THE MONTHLY GLOBAL CHANGE REVIEW #12
March 2022
And then the war came. Like the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Europe — which has never ceased to rage in many parts of the world — highlights a very Anthropocene feature: the entanglement and interdependence of all the elements that define our way of life. The unprecedented conjunction of several particularly destabilizing factors is of course a threat to the most basic security, but also to energy and food resources, on all continents. In short, everything that the IPCC reports tirelessly predict, one after the other, is happening now. Meanwhile, in the city: adapt, adapt, adapt!
A monthly publication by Lyon Urban School (Université de Lyon), dedicated to a better understanding of global change and the Anthropocene urban world: a selection of news in many fields of study to grasp the world we live in and the world to come.
📢 Enjoy reading or listening to original Anthropocene podcasts: Net Zero, Algorithms , Drink or Drive.
If you have any comments or suggestions to enhance this daily monitoring, feel free to share: berenice.gagne@universite-lyon.fr
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URBAN
- “Covid, Global Warming: The Resistance of Cities”: “analyses of how cities around the world can respond to the health crisis and climate change” (métropolitiques, 14/03/2022).
- “Climate change: cities seek ways to cope with rising sea levels. Jakarta, Houston, Lagos… some thirty coastal cities signed a joint declaration on February 10 to accelerate their transformation in the face of global warming” (Le Monde, 28/02/2022).
- “Developing an “urban ecology” to shape “earthy cities”. Is it really necessary to “put nature back in the city”? Should cities be saved? Perhaps, but we must not forget that the city has long been, sheltered by its walls, a place where nature was not. Baptiste Lanaspèze, author of Marseille, ville sauvage [Marseille, wild city] and founder of Wildproject Editions, urges us to develop an “urban ecology” in order to create “ earthy cities “ that find their rightful place in the biosphere” (Socialter, 15/02/2022).
AGRICULTURE & FOOD
- “War in Ukraine: alert on global food security”. The war comes on top of an unprecedented combination of factors destabilizing the global food market: rising energy prices and the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the end of 2021, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) food price index, “which aggregates prices on international markets for several basic commodities (cereals, sugar, meat, dairy products, etc.)” had already increased by 30% compared to the previous year. The FAO expects a new increase of 8 to 20% of this index, as Russia and Ukraine are “among the main world exporters of cereals” (Le Monde, 12/03/2022). Read also: “Agricultural shortages, inflation, food insecurity: the repercussions of the war in Ukraine” (The Conversation, 07/03/2022).
- A review of Matthieu Calame’s Enraciner l’agriculture: société et systèmes agricoles du Néolithique à l’Anthropocène [Rooting agriculture: society and agricultural systems from the Neolithic to the Anthropocene] (Puf, 2020) : “While criticism of agribusiness is mounting, Matthieu Calame argues that no real agricultural transition can take place unless political and cultural frameworks change as well. This transition is already underway through small-scale experiments, and it will necessarily be marked by more cooperation and conviviality. But his message remains firmly anchored on the ground, repeating over and over again that it is through a transformation of the legislative and fiscal system that these still minority experiences will be able to impose themselves on the whole of society as well as the productive system” (la vie des idées, 16/02/2022).
- Climate change is modifying the distribution of fish stocks shared between exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and calls for the adaptation of international fisheries governance to avoid conflicts (renegotiation of quotas?). “By 2030, 23% of transboundary stocks will have shifted and 78% of the world’s EEZs will have experienced at least one shifting stock” (Global Change Biology, 18/01/2022).
ARTS & CULTURES
- Imaginations: “The pandemic has accelerated already existing dystopian trends” (Usbek & Rica, 14/02/2022).
BIODIVERSITY
- “Pronounced loss of Amazon rainforest resilience since the early 2000s”. 75% of the Amazon forest now seems to show a loss of resilience. This loss is more pronounced in the driest areas and where human activities are more intense, which mainly concerns the southeast of the forest, an area that corresponds to Brazil (Nature, 07/03/2022).
- An investigation into illegal deforestation in Romania’s old-growth forests, of which the multinational IKEA — the world’s largest buyer of wood — is the largest private landowner (The New Republic, 16/02/2022).
CLIMATE
- “New IPCC report: more documented, more precise and more alarming. The IPCC points out that many initiatives focus on short-term risk reduction. This limits the implementation of transformative adaptation measures, particularly with regard to our production and consumption patterns” (The Conversation, 10/03/2022).
- “France, poorly prepared, will have to “avoid the unmanageable” and “manage the unavoidable”. Specialists regret that the response to extreme events only takes the form of “scattered actions”, without a global vision” (Le Monde, 28/02/2022).
