Climate Champ–Jasmine Butler, Science News For Students Climate Change Series, New Zealand’s Groundbreaking Climate Change Banking Law, Accelerate Resilience LA

CLIMATE CHAMPION, JASMINE BUTLER

Jasmine Butler is a Black geographer, environmental historian, educator, and community organizer. She is deeply invested in creating more just futures for all, and particularly for poor Black and brown southerners. While her work primarily falls within the environmental/climate justice realm, Jasmine is acutely aware of the connections and intersections of all forms of justice – racial, economic, migrant, food, etc. Currently Jasmine works as a network organizer with the Power Shift Network where she provides training, resources, and connections for network member organizations.

Butler was involved in the recent People vs. Fossil Fuel weeklong climate action events in Washington, DC.

Butler is quite candid about climate anxiety amongst her generation. In a recent interview with NPR, Butler said, “Climate anxiety is super-real. There are even orgs that I’m, you know, in community with who are starting to have whole events to try to help folks my age learn to deal with it.” 

She went on to say that A lot of folks her age are falling into this place of, despair. “What’s the point of working or trying or having kids or planning for a future that is so uncertain and so likely to look so different than we could have previously thought?”  Hey folks she’s leading the charge. We cannot let her down.

DEEPER DIVE: NPR, LinkedIn, Power Shift Network

ACCELERATE RESILIENCE, L.A.

Accelerate Resilience L.A. (ARLA) envisions Los Angeles as a climate-resilient region that is safer, healthier, and more prepared for our increasingly dangerous climate reality.

The group engages in capacity building, cross-sector collaboration, and community engagement to advance multi-benefit approaches that are key to developing individual and collective climate resilience.

ARLA was founded by Andy Lipkis, former President of TreePeople. He started planting trees to rehabilitate smog and fire damaged forests as a teenager. By age 18, he founded TreePeople, and served as its president from 1973 to 2019. Lipkis is a pioneer of Urban and Community Forestry and Urban Watershed Management. The Society of American Foresters and the American Society of Landscape Architects have, respectively, granted him the honorary titles of Forester and Landscape Architect in recognition of his life’s work.

We’d love to tell you more about ARLA, but sadly there just isn’t much on their website. I discovered them during my Climate Reality Leaders training session, sponsored by the Climate Reality

According to the non-profit jobs website, Idealist, ARLA engages in grant making, capacity building, cross-sector collaboration, technology development, and community engagement to enable a whole systems multi-benefit approach to resilience. ARLA worked recently with the Hilton Foundation to develop the Resilient Cities Initiative.

DEEPER DIVE: ARLA, Resilient Cities, Tree People

SCIENCE NEWS FOR STUDENTS CLIMATE CHANGE SERIES

Now more than ever, parents need to find ways to explain climate change to their children, along with the effects climate change will have on the rest of their lives. Daunting. So, why not get some help?

Since the 2018-2019 school year (?), Science News for Students has delved into those changes, with stories that focused on the new science behind them. From the start, it explored how Earth’s life — including humans — has begun to adapt. It’s a mistake to think that climate change is something that will only happen sometime later this century. These changes are underway now.

Science News for Students dedicated its first entire year to the topic in Climate Change Chronicles because well, Climate change is underway, and affecting the entire planet. 

What is Science News for Students and why does it matter to us?

Science News for Students is a free, award-winning online publication founded in 2003. It’s dedicated to providing age-appropriate science news to learners, parents and educators. It’s published by the Society for Science, a 501(c)3 non-profit membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education.

These are the 10 main features from the series that explain climate migration, the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events, how climate change has some unpredictable and strange effects on local weather, the impending water crisis, sea level rise and how the food we eat in the near future may be vastly different than the food we eat now.

Each article comes with a vocabulary lesson and other support. This series has a total of 33 articles that address the environment, culture and the effects of psychology on climate change, too.

DEEPER DIVE: SNfS, Climate Change Chronicles

NEW ZEALAND’S NEW CLIMATE REPORTING LAW FOR BANKS

Last week, New Zealand became the first country in the world to pass a law that will ensure financial organizations disclose and ultimately act on climate-related risks and opportunities. That according to a press release from Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Dr. David Clark and Climate Change Minister James Shaw.

“Financial services and markets play an important role in New Zealand’s transition to a clean, green and carbon-neutral future,” David Clark said.

The law will require disclosures for financial years beginning in 2023, subject to the publication of climate standards from New Zealand’s independent accounting standard setter, the External Reporting Board (XRB).

David Clark said, “This Bill will require around 200 of the largest financial market participants in New Zealand to disclose clear, comparable and consistent information about the risks, and opportunities, climate change presents to their business. In doing so, it will promote business certainty, raise expectations, accelerate progress and create a level playing field,”

The legislation is one of a number of actions the Government is taking to meet its international obligations and achieve the 2050 emissions targets required by the Climate Change Response Act 2002.

Said James Shaw, “Climate-related disclosures will bring climate risks and resilience into the heart of financial and business decision making. It will encourage entities to become more sustainable by factoring the short, medium, and long-term effects of climate change into their business decisions.”

Once in effect, it is expected to make a significant contribution to New Zealand achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

Shaw added, “New Zealand is a world-leader in this area and the first country in the world to introduce mandatory climate-related reporting for the financial sector. We have an opportunity to pave the way for other countries to make climate-related disclosures mandatory,”

DEEPER DIVE: NZ.gov, Reuters, NZ PM Speech, NZ Carbon Neutrality Presser