Monthly Archives: August 2021

Our analysis covers the resource and GHG impact of ME in the residential-building and passenger-vehicle sectors, covering the entire world comprising 20 countries/regions, grouped into the Global North (OECD(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), former USSR countries, China) and the Global South (low- and medium-income countries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas). The ten ME strategies assessed include the following: supply-side measures (higher yields in fabrication and scrap recovery, reuse of fabrication scrap, and product light-weighting through better design/downsizing or material substitution) and demand-side measures (reuse of products and product-lifetime extension (longer use), sufficiency-related measures including more efficient use of cars via car sharing and ride sharing, and more intense and efficient use of dwelling space resulting in less floorspace per person). When implemented in a given scenario, the full technical potential for each ME strategy is assumed to be realized by 2040. The assessment considers three socioeconomic scenarios, an LED scenario25, and two of the shared socioeconomic pathways26, SSP1 and SSP2, representing low and intermediate socioeconomic challenges related to climate-change adaptation and mitigation, respectively. Two policy scenarios are considered for each SSP, one with no new climate policy after 2020 and one for decarbonizing the energy supply and widespread electrification to limit the average temperature rise to 2C (i.e., the representative concentration pathway of 2.6W/m2 additional forcing, RCP2.6)27. The model captures the production, demand, use, and recycling of six major climate-relevant materials (aluminium, cement, copper, plastics, steel, and wood) for the period 20162060 (results reported for/by 2050), starting from 2015 as the last year with complete empirical data.

On the basis of the LED and SSP scenario storylines28, we developed parameter values using a combination of data-driven extensions of historical data, literature studies, and expert consensus approaches, similar to the development of the SSP scenarios framework itself. These parameters include future service level (passenger-km delivered by cars, residential floor area utilized) and the share of the different drive and building technologies used. Future service levels were subject to several rounds of consensus building and refinement, documented in detail in an accompanying study29,30.

Whereas the LED values were only slightly modified when breaking them down from the Global North/South split to individual countries, the SSP2 values continue (Global North) or converge to (Global South) service levels currently experienced by citizens in the Global North. The SSP1 values typically describe a compromise between the LED and SSP2 trends (see the Methods section). Except for extrapolations of service levels in the SSP2 scenario, GDP is not used as a model driver; the scenarios are GDP agnostic31.

The different ME strategies combined can reduce cumulative global GHG emissions of the period 20162050 by 3277Gt (1318% of the total), depending on socioeconomic development and climate policy (Fig.1, top row, see the Methods section for scenario settings). All examined strategies show a visible contribution (numerical values reported in the data supplement). For the LED scenario, where in-use stocks are already used very intensively (low floorspace per capita), material substitution, reuse, and longer use are the ME strategies with the largest GHG reduction potential. For SSP1 and SSP2, more intense building use and material substitution show the largest contribution, followed by downsizing, reuse, and longer use. The ME strategy car sharing shows much larger contributions in the 2C policy mix. The reason for that is that this scenario has a higher share of electric vehicles, which are introduced faster, because car sharing reduces the vehicle fleet size but increases the average annual kilometrage, thus shortening vehicle lifetime, which increases the turnover of the fleet.

Results are shown for threesocioeconomic (low energy demand (LED) and the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP1 and SSP2)), and climate policy (No Pol. and 2C Pol., see text) scenarios and ME strategy for the passenger-vehicle and residential-building sectors combined. The absolute values in the plot are in megatons (Mt) or gigatons (Gt) of CO2-eq. See the Methods section for an overview of the different ME strategies implemented.

Once fully implemented, ME strategies can lead to large reductions of annual global GHG emissions. In 2050, annual savings can be between 22% and 61%, depending on ME stringency, energy-sector decarbonization, and anticipated growth in services (Fig.1, bottom row). ME can make an important contribution to keeping anthropogenic GHG emissions within the remaining emission budget available for limiting global warming below 2C. Therefore, ME can reduce the risk and magnitude of emission overshoot and the need for negative emission technologies. Annual emission cuts from ME in 2050 are smaller in absolute terms but more important (as a share of the total) in the 2C scenario with a low-carbon energy supply compared to the case with no additional policy to drive further decarbonization. In a low-carbon energy future, ME-induced reductions of the difficult-to-mitigate GHG emissions in material production have a relatively high impact in the systems GHG balance compared to energy-supply impacts. On the other hand, ME strategies will be crucial for delivering substantial GHG emission reductions in a future with resource intensive socioeconomic development and without stringent climate policy Fig.1, SSP2 No Pol.).

The considered supply and demand-side ME strategies lead to a reduction of the use phase and production/construction-related GHG emissions of the vehicle and building sectors across all world regions and climate policy scenarios (Fig.2). The vehicle sector in high-income countries/regions experiences a moderate decline in GHG emissions if no additional climate policies are issued and substantial decline with stringent climate policy (especially an electrification of the fleet, combined with low-carbon electricity supply). Countries in the Global South are poised for further growth in sectoral emissions, but stringent climate policy and ME can mitigate emission growth to enable an earlier and lower peak (around 2035 instead of 2050). Emission reductions are more pronounced for residential buildings, as the energy mix is already relatively electrified to begin with, and emissions fall rapidly due to the decarbonizing electricity supply. Stock turnover and retrofits such as better insulation and heat-recovery ventilation further improve efficiency, and the replacement of oil and gas furnaces with heat pumps further increases electrification. In industrialized countries, emissions are set to decline even under current policies.

