MC(m): So, just to welcome you all to today's conference, “Leaders Preserving Our Future: Pace and Priorities on Climate Change,” which is jointly organized by Dods and the World Preservation Foundation, and we really are delighted to have you here, particularly in the circumstance. This conference has been organized with a very specific aim in mind: it's to raise awareness about the urgency of having a near-term solution for climate change, and to highlight one of the most effective solutions to achieve this.

As you will notice, we've got a lot of speakers today, many of them sitting next to me, even as I speak, and they're from different scientific fields and very many prestigious organizations. So, I'm going to start by introducing our first speaker, who is Geoff Tansey.

Geoff is a trustee of the Food Ethics Council in the United Kingdom and one of the six recipients of the Joseph Rowntree “Visionaries” Award. He's also winner of the Derek Cooper Award for best food campaigner and educator. And today, he'll address the conference on how we can ensure food security from global to local level in the face of water scarcity and climate change. So if you'd put your hands together, please, for our first speaker.

Geoff Tansey (m): Right, thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thanks to the Foundation for the invitation to speak here. The Food Ethics Council is an independent charity that seeks to put ethical thinking at the heart of our discussions on food, and that means looking at social justice and fairer decisions within the framework of the bigger picture.

Well, I'm speaking here personally, but drawing on some of the work of the council… But first, let's look at today's world. We've a dysfunctional food system, despite having the capacity to feed everyone well. It leaves getting on for a billion people hungry, well over that, overweight or obese, and even more with micronutrient deficiencies.

The poor are affected most. Most people still work in agriculture globally, most poor people are still in the rural areas, and women are often the most badly affected. Yet, they're also responsible for the majority of food produced and hold much knowledge about farming in challenging and difficult environments around the world. Now, achieving food security for all is a complex challenge, and it's got many ingredients and there are lots of definitions.

After the first world food crisis in the 1970s, the focus was on grain reserves, as this quote illustrates. Now, this broader definition from the FAO summit in 1996 is usually linked to thinking about food security in terms of three words: Accessibility, Availability, and Affordability.

But it actually neglects how food is produced and distributed, and the sustainability of that. Some more recent thinking looks at sustainable food systems where you're very clear about what the goals are. It includes the three A's, but imbeds them in systems that are sustainable and resilient.

Increasingly, however, peasants' movements seek food sovereignty, which adds “who has what power and control in the system?” into the equation. Now, achieving food security requires action from the global to the household level. It also means that no one suffers fear and anxiety about where and when the next meal will come from, and is confident of that continuing - and that's a confidence that climate change could shatter for all of us.

The long-term worst-case scenarios see farming becoming impossible in many tropical latitudes, failing monsoons in India, loss of the Amazon rainforest, widespread desertification in Africa and elsewhere, leading to population movements the like of which we have never seen. The best single way of dealing with these is not to go there, to change our practices now before it's too late.

The least bad scenario suggests major disruptions in key producing areas, yield declines in many areas in the tropics and surrounding temperate areas, with perhaps some advantage to the higher latitudes. All see a loss of biodiversity and agricultural biodiversity. Now, these trends are often talked about in terms of 2 to 6 degree average rise in temperature, but this really is misleading, for climate change will, indeed, is already destabilizing weather patterns, leading to more and more extreme events of increasing intensity, from floods - as we saw recently in Pakistan and Thailand - which will be exacerbated for coastal areas - and we're in one, looking at the Thames - as sea levels rise with melting ice caps and glaciers, to winds and droughts and fires, as we saw in Russia recently.

Now, these extremes will make harvests less predictable. If several coincide in one year, they may lead to major food shortages of core commodities and huge price rises. Price fluctuations and rises will, indeed already have been, compounded by competition over scarce resources, using land for agro-fuels, and commodity price speculation.

As we saw, particularly in 2007 and 2008, when over 100 million people were driven into hunger, and governments fell. Now, although the poor and most marginalized are the first to suffer from climate change, it will affect everyone, including us here, and push food prices up and disrupt supply chains.

