Hubbard glacier in Seward, Alaska. Credit: Bigstock

Many eyes are turning north to the Arctic, some in horror at the rapid decline of a key component of our life support system, others in eager anticipation at the untapped resources beneath the vanishing snow and ice.

“I’ve worked in the north for 21 years and the scale and speed of change up there is astonishing,” said Douglas Clark of the University of Saskatchewan.

“These changes, taken as whole, and reflected in our report, keep me awake at night,” Clark told IPS.

Rapid and even abrupt changes are occurring on multiple fronts across the Arctic, according to the Arctic Resilience Report (ARR).

And what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.

“It’s the first international report to tell the world to buckle up, we’re on a wild roller coaster ride and we don’t know what’s coming,” he said.

The ARR report is a two-year collaboration between experts in the Nordic countries, Russia, Canada and the United States, and includes indigenous perspectives. It is a cutting edge assessment of how changes in climate, ecosystems, economics, and society interact.

The report was prepared for and released at the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Kiruna, Sweden on Wednesday.

“What is happening in the Arctic has profound implications for every part of the world,” said Sarah Cornell, lead author of the study.

Global warming is not only melting snow and ice, it is warming the Arctic ocean and the surrounding lands. Seasons are changing, permafrost is thawing, new species are invading, Arctic species are struggling, lakes are vanishing, and rivers are being redirected by the melting landscape, the report documents.

Some Arctic ecosystems are undergoing catastrophic changes, and some of these are large-scale and irreversible, Cornell, a scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, told IPS.

While the Arctic is as remote as the moon for many people, it is intimately interconnected with the rest of the world. Weather is driven largely by the cold Arctic and Antarctic regions balanced by the hot tropics. But the Arctic is rapidly defrosting – last summer the sea ice shrunk to half of what it was less than 30 years ago. The ice decline and the heating up of the Arctic have been accelerating in recent years.

“This has and will have spectacular consequences for the rest of the world. We don’t know what they’ll all be,” Cornell said.

The Arctic is home to cultures and species found nowhere else and they can’t go any further north to escape the rising temperatures. It is a real struggle to survive, said Tero Mustonen, president of Snowchange Cooperative, a network of local and indigenous cultures around the world.

“The Arctic is undergoing fundamental changes. Moose are showing up in the tundra for the first time along with new insects, plants and even trees,” Mustonen told IPS from his home in eastern Finland.

Mustonen, a co-author of the ARR, works with Chukchi reindeer herding communities from northeastern Siberia who have roamed those remote lands for hundreds of the years. Like many indigenous communities living on the land, they have a deep ecological, cultural and spiritual connection to their landscape. And that landscape is changing so much they sometimes don’t recognise their own home, he said.

“The Chukchi don’t easily share their thoughts. But the elders have a clear and powerful message to convey to the world: ‘Nature doesn’t trust humans any more’.”

However, the focus of the eight-nation Arctic Council was primarily on future shipping opportunities, access to oil, gas and mineral resources, and geopolitics, with China, Japan, India, South Korea, Singapore and Italy granted observer status on the Council while Canada blocked the European Union’s application.

The Council is the world’s main international forum on northern issues and will be led by Canada for the next two years. Canada said it will focus on economic development. Estimates show that the region may have 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30 percent of undiscovered gas deposits, and vast quantities of mineral resources.

The Council’s much-lauded scientific research will now be focused on how to develop northern resources for the benefit of northerners. Canada recently drew criticism for re-directing its own scientific research to supporting business and industry.

Secretary of State John Kerry represented the U.S. at the Arctic Council, demonstrating Washington’s renewed interest in the Arctic. The White House also released its new National Strategy for the Arctic Region. While acknowledging the profound impacts of global warming on the region and indigenous people, the U.S. strategy says the region will help to supply U.S. energy needs well into the future.

At the meeting, members adopted an agreement on marine oil pollution preparedness. Some indigenous and environmental groups urged the Council to place a moratorium on drilling for oil in the Arctic given the dangerous conditions and difficulties of clean up.

Greenpeace International said the oil pollution agreement offered no specific practical minimum standards and had no provisions to hold companies liable for the full costs and damages.