Results are shown for passenger vehicles (top row) and residential buildings (bottom row) for the SSP1 shared socioeconomic pathway (easy adaptation and mitigation) and two climate policy scenarios, with no material efficiency (ME) strategies considered and the full spectrum of ten strategies considered. See Section 5 of theSupplementary Material for scenario results for the other scenarios and for all 20 model regions. G7 refers to the Group of Seven countries.

Using wood from sustainable forestry as long-lived construction material where available32,33 can lead to additional emission savings of 12Gt/yr, depending on how much of it is used. In some regions of the Global South, the regrowth of forest in response to sustainably harvested timber for residential buildings can almost offset the emissions from the production of other construction materials by around 2050 (values close to zero in Fig.2). Next to wood use in buildings, a development towards more intense use of buildings (modelled as lower average floorspace per capita) is a highly effective mitigation strategy that combines sufficiency with large energy and material savings in all countries and regions.

The contextual analysis (Fig.3) shows that due to the dominance of energy-related GHG in the global emissions budget, energy efficiency and a low-carbon energy supply are key to curbing global warming. However, even with these measures fully implemented in the two sectors studied, 2050 residual emissions are still substantial (e.g., 4.1Gt for SSP1) andif no other measures are takenare likely to require compensation by negative emissions technologies to achieve carbon neutrality mid-century2. Therein lies the main contribution of ME to GHG emission reduction. ME offers additional emission reduction opportunities that can help bridge the gap between a 2C and 1.5C future, as evident in Figs.2 and 3. ME strategies are also less subject to concerns of feasibility, scalability, burden shifting, and rate of deployment that are associated with negative emission technologies2,34,35.

Breakdown of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emission savings from baseline with no new climate policy (black horizontal line on top of bars) into end-use energy efficiency, energy supply (en. supply), industrial and demand-side material efficiency (ME), and for passenger vehicles and residential buildings combined, at the global level (a), the Global North (b), and the Global South (c). Three socioeconomic scenarios are shown: low energy demand (LED) and the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP1 and SSP2). For the left bar in each scenario, ME was implemented first, before adding energy efficiency and low-carbon energy supply. For the right bar, ME was applied in addition to energy efficiency and low-carbon energy supply. The two red-coloured segments cover the ten ME strategies. Industrial ME includes recovery ratios for recycling, fabrication yield and scrap diversion, reuse, and material choice. Demand-side ME includes product light-weighting/downsizing, lifetime extension, car sharing, ride sharing, and more intense use of buildings. GHG emissions are reported in gigatons (Gt) of CO2-eq.

The model-estimated contribution of mitigation strategies to overall emission reduction depends on their sequencing. In the bars on the right side of each scenario in Fig.3, energy efficiency and low-carbon energy supply are introduced first, and ME strategies are then applied on an already decarbonized system, yielding higher savings from decarbonization and lower savings from ME than if the sequence was reversed (left side bars). These two alternative sequences show that the impact of ME is larger for SSP1 and SSP2 in a world with high-carbon energy supply, which is a direct consequence of the carbon intensity of material production and of the use phase-related energy savings mediated by ME. The situation is different for LED, where the GHG savings potential of ME after implementing energy efficiency and low-carbon energy supply is larger than for the opposite sequence, especially for the Global South. The main reason for that effect is that material substitution, which dominates ME GHG savings in LED (see also Fig.2), becomes much more effective once aluminium production is decarbonized (vehicle steel substitute), which is the case in the right bar but not in the left bar. After seizing the energy efficiency (green) and energy supply transformation (blue) potentials, the share of remaining global emissions reduced through ME is smaller in SSP2 (32%) and SSP1 (39%) than in LED (62%), because ME strategies are applied more gradually and to less ambitious end targets in SSP2 and SSP1, reflecting the storylines of those scenarios.

In 2016, material demand of the two sectors studied absorbed about 430Mt of steel and 900Mt of cement (Fig.4), corresponding to roughly 26% and 22% of the global steel and cement production, respectively. The impact of ME on primary and secondary material production at the global level is substantial, because of massive reductions in demand for primary (produced from virgin natural resources) steel, cement, copper, and plastics (Fig.4a). In the Global North, steel and cement demand drop, because demand for new residential floorspace plummets, as more intense use leads to a re-purposing and contraction of the existing stock rather than an expansion of living space. In the ME scenarios, excess steel scrap from demolished buildings and de-registered vehicles is recycled for use in the Global South, where it bolsters growth of in-use stocks and helps raise living standards and urbanization, in particular (Fig.4b). Demand for new plastics drops for two reasons. First, a lower stock growth due to more intense use (same as for steel and cement). Second, a substantial increase of the end-of-life recycling rate of plastics from todays 18% on average36 to up to 70%, factoring in better product design (eco-design and design for dismantling) and the need to dilute recycled plastics with virgin material to maintain material quality. In addition to saving energy and GHGs, reduced primary production will also lower industrial use of mineral resources, land, and water, thus yielding multiple co-benefits, which have yet to be quantified22. The material production volumes (Fig.4) only include the demand and scrap supply of the two sectors studied, and the ratio between primary and secondary production reflects the sector-specific material stock dynamics and not the global total for the individual metals. Copper is an interesting example here, as its global average recycled content is below 40%, mainly due to large losses in electronics37,38, but for vehicles and buildings, scrap recovery rates are high and the recycled content in the material supply for these two sectors can be 60% and higher.