Now, we need to meet these challenges in ways that embed social justice into the heart of our approach; otherwise, it will fail. As our inquiry into food and fairness discussed in a recent report “Food Justice,” this means addressing the issues about fair shares, fair say, and fair play in tackling the problems in the food system and climate change. But it also is about recognizing what can be done within the food system framework and what requires changes to the rules of the game.

Now, as Tim Jackson said in his eloquent evidence to the commission, the rich really need to rethink what we mean by prosperity and develop a new kind of ecological economics that's not based on the growth paradigm, what he calls “prosperity without growth.” For us in Britain and Europe, that means questioning assumptions, such as that we can eat what we want when we want from wherever we want.

It means accepting responsibility for the generation of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the extent of our ecological debt, as our footprint spreads much more widely over the world than our numbers justify, thanks in significant part to our need for animal feed. So it requires innovation, but not just in technology, where so much of the focus goes. And even there, the focus is often on finding ways that are essentially about allowing us to carry on doing what we do now, such as agro-fuels, rather than change. And in reality, we need innovation that allows us to do things differently, not just technologically, but socially, politically, and economically.

We need to rethink the way we produce food, to move from intensive systems, which are fossil fuel-based, to farming systems that are more agro-ecologically sound and resilient, as has been argued in various reports over the last few years - the global report at the top, the one from the National Academy of Sciences in the States. But we do also need to rethink what we consume. Whether or not we can feed a world with a population likely to stabilize at 9.5 billion people depends upon what they all eat, and the impact of producing that food on our life support systems.

Now, it wouldn't be sustainable nor healthy, for example, for global meat and dairy consumption levels to rise to that of the American or European level. Food accounts for about 20% of total UK greenhouse gas emissions by consumption, and that rises to 30% if you include indirect emissions from global land use changes.

Meat and dairy is about 7 to 8%. Agriculture globally also uses about 70% of the water that's abstracted. The UK imports about two-thirds of the virtual water it uses in food. And the way we do things at the moment increases the loss of biodiversity and agricultural biodiversity.

So, apart from action to change on production, we also need action on waste and consumption, to reduce the waste built into systems through the standards and production processes and supply chains, to the waste that occurs domestically and in catering. Now, the Food Ethics Council, along with WWF, has been looking at consumption of meat and dairy, because this is a significant part of our greenhouse gases in the UK - and you'll hear more from WWF this afternoon, and our latest report is actually out on Friday.

Now, the work focused on consumption related emissions because a production focus ignores the emissions that arise when production's done abroad, so-called “off shoring.” Now, one essential in this is dialogue with the producers so that they are able to engage with and see the calls for eating less meat, for example, as an opportunity in developing a more equitable, resilient, and sustainable food system. The producers can also give the practical insights of the, perhaps, unintended consequences of different policies.

So I think we need to see this as a time of opportunity, as well as danger, if we are to avoid in the future the sense of déjà vu I get today when I look back at the world food crisis in the 1970's, as this quote illustrates when I first started working on food policy. We actually need creative solutions from the bottom up, within enabling frameworks that do not disadvantage the poor.

Now, food is a lens through which to look at the problems we face. It connects peoples and it's an opportunity because it's something that everyone needs and it's a way of helping people understand both the importance of dealing with climate change and the things that can be done about it.

And the way we deal with food links sustainability, health of people and planet, and social justice, and that includes gender equality. And I look forward to hearing more detail about the other areas as we go throughout the day. Thank you very much.

MC(m): Thank you, Geoff. Our next speaker is David Vaughan. Professor David Vaughan is a climate scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, and was coordinating lead author of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, and he's just about to begin the same role in the 5th Assessment. His research focuses on the role of ice sheets, the threat of climate change and rising sea levels. Professor Vaughan will now speak about ice melt in Antarctica in terms of its effect, severity, urgency and potential consequences. Please put your hands together.

Prof David Vaughan(m): Thank you. Thank you very much. I speak today as a working scientist rather than a representative of the IPCC, but I do have those roles that were pointed out. Sea level rise is somewhat the poster child of climate change, partly because people can really understand quite simply what the impacts are. That's actually an illusion.