“There were two conferences going on here — one that warned of the dangers of climate change and rapid industrialisation in this fragile region, and another, attended by foreign ministers, that took almost no concrete steps to address them,” said Ruth Davis, Greenpeace International senior policy advisor.

Arctic peoples aren’t necessarily opposed to economic development but they do want to be in control of what happens. However, Arctic nations and local communities are at very different stages. In Finland and Russia, indigenous people have no official land or water rights, unlike Canada or Alaska, said Mustonen.

“The rights and cultures of indigenous peoples in these regions have to be taken seriously in order to integrate their needs into any form of development,” he said.

A child at a lead-contaminated site. Credit: Blacksmith Institute

Toxic waste sites in 31 countries are damaging the brains of nearly 800,000 children and impairing the health of millions of people in the developing world, two new studies have found.

Toxins and pollutants in the environment are major sources of illness and reduced lifespans globally. The impacts on health in some countries are on par with malaria, said Kevin Chatham-Stephens, a pediatric environmental health fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

“We were surprised that health impacts of living near toxic sites were on par with other well-known threats to public health such as malaria,” Chatham-Stephens told IPS.

In one study researchers found elevated levels of lead, chromium and other chemicals in soil and water samples near 373 toxic waste sites located in India, the Philippines and Indonesia. Nearly nine million people live near these sites and researchers calculated that the likely impact from diseases caused by exposure to these chemicals amounted to 828,722 lost years due to ill-health, disability or early death.

Malaria in the same countries caused 725,000 lost years of full health.

The “lost year” metric is known as disability-adjusted life years (DALY), a measure of overall disease burden used by the World Health Organisation. One DALY represents the loss of one year of equivalent full health.

“Lead and hexavalent chromium proved to be the most toxic chemicals and caused the majority of disease, disability and mortality among the individuals living near the sites,” said Chatham-Stephens, co-author of the study published this week in Environmental Health Perspectives.

The study was done in partnership with the Blacksmith Institute, a small international NGO based in New York City investigating the health risks of toxic sites in low and middle income countries. Blacksmith publishes the annual “World’s Worst Pollution Problems Report” to raise awareness and funding to help clean-up the worst sites.

Toxic sites “fly under the radar” in terms of public health awareness and action. Little research has been done on the health impacts of chemical pollutants in developing countries.

“This is the first estimate of the burden of disease resulting from living near toxic waste sites,” said Chatham-Stephens.

Previous studies have shown that lead can cause neurological, gastrointestinal and cardiovascular damage. Exposure to high levels of chromium has been shown to increase chances of developing lung cancer.

“This study highlights a major and previously under-recognised global health problem in lower and middle income countries,” said Philip Landrigan, MD, MSc, dean for Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine and a co-author.

“The next step is targeting interventions such as cleaning up the sites and minimising the exposure of humans in each of these countries where toxic chemicals are greatly present,” said Landrigan.

In a second study, researchers measured lead levels in soil and drinking water at 200 toxic waste sites in 31 countries, then estimated the blood lead levels in 779,989 children who were potentially exposed to lead from those sites. They found that their blood lead levels were likely very high, 15 to 20 times higher on average than children in the U.S.

“Lead has serious, long-term health consequences such as the potential to impair cognitive development in children and cause mental retardation,” said Chatham-Stephens.

Based on these findings, Chatham-Stephens estimates a loss of five to eight IQ points per child and an incidence of mild mental retardation in six out of every 1,000 children.

Increased cardiovascular disease is another impact from lead exposure but wasn’t part of the study. “We couldn’t account for every health impact,” he said. “We hope these studies raise awareness and result in on-site disease surveillance, including measurements of blood lead levels in children.”

Given the very high levels of toxins at some sites, targeted clean-up is also an urgent issue, he said.

“(Toxic sites) are a major public health problem that is hiding in plain sight,” Bret Ericson of the Blacksmith Institute previously told IPS.

“We have found lots of nasty sites out there but we don’t have the money to clean them up,” Ericson said.