a Global material production 20162050 (primary=from virgin resources, secondary=from post-consumer scrap) for six major materials in SSP1 and a 2C policy mix, for passenger vehicles and residential buildings, and for scenarios with no and those with full material efficiency (ME). b Per-capita in-use stocks (20162050) of materials in passenger vehicles and residential buildings, Global North, and Global South average. The unit for part a is megatons per year (Mt/yr) and for part b it is ton per capita (t/cap).

Implementing ME at full technical scale does not mean that we use less of each material. There will rather be a higher demand for substitution materials such as aluminium and, temporarily, wood. Copper demand grows mainly because of the electrification of the passenger-vehicle fleet. The vehicle-material substitution scenarios are based on aluminium, because a large-scale supply of low-carbon aluminium requires only a change in the electricity source and is hence expected to arrive earlier than low-carbon steel, which requires entirely new facilities and production processes that are not expected to reach broad rollout before around 2035.

For wood, the increased demand from timber-based buildings is compensated for by the overall reductions from other ME strategies and more intense building use, in particular. The same trade-off applies to secondary materials, where overall throughput reduction fromamong othersproduct light-weighting and lifetime extension is larger than the increase from higher recycling ratios for steel, copper, and wood. For aluminium, cement, and plastics, the full implementation of ME will increase global secondary production but for different reasons: much higher recycling rates (plastics), higher in-use stocks of aluminium and thus higher scrap flows, and reuse of concrete elements (cement).

For steel and cement, current in-use stocks per capita differ by a factor of ca. 3 across the two world regions (Fig.4b). Per-capita in-use stocks of steel and cement converge at the global level, for scenarios with and without ME. This is mainly due to the convergence of per-capita residential floorspace between the Global North and the Global South. Dematerialization in the form of contraction of steel and cement stocks, however, and with it material and GHG savings, are only observed for the ME scenarios. Here, per-capita in-use stocks reflect a global state of service equality and converge to a level that lies in between toadys stock levels in Global North and Global South by the end of this century. For in-use stocks of wood, the difference between the two regions is much smaller. As wood benefits from material substitution, there is no contraction of in-use stocks. Aluminium, copper, and plastics in-use stocks show few signs of convergence. Global North aluminium stocks are not much impacted by ME, because the effects of decreasing product stocks are largely compensated for by the increased aluminium intensity through material substitution. In-use stocks of copper and plastics in the Global North decrease by about one-fifth due to ME, mainly because of the smaller vehicle fleets in the car-sharing and ride-sharing scenarios. Global South stocks of aluminium can increase by up to 70% under material substitution scenarios. As material stock size is determined by several factors, including service demand, technology types, product size, material choice, and ME, no universal trend for the evolution of the different stock curves can be observed for these materials. This means that in order to understand future material stock and production trajectories, models with high technological detail are needed. Scenario studies for changing stock patterns of such materials must take into account such detail to produce consistent and technologically feasible results, rather than assuming simple growth or de-growth patterns for material stocks, which has so far been the case.

This study provides a detailed assessment of ME strategies in two major end-use sectors with a global scope and in a changing socioeconomic and energy-supply context. The high-resolution material and product-life cycle model allows us to quantify the overall impact of ME strategy bundles at scale, taking into account both the mutual dependencies among strategies (e.g., product light-weighting means that less material is available for recycling) and the development of service demand over time. To quantify these effects, our model captures the interaction of product design and life cycles, of material-cycle dynamics, and of macro-level changes of service demand and in the energy system. It hence demonstrates how detailed knowledge about technological change can be relevant for, and used in, global assessments. Material-cycle modelling is largely absent from integrated assessment models, which are the work horses of global climate-mitigation assessment, and assessments such as the one presented here can be soft-linked to and possibly integrated into such models similar to how land-use modelling has recently been integrated. Soft-linking would help establish the stock-flow-service nexus39, ME strategies and material cycle and resource constraints in climate-mitigation scenarios40, and integration would allow for including ME into optimization routines. Better integration into large-scale assessments would also allow us to study the global economic implications of ambitious ME.

Although the resource-efficiency and climate-change (RECC) framework features substantial service provision and engineering detail, it needs verification and improvement based on high-resolution product and process-level data. For example, building archetype models including specific components (heating system and plumbing) or process models of waste sorting and scrap remelting41 should inform changes of parameters in the RECC scenarios in the future. The RECC results represent estimates of the technical potential of ME. To estimate the feasible potential of ME under different business models and policy scenarios, material production and recycling costs need to be included, among others. Adding the cost layer to the material cycles would allow for circular-economy business model simulation for ME42 and the estimation of employment impacts43. Combined with macro-economic modelling, cost information would enable us to quantify rebound effects44 due to lower material prices from under-utilized primary production assets and increased availability of (lower quality) recycled material45. Including costs would facilitate the simulation of policies to mitigate ME rebounds, such as eco-design standards, cap and trade systems for recourses, or raw material extraction taxes.

