuesday, calling for action against the “predictable” impact.

El Nino is a periodic event that affects global weather patterns, occurring every few years when eastern Pacific Ocean waters get unusually warm, leading to heavy rain in some regions but relative drought in others.

US-based researchers examined 40 years worth of data for more than one million children across all developing country regions and compared their weight in El Nino with non-El Nino years.

They found that warmer and drier El Nino conditions increased childhood malnutrition across the tropics — a part of the world where 20 percent of children are already severely underweight.

Crucially, while the children’s weight appeared to rebound following an El Nino, the shock to their nutrition caused by the phenomenon led to stunted growth for years.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team found that a typical El Nino event saw childhood malnutrition rates soar as much as three times higher than that witnessed during the coronavirus pandemic.

“It would have been very difficult to prepare the world for a pandemic that few saw coming,” said co-author Amir Jina, from the Harris School of Public Policy.

“But we can’t say the same about El Nino events that have a potentially much greater impact on the long-term growth and health of children.”

In 2015, a particularly strong El Nino year, the team found that an additional six million children were driven into malnutrition.

While it is unclear if global heating will increase the frequency of El Nino years, it is already making hot and dry areas hotter and drier. 

Because the event can be predicted by climatologists at least six months in advance, authors of Tuesday’s paper called for governments to integrate El Nino into their humanitarian plans.

“These are routine events in the climate that lead to real tragedy around the world,” said Jesse Anttila-Hughes, from the University of San Francisco.

Anttila-Hughes said that further study of how El Nino affects crop cycles on a regional level could provide insight into how food systems globally are likely to adapt to a warming world. 

“But the fact that we live through an El Nino every few years, we know they’re coming, and we still don’t act is a bad sign since many of these climate shifts,” he said.

President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday announced a plan worth 30 billion euros ($35 billion) to re-industrialise France on the basis of innovative and green-friendly technologies including electric cars, hydrogen fuel and efficient nuclear plants.

Six months before a presidential election and one month ahead of a UN climate summit, Macron said France had taken key decisions “15-20 years later than some of our European neighbours” and now needed “to become a nation of innovation and research again”.

The spending was to address “a kind of growth deficit” for France brought on by insufficient investment in the past, he told an audience of company leaders and university students at the Elysee Palace.

France, he said, needed to return to “a virtuous cycle” which consisted of “innovating, producing and exporting and in that way finance our social model” as part of a new “France 2030” plan.

Over the next decade, France would aim to become a global leader in green hydrogen, which companies and governments are increasingly putting at the centre of efforts to de-carbonise economic sectors that rely most on fossil fuels for their energy needs.

France would get two electrolysis giga-factories for hydrogen production, as part of eight billion euros of investment in the energy sector.

He said that following the Covid-19 pandemic, “which put us face to face with our vulnerabilities”, France had to work towards French and European productive autonomy.

France also needed to invest heavily in medical research, Macron said.

After the global Covid-19 outbreak, French pharma giants were unable to come up with a vaccine, unlike biotech startups BioNTech and Moderna.

The aim was now for France to develop “at least 20” biotech drugs against cancers, as well as against emerging and chronic illnesses, including those associated with ageing, Macron said.

“We need to concentrate all our efforts on this objective,” he said.

– A new revolution –

A French presidential official, who asked not to be named, said Macron had laid out the plan in the wake of the coronavirus crisis “which showed our vulnerability and our dependence on foreign countries in some key sectors but also the importance of innovation which can change everything.”

French officials believe that France needs to act rapidly to close the gap and not surrender more ground to emerging powers, notably China.

French carmakers, which Macron said had suffered “cruelly” over the past 30 years, should redirect their efforts towards cleaner vehicles, with a target of putting two million electric or hybrid cars on the roads.

France would also invest “massively” to get the first low-carbon aircraft into the air with the help of European partners, he said.

Macron said France would also spend one billion euros by 2030 in “disruptive innovation” to produce atomic power, notably by designing compact nuclear reactors known as “small modular reactors” (SMRs) with improved nuclear waste management.

Disruptive innovation was also needed in agriculture, where two billion euros would be earmarked for new technologies, he said, especially in robotics.

