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This week:
- How would you rebrand these boring climate terms?
- Recyclable construction waste
- How to cool buildings sustainably
How would you rebrand these boring climate terms?
It is not the job of a reporter to put you to sleep.
But with phrases like “New Collective Quantified Goal,” “maladaptation” or “representative concentration pathways” — I know, I’m pushing it.
These are the kinds of terms you find in rigorous reports warning us about the state of our climate or in global agreements that shape environmental policy at home. Succinct? You bet. Confusing? Oh yeah.
“It’s that tension … how do you explain something concisely without losing the clarity?” asks Chantal Barriault, science communication expert at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont.
But, as unsexy and not soul-stirring as these words are, they can bring the issues closer, and help you be more informed about what your communities, businesses and governments are doing — or not doing — about climate change.
I’m also going to attempt to rebrand these terms, too. Ready?
Let’s start with the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), which is currently the big deal under negotiation at COP29 in Azerbaijan.
It’s not in the term, but we’re talking about money. Specifically, money coming from richer countries to help poorer ones defend against the impacts of climate change and develop without contributing to climate change further. But just how that money is doled out, who’s paying and how much is all deeply contested. Developing nations are saying as much as $1.3 trillion US is needed — far more than the $100 billion US that countries already committed to in 2009.
Arriving at a strong NCQG is seen as crucial as climate impacts are only getting worse from a world warmed by the burning of fossil fuels. Poorer nations, that historically haven’t emitted as much as richer nations, do not have the resources to adapt to those impacts.
“The understanding of why that money is so important, I think, is more important than the term itself,” said Kathryn Harrison, professor of political science at the University of British Columbia.
“So the term can be a gateway to explaining what the issues are.”
The name, “New Collective Quantified Goal”, could use some help. Barriault says there’s a term for words like this — noun strings — and they can confuse a reader.
“Like, which word out of these four am I supposed to be paying attention to?”
What could work better? Disaster money.
Ok, still with me? Then let’s try another one: representative concentration pathways (RCPs).
This term comes up in scientific reports and, simplified, asks: What do possible futures look like depending on how much carbon we emit? Scientists came up with situations to represent the path we follow in relation to the concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere. The more we emit, the greater chance we’re headed to an incredibly warmer future.
But Harrison is quick to remind that “the lines are not predictions of the future. They are scenarios. What underlies those different scenarios is really important for our political debate about climate policy in this country.”
In other words, using these scenarios can help us see what actions will lead us to less risky outcomes.
What could work better? The ghosts of climate future. (Y’know, like in A Christmas Carol)
Ok, last one: Maladaptation.
You might guess this one. Mal = bad. Bad adaptation. Essentially, a solution to climate change that’s making the problem worse or creating another one.
A real-world example can be seawalls, which are waterfront barriers to protect against coastal erosion and flooding. But scientists say while they can “reduce impacts to people and assets in the short-term,” they can also harm coastal ecosystems, and draw more people and development to what is still a high-risk zone under a false sense of safety.
What could work better? Un-solutions.
The challenge with climate terms, Harrison says, is their complexity and interdisciplinary nature. They’re also refined and updated as the science improves, and are not usually written for a general audience. But experts still see a responsibility in helping everyone understand them, even if that means using more words.
“We shouldn’t shy away from the complexity, we just have to make it more clear — using language that people are familiar with,” Barriault said.
So what do you think? Did the rebranded versions work better for understanding? How would you rebrand these phrases?
— Anand Ram
Want to geek out on more climate terms? Check out the CBC Climate Glossary.
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Check out our podcast and radio show. In our newest episode: Come with us to California where entrepreneurs are sending balloons full of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. It’s a form of solar geoengineering known as stratospheric aerosol injection, and the company Make Sunsets isn’t waiting for scientific consensus before they launch. We hear about their business model, and then from the researchers who question both the science and ethics of the practice.
What On Earth26:55Can we cool Earth by blocking the sun’s rays? And should we?
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Reader feedback
Last week, we had the story of an EV owner who charged his car by plugging into outlets originally intended for block heaters. His landlord banned the practice and disabled the outlets. Noel Burnham of Parksville, B.C., wrote: “Landlords have benefited from reduced use of block heaters in modern vehicles, and seem to be unaware that block heating, (which was acceptable), actually used more power on average than charging the tenant’s electric vehicle, because of the cutoff at full charge. Block heaters were usually plugged in for the whole night with no cutoff. If block heaters were acceptable, landlords should not object to charging, and to disconnect outlets is just mean-spirited without any logic.”
JPlug.io, a company that installs EV charging infrastructure, actually has a detailed calculation showing that block heaters and EV charging use a comparable amount of energy, although block heaters may use more than EVs during extreme weather conditioners. In fact, some technology companies in both Canada and Finland, are making it easier for landlords to offer the use of block heater infrastructure to charge electric vehicles.