The findings confirm that, for deep emission reductions in the residential-building sector, low-carbon electricity by itself will not be sufficient46, but additional demand-side efficiency and sufficiency measures are required47. The same holds for the vehicle fleet, where electrification and a transformation to low-carbon electricity must go hand in hand, as confirmed by our results. Lifting ME to similar prominence as energy efficiency increases the feasibility of attaining the Paris goal of limiting global warming to well below 2C and may reduce the dependency on negative emission technologies. As countries struggle to implement and update their nationally determined contributions to the Paris climate agreement, new mitigation options, and co-benefits with other sustainable development goals are needed to get them on track48. ME shows strong co-benefits in savings of raw materials, energy, and GHG emissions, and its technical and scaling feasibility is high. These advantages over negative emission technologies represent a compelling reason to give ME a higher priority in climate policy.

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Global scenarios of resource and emission savings from material efficiency in residential buildings and cars - Nature.com

The next government that will take the reign of our small country in the coming months has a herculean task ahead to cure a sick nation.

All the economic indicators spiced by the numerous polls that aim to monitor the pulse of society are baffling many. Can the nation, riddled with major, headline-catching scandals of corrupt practices between the big business cartels and the political parties in the past decade, be so immune to such a moral tragedy?

I believe the Maltese are suffering from an economic illness, known as the Dutch disease. Economists have studied the long-term harm to economies following the discovery of large natural resources. This phenomenon took its name following the effects of the Netherlands economy after the discovery of huge deposits of gas in the North Sea.

Studies show that the long-term negative effects on an economy emanate from a strengthening of the currency following a large inflow of foreign currency from the sale of an abundant natural resource, especially during a time of a surge in commodity prices. This negative economic experience was also recorded to result from foreign aid and remittance that is not towards an investment that generates wealth over the long term.

New research has shown that the disease also arises from the inequality in the distribution of resource rent. What this means, in laymans terms, is that a particular sector of the economy is earning proceeds that exceed what is economically or socially necessary and acceptable. As the sector mushrooms disproportionately, there is increased demand and opportunities for workers to leave other sectors to partake from the gravy train.

Thus, production in sectors such as the primary and secondary sectors decline, not necessarily because of their cost structure but because they do not give priority to the economic well-being of these important sectors in the short run.

All the above have been bearing on the Maltese economy over the past decade. The international trading company status provides online casinos with an indefinite low tax regime. It is not the short-term tax holiday with an agreed expiry date that the state is allowed to provide to attract foreign direct investment to establish on our shores. An ITC established in Malta that trades exclusively outside our miniscule market has the benefit of annual and perpetual tax rebates bringing down the annual corporate tax bill to ridiculous levels.

The people are surely not unhappy if the polls are to be taken seriously- Charles Theuma

The iGaming sector (the harmless label given to an addictive, socially damaging activity) has overgrown the Maltese labour market and, with its open cheque mentality, has kicked off an inflow of mostly European workers with fancy remuneration packages at every level of the organisation.

The Maltese throng the mostly lower layers of these multi-million companies, employees that preferred to leave the mundane behind opening vacancies in the hospitality, health, retail, construction and education sectors, filled by thousands of third-country nationals. This has triggered a building boom exasperated through a sudden uncalled for relaxation of urban planning and lowering of sales taxation. The result is a double digit inflation rate on rentals and the price for housing that is now beyond reach of a Maltese graduate, just out of university.

The millions of euros coming from the European structure and social funds, plus further remittance of millions through the Individual Investor Programme and the good tidings of the all-year-round tourism enjoyed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic cliff edge fall, meant a seriously overheating economy. But who cares?

The people are surely not unhappy if the polls are to be taken seriously. The fact that Malta has the highest number of school leavers with minimal qualifications and our education system is repeatedly shamed through the PISA OECD education benchmark, and still enjoys full employment for many years running, means that everyone willing to work is employed.

Research shows the Dutch disease generates political uncertainty, with an incumbent government offering public service jobs, subsidies and other forms of economic transfers geared towards political clout and survival. Resolving an ailing nation needs a deep transformation of the state-society relationship and not just sound macroeconomic strategies.

The nations representatives need to either take the painful route towards a safer, albeit less glamourous future that is based on fundamental economic principles that build superior competences that garner global market share in the various value chains the nation had managed to enter, or ignore the clear warning of the FATF greylisting and continue to resist the need to restructure.

Tightening the financial services system to minimise money laundering opportunities will result in an attrition of the tax avoidance sector and all that benefits from it.

On the other hand, the Maltese may opt to continue to juggle the appeasement of the European community and our damning label as a tax avoidance haven against the necessity to cure ourselves from this ingrained Dutch disease, weaning the nation off its drunkenness and seriously focusing on developing a diversified sustainable economy, one that is built on internationally recognised and respected competences that guarantee longevity at a slightly lower, yet, decent standard of living for all.

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Are we going Dutch? Charles Theuma - Times of Malta

WHEN people think about refugees coming to their country, they may fear that already limited resources will have to be divided among even more people.