Floods devastated the Mauritian capital, Port-Louis, on Mar. 30 but locals can expect the island to be affected by more floods, landslides and cyclones in the coming years because of climate change. Credit: Nasseem Ackbarally/IPS

Another week of international climate negotiations ended in Bonn, Germany last Friday, but there was little mid-level bureaucrats could do when world leaders remain in thrall to the fossil fuel industry, say environmentalists.

“The main barrier to confronting the climate crisis isn’t lack of knowledge about the problem, nor is it the lack of cost-effective solutions,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“It’s the lack of political will by most world leaders to confront the special interests that have worked long and hard to block the path to a sustainable low-carbon future. Until this changes, we’re not going to see the action we need,” said Meyer, who has attended virtually every climate negotiation over the past 19 years.

Canada offers a perfect example. Its much-promoted strategy for future prosperity is based on pumping two billion of tonnes of climate-heating CO2 into the atmosphere. Tens of billions of dollars are being invested in the Alberta tar sands to increase production from 1.6 million barrels a day to four to five million a day by 2020.

That translates into one billion tonnes of CO2 a year from tar sands extraction and burning the resulting fuels.

Canada is also one of the world’s largest natural gas producers, with aggressive expansion plans estimated to result in adding 0.5 billion tonnes of CO2 annually by 2020 for production and burning.

Top this off with 80 to 100 million tonnes of CO2 from coal and Canada’s ‘normal’ domestic emissions of half a billion tonnes and Canada’s future prosperity will be based on profiting from dumping two billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The science is clear that to have a good chance of keeping global temperature increases below two degrees C requires global emissions to decline at least six to 10 billion tonnes below 2011 levels by 2020. And this decline must continue to push emissions lower every year thereafter. Instead emissions are increasing each year.

At least 78 percent of Canada’s proven oil, bitumen, gas and coal reserves, and 89 percent of proven-plus-probable reserves would need to remain underground as part of Canada’s effort to stay below two degrees C, according to a recent study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

“Business-as-usual for the fossil fuel industry is incompatible with the need to keep the global temperature increase to two degrees C or less,” said CCPA senior economist Marc Lee.

“We are in need of a ‘managed retreat’ from fossil fuel investments,” said Lee.

However, under the Stephen Harper government Canada has pulled out of the Kyoto climate treaty, and reduced its support for energy efficiency and clean energy while continuing to provide more than one billion dollars in annual subsidies or tax incentives for fossil fuel companies.

Despite propaganda that rich countries like Canada take the dangers of climate change seriously, it is absolutely clear they do not. “World leaders are acting like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Meyer said in a statement.

Developed countries must look at the gap between where the science says their targets should be in 2020, which is 50 percent below 1990 levels, and their current commitments are just 13 percent, said Augustine Njamnshi of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA).

Despite all this the Bonn meeting ended with a positive dynamic, according to many participants. The Association of Small Island States launched a plan designed to have countries commit to deeper cuts in carbon emissions in the next few years. And there was much discussion around the issue of equity or fairness in terms of emissions reductions for a new climate treaty to be signed in 2015.

However, there were no commitments or specifics, said Njamnshi in a statement.

These discussions will continue at a two-week meeting in June also in Bonn. In November, leaders are slated to attend the annual U.N. climate conference known as COP 19 in Warsaw. There they need to agree on action to shrink the gap between pledges and what science says is needed, said Jan Kowalzig of Oxfam Germany.

“We’re on track to four degrees of warming which will be disastrous for most countries,” Kowalzig told IPS.

In Bonn, there was good discussion on how to reduce the gap, including the Association of Small Island States’ plan to have governments make specific commitments on renewable energy and energy efficiency at COP 19, he said.

The Climate Action Network, a coalition of over 90 civil society organisations including Oxfam, “wholeheartedly support this initiative”, he said.

An action plan for phasing out fossil subsidies also needs to be agreed on at COP 19. In addition, developed countries like Canada, the U.S. and Australia must come prepared to increase “their pathetically low emissions reduction targets”, Kowalzig said.