Some of the impacts are quite subtle and difficult to understand, and we're going to talk about some of those in this talk. Sea level rise has two aspects that speak to the climate change debate: one is the longevity of the response that's provoked by climate change, that might go on for many, many centuries after carbon emissions have stabilized; and the other is that there is really no going back, that once sea level rise begins, then it is here to stay for a considerable period.

And the only rational response in the short term, let's say less than 200 years, is adaptation. Climate change is being provoked by increasing carbon dioxide and methane, greenhouse gases, I think there's very little doubt about that - and throughout geological history, as temperature has risen, carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases have risen, so has sea level.

The question is, really: What's going to happen in the future? And there are several different sources of sea level rise within the Earth's system. One is the straightforward expansion of the oceans as the temperatures rise. Actually, this takes many decades, perhaps even longer than that, before the heat really gets into the deeper parts of the ocean and the full effects of ocean expansion are seen.

Then we have the loss of mountain glaciers around the world, and throughout the world, mountain glaciers are now being lost in virtually every glaciated mountain range. This is just one example. I showed it to somebody the other day while I was trying to put this together, and they said, “That's a lot of ice!” And indeed it is. This is just one glacier. Elsewhere, there are, in the polar regions, two large ice sheets - one in Greenland and one in Antarctica - each has the capacity, the ice in it, to raise global sea level by many meters, and we are now seeing some losses in those areas.

The key issue here is that once loss from these ice sheets is provoked, once it's driven, then it may continue for many, many centuries. Sea level is currently rising, and has been increasing in the rate that it's rising throughout the 20th century.

We are now at 3 millimeters a year. Doesn't sound like a lot, but it is a one way street. It's very hard to imagine that the losses of ice that contribute primarily to this are actually going to decrease in the near future. So 3 millimeters a year adds up to 3 centimeters per decade, and by the time we're at a century, it's starting to look like a substantial amount. The IPCC's last projections of sea level rise were something between 19 centimeters and 58 centimeters by the end of 2100. However, some of the effects that the authors of that report were very suspicious were going to start showing were not included in that projection.

And they took a somewhat brave - in my opinion - view of saying there really isn't the science to include all of these effects - specifically the ice sheets' response to changing atmospheric and ocean temperatures - into those projections. So those projections were, in a sense, lacking in one of the key elements.

Since that last IPCC report has gone on, we have developed substantial numbers, four separate ways of measuring the ice loss from these two major ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. And you can see that there are some large areas where ice loss is now persistent year to year, and is sufficient that it's making a significant contribution to that 3 millimeters a year of global sea rise. Elsewhere around the Antarctic Peninsula, we've seen the loss of many ice shelves.

This one in the background, Wilkins Ice Shelf, was the most recent one to really hit the headlines. But, actually, the headline news is not the one that I want you to take away, the smaller diagram to the right hand side shows that this pattern has been persistent all the way along the Antarctic Peninsula where ice shelves have been retreating over a considerable period, at least the last 50 years.

Those are the projections from the IPCC. However, if we start to think about what those projections might look like if we really do include realistic contributions from ice sheets, then perhaps we can think of… you know, certainly the left hand diagram shows quite a moderate scenario that continues the rate of sea level rise over the last 150 years, shown in the green line in a relatively simple progression and reaches half a meter by 2100.

And a more aggressive increase in the rate of ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland would push us up to something like the right hand side diagram where we have about 1.4 meters by 2100. Now, these are still well short of the real doomsday scenarios that some commentators, even some scientists, have been talking about, and I actually think that that right hand side does represent something close to an upper limit on the likely sea level rise by 2100. However, by the time we get to 2100, in that scenario, we're seeing sea level rise at a rate of about 10 times its current rate. What does this really mean? It's very hard to understand really what, let's say, a meter of sea level rise actually means.

Well, let's focus on London, because we're here, and along with 1.25 million other people and an enormous amount of property and assets close to sea level. In UK, we've been very responsive to flooding events in the past and have raised our sea defenses, largely when a flooding event has actually driven us to do it. You can see this sea wall down near Greenwich and how it was raised most noticeably after floods in 1928, and then again, as the Thames barrier was being built after the 1953 flood. We've tended to be extremely responsive in the way that we look at sea defense and build to it.