This scarcity thinking closes our borders to those in need. This scarcity thinking shuts down our minds to solutions. And this scarcity thinking locks other human beings into their dire straits.

This ill-informed, fear-based thinking is a myth. The pie is not finite.

The truth about welcoming refugees to your country was captured in a now-viral photo taken at the Melsbroek airfield in Belgium on Wednesday.

This is what happens when you protect refugees...

Welcome to Belgium, little girl !

Wonderful @Reuters picture via @POLITICOEurope pic.twitter.com/v1127frvf9

An Afghan girl, dressed in yellow, hair caught in the wind, skips along the tarmac, so filled with joy that neither of her feet touch the ground. Ahead of her are her family, walking into safety. Imagine her potential, the life in front of her, the things she will go on to achieve.

She is the opposite of our burden.

This is what happens when you protect refugees. Welcome to Belgium, little girl, wrote former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt, MEP.

You know those scenes of homecoming beamed to us on RT news from Cork and Dublin airport at Christmas, especially around the time of the recession? Imagine if we greeted with that level of warmth, welcome, and positive anticipation the 250 Afghan people we have promised to resettle.

This week, US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, along with 70 other members of the US Congress, called on the Biden administration to increase the cap on refugees to 200,000. Under former US president Donald Trump, the cap stood at 15,000 annually. Under George W Bush it was 70,000 a year. Under Barack Obama it was 85,000. And with Ronald Reagan it was 231,700.

US migration policy aside, the congresswoman made a point that relates not to numbers or strategy, but to our thinking about refugees.

To those questioning if it really is our responsibility to provide refuge for those fleeing conflict, persecution, or dire living conditions, yes, it is, said Ms Ocasio-Cortez. In fact, it is not only our responsibility, but it is our greatest strength.

It is a strength, yes, but its also loaded with opportunity.

Welcoming refugees is a win-win situation and when we look at it like that we can free ourselves up to do everything to make sure our country and government play their part in rolling out the red carpet.

We dont need to change our migration policy: We need to change our mindset.

Some people say they would like to welcome refugees, but that we cannot afford it, said Hippolyte dAlbis, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, last year.

He was highlighting scarcity thinking.

Just supposing it were just about money...

In the US, a study from the University of Notre Dame found that, between 1990 and 2014, each refugee resettled cost the government $15,000. Their needs included housing, healthcare, and language learning.

But this is only half the story. The study found that within eight years of their arrival, adult refugees begin paying more in taxes than they receive in benefits.

And if youre only in it for the money, it gets better. By the time adult refugees have lived in the US for 20 years, they will have paid an average of $21,000 more in taxes than the benefits they received at their arrival. Whos benefiting now? And where exactly is the burden?

You might say, Well, thats great, theyre benefiting the economy, but theyre taking my job.

Research from the World Bank dispels that scarcity myth, too. A 2015 working paper from the bank found that Syrian refugees to Turkey generated more formal non-agricultural jobs and helped to increase average wages for Turkish workers.

The win-win situation of welcoming refugees has quite the ripple effect.

Refugees are extremely entrepreneurial, creating jobs for others. So, instead of saying: Theyre taking my jobs, the truth is that they create jobs.

In the US, 13% of refugees are entrepreneurs, compared to just 9% of the native-born population, according to the 2015 New American Economy report. This study used the five-year American Community Survey (ACS) to provide a picture of the 3.4m refugees who arrived in the US since 1975.

Hippolyte dAlbis, who called out peoples scarcity thinking for believing they could not afford refugees, frames it differently.

He said that welcoming refugees has not been a cost, and that if you do not welcome immigrants, the economy might be worse off.

So where will the initial money come from?

Professor Mariana Mazzucato, an economist at University College London, spoke to The Irish Times last year.

Money is not scarce, as society has been led to believe, she said. Instead, its a technology, a lubricant to be used.

Money is a social technology and not an inherently scarce resource, as the public has been led to believe, Prof Mazzucato said.

The wealth of our nations comes from our ability to activate our resources to solve our problems and improve the way we use them through innovation and more mutualistic relationships between the public and private sector.

Money is a crucial instrument to mobilise our common potential, Prof Mazzucato added.

She cited the example of former US president Franklin D Roosevelts New Deal of the 1930s, which revitalised the US economy following the Great Depression.

He did not wait to find the money, Ms Mazzucato said.

The core point of macroeconomics is that spending equals income and, indeed, creates the income. Instead of asking where the money is going to come from, we should ask: Where are the physical and intellectual resources going to come from?

The argument not to welcome refugees on economic grounds holds no weight. Its just racism and xenophobia dressed up as bogus economics. And these people are far more than economic actors or refugees: They are human beings with flesh and bones and families and lives and hobbies and friends, just like you and me.

Any one of us could one day need to flee

As terrorist attacks killed and injured dozens in Kabul this week, a day after that little girl skipped into Belgium, the fragility of all of our humanity was laid bare, not just the refugees fragility.

Any one of us could need refuge because of circumstances beyond our control. Afghan refugees are people; their circumstances are that they are fleeing. Lets not define people by their circumstances. When we do, we see burden and scarcity where there is none.

Welcoming new people to our country is a win-win. We receive new intellect, new experience, new perspective, new skills, new cultures, new entrepreneurship, new language, and those coming in, hopefully, get a safe place to rebuild their life.