– ‘Macronian propaganda’ –

France should start “a new revolution” in food production which should be “healthy, sustainable and traceable”.

Agriculture would become cleaner, phase out “some pesticides”, enjoy greater productivity and develop “bio-solutions” that would be “more resilient and more solid”, the president said.

Close to six billion euros were meanwhile earmarked for France’s electronics sector with the aim of doubling production and “secure” the country’s supply needs for microchips.

Opposition figures were quick to criticise Macron for the timing of the announcement, with Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger in the April 2022 presidential election, saying he was “making promises that his successor has to keep”.

Leftist candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon called the speech “Macronian propaganda”, while NGO Greenpeace meanwhile accused Macron of subscribing to a logic that “always delays any real transition and continues to produce as if the planet’s resources were infinite”.

At least 11 people were killed and seven others were missing after heavy rain across the Philippines flooded villages and triggered landslides, authorities said Tuesday.

Severe Tropical Storm Kompasu drenched swathes of the most populous island of Luzon on Monday as it swept across the archipelago nation towards the South China Sea.

Six people were killed and two missing in landslides in the landlocked mountainous province of Benguet, and one person drowned in the province of Cagayan, the national disaster agency said. 

Four people were killed as flash floods hit two towns on the western island of Palawan, where five other people are still missing, officials added.

The coast guard said its personnel involved in the rescue effort also recovered three other bodies in the northern province of Ilocos Sur, but the disaster agency could not immediately confirm if the deaths were related to the storm. 

“Eleven municipalities were flooded but it subsided this morning,” Cagayan provincial information officer Rogelio Sending told AFP.

Major highways and bridges were flooded, he said, but the water was retreating Tuesday as the storm bore down on the Asian mainland.

“Around seven to eight barangays (villages) are still flooded… due to clogged drainage or lack of drainage,” said Earl Timbancaya, a disaster officer in the city of Puerto Princesa on Palawan.

“But it’s subsiding now.”

The Philippines is hit by an average of 20 storms and typhoons every year, which typically wipe out harvests, homes and infrastructure in already impoverished areas.

Because a warmer atmosphere holds more water, climate change increases the risk and intensity of flooding from extreme rainfall.

President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday announced a plan worth 30 billion euros ($35 billion) to re-industrialise France, saying the country should reclaim its crown as a global leader in innovation.

Speaking at the Elysee Palace six months before a presidential election and one month ahead of a UN climate summit, Macron said France had taken key decisions “15-20 years later than some of our European neighbours” and now needed “to become a nation of innovation and research again”.

The spending was to address “a kind of growth deficit” for France brought on by insufficient investment in the past, he told an audience of company leaders and university students.

France, he said, needed to return to “a virtuous cycle” which consisted of “innovating, producing and exporting and in that way finance our social model” as part of a new “France 2030” plan.

Over the next decade, France would aim to become a global leader in green hydrogen, which companies and governments are increasingly putting at the centre of efforts to de-carbonise economic sectors that rely most on fossil fuels for their energy needs.

Macron singled out steel production, cement and the chemical sector, as well as truck, bus, rail and air transport.

He said that following the Covid-19 pandemic, “which put us face to face with our vulnerabilities”, France had to work towards French and European productive autonomy.

France also needed to invest heavily in medical research, Macron said.

After the global Covid outbreak, French pharma giants were unable to come up with a vaccine, unlike biotech startups BioNTech and Moderna.

The aim was now for France to develop “at least 20” biotech drugs against cancers, as well as against emerging and chronic illnesses, including those associated with ageing, Macron said.

“We need to concentrate all our efforts on this objective,” he said.

– A new revolution –

A French presidential official, who asked not to be named, said Macron had laid out the plan in the wake of the Covid crisis “which showed our vulnerability and our dependence on foreign countries in some key sectors but also the importance of innovation which can change everything.”

French officials believe that France needs to act rapidly to close the gap and not surrender more ground to emerging powers, notably China.

French carmakers, which Macron said had suffered “cruelly” over the past 30 years, should redirect their efforts towards cleaner vehicles, with a target of putting two million electric or hybrid cars on the roads.