A contaminated stream in Kimicanga, a suburb of Kigali, Rwanda. What if human and other waste could be turned into an energy and revenue-producing bio-gas? Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

One, two or more of the 102 newly launched out-of-the box ideas to improve global health could be world-changing breakthroughs.

It might be someone’s idea to create a test strip you touch with your tongue to see if you have a deadly disease. Or a mobile phone game to prevent HIV. Or the idea that untreated human waste from slums could be turned into marketable products.

Breakthroughs can’t happen without a genius idea and the opportunity to see if it works, said Dr. Peter Singer, CEO of Grand Challenges Canada.

“The health challenge is global but opportunities to pursue unconventional ideas is not,” Singer told IPS.

Grand Challenges Canada just announced grants of 100,000 dollars for 102 imaginative new ideas to tackle health problems in resource-poor countries. Of these, 59 grants went to researchers in 13 low- and middle-income nations worldwide.

“I was in Tanzania recently and young researchers there had great, off-the-wall ideas but no one thought they’d ever have a chance to pursue them,” he said.

Global Challenges Canada not only provides funding, it often acts as a mentor and helps set up partnerships with researchers in Canada. “Sometimes it’s just a matter of building self-confidence in their idea,” Singer said.

Although the 102 ideas are selected through a peer-review process, at this early point they aren’t much more than inspired ideas. No public or private organisations are interested in investing at such an early unproven stage.

Singer calls this the “pioneering gap” and hopes to create an “innovation pipeline” that one day will improve the health of people in their country.

“Maybe a few of these will become household health products one day,” he said.

If any of these raw ideas prove effective, the innovators will be eligible for an additional Grand Challenges Canada scale-up funding of up to one million dollars. The government of Canada funds the programme and is committing roughly 10.9 million dollars to support a portfolio of projects that could transform the way disease is treated in the developing world through the Grand Challenges Canada Stars in Global Health programme.

“We are pleased to work with our like-minded partners around the world to support global innovation and entrepreneurship that help produce better, brighter futures for people around the world,” said Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.

In Uganda, almost all human waste is discharged into streams, rivers and lakes, causing huge health problems. What if human and other waste could be turned into an energy and revenue-producing bio-gas?

Corinne Schuster-Wallace of U.N. University’s Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health is working with two Canadian companies to use large underground tanks to mulch human waste along with fish market refuse and other organic trash. Methane from the tanks will be tapped for a new economical source of fuel.

A sanitation system for 400,000 people in Kampala’s urban slums could operate on the profits from selling the biogas, a recent study showed. (Video of Schuster speaking about the project)

Another Ugandan project involves the development of a paper-strip test for the rare but deadly Ebola and Marburg viruses. The highly infectious nature of both diseases makes them major global threats. They are very hard to detect in the early stages, said project leader Dr. Misaki Wayengera of the Makerere University College of Health Sciences. (Video clip of Dr Wayengera talking about his project)

A similar test strip is being developed to test for dengue, often called “breakbone fever”, which afflicts up to 100 million people in tropical climates, said Ken Simiyu, a programme officer at Grand Challenges Canada. Early detection and treatment makes a huge difference in the outcome.

The idea is that a 10-cent strip of plastic-coated gold nanoparticles in combination with a 10-dollar hand-held device will be able to detect the disease, Simiyu told IPS.

Brazilian-born Dr. Alexandre Brolo of the University of Victoria, Canada has developed the test strip and will be testing it in Brazil. (Dr. Brolo talks about his innovation)

A less high-tech approach to improving global health is the proposed “sugar daddy” game for mobile phones. It’s a role-playing game to raise awareness about HIV’s dangers among girls and anticipate propositions from “sugar daddies”, said Simiyu.

Led by Dr. Njambi Njuguna of Kenyatta National Hospital, Kenya, the programme will send HIV-related mobile phone text messages to young females, many of whom do not perceive themselves to be at risk and thus don’t test. In Kenya, 84 percent of HIV-infected people are unaware of their status, with 33 percent untested because they don’t perceive a risk to themselves. (Dr. Njuguna talks about her bold idea)

Mobile phones could also provide real-time public health data from remote regions such as Nepal’s mountainous rural Achham district northwest of Kathmandu. Harvard researcher Duncan Maru, MD, PhD and a team of rural practitioners plan to help remote, rural community health workers use mobile phones to upload and publish data on both illness and local public health care capacity. (Dr. Maru talks about this first real-time surveillance system)

Getting this kind of real-time data is extremely important in both prevention and in designing effective public health programmes, said Singer.