DECOLONIALISM & POSTCOLONIALISM
- “Colonial habitation, pollution and the production of ignorance. The chlordecone tragedy in the West Indies illustrates how North-South inequalities and the legacies of slavery and colonialism have durably structured public action in the field of health, leading to the authorization and maintenance of a product that was known to be extremely toxic” (La vie des idées, 15/03/2022).
- In the Negev desert, Israel is evicting the Bedouins to plant forests. A classic: the environmental rhetoric as a tool for colonization. The Bedouins denounce the despoliation of their lands by Israel, justified by reforestation in the Naqab desert (Reporterre, 22/02/2022).
EXTRACTIVISM & ENERGY
- Is it time for microgrids? “A microgrid is a local, community-centred electricity network that can operate independently (in “islanded” mode) while remaining connected to the public grid and drawing power from it if necessary” (The Agility Effect, 18/02/2022).
- “Renewable energies: how far can the energy autonomy of territories go? What is involved, with whom and with what aim in energy reterritorialization projects?” (The Conversation, 14/02/2022).
HEALTH
- “The sea, that other growing source of medicines”: the oceans “are the largest available source of biological resources, with a biodiversity unmatched by any other terrestrial ecosystem” (The Conversation, 27/02/2022).
MOBILITY
- An analysis of the generalized process of “logistization”: the circulation of humans and goods is at the heart of our societies. But has logistics also taken over language and the living? (La vie des idées, 14/03/2022).
PHILOSOPHY, SOCIOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY & OPINION
- “Once upon a time… the atmosuicide of the Earthlings”: “we imagined a fiction, a dystopian daily life: oxygen becomes rare and, to face it, the society intervenes everywhere and conditions everyone” (The Conversation, 02/03/2022).
- “Constituting a common culture in times of crisis”, a conversation with Pierre Charbonnier, author of Culture écologique (Presses de Sciences Po, 2022), who discusses what ecological awareness means (Le Grand Continent, 17/02/2022).
POLITICS & GEOPOLITICS
- “Is fascism the wave of the future? How climate change benefits the extreme right”. “The one thing fascism cannot survive is a world in which the parts understand themselves as inextricable from the whole. This condition is also essential to our attempts to come to grips with climate change; at this moment in history, the fight against fascism is also a struggle for climate justice” (The New Statesman, 11/02/2022).
- “Climatoskeptic rhetoric”: the latest issue of the journal Mots. Les langages du politique [Words. The Languages of Politics], which “looks at the modes of production, presentation, and circulation of climatoskeptic narratives, in a variety of settings and contexts. Pro-Brexit political campaigning, francophone print media, anti-vegan speeches on social networks, and promotion of technological solutions” (Mots. Les langages du politique, n°127, novembre 2021).
SOCIETY
- Portrait of Johan, 20 years old, fighter for climate justice: “In solidarity with the Yellow Vests as well as Greta Thunberg, favoring local roots, short economic circuits and low-tech (simple technologies), the commitment of Johan, 20 years old, is the image of a new generation of activists for whom the ecological emergency is the absolute priority” (la vie des idées, 08/03/2022).
- “Weatherpersons, spokespeople for climate change”: “The climate is going out of control and the weatherpersons know it well. Distraught by the climate emergency, five of them tell how they take advantage of their bulletin to raise awareness among the French public” (Reporterre, 25/02/2022).
- Ration and share? “Giving to all through cooperation, rather than letting the violence of competition take over” (Socialter, 21/02/2022).
WASTE
- “Study of the contamination of the world’s major river basins”: water quality is a major challenge for the 21st century. A research team from Lyon has conducted a survey to assess the spatial distribution of pollution in major river basins (Anthropocene2050, 14/03/2022).
- A global treaty on plastic pollution: 175 countries have agreed to a legally binding commitment covering the entire life cycle of plastics, from production to consumption and disposal, to stop plastic pollution (New Scientist, 01/03/2022).
- Circular economy: its implementation implies “ensuring that secondary resources (from waste) do not present more risks (health, environmental) than equivalent primary resources. In nature, the waste of organisms is food for other organisms whose own waste is a nutritive resource for plants. Can this model of circularity be transposed to the urban world, whose needs (food, water, energy, materials) are much greater? In part, certainly, and on the condition that our cities know how to invent sufficiently sober modes of organization, production or consumption, as well as reliable and risk-free methods of resource recovery” (Le Monde, 21/02/2022).
- A new study reveals that the toxicity of microplastics increases tenfold when they mix in aquatic environments with traces of organic pollutants found in pesticides, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics (Chemosphere, Février 2022).
