A massive landslide just north of Oslo, Norway, on Wednesday left 10 people dead or unaccounted for, officials said.

The landslide wiped out more than a dozen buildings in Ask, the administrative center of Gjerdrum municipality about 15 miles northeast of Oslo.

Authorities fear that some victims may be trapped in buildings that collapsed in the slide.

Officials said the landslide, which happened before dawn Wednesday, was roughly 2,300 feet long and dozens of feet wide.

“Those who worked here last night were overwhelmed when they saw the scene after daylight appeared,” local operations manager Roger Pettersen said.

At least six people from Ask were hospitalized and hundreds more from the village were evacuated. Efforts to rescue others were partly stymied by the ongoing danger of the landslide.

“It hurts to see how the forces of nature have ravaged Gjerdrum,” Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg tweeted. “My thoughts go to all those affected by the landslide. Now it is important that the emergency services get their job done.”

About 300 people who were evacuated from Ask took shelter at a hotel in nearby Skjetten, its manager said.

Ask is home to some 5,000 people.

Norway’s king Harald said in a statement that the accident had “made a deep impression on me and my family.

“My thoughts are with everyone affected, the injured, those who lost their homes and are now living in fear and uncertainty of the full extent of the disaster,” he said.

The observations from 2019 show that the annual average CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that year was 411,9 parts per million (ppm) at Zeppelin in Svalbard. This is 2,6 ppm more than the year before.

At Birkenes in Agder, the concentration is 416,1 ppm, which is 0,9 ppm higher than the year before.

This is according to a report by NILU, the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, commissioned by the Norwegian Environment Agency.

Concentration of CO2 is increasing

“We have observed new CO2-records at Zeppelin every year since 2001”, says Cathrine Lund Myhre from NILU in a press release.

“As long as we keep emitting more CO2 than that which is stored, the concentration in the atmosphere will continue to increase”, she says.

If the world is to keep the temperature below the 2 degree limit, the concentration of CO2 needs to stabilize at a level below 400 ppm over time.

Increased concentration of methane

When it comes to methane, the annual average was measured to 1961,2 parts per billion (ppb) at Birkenes, and 1952,9 ppb at Zeppelin.

Compared to 2018-levels, this represents an increase at Zeppelin of 14,3 ppb, the highest annual increase ever registered. At Birkenes, the increase was also considerable, at 8,2 ppb.

According to Lund Myhre, the increase in the concetration of methane is still a mystery to the researchers.

“We don’t know for certain whether the increase is due to emissions of methane from human activity, or if it is because climate change has started processes in nature that release more methane into the atmosphere”, Lund Myhre says.

Plastic pollution is not being effectively addressed by the current international legal and policy framework. Expert Group request UN to consider new global agreement. 

In the beginning of November over 200 delegates from all over the world representing government, business and civil society met to discuss how to deal with the increasing amount of ocean plastic pollution. A large majority of experts expressed support for launching negotiations to establish a global agreement to prevent plastic pollution at the fifth UN Environment Assembly (UNEA).

– It is frightening to know that vast amounts of plastic is entering the ocean and the environment every day, and that the problem is only increasing. In the same way we are cooperating globally to reduce climate emissions through the Paris Agreement, we need a global agreement to accelerate actions to prevent plastic pollution, says Norwegian Minister of Climate and Environment, Sveinung Rotevatn.

After a Norwegian initiative, the third UN Environment Assembly established an Ad Hoc Open-Ended Expert Group to assess various response options that can effectively reduce ocean plastic pollution. The Expert Group has now identified a range of options and requests countries to seriously consider these at the fifth UN Environment Assembly. Norwegian Climate and Environment Minister Sveinung Rotevatn is currently the President of the UN Environment Assembly.

Waste of resources

Vast quantities of plastic waste makes it to the ocean every day. Estimates show that plastic production is set to double in the next 20 years. There is reason to expect that pollution levels will rise in parallel if stronger measures are not put in place quickly.   

The Expert Group agrees that existing efforts are not sufficient, and there is a urgent need for stronger measures throughout the life cycle of plastics at the national, regional and global level to stop ocean pollution.

– Plastic pollution is destroying our oceans and the environment, with detrimental effects to animal life and biological diversity. But this is not only a pollution problem, it is also a waste of resources. I believe a global agreement will lead to stronger measures being implemented by countries throughout the life cycle of plastic than otherwise would be the case, says Norwegian Climate and Environment Minister, Sveinung Rotevatn.

Digital meetings

On account of the pandemic, delegates were unable to meet face-to-face and the meeting was held virtually. At times, there were significant technical difficulties for several delegates throughout the meeting as the quality of internet connections varied across geographical regions.

