Dutch court rules that government must help stop climate change

Nature ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quirin Schiermeier
Keyword(s):  
2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 241-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas Bergkamp

The latest move in the environmentalists’ fight against climate change involves judicial proceedings against states. In these proceedings, climate action groups seek court orders to force governments to impose more stringent measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A recent judgment by a Dutch court has given this strategy momentum. In the Urgenda case, the court ruled that the Dutch government owes a duty of care to its citizens to provide protection against the risks posed by climate change. On this basis, the court ordered the government to revise its current policies to ensure that by 2020 carbon dioxide emissions are reduced by at least 25% compared to 1990 levels. As this article demonstrates, this kind of litigation raises constitutional issues, because courts may not infringe on the legislature’s prerogatives. Climate policy-making requires a series of value judgments and policy choices, and the state has non-justiciable discretion as to how it meets its duties of care.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 723-729
Author(s):  
Roslyn Gleadow ◽  
Jim Hanan ◽  
Alan Dorin

Food security and the sustainability of native ecosystems depends on plant-insect interactions in countless ways. Recently reported rapid and immense declines in insect numbers due to climate change, the use of pesticides and herbicides, the introduction of agricultural monocultures, and the destruction of insect native habitat, are all potential contributors to this grave situation. Some researchers are working towards a future where natural insect pollinators might be replaced with free-flying robotic bees, an ecologically problematic proposal. We argue instead that creating environments that are friendly to bees and exploring the use of other species for pollination and bio-control, particularly in non-European countries, are more ecologically sound approaches. The computer simulation of insect-plant interactions is a far more measured application of technology that may assist in managing, or averting, ‘Insect Armageddon' from both practical and ethical viewpoints.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Millington ◽  
Peter M. Cox ◽  
Jonathan R. Moore ◽  
Gabriel Yvon-Durocher

Abstract We are in a period of relatively rapid climate change. This poses challenges for individual species and threatens the ecosystem services that humanity relies upon. Temperature is a key stressor. In a warming climate, individual organisms may be able to shift their thermal optima through phenotypic plasticity. However, such plasticity is unlikely to be sufficient over the coming centuries. Resilience to warming will also depend on how fast the distribution of traits that define a species can adapt through other methods, in particular through redistribution of the abundance of variants within the population and through genetic evolution. In this paper, we use a simple theoretical ‘trait diffusion’ model to explore how the resilience of a given species to climate change depends on the initial trait diversity (biodiversity), the trait diffusion rate (mutation rate), and the lifetime of the organism. We estimate theoretical dangerous rates of continuous global warming that would exceed the ability of a species to adapt through trait diffusion, and therefore lead to a collapse in the overall productivity of the species. As the rate of adaptation through intraspecies competition and genetic evolution decreases with species lifetime, we find critical rates of change that also depend fundamentally on lifetime. Dangerous rates of warming vary from 1°C per lifetime (at low trait diffusion rate) to 8°C per lifetime (at high trait diffusion rate). We conclude that rapid climate change is liable to favour short-lived organisms (e.g. microbes) rather than longer-lived organisms (e.g. trees).


2001 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Moss ◽  
James Oswald ◽  
David Baines

Author(s):  
Brian C. O'Neill ◽  
F. Landis MacKellar ◽  
Wolfgang Lutz
Keyword(s):  

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