That the social and economic process of resettling and integration is complex is undeniable, but complexity is not a reason to close doors.

With facts on our side, humanity as our ideology, and pragmatism as our politics, lets roll out the red carpet to people seeking refuge.

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Joyce Fegan: Welcome, little girl. And let's roll out the red carpet for refugees - Irish Examiner

IRELAND IS NOT spending enough on protecting our under-threat biodiversity and the majority of what we are spending is going on schemes that are failing to have an impact.

Inpart one of this Noteworthyinvestigationinto the state of Irelands biodiversity, we found that the natural world remains significantly impacted by the human hand through habitat loss, degradation, overexploitation, pollution, and climate change.

So what is the State doing to ensure funding and resources are in place to turn the tide on biodiversity loss here in a meaningful way?

Noteworthy has found that:

Russelstown wood beside the Poulaphouca Reservoir SPA in Co Wicklow Source: Niall Sargent/Noteworthy

Sizeable resource gap

Since the late-2000s, international organisations and researchers have identified inadequate finance as a major reason for the failure to halt the decline in biodiversity.

Globally, it is estimated that between78 and 91 billion is spent on biodiversity finance every year. At face value, this appears to be an exorbitant amount of money.

Yet, a look at the spending on supports which are potentially harmful to biodiversity estimated by the OECD at 500 billion per year puts this figure into perspective.

This global trend is seen in Ireland too. Since the Central Statistics Office (CSO)started closely tracking environmental supports in 2010, 8 billion has been paid out on those measures, compared to over 20.5 billion in fossil fuel subsidies, much of which goes to sectors that are known to have negative environmental impacts.

A review of global biodiversity financing by the OECD last year found that there are also significant gaps in information on biodiversity spending, warning that up-to-date and accurate estimates are needed to establish a baseline from which governments and other stakeholders can track biodiversity finance trends over time.

Prior to 2010, there was no obligation on governments to monitor biodiversity-related expenditure so, to bridge this gap, the UN introduced a new requirement that all parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) report on biodiversity expenditure.

A new CBD strategy to monitor finance for biodiversity is, for the first time, driving efforts to change this dynamic by accurately tracking finance for conservation through National Biodiversity Expenditure Reviews (NBERs).

Difficulties in monitoring finances

According to a 2021 paper from UCD and the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), these reviews have the potential to introduce a blueprint for national biodiversity governance.

In Ireland, researchers from UCD, with support from the NPWS, have started to track biodiversity-related expenditure, with a 2018 report showing, for the first time, a detailed and comprehensive picture of the landscape of biodiversity finance in Ireland.

And the findings were stark, revealing a sharp decline in the resources available for biodiversity conservation since the economic crash in the late 2000s.

The Irish review found that both direct and indirect spending on biodiversity conservation was 1.49 billion between 2010 and 2015, with overall spending declining by 31% during this six-year study period.

On average, according to the expenditure review, Ireland spent 250 million per year on biodiversity or 0.13% of GDP, well short of the 0.3% of GDP recommended for OECD countries by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Farming and biodiversity interlinked

Some 80% was spent on agri-environmental subsidies, the review found, with 1.1 billion, or 75%, of all funding over the six-year window examined sourced from the Department of Agriculture.

These findings were backed up by a review of finance arrangements for biodiversity conservation in Ireland released last year that found 75% of funding over a seven-year window between 2014 and 2020 went to agricultural schemes.

The majority of this went to GLAS, an agri-environmental payment scheme that the States most recent audit found has had a modest climate and biodiversity impact that is outweighed by agricultural expansion.

According to a co-author of both UCD reports on biodiversity funding, environmental economist Dr Craig Bullock, it is not surprising that there is a large funding pot for these schemes as farming has tremendous influence on whatever goes on in relation to trends in biodiversity in Ireland.

Much of ourprotected landscape is fragmented- compared to 41 other European states, we have the5th lowest connectedness scoreacross the bloc and much of our biodiversity is found outside of protected nature areas in farmland and rural landscapes.

The problem, Bullock said, is that were not really achieving the biodiversity outcomes as evaluations of GLAS and its predecessor schemes show that any positive on-farm changes are rather peripheral against a background of continued intensification of farming.

Role of NPWS severely hindered

In comparison to funding for agri-ecology schemes, the 2018 biodiversity expenditure review demonstrated that, between 2010 and 2015, the National Parks and Wildlife Service only received 10% of State biodiversity funding.

The additional 2020 UCD study presented the downside of these long-term funding gaps in stark terms, stating that the chronically low budgetary allocation to state bodies responsible for biodiversity protection does not allow these organisations to fulfil their EU-mandated environmental objectives.

According to biodiversity experts who spoke to Noteworthy, the level of funding received by the agency has to change, and fast, given the complex and wide-ranging role that it has, described recently in the Dil as the most important piece of the jigsaw in pulling all of the different ecological strands together.

The agency, for example, provides the scientific evidence underpinning biodiversity protection in Ireland and reports on the status of habitats and species to the EU and UN.

It also has a wildlife crime enforcement role and a statutory role in assessing planning and licences applications which may impact on the natural world, as well as a myriad of other communications, administrative and funding roles.