“Beverage companies know exactly how many bottles they sold today. But in most of the world, we don’t know how many children died today,” he said. “If we don’t measure we can’t act.”

Mining tar sands oil in Canada. Credit: Chris Arsenault/IPS

Nearly 70 percent of known reserves of oil, gas and coal must remain in the ground to avoid dangerous climate change. So why did the energy industry spend 674 billion dollars in 2012 looking for more?

A moratorium on investments new fossil fuel infrastructure is the obvious thing to do about this, said Asad Rehman, head of international climate at Friends of the Earth in the UK.

The United Nations is the place to get countries to begin a serious conversation about imposing such a moratorium starting Monday in Bonn, Germany, Rehman told IPS.

The 195 parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are meeting next week in Bonn on a new climate treaty that would go into force in 2020 and discuss ways reduce emissions from fossil fuels prior to 2020.

The World Bank, International Energy Agency and a new report from economist Lord Nicholas Stern all say that close to 70 percent of known reserves of fossil fuels are “unburnable” to have a chance of global warming staying below two degrees C.

The global average temperature has already risen 0.8C, leading to the loss of most of the sea ice in the Arctic, extreme weather events around the world, rising sea levels and oceans that are 30 percent more acidic.

The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere will likely hit 400 parts per million (ppm) this May. That will be the first time in at least three million years.

All nations have agreed under the UNFCCC to keep temperatures below two degrees C, which is by no means a safe level of warming. However, scientists say we are on a path to at least three degrees C, which will trigger irreversible feedbacks leading to much higher temperatures and far worse impacts.

“It’s illogical to be making new investments in fossil fuel infrastructure,” Rehmand said.

The Carbon Tracker agrees. It’s a thinktank whose supporters include the big banks, Standard and Poor’s and the International Energy Agency. It co-authored the “Unburnable Carbon 2013″ report with Lord Stern.

The Carbon Tracker says investments in fossil fuel are foolish and continuing them will inevitably crash the global economy because countries will be forced to severely limit how much fossil fuel is burned.

“The scale of ‘listed’ unburnable carbon revealed in this report is astonishing,” said Paul Spedding, an oil and gas analyst at HSBC.

“This report makes it clear that ‘business as usual’ is not a viable option for the fossil fuel industry in the long term,” Speeding said in statement.

While banks and investors are finally waking up to the carbon-climate problem, countries have struggled for two decades under the UNFCCC to construct a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions enough to stay below two degrees C. Perversely, those same countries are pumping 1.9 trillion of their taxpayer’s money each year into subsidising the fossil fuel industry, reported the International Monetary Fund last month. (1.9. trillion seconds is about 60,000 years.)

Countries have promised to reduce these subsidies for the world’s richest industry, but few have acted.

“It’s bipolar…there is a complete lack of leadership,” said Alden Meyer, Union of Concerned Scientists’ director of strategy and policy.

The result is that global carbon emissions rise ever higher each year when they need to begin to decline. The gap between where we are and where we need to go is getting wider every year, Meyer said at a press conference last week.

The UNFCCC meeting in Bonn Apr. 29 to May 3 is one of several weeks of meetings before the annual Convention of the Parties (COP 19) negotiations in Poland this November. The main issues, as always, will be deciding how big the emissions cuts will be, the timing of those cuts and what the contribution should be for each country.

“There are two things to tackle in Bonn: how developed countries fulfill their promises to cut emissions deep and meet their financial commitments to enable developing countries to address climate change now,” said Meena Raman, negotiation expert at the Third World Network.

Developed countries and blocs like the U.S., Canada and the European Union do not appear ready to increase their promised emission cuts even though they are insufficient to achieve the two-degree C target and are collectively less than those from developing countries, as previously reported by IPS.