In the future, we need to be much more proactive. The building of the Thames barrier and its potential replacement in the next few decades is actually a bit of a triumph, and actually what I need to preface, what I'm going to say next, is that the environment agency actually has a very sensible and forward-looking plan to protect London in the future. And what's it trying to protect against? Well, if we look at the storm statistics gathered over the last hundred years or so, then we can project what we believe is likely to be the one in 1000-year storm height, something over 6.5 meters, the one in 100-year storm height, and the one in 10-year storm height.

Now you can see that if we raised global sea level by 50 centimeters - remember that's actually a fairly moderate range - we shift this axis along the bottom so that the one in 100-year storm surge is now equivalent to what was the one in 1000-year storm surge. Another 50 centimeters of sea level rise, and that one in 1000-year storm surge, when the Thames barrier was built, will now start to come every ten years.

So we would really, under that scenario, have to consider a substantial raising of the Thames protection… sea defenses. Looking more globally, we have enormous sea level populations now living close to coasts and in vulnerable areas, and already about 10 million people a year are affected by coastal flooding.

That might go up naturally without sea level rise, to something like 30 million a year by mid century. If we have a substantial sea level rise on top of that, then we could easily double that. This is enormous numbers of people suffering from coastal flooding every year. Obviously in developing countries, there are significant issues associated with survival of coastal populations; and we tend to think of the developing countries as uniquely vulnerable to this. In many ways, a developed city and developing countries have actually developed to the state that they've lost their adaptability. And this is a picture of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina - I'm not saying that global change caused Hurricane Katrina, or even indeed the flooding here; however, it's fairly clear that with sea level rise in the future, more events like this are likely to occur, and with a greater frequency.

So, what's the role for science now? Well, I think we have got past the point where scientists really should be issuing warnings of drastic climate change, and really looking to our role of what we can do to help society come to terms with this. And, indeed, in sea level rise science, I think we have a great role in improving the quantification of risk, improving the basis for sea defense planning, on that relatively short time scale of, let's say, 100 to 200 years, support for coastal adaptation, where defense is not the only answer, and the avoidance of unwarranted expenditure, or expenditure that is too soon.

Good predictions allow you to time the expenditure of sea defense infrastructure much more effectively. And, finally, we have a role in contributing towards a fuller evaluation of the long-term impact of climate change on the planet, and the commitment to long-term sea level rise that will continue even after carbon dioxide emissions have stabilized. European Union is funding at the moment a substantial program with 24 institutes across Europe to contribute towards sea level rise projection, and this is my project that I'm leading at the moment. Thank you very much.

MC(m): Our next speaker is John Topping, the founder and president of the Climate Institute in Washington DC, served as editor for portions of the IPCC First Assessment report and was recognized for his contribution in the 2007 Award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC. Mr. Topping will talk about recent research highlighting the importance of reducing non-CO2, shorter-lived climate forcers and how they can significantly reduce the cause of warming in the near future. Please put your hands together for John Topping.

John Topping(m): Thank you very much. Dr. Vaughan's presentation, I think, underscored the urgency of acting. And what I'm going to do here is pick up on something where I want to compliment the World Preservation Foundation and Dods for their prescience, really, in a couple of regards. One, of focusing very much on the role of agriculture and food systems really, and the whole climate issue - this has really tended to be underplayed very much in most of the discussions - and also on recognizing the importance of moving on non- or shorter-life greenhouse gases, things other than carbon dioxide.

Not that we don't want to move on carbon dioxide, but if we wait and we focus only on carbon dioxide, all the worst things that were projected by Dr. Vaughan will probably happen. And it's one of the reasons why Micronesia, one of the very vulnerable island countries, has really being very active in the UN and pushing for action on black carbon. I'm grateful to Dr. Michael MacCracken, our chief scientist who also ran the US National Assessment, and for four years headed the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences, and my colleague John-Michael Cross, for developing some fairly interesting graphics to illustrate the opportunities and the need to act. First, you'll see, using the “business as usual” scenario, BAU, essentially is what happens if you don't have climate conscious policies but you assume a certain amount of natural energy efficiency that would happen with the development of the world economy. And as you can see, there are legacy greenhouse emissions, primarily CO2 from the past century.