Susan Lea of Victoria wrote: “Upon reading your article on urban salmon, I was reminded of an NFB film about Frank Jenkinson from Saltery Bay, B.C., called The Man who Digs for Fish. I used it when I was a teacher many years ago now. It’s about 15 minutes long. Frank was the first person I learned of who was cleaning up the salmon rivers. It was a good teaching resource. Nice to know there are still people taking care of the streams.”
Write us at [email protected]. (And feel free to send photos too!) Please keep sharing your suggestions for greener holiday gifting or other ways to make the holidays greener – we will compile them for a future issue.
The Big Picture: Recyclable construction waste
Constructing, renovating and demolishing buildings generates a huge amount of waste — four million tonnes annually nationwide, according to a Statistics Canada estimate, accounting for about 30 per cent of the material piled up in a typical landfill. The largest fraction of that is typically wood, which decomposes into the potent greenhouse gas methane. The graphic below shows many construction materials can be reused and recycled. Unfortunately, they rarely are. That’s partly because the demolition process breaks up and mixes materials into a rubble that’s hard to separate into recyclable components. One solution is to “deconstruct” buildings at their end-of-life instead of demolishing them.
You can read more about how that works here.
— Emily Chung
Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web
How to cool buildings sustainably
As cold temperatures are once again upon us, it’s unlikely many Canadians are thinking about heat waves. But Canadians increasingly have to deal with them, and it’s virtually certain next year won’t be any different.
In 2021, a heat wave stifled parts of B.C., killing more than 600 people. As a result, many people rushed out to buy air conditioners, and the government even created a program to provide free AC units to low-income families.
The effort to stay cool in a warming world is a challenge. Our air conditioners are not only hooked up to energy grids that may be fossil fuel-intensive, but they often leak, emitting harmful greenhouse gases — the most concerning being hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HFCs) — into the atmosphere.
They also emit a lot of heat themselves.
So how do countries keep their citizens cool and safe as heat waves become more frequent and intense without increasing their carbon footprint?
The answer is called sustainable cooling.
That could be “passive” cooling (such as planting greener areas in cities and on buildings), developing a renewable-heavy power grid or building air conditioners that are less harmful to the environment.
“We’ve got to make it accessible and environmentally sustainable, because currently, cooling accounts for seven to eight per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it’s the fastest-growing cause of global greenhouse gas emissions,” said Toby Peters, a professor in cold economy at the University of Birmingham in England.
HFCs that leak from air conditioning units have an incredible global warming potential (GWP) — 14,800 times higher than CO2 over 100 years. A recent study found that if we continued along the business-as-usual path, HFCs could add 0.5 C of global surface warming.
When it comes to passive cooling, there are many examples. A “green” roof helps regulate a building’s internal temperature and reduces both heating and cooling costs. There are also “white” roofs, where the tops of buildings are painted white in order to better reflect the sun’s radiation and heat.
It’s a way of cooling used in the past.
“You’ve seen pictures of traditional Greek architecture, for example … you have these white-coloured buildings. There’s a reason for that,” said Tim Fox, an independent consultant on climate mitigation and adaptation based in Cornwall, England.
There are other passive ways. Paul Huggins, associate director with the Carbon Trust, a global consultancy that helps companies decarbonize, notes that a building’s orientation along with the use of facades and large overhangs are good ways to reduce the need for cooling.
U.S. cities like Los Angeles are even using a coating on pavement that keeps it cool, which is important in urban centres that create warmer “heat islands” than the surrounding areas. Some cities are cooling their buildings with ice, such as the Goldman Sachs building and the Rockefeller Center in New York.
Technologically, there has been an increased effort to move away from HFCs. This refrigerant was initially used to replace chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were depleting ozone — which protects all life from harmful ultraviolet radiation — over the South Pole.
But it became apparent HFCs were also harmful when it came to climate change and the atmosphere.
This has led to a 2024 change to the Montreal Protocol — the 1987 agreement made by countries to phase out CFCs — called the Kigali Amendment, which will similarly phase out HFCs.
Interestingly, the Global Cooling Prize was announced in 2018 in an effort to find ways of reducing the climate impact from air conditioners by at least five times. Two companies won in 2021, illustrating it can be done.
“Obviously, what we haven’t yet seen is those technologies come to market,” Peters said.
But that does offer hope, he said.
At COP28 in Dubai, U.A.E., in 2023, more than 60 countries signed the Global Cooling Pledge, which aims to “reduce cooling-related emissions by 68 per cent from today by 2050, significantly increase access to sustainable cooling by 2030, and increase the global average efficiency of new air conditioners by 50 per cent.”
The biggest way we can reduce emissions is by switching to renewables, as we use so much energy in every facet of our lives, Peters said.
“You want to live in India or Dubai or Toronto? You need air conditioning. You want to talk over Zoom? You need cooling for a data centre. So it’s critical infrastructure,” he said. “The challenge is, how do we deliver access to cooling for all who need it, without the environmental damage that cooling currently does, and make it also resilient as well.”
— Nicole Mortillaro
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Editors: Emily Chung and Hannah Hoag | Logo design: Sködt McNalty