China is now the world’s biggest carbon emitter but it will be many years yet before the carbon molecules in the atmosphere with little Chinese flags on them will match those with U.S. flags. Since CO2 resides in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, emissions of 50 years ago have the same impact on the climate as those emitted today.

“It’s not hard to figure out the total amount of CO2 from the U.S. and other developed countries already in the atmosphere,” said Sivan Kartha, Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute’s US Center.

“Taking responsibility for the mess you made is a widely-accepted principle,” Kartha told IPS.

This politically thorny issue is known as “historical emissions” and it pits the South against the North. More recently, countries in the North have been pushing the concept of “mitigation potential” suggesting that it is harder for the U.S. to reduce carbon emissions because of existing infrastructure than it is for poor countries like India who haven’t built them yet, he said.

While “moratorium” will only be whispered about, “equity” will be the buzzword in play in Bonn this week, Kartha said.

Positive developments on climate are largely found outside the UNFCCC process. China and the U.S. recently signed a landmark agreement on climate and clean energy. Both countries agreed climate change poses a serious risk and have agreed to take a global leadership position, said Alden Myer.

“I take this a very positive sign,” but it remains to be seen if this translates into action, Meyer said.

Antarctic Ocean Alliance activists outside the Russian Embassy in Berlin. Credit: Courtesy of George Torode

Everyone loves penguins, but few will know that Thursday is World Penguin Day. Fewer still are those who know penguins are threatened with extinction by climate change and giant fishing trawlers from Europe and Asia stalking the oceans around Antarctica.

Penguins are a protected species, but the factory-sized trawlers are vacuuming up the tiny shrimp-like krill that are their main food source. The Southern Ocean is also becoming increasingly acidic from emissions of fossil fuels and will have a significant impact on krill populations.

And yet efforts to create two marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean have been blocked by China, Russia and Norway.

A network of protected areas was supposed to be established last year but the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) failed to reach a consensus, said Donna Mattfield of the Antarctic Ocean Alliance, a coalition of 30 scientific and environmental organisations.

All 25 CCAMLR member nations had committed to establishing a network but could not agree on marine protected area (MPA) proposals for East Antarctica, and the Ross Sea. They previously agreed to one small MPA in the South Orkney Islands, Mattfield told IPS.

“There’s no scientific justification for not going ahead with the MPAs,” she said noting that less than two percent of the world’s oceans are under any kind of protective management.

The proposed MPAs cover several million square kilometres of the Southern Ocean with a combination of multiple use MPAs and no-take marine reserves. A final decision on these MPAs will come at a special CCAMLR meeting in Bremerhaven, Germany in July.

“The Southern Ocean is under increasing pressure from climate change and resource extraction, but areas such as the Ross Sea and East Antarctica are amongst the least impacted, healthiest, and most beautiful oceans in the world. They are one of the last remaining wildernesses on the planet and deemed a necessary ‘living laboratory’ by scientists”, said Onno Gross, a marine biologist and director of Deepwave, an ocean conservation NGO.

Of the world’s 18 penguin species, 13 are now so threatened they need special protection. In the last few years, factory trawlers have made their way to the remote Southern Ocean to catch krill for the fast-growing trade to supply krill as fish meal for farmed salmon.

More recently, krill are being used to supply the booming health food and pharmaceutical markets for omega-3 three fatty acids believed to prevent heart disease and inflammatory conditions such as arthritis.

“Omega-3 three fatty acids can be obtained from plants. We don’t need them from fish,” says Thilo Maack of Greenpeace.

Europeans are subsidising the construction of supertrawlers that are plundering the oceans off West Africa and now the Southern Ocean because there aren’t enough fish left in European waters, Maack told IPS.

He knows of at least two German-built supertrawlers that are fishing krill. “It’s absurd. We’re going to the ends of the world to find the last few fish. We haven’t learned from our mistakes,” he said.

CCAMLR has set a krill quota of 400,000 tonnes and some 50 trawlers now ply the cold and dangerous waters. Just last week in the Ross Sea, a Chinese supertrawler caught fire and its crew of nearly 100 had to rescued. Luckily the trawler did not leak its thousand tonnes of diesel fuel.