Macron said France would also invest 1 billion euros by 2030 in “disruptive innovation” to produce atomic power, notably by designing small-size nuclear reactors with improved nuclear waste management.

Disruptive innovation was also needed in agriculture, where two billion euros would be earmarked for new technologies, he said, especially in robotics.

France should start “a new revolution” in food production which should be “healthy, sustainable and traceable”.

This would also rely on investment in “three revolutions” which he said were digital, robotics and gene technology.

Agriculture would become cleaner, phase out “some pesticides”, enjoy greater productivity and develop “bio-solutions” that would be “more resilient and more solid”, the president said.

Macron’s plan also called for a boost in French deep sea exploration over the next decade.

Even if humanity beats the odds and caps global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, seas will rise for centuries to come and swamp cities currently home to half-a-billion people, researchers warned Tuesday.

In a world that heats up another half-degree above that benchmark, an additional 200 million of today’s urban dwellers would regularly find themselves knee-deep in sea water and more vulnerable to devastating storm surges, they reported in Environmental Research Letters.

Worst hit in any scenario will be Asia, which accounts for nine of the ten mega-cities at highest risk. 

Land home to more than half the populations of Bangladesh and Vietnam fall below the long-term high tide line, even in a 2C world.

Built-up areas in China, India and Indonesia would also face devastation.   

Most projections for sea level rise and the threat it poses to shoreline cities run to the end of the century and range from half-a-metre to less than twice that, depending how quickly carbon pollution is reduced. 

But oceans will continue to swell for hundreds of years beyond 2100 — fed by melting ice sheets, heat trapped in the ocean and the dynamics of warming water — no matter how aggressively greenhouse gas emissions are drawn down, the findings show.

– Not ‘if’ but ‘when’ –

“Roughly five percent of the world’s population today live on land below where the high tide level is expected to rise based on carbon dioxide that human activity has already added to the atmosphere,” lead author Ben Strauss, CEO and chief scientist of Climate Central, told AFP.

Today’s concentration of CO2 — which lingers for hundreds of years — is 50 percent higher than in 1800, and Earth’s average surface temperature has already risen 1.1C.

That’s enough to eventually push up sea levels nearly two metres (more than six feet), whether it takes two centuries or 10, Strauss said.

The 1.5C warming limit enshrined in the Paris Agreement that nations will try to keep in play at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow next month translates into nearly three metres over the long haul.

Unless engineers figure out how to quickly remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, that amount of sea level rise is not a matter of “if” but “when”, according to the study.

These are the optimistic scenarios.

“The headline finding for me is the stark difference between a 1.5C world after sharp pollution cuts versus a world after 3C or 4C of warming,” Strauss said.

“At Glasgow and for the rest of this decade, we have the chance to help or to betray a hundred generations to come.”

– Buying time –

National carbon-cutting pledges under the 2015 Paris treaty would, if honoured, still see Earth warm 2.7C by 2100. If efforts to reign in greenhouse gases falter, temperatures could rise 4C or more above mid-19th century levels.

This much warming would add six to nine metres to global oceans over the long haul, and force cities currently home to nearly a billion people to either mount massive defences against future sea level rise or rebuild on higher ground.     

In China alone, land occupied today by 200 million people would fall below high tide in a 3C scenario. And the threat is not only long-term: absent massive sea walls, Chinese cityscapes home to tens of millions could become unliveable within 80 years.

“1.5C of warming will still lead to devastating sea level rise, but the hotter alternatives are far worse,” said Strauss.

“We’re in bad shape but it is never too late to do better, and the difference we could make is enormous.”

At higher levels of warming, the danger increases substantially of triggering the irreversible disintegration of ice sheets or the release of natural stores of CO2 and methane in permafrost, scientists warn.

Capping global warming as low as possible also buys us time to adapt.

“It is almost certain that seas will rise more slowly in a 1.5C or 2C warmer world,” Strauss said.

Researchers from Princeton University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany contributed to the study.

China on Tuesday pledged to inject $233 million into a new fund to protect biodiversity in developing countries during a key UN conservation summit, despite disagreements among major donors on the initiative.