– It is notable that the group was able to agree even under such difficult circumstances. Environmental problems do not go away just because there is a pandemic. We cannot afford to postpone every challenging conversation until we are back to normal, says Rotevatn.

Internationally there is growing support for establishing a global agreement to prevent plastic pollution. Around 110 countries are encompassed by political declarations of support for exploring this possibility. However, several major countries such as USA and China have not expressed support for a new agreement. 

One way to fight deforestation is to pay countries to keep their forests from being logged. Norway is leading the way for such programs and has announced it will double the price it pays – but the rate might still not be competitive enough in middle-income countries.

Norway is doubling the price it guarantees developing nations to keep their tropical forests standing, in a step to slow catastrophic losses and encourage big companies to invest far more in nature to combat climate change.

In exchange for boosting the floor price it offers nations to slow deforestation to $10 per metric ton of carbon dioxide from $5 – until now the international standard – countries must adopt better monitoring, said Per Fredrik Pharo, director of Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative.

Norway is the top donor for safeguarding rainforests, ahead of nations including Germany and Britain, and has spent up to $330 million a year since 2008.

But despite concentrated efforts to curb losses, tropical forests are being cleared at a rate of a soccer field every six seconds, and deforestation accounts for about 11% of man-made greenhouse gas emissions each year, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Trees naturally curb global warming by soaking up carbon dioxide from the air in order to grow, which makes protecting forests a cost-effective way to deal with climate threats.

United States President-elect Joe Biden called in September for the world to mobilize $20 billion to protect the Amazon.

That rainforest locks up an estimated 500 metric tons of carbon dioxide for every 2.5 acres – roughly the size of a soccer field.

At $10 a metric ton, tropical forest countries could earn $5,000 for every 2.5 acres of rainforest they conserve compared to a benchmark of historic rates of losses.

The move comes as major firms including Walmart, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Shell have set goals of net zero emissions in coming decades since almost 200 governments adopted the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

To achieve those goals, many – besides slashing their own emissions – will need to pay to offset what they cannot cut, through measures potentially including protecting forests.

Mr. Pharo said getting the payment system for forest protection running effectively had suffered from “a chicken and egg problem” up to now. But “serious companies are now entering the fray,” he said, with Norway “using our money to grease the wheels.”

On one side of the chicken-and-egg dilemma, developing nations have found it less profitable to safeguard rainforests – at least in the short term – than to allow logging or to permit farmers to burn down forests to produce soya, palm oil, or beef.

On the other side, donor nations and companies are wary of paying to protect forests when their investments may literally go up in smoke. Deforestation has risen in Brazil, for instance, since populist President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019.

To qualify for the $10 floor price, Mr. Pharo said tropical forest governments will have to adopt a rigorous accounting and monitoring system for forests, known as ART TREES, worked out in February.

“What we are saying to countries – like Gabon, Indonesia, Colombia – is that ‘You have our price guarantee. If you deliver [metric tons] under ART TREES, we will pay you $10 a [metric ton], up to some ceiling’,” he said.

The hope is that compliance tracked by satellites and on-the-ground inspections will make big companies confident enough to invest $10 per metric ton or more, allowing Norway to stand aside and act mostly as a back-up.

Norway, which is western Europe’s top oil and gas exporter, has also helped set up nonprofit group Emergent to act as a broker to promote forest investments by companies.

Still, it is unclear if the $10 floor price will be enough to unlock investments.

Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, a former Costa Rican environment minister who heads the Global Environment Facility in Washington, said the value of standing forest had to match what farmers in tropical nations could earn from “unsustainable cattle ranching or agriculture after the land is deforested” and reward “positive land uses.”

Safeguarding forests also offers benefits like protecting biodiversity and human well-being, he said. But the costs of managing and monitoring forests to limit deforestation is often “higher than $10” per metric ton of carbon dioxide.

“For least developed countries, [$10] may be attractive, but for middle-income countries and those with high forest cover, it may be very low,” he said.

Frances Seymour, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, a U.S. think-tank, and chair of ART TREES, said a contract signed by Norway and Gabon in September 2019 – the first for $10 a metric ton – was seen among forest experts as “a big step forward.”

“Private sector talk of $15 a [metric ton] has raised eyebrows even further [and is] more in the ballpark towards $20 that would actually be of interest,” she said.

She said the international focus needed to be on slowing losses of existing rainforests, rather than planting new trees. She predicted a Biden administration will increase U.S. engagement in protecting forests.