Not a great deal is known about Antarctic krill populations. They are believed to exist in the hundreds of millions of tonnes. However the Southern Ocean is undergoing rapid changes. Krill larvae feed on algae living on the bottom of sea ice, which is rapidly dwindling around the Antarctic Peninsula with rising temperatures.

According to one estimate, the number of krill in the Southern Ocean may have dropped by 80 percent since the 1970s.

CO2 emissions from fossil fuels has made seawater is 30 percent more acidic than 50 years ago. These acid waters weaken or dissolve the shells of many creatures like sea snails. This is already happening in parts of the Southern Ocean. Krill will also be affected especially as acidification worsens with more CO2 emissions, says Maack.

Without major emissions cuts, large parts of the Southern Ocean will be too acidic for shell-forming species, including most plankton and krill, by 2040, oceanographer Carol Turley from Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK previously told IPS.

“We are hoping Germany as host of the special CCAMLR meeting in July will push China, Russia and Norway into agreeing to the two proposed MPAs,” Maack said.

There is a lot riding on this decision Mattfield believes. “It’s an opportunity to create the biggest protected area in history,” she said.

Solar panel fields in Provence, France. Credit: Coralie Tripier/IPS

It is the first conference in U.S. history where the leaders in the 100-percent renewable energy revolution will share their knowledge and vision.

“There are powerful economic and environmental reasons for this transformation…and the sooner we get there the better for the climate,” says Diane Moss, organiser of the “Pathways to 100% Renewable Energy” conference at the FortMasonCenter Apr. 16.

“It’s already started but we need a serious global dialogue about how to successfully chart the course to a shared 100-percent renewable energy future,” Moss told IPS.

The clean-and-green-energy era is well underway in Denmark, Scotland, Iceland and in cities like Munich, Germany, Malmo, Sweden, and San Francisco, all of which are moving towards 100 percent renewable energy. Many towns in Europe have already have 100 percent pollution-free “eternal” energy sources from wind, solar, and biomass, she says.

In the United States, Greensberg, Kansas achieved 100-percent green energy in just a few years after the town was devastated by tornados in 2007. Dozens of other towns and cites totalling more than 40 million people have moved or are moving to 100 percent renewable, according to Go100% Renewable Energy.

In the first three months of this year, the U.S. added more wind and solar energy generating capacity than any other form of energy combined, although renewables remain a fraction of the grid – 13.2 percent in 2012, a little more than half consisting of hydropower.

“The next big step is create policies so communities and the general public directly benefit,” says Jose Etcheverry, co-chair, Sustainable Energy Initiative at YorkUniversity in Toronto.

“It’s not enough just to get a token payment, the public needs to be directly involved,” Etcheverry told IPS.

Coastal communities in Denmark have created trusts to finance renewable projects and in some cases green energy has become their main source of income, he said.

Using wind, water and sunlight to meet 100 percent or close to 100 percent of energy needs is both feasible and practical. StanfordUniversity energy expert Mark Jacobson published a detailed plan how New YorkState could reach that goal by 2030, IPS previously reported.

It’s not only doable but also “sustainable and inexpensive”, Jacobson told IPS

Air pollution, which comes mainly from burning coal, oil and gas, costs U.S. citizens hundreds of billions a year in healthcare, lost days at work and shortened lives. Globally, climate change is estimated to cost 1.2 trillion dollars a year from lost food production and extreme weather events, according to the DARA group, a non-governmental organisation based in Europe.

Much of the San Francisco conference will focus on the best local and regional policies such as feed-in-tariffs, green power purchasing and utility regulation, says Etcheverry.

Feed-in-tariffs are often portrayed as subsidies, which is inaccurate, says Paul Gipe, a wind energy expert from California. They are simply a negotiated price for energy from an energy provider to a user. The price has to be enticing enough for the provider or generator to make the capital investment.

“That is how the electricity sector in the U.S. functioned for years before de-regulation,” Gipe told IPS. “I’m opposed to subsidies, especially those the fossil fuel industry receives.”