Beijing —  the world’s biggest polluter — has sought to play a more prominent role internationally on biodiversity conservation in recent years.

Its pledge came as delegates from about 195 countries gathered in the southern Chinese city of Kunming for the first of a two-part summit on safeguarding plants, animals and ecosystems.

The summit aims to establish a new accord setting out targets for 2030 and 2050.

“China will take the lead in establishing the Kunming biodiversity fund with a capital contribution of 1.5 billion yuan ($233 million) to support the cause of biodiversity conservation in developing countries,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said during a speech delivered via video link at the COP15 leaders’ summit.

“China calls on… all parties to contribute to the fund.”

A key proposal being debated at the conference is the “30 by 30” agenda that would afford 30 percent of the Earth’s land and oceans protected status by 2030. 

Global spending to protect and restore nature needs to triple this decade to about $350 billion annually by 2030 and $536 billion by 2050 to meet this target, a UN report said in May.

But some rich country donors say a new fund for conservation is unnecessary because the United Nations’ Global Environment Facility already helps developing nations finance green projects.

“It is… important to mobilise all sources, including existing funds such as the global environment facility and the climate fund, to protect… and restore biodiversity,” French President Emmanuel Macron said. 

The funding issue will be taken up at negotiations in Geneva in January 2022 and then later at the second part of the summit in April and May next year.

China’s pledge is far below the $4 billion committed by Britain for global conservation projects over the next five years or France’s commitment to spend 30 percent of its climate finance on biodiversity.

“China’s announcement… is the start not the end of the race,” said Georgina Chandler, senior international policy officer at the UK-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

“We now need to… see other countries stepping up between now and spring next year… Without tangible actions on the table, the world will agree on yet another set of targets with no commitment to delivering them.”

– ‘Suicidal war’ –

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity has been ratified by 195 countries and the European Union — although not the United States, the world’s biggest polluter historically — with the parties meeting every two years.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the world’s poorest nations will be worst affected by biodiversity loss.

“We are losing our suicidal war against nature,” he said.

“Ecosystem collapse could cost almost $3 trillion annually by 2030 — its greatest impact will be on some of the poorest and highly indebted countries.”

The biodiversity discussions at COP15 are separate from the weightier COP26 summit set to begin next month in Glasgow, where world leaders are under pressure to act on the climate crisis.

China on Tuesday pledged to inject $233 million into a new fund to protect biodiversity in developing countries during a key UN conservation summit, despite disagreements among major donors on the initiative.

Beijing —  the world’s biggest polluter — has sought to play a more prominent role internationally on biodiversity conservation in recent years.

Its pledge came as delegates from about 195 countries gathered in the southern Chinese city of Kunming for the first of a two-part summit on safeguarding plants, animals and ecosystems.

The summit aims to establish a new accord setting out targets for 2050 and 2030.

“China will take the lead in establishing the Kunming biodiversity fund with a capital contribution of 1.5 billion yuan ($233 million) to support the cause of biodiversity conservation in developing countries,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said during a speech at the COP15 conference on Tuesday.

“China calls on… all parties to contribute to the fund.”

A key proposal being debated at the conference is the “30 by 30” agenda that would afford 30 percent of the Earth’s land and oceans protected status by 2030. 

Global spending to protect and restore nature needs to triple this decade to about $350 billion annually by 2030 and $536 billion by 2050 to meet this target, a UN report said in May.

But some rich country donors say a new fund for conservation is unnecessary because the United Nations’ Global Environment Facility already helps developing nations finance green projects.

The funding issue will be taken up at negotiations in Geneva in January 2022 and then later at the second part of the summit in April and May next year.

Xi also took a swipe at the United States in his speech on Tuesday, saying: “We should practise genuine multilateralism and abide by international rules which are not to be exploited or discarded at one’s own will.”

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity has been ratified by 195 countries and the European Union — although not the United States, the world’s biggest polluter historically — with the parties meeting every two years.

The biodiversity discussions at COP15 are separate from the weightier COP26 summit set to begin next month in Glasgow, where world leaders are under pressure to act on the climate crisis.