Impact
March 26, 2020
Restoration ecology is a young scientific discipline whose limitations can compromise the recovery of ecosystem biodiversity and functions. Specifically for limitations on forest restoration, we first recommend considering measures prior to land use changes to deal with the common lack of efforts to anticipate and plan restoration. Second, we suggest using multiple references in restoration planning to avoid simplified reference characterization, and we advise assessing ecosystem recovery with indicators that better incorporate ecosystem complexity in recovery assessments.
March 25, 2020
There is broad evidence of climate change causing shifts in fish distribution worldwide, but less is known about the response of fisheries to these changes. Responses to climate‐driven shifts in a fishery may be constrained by existing management or institutional arrangements and technological settings. In order to understand how fisheries are responding to ocean warming, we investigate purse seine fleets targeting tropical tunas in the east Atlantic Ocean using effort and sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA) data from 1991 to 2017.
March 20, 2020
A pesar del rápido crecimiento del uso de la restauración, esta no siempre genera una respuesta a corto plazo en los ecosistemas que garantice la recuperación de su estructura, funciones y servicios. Hasta ahora, la mayoría de los estudios que han evaluado la recuperación de ecosistemas utilizaban métricas que ignoran la complejidad necesaria para estructurar las comunidades de organismos que conforman los ecosistemas.
March 2, 2020
The attribution of the responsibility for the emissions for CO2 between producers and consumers is a controversial issue in NEW BC3 publication in Nature Communications journal “Towards a more effective climate policy on international trade” climate change policy and research. Two main accounting methods are used in the literature to determine countries’ contribution to global emissions. The production-based accounting (PBA) measures the amount of CO2 released to the atmosphere by the industries and households of a country. The consumption-based accounting (CBA) attributes emissions to the country’s consumption of final products. CBA redistributes the emissions from PBA and considers that emissions in another country are necessary for the home country’s consumption. These two accounting frameworks are used to assign responsibility for current CO2 emissions. Producer responsibility addresses the countries that directly generate the emissions. Consumer responsibility addresses the countries that ultimately drive the pressure.
February 6, 2020
This infographic video has been produced as part of the BC3- Basque Centre for Climate Change contribution to the COP25 in Madrid (Pabellón España-5th December 2019) and under the H2020 project iSAGE.
The video attempts to graphically illustrate why ruminants are not to be blamed for climate change. Different arguments are shown regarding the differences between emissions from biogenic methane from ruminants and fossil fuel CO2, differences in production systems and the uncertainties regarding N2O emissions and the baseline of reference to compare emissions from ruminants compared with other activities.
The video idea and script have been developed by Agustin del Prado (BC3) and Pablo Manzano (University Of Helsinki), animated and produced by Yelena Grigorenko and voice over by Bosco Lliso (BC3).
November 11, 2019
The program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is one of the major attempts to tackle climate change mitigation in developing countries. REDD+ seeks to provide result-based incentives to promote emission reductions and increase carbon sinks in forest land while promoting other cobenefits, such as the conservation of biodiversity.
October 22, 2019
The Paris Agreement introduced an ambitious goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. Here we combine a review of modelled pathways and literature on mitigation strategies, and develop a land-sector roadmap of priority measures and regions that can help to achieve the 1.5 °C temperature goal. Transforming the land sector and deploying measures in agriculture, forestry, wetlands and bioenergy could feasibly and sustainably contribute about 30%, or 15 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) per year, of the global mitigation needed in 2050 to deliver on the 1.5 °C target, but it will require substantially more effort than the 2 °C target
September 19, 2019
Environmental change constitutes a risk to the sustainability of economic activities, within deltas and the wider regions and economies within which they sit. Slow acting environmental change and shocks from extreme events can affect economic activities. Using multiregional input-output tables, extended to include environmental dimensions and combined with Computable General Equilibrium models, flows of economic activities and ecosystem services across supply chains are assessed.
September 18, 2019
Environmental externalities call for the use of environmental taxes to get prices right and thereby reduce environmental pressures. To date, however, the Spanish government makes only limited use of environmental taxes. One major reason for the policy reluctance are concerns on the regressive impacts of environmental taxes. We argue that policy can hedge against these concerns by means of revenue recycling. More specifically, we assess the impacts of a green tax reform where additional revenues are redistributed lump-sum to Spanish households on an equal-per-capita basis. Based on quantitative evidence from coupled microsimulation and computable equilibrium analyses we find that such a green tax reform leads to a substantial reduction in harmful emissions while having a progressive impact.
September 16, 2019
BC3 – Basque Centre for Climate Change former cientific director Anil Markandya took part this week at the fourteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP 14). This conference was scherduled to take place from 2-13 September 2019, at the India Expo Center and Mart in New Delhi, India.
Part of the side event “Economics of land degradation: Development Alternatives, WOTR & the ELD Initiative” the Distinguished Ikerbasque Professor Markandya gave a presentation about “Economics of Land Degatation: Insights from an evaluation study in Bundelhand by Development Alternatives Group”.