Some would be longer-life greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide, some chlorofluorocarbons, which still persist even though we've moved aggressively under the Montreal Protocol. There would be rapid increases under business as usual in CO2, but also for methane, which would be associated both with agricultural activity and energy activity. From tropospheric ozone, which is essentially a product of a variety of carbon monoxide, methane, hydrocarbons, in the presence of NOx, essentially creating something that is dangerous both to human health and to agricultural crops.

That's whatwe tend to think of as smog in our urban areas and so on. And then some other greenhouse gases, nitrous oxide and a variety of others here. Black carbon is something that really was ignored largely in the climate debate until the last couple of years. It's probably where we can make the biggest difference in the near-term. I mean, this is essentially soot, particles that are a great danger to human health. Because they are only up for a week or two at a time, the tendency was to not factor them in, but the problem is, they're constantly replenished.

If cook stoves don't change, if the urban transportation doesn't change, if the industrial practices don't change, those particles are replenished readily. And on the other hand, if they do change, you can make a huge difference in radiative forcing

very quickly, while also having very positive impacts on human health.

There is also a huge inertia within the energy systems and also, to some extent, within the agricultural systems of the world. In the US, interestingly, in the last couple of years, there has been a dramatic drop in CO2 levels from 2007 to 2009, about a 10 percent per capita drop, half of that due to changes in the world economy; other things, really, due to switching from coal to natural gas, because we have a lot of available natural gas, and a variety of other things that are structural change.

We have a couple of practical problems with the greenhouse system right now, the trading systems formally. In the formal system, one ton of methane is equated to 22 tons of CO2, but the practical problem is, if we're concerned with the very dangerous things that could be happening soon, we probably ought to have a much higher valuation for methane. I mean, many of these tipping points are really likely to happen in the lifetime of many of us in this room, notin 2100.

And I'll give you a quick illustration here. I mean, the 1 to 22 is really looking at this over a 100-year period, but if we really look at the equation over a 20-year period, Methane could have a much higher valuation. The reason for that is, typically, you're talking about a 12-year residence in the atmosphere versus much longer terms in carbon dioxide. So in terms of what's driving the changes that would be melting the Greenland ice sheet, that would be causing the positive feedbacks, and that is static climate change that may be going on in the Arctic - changed albedo,

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo] other things that are feeding on itself. This itself is a problem. What's interesting is, while carbon dioxide is the most important single constituent driving climate change, it's responsible for less than half. And because it's so persistent in the atmosphere, you aren't going to make a huge dent right away, even if we could wave a magic wand, we would find carbon dioxide concentrations and stop all emissions, it would still stay awfully flat, and the radiative forcing would still be very, very large.

So this underscores the need to work in some other areas. Now, the fortunate thing about this is most of the other short-term climate forcers are ones where there are huge human health benefits or other win-win aspects. Methane levels have been rising. For the “Lasts 12 years in the atmosphere,” it has roughly half the effect of CO2. But there are a remarkable number of win-win aspects when we talk about reducing methane: coal miners' safety from draining of the methane that are already responsible for explosions; harvesting energy from gas pipeline leaks, from avoiding flaring; or landfill methane in the agricultural area; improved animal husbandry; and moving to a more plant-based diet, which wouldreduce both CO2 and methane basis, and probably doing that primarily on a health basis.

Black carbon plays a couple of important roles. It's only up for a short period of time, but it's constantly replenished. It has a warming effect that's roughly 55% - according to the better science on this, I think is the Ramanathan, Carmichael science - of CO2. And that doesn't even include calculating the albedo effect, where in the Arctic it plays a much larger role, and in the Himalayas as well, there potentially impairing water supplies.

But it has huge impacts on human health, and that's perhaps the key to be able to get aggressive action on this. Now, the regional effects of this are quite large. These are indications from a few scientists here. The effects really, together, of black carbon and tropospheric ozone, and to some extent the reduction of the sulphates thathappened because of the serious steps we took to address acid rain and so forth, these look like the primary driver for the very, very rapid warming that has been happening recently within the Arctic, and there's a real opportunity to make a difference here.

