June 5, 2023 - Your Scoop in CDR!

Disruptive Climate Protests Spur Police Raids in Germany and the US Inside Climate News- A series of police raids in Germany and the United States this week are resparking the debate over what is and isn’t an acceptable form of protest, as climate activists frustrated by the slow progress of their governments to curb rising carbon emissions continue to block traffic, target art installations and generally disrupt day-to-day public life.

On Wednesday, German police raided 15 properties linked to a climate activist group, making no arrests but seizing bank accounts and other assets as part of a larger criminal investigation that includes allegations of members trying to sabotage an oil pipeline. That same day, U.S. police arrested three environmental justice activists in Atlanta and charged them with money laundering and charity fraud. Those arrests were made in relation to ongoing protests over the controversial plan to build a large law enforcement training facility—nicknamed “Cop City” by activists—in some of Atlanta’s old-growth forest, which environmentalists want to protect.

Jobs created by net-zero transition will 'offset' fossil-fuel job losses in … Carbon Brief- Republican strongholds, such as Texas, Wyoming and Oklahoma, stand to gain hundreds of thousands of jobs in the clean-energy sector as the US moves to a net-zero economy, a new study concludes.

It finds that jobs in low-carbon industries would outweigh losses in most of the country’s fossil-fuel rich regions, as oil, coal and gas operations close down.

Total employment in the nationwide US energy sector could double or even triple by 2050 to meet the demand for wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines, according to the modelling published in Energy Policy.

Protected areas store a year’s worth of CO₂ emissions, study reveals Mongabay- By avoiding deforestation, globally protected areas store roughly one year’s worth of global fossil fuel emissions, compared to otherwise unprotected areas. That’s the conclusion of a recently published study that sought to calculate the carbon benefits of preserving forests and other landscapes.

Brazil’s Amazon has the highest rate of carbon stock of protected areas, according to the study, accounting for as much as 36% of the total. “These forests are the most threatened by human pressure, so protected areas are particularly important here,” Laura Duncanson, an assistant professor of geographical sciences at the University of Maryland and lead author of the new paper published June 1 in Nature Communications, told Mongabay in an email.

This study supports continued protection and expansion of protected areas as one approach to climate action,” Duncanson told Mongabay in an email. “Of course, this is still a relatively small piece of the picture — forest conservation alone will never solve the crisis without drastic cuts in fossil fuel emissions.”

For Viola Heinrich, a postdoctoral researcher with the University of Exeter, U.K., and the German Research Centre for Geosciences, who was not involved in the study, the results aren’t surprising but are welcome as they offer new data to inform policymakers. “It actually provides the quantitative evidence for policymakers to potentially expand protected areas where it’s possible, or where it’s feasible.”