The 2020 UCD report found, however, that the NPWS receives inadequate financial support to conduct these activities despite a recent funding bump from the new coalition Government involving the Green Party.

The recent increase is well welcomed but it follows a period when the budget has been declining for many years, said UCDs Bullock. Unless you have a fundamental amount of expenditure, you cant get beyond just supporting the people and parts of NPWS in their jobs during their basic day to day activities.

If you really want to achieve biodiversity gain, the department needs more people on a permanent basis to be working on a greater range of activities because what were doing is really just standing still at the very best. The funding [the NPWS] is getting by on is really minimal.

The NPWS itself identifies the issues in the terms of reference for an ongoing review of the agency that states its resourcing remained severely challenged for a number of years after the 2008 2013 financial crisis and that, relative to 2008, total funding in 2020 still has a significant recovery to make.

The NPWS has never once been under the same governance structure for 10 consecutive years, and has constantly shifted from one ministerial brief to the next, with prominent voices in the ecological and conservation network calling for a more stable position, including the Irish Wildlife Trusts Pdraic Fogarty.

Speaking before an Oireachtas committee earlier this year, Fogarty said that the agency should be made independent to build itself up again, communicate the science, tell Departments what needs to be done all in the knowledge that its structure is not going to be shifted, moved or undermined after the next election cycle.

The 2020 UCD financial review came to a similar conclusion, with co-author Dr Shane McGuinness telling Noteworthythat a key issue is how the agency has been hollowed out for the last decade or more to the point that it has to outsource chunks of their work because they dont have the internal capacity. The NPWS review is ongoing.

Other agencies facing difficulties

Another organisation that has an important role but lacks long-term stability is the National Biodiversity Data Centre (NBDC) that is responsible for a range of activities on top of its key role as collator and disseminator of biodiversity data in Ireland.

Established in 2006, it is also responsible for the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan, roundly lauded as a success story in mainstreaming the protection of bees and butterflies across a range of sectors.

Despite its title and role as the national node for biodiversity data, the NBDC is actually operated by an outsourced private company that has operated under short-year service agreement contracts awarded by the Heritage Council. The current contract is set to expire at the end of 2022, at which time another tender process will be run.

Speaking before the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action in May 2021, the Director of the Centre Dr Liam Lysaght said a key impact of this situation is that staff have a short-term perspective as they are consistently on short contracts.

It is an insecure time for the staff of the data centre and we hope that by the end of next year there will be a more positive and secure future for us, he said. The Heritage Council has established a task force to identify the best model to make the centre a more secure entity that Lysaght identified as a very positive step.

The National Biodiversity Forum has also called for the centre to be strengthened and expanded to establish biodiversity monitoring as a long-term national priority and protect it from electoral cycles and changing political agendas.

In a statement, the Heritage Council said it agreed that, while having the advantage of not formally committing the exchequer to open-ended financial obligations to support the NBDC, the service-level contract model has considerable drawbacks.

The most noticeable issue, it said, is that the model is a a short-term mechanism for a service which requires long-term planning and does not allow the centre to establish as a legal entity with governance responsibilities such as sourcing additional funding for its work.

This service requires a structure which consolidates its position on a permanent basis and has the flexibility and authority to realise its full potential, the council said.

The work of the task force is on-going and it is expected to make recommendations on the future structure of the NBDC in late 2021 or early 2022.

Example of high nature value farmland that can help support species like Corncrake Source: Liam Loftus

Results-based model the way forward

Another solution offered up by biodiversity experts is a landslide shift in agri-environmental funding from a prescriptive model based on actions rather than outcomes to a measurable, results-based approach to protect a range of iconic species traditionally associated with farmland but now under threat from agricultural intensification.

According to a comprehensive State report to the UN in 2019, the shift to a more intense monocultural grass-based model has influenced a decline in various species, including birds, bees, butterflies and insects impacted by the drive to ever higher levels of productivity characterised by a loss or neglect of hedgerows, farmland edges and scrub.

Results-based models require a lot of early work such as developing scoring cards to assess habitat quality, setting up knowledge exchange groups for farmers, embedded community engagement and scientific research. But there is a huge appetite for them, according toJohn Carey of the novel results-basedCorncrake LIFE project.

Farmers regard results-based payment systems as fair and equitable, Carey said. Its a paradigm shift to put the farmer back in charge of their own destiny rather than just prescribing actions for them to follow.

The five-year project running from 2020 to 2024 seeks to protect the ground-nesting corncrake, the decline of which is closely linked to changes in farming methods such as the move away from hay-making to silage, drainage of damp ground for grassland, and reseeding of mixed-species grasslands with more productive grasses.

According to Carey, the species decline is symptomatic of a rapid change in land use across Ireland. They have literally been pushed to the edge of their range. If the corncrake disappears, along with them will go a myriad of lesser known species that inhabit the same ecological niches.

Under the project, there will be direct conservation work on around 1,000 hectares of land to address these pressures and enhance the habitat, including predator risk management and the re-establishment of traditional farming practices, with the ultimate aim to help boost the species population by 20% by 2024.

What we hope to build is not just habitat, but the knowledge and skills to create and maintain the habitat and ensure the best possible outcome for both the birds and the landowners who conserve them, Carey said.