Now, what are the opportunities from aggressive actions on black carbon? Perhaps the most immediate would be acute decreases in the Arctic warming, and that's probably the most dangerous single thing that can happen on the planet right now, with respect to sea level and with respect to the possibility of climate feedbacks.

But it also has the ability to cut down substantially the nearly two million lives, about 1.9 million from cook stoves, about 85% women and children, and outdoor air pollution, which kills about another 800,000 worldwide. So, this can go ahead aggressively and at the same time it yields very sizable climate benefits. What's interesting is if we assume, for example, a 50% reduction by 2050 across the board, including CO2, and an 80% reduction by the end of the century, this is how things could break out.

As you can see, we can make a dent in CO2 and that's important, but we can make a huge dent in the other gases, because of the times and so forth there, and especially so with respect to black carbon. Now, this takes us between now and 2040 - a lifetime in which many of us would hope to be around for much of this time.

This is really the critical time, I think, for a lot of these tipping points. The first is “business as usual” and then the second is the aggressive reductions. If we do this, we really have a chance of avoiding absolutely catastrophic climate change.

Right now, the two most interesting efforts underway are clean cook stove efforts - the UN Foundation and Shell Foundation and others have worked very much on this, where the primary motivation is really saving people's lives, but at the same time there will be real benefits to the climate.

In Manila, there's a fascinating effort underway right now involving an Australian firm that is retrofitting jeepneys, working with the Jeepney Owners Association using voluntary emission reduction credits. Jeepney drivers die a lot sooner than others, and pollution levels are very high as a result of this. Hopefully some of these things, certain voluntary emissions reduction credit systems, will happen.

Now, at the same time we move on black carbon, it's important that industrial countries have to move aggressively on it as well. In the industrial countries, we can strengthen diesel standards, and we are starting to do that. We can also take off-road [meaning to take vehicles off the road that don't meet the standards] vehicles or retrofit some of the older vehicles that don't meet the standards; increase industrial energy recycling cogeneration, which harvests both CO2 and also additional particulates; and then work aggressively through the Arctic council on these areas.

I would like to suggest is it's important to get consumer follow through on this. In Mexico, Chris with the Tickell Interactive Network is pulling together a series of Climate Theatres, like planetariums for climate education. There are now three; there will be about eleven by the end of the year. The first of these is in the State of Puebla. The State of Puebla has become the first State in the world to move aggressively on black carbon. And I think that's important, we need this kind of action. We really need to do this. Thank you very much.

MC(m): Thank you.

CAPTIONWally Fry (Vegan)Founder and CEO, Fry Group (Vegan) Foods, South AfricaWally Fry (m): The most powerful thing I've learned today is a camaraderie that exists in the whole movement towards a meat-free society on planet Earth. That was one of the most wonderful feelings I have today. But apart from that, there was a great evidence shown by really, really well-known scientists, showing that these intellectual inspirations that I've known about for a long time, whereby I knew that the eating of meat was destroying the planet. They exposed that to us in very, very clear, scientific terms and some of it was quite shocking.

AK(m): We're 50% above sustainability at a planetary level. And of course, closely linked to that, we are in a midst of one of the great mass extinctions this planet has ever known. We have lost 30% of the biodiversity on this planet in just 40 years.

And in the tropics, we're talking about 60% declines in biodiversity. We have to stop that destruction, and we have to ask ourselves: Are the diets that we aspire to and have become used to eating in rich, industrialized nations, like our own, the way forward?

PT(m): But in the last few years, a convergence of research in the fields of environment, climate change, and health have shown that being a meat guzzler is just as unsustainable as being a gas guzzler. People who are reducing their meat consumption are making an ethical decision. They're also making a rational decision to protect the future.

WF(m): We are currently in debt to the planet to the extent that we need about 1.4 Earths to fund our activities and have crossed our credit boundaries with biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and fresh water use and land system changes. The time has, therefore, come for industrialists across the spectrum - not only in food production - to make changes.