Anders Haug Larsen, of the Rainforest Foundation Norway, welcomed Norway’s plan but said $10 “was not enough by itself to make the carrot big enough” for many forest nations.

Among hard-to-value extra benefits, forests are vast stores of biodiversity, from orangutans to jaguars or rare orchids. About 25% of all pharmaceuticals have ingredients from plants.

But managing forests better also can have spinoffs such as eco-tourism and sustainable logging.

Mary Grady, director of ART in California, said she was in talks about taking part with about 25 developing countries or sub-national governments that have power to pass laws to safeguard forests.

By enlisting governments, ART TREES will try to avoid past problems where successful forest protection in one region merely displaced loggers and farmers elsewhere, with no net benefits for forests.

“The corporate buyers like to be able to point to a specific region, a community, an iconic species they are protecting,” Ms. Grady said.

“While that is great on the cover of the annual report, it’s not delivering a real climate benefit if you realize that the forest is being burned down in the next jurisdiction over,” she added.

Emergent’s executive director Eron Bloomgarden said he was in talks with a wide range of major companies, in oil and gas, finance, technology, and other sectors, with combined annual turnover of $2 trillion.

He declined to give a list of names, except Norwegian energy group Equinor, which has publicly said it will invest in forests once a “well-functioning market is in place”.

Mr. Bloomgarden said he hoped for a first round of big corporate announcements of investments by a United Nations climate summit next year in Glasgow, Scotland.

Constance McDermott, a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, said there were still many hurdles standing in the way of Norway’s programs.

Any certification system will struggle, for instance, to ensure indigenous peoples’ rights to land, something often disputed by governments in developing nations, she said.

She called the Norwegian initiative “an interesting idea. But it has a lot of challenges to address.”

This story was reported by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The 2019 amendments of the Basel Convention, introducing new and stronger, legally binding international control on the transboundary movements of certain types of plastic wastes, are translated into Norwegian law, just in time for the 1.1.2021 implementation deadline. The new regulatory regime will facilitate government control with environmentally sound management conditions of plastic waste. 

Norway proposed these amendments in 2019. The Norwegian minister of climate and environment, Mr. Sveinung Rotevatn states:  “It is very important that we gain better control of the environmental conditions of this international trade. Unregulated trade in plastic waste globally has caused major problems to human health and the environment, especially in developing countries. The new international regime also reduces the risks of discharge of plastic litter and microplastics to the oceans.”

The essence of the new regulatory regime is the introduction of the Prior Informed Consent (PIC) procedure under the Basel Convention to plastic waste that is mixed, polluted and generally of little recycling value.  The procedure requires the exporter to submit documentation to its national authorities proving the existence of a contract with a recipient in the importing country, ensuring that the waste will be subject to environmentally sound management at its destination. The corresponding authorities in the importing country may approve of the transport, deny import or set specific conditions. The exporting country shall not allow the transport to proceed before the importing country has given its consent. This ensures that the waste is not sent to an unknown destiny. If anything goes wrong, the exporter has a duty to re-import.

Plastic waste that is suitable for recycling may be exported without going through the PIC procedure. The Basel amendments outline in detail how to distinguish between waste inside and outside of the control category. 

The decision to amend the Basel Convention was made at the 14th Conference of the Parties to the Convention. The Basel Convention is a multilateral environmental agreement on waste and in particular, transboundary transport of waste. The Convention entered into force in 1992, and has 188 Parties. The US is not a Party. 

Technically, the translation of the Basel amendments on plastic waste into Norwegian law is made by Norway accepting, as an EEA country, the revised EU regulation on transboundary transports of waste implementing the plastic amendments. The revised EU regulation is stricter than the Basel Convention in one direction: The EU introduces a ban on exports of Basel-regulated plastic waste from the EU to non-OECD countries. Norway will adopt the same regime.

A consequence of new rules is that more plastic waste than today has to be notified for consent by the national authorities before export.  However, Norwegian exports of plastic waste at present are not extensive. A main category is plastic waste from households. This waste is already subject to the PIC procedure when exported from Norway. Overall, the new regime will make it easier for the environmental authorities as well as private enterprises to be ensured that plastic waste that represent an environmental risk is not mismanaged. The fact that plastic waste suited for recycling does not require prior informed consent procedures will hopefully stimulate increased sorting of plastic waste into cleaner fractions before export, and thus support increased recycling rates and a more circular economy for plastics globally. 

The Norwegian Environment Agency is responsible for a four week public consultation on the revised regulation, from the 10th of November 2020.

The revised regulation shall enter into force as Norwegian law 1.1.2021.