There is a sense among the communities of the importance of protecting the integrity of local areas while seeking to create a sustainable future for families. Finding these synergies is the key to conservation success, and we are lucky that so many of the local communities are engaged with us on this already.

Corncrake being handled by members of Corncrake LIFE team Source: Corncrake LIFE

More funded needed to make a real difference

Although heavy on admin costs, UCDs Shane McGuinness said that such results-based models are effective as they focus on tangible targets where you can actually see the 10% increase in hedgerows or the five metre margins around your fields.

Ireland is looked at in terms of a lighthouse for this model due to the early success of the Burren LIFE project in the mid-2000s, according to McGuinness, the first major farming for conservation project in the EU.

Unfortunately, he said, results-based schemes still make up only a tiny fragment of agricultural supports to date.

The rest of the EU look at the Burren and say thats fantastic but that is a drop in the ocean in Ireland. Thats shown in our rivers. Its shown in our corncrakes, our curlews, our marsh fritillaries and pearl mussels.

According to the 2020UCD study that McGuinness co-authored,this problem is linked to the under-resourcing of the NPWS. By failing to invest in the agency and depriving it of capacity, McGuinness said that the State is preventing the acquisition of additional EU grants or the spending of existing EU allocations which are not fully claimed.

This issue was further expanded upon by the UCD reports other author, Dr Craig Bullock, together with NPWS staff, in a paper released earlier this year.

The paper found that restricted sources of finance have trapped the NPWS in a cycle of continually fighting to survive while operating below the critical mass to be effective.

This includes funding under the EU LIFE programme, according to McGuinness, that has funded many results-based projects to date, including the corncrake project.

Were involved in huge chunks of funding that are given over and were at risk of not spending those allocations. And this is millions of euros, McGuinness said.

So with a lot of these funds, they either go under-spent, under-claimed or over-administered, which is tragic, really, given how limited the funding is already for biodiversity.

Data released by the Department of the Environment, that assists potential applicants with the process, shows Irish projects received 100 million in LIFE funding between 1992 and 2019. We have created a table herewith details on all Irish projects.

While the use of indicative national allocations were only introduced in 2007 and subsequently discontinued in 2018, a Noteworthy analysis shows that Ireland underspent on its allocation by 12 million over a 10-year window between 2007 and 2017.

The Department said that these indicative allocations were not intended to suggest secured funds or allocations per Member State and that the quality of the project was always considered the overarching criterion governing the project evaluation and award process.

Another issue identified by experts tied to resource issues is the lack of accounting for natural capital in State plans and programmes.

Taking stock of our natural capital

It is estimated that more than half of the worlds economic output US$44 trillion of economic value generation is moderately or highly dependent on nature.

In 2008, the NPWS looked at the economic benefits of biodiversity in Ireland, putting the value of national ecosystem services at over 2.6 billion euro per year.

For example, pollinators contribute over50 million to the Irish economy, while our natural, unspoilt environment was cited by 82% of visitorsas an important reason for visiting Ireland in 2019, a year that brought in over 5 billion from overseas tourism.

Yet, according to the 2020 UCD biodiversity finance review, there is only a modest acceptance by some departments of their dependence on natural capital, even in those sectors with high dependency on these services.

According to Trinity College Dublin ecologist Catherine Farrell, up until now, we havent integrated nature into decision making at all with policy moves based almost purely on economic metrics without actually considering how we can work with the broader set of wealth that we have.

We need to bring out more knowledge of where the ecosystems are and what theyre doing. That is a powerful tool, she said. The tide lifts all boats [and] the tide for restoration should lift all habitats and all species because theyre all connected.

Farrell is a member of the INCASE research team, a multi-disciplinary team funded by the EPA made up of specialists in ecology, economics, mapping, accounting and agriculture, working together to measure the positive contributions of our natural world.

This involves gathering data about the extent and condition of ecosystem stocks, the services and benefits they bring, and then aligning this detail with a system of national accounts to better integrate nature into the decision-making process.

Farrell said that there is still a widespread lack of understanding of how natural capital accounting works. People think it just sticks a price on nature which doesnt have to happen at all.

If we dont have a natural capital dashboard alongside other metrics such as health and economic trackers, we neglect to account for the key thing that underpins the success of all societal and economic targets nature. Not tracking stocks and flows in nature has gotten us where we are [today], she said.

Catherine Farrell (l) on field research with other members of the INCASE team Source: INCASE

A lack of joined-up thinking

For example, in order to know the societal values generated by ecosystem services, we first need to know what condition the ecosystems are in, how they have changed or been altered over time, and the ways in which communities will benefit from their protection.

In the INCASE projects study of the 18,000 hectare Dargle catchment released in April 2021, however, it stated that progress on ecosystem accounting remains limited.

The challenges identified in this case study reflect those identified in other studies and include the lack of data the absence of targeted and reliable time-series data on structure and function, as well as the need for agreed reference levels, the study found.

A 2020 paper from the Royal Irish Academy on the value of Irelands agri-ecosystem services also found that there is still a lack of data for certain ecosystem services that can have knock-on impacts for conservation work.

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Funding failure: Most of Ireland's biodiversity spend goes on schemes that have little impact - TheJournal.ie