According a new report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the fossil energy sector receives a “staggering 1.9 trillion dollars worldwide” a year in public subsidies, rebates and avoided tax on pollution. (1.9 trillion seconds is roughly 60,000 years) Removing those subsidies would strengthen incentives for “research and development in energy-saving and alternative technologies”, the IMF said.

None of this cheers the extraordinarily rich and powerful fossil energy industry. Nor are the nuclear industry and many big power utilities supporters of a renewable revolution. “Renewables threaten their business model and their profits,” Gipe says.

An intense public relations war is underway to persuade the public and political leaders that renewables are too expensive, unreliable, and not practical. Anti-wind movements have sprung up, sometimes in areas where there are no wind turbines.

“It’s actually an attack on renewables,” Gipe says. “Anti-wind advocates are often angry bullies who shout others down at meetings. My life has been threatened more than once.”

In California or Ontario, local utilities require 50 pages of paperwork for a homeowner to plug their rooftop solar panels into the electrical grid. And even then it could take a year or more to be connected. In Germany, the paperwork is four pages and residents have a legal right to connected as fast as possible, Gipe says.

To have a real opportunity to be climate heroes instead of climate victims, the silent majority will have to speak up and stand up to the propaganda and the bullies, he says.

Recurring droughts have destroyed most harvests in the Sahel. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

Canada’s Stephen Harper government made the decision behind closed doors without consultation.

This follows another unexpected decision late last week to fold Canada’s aid agency CIDA into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The CIDA decision was widely criticised by Canada’s development community for directly linking aid to trade.

Desertification and degradation of land is an enormous problem and getting worse with climate change, says Robert Fox of Oxfam Canada.

“I’m gobsmacked Canada would do this,” Fox told IPS.

Each year, 12 million hectares of land, where 20 million tonnes of grain could have been grown, are lost to desertification. Land degradation is the world’s quiet crisis, undercutting food production, increasing water scarcity, impoverishing hundreds of millions of people and affecting two billion overall.

“Our goal is to build a land-degradation-neutral world,” Luc Gnacadja, UNCCD executive secretary, told IPS previously. The target date to reach that goal is 2030.

Every country in the world makes a contribution to support the UNCCD. Canada’s contribution for 2012-13 was supposed to be 315,000 dollars and it remains unpaid, the secretariat told IPS.

In an emailed response, Amy Mills of CIDA told IPS, “CIDA has already paid Canada’s assessed annual contribution of 350,000 dollars for 2012, and will pay its contribution of 315,000 dollars for 2013.”

Canada’s commitments to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity are unaffected, she said.

“We are seeking to use Canada’s resources in the most effective manner possible. Canada will continue to play a leadership role in advancing the global food security and nutrition agenda. For example, Canada has helped almost four million farming households across Africa obtain more drought-resistant seeds for their bean crops.

“In the past, Canada has tried several times to help position the Desertification Convention as a significant means to promote global, and Canadian, priorities to improve food security and to combat land degradation and desertification. We believe other efforts are achieving better results,” she said.

Last year, the Stephen Harper government spent 28 million dollars celebrating the 100th anniversary of the War of 1812, a minor conflict between the U.S. and Canada.

“That Canada would do this (leave the UNCCD) is really a scandal,” Christoph Bals, policy director of Germanwatch, a German NGO focused on development and global equity.

Canada has long been a leader and champion of the U.N. and multilateralism, which is the only way major global issues like poverty, hunger and climate change can be addressed, he told IPS from his office in Berlin.

The decision to abandon the UNCCD follows another Harper government decision in 2011 to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, the only legal treaty to combat climate change.

“I heard from many, many Canadians about how ashamed they were by the decision to leave Kyoto,” said Bals. “That decision and the UNCCD decision do not reflect the majority of Canadians, in my opinion.”

Instead the Harper government decisions reflect the narrow interests of Canada’s fossil fuel industry, he says.

Canada’s abandonment of yet another U.N. organisation trying to solve major global issues could have far-reaching consequences, Bals says. Canada is wealthy and doing very well economically but countries facing economic or other challenges may decide they don’t need to participate either.

“It sends a very negative signal,” he said. “There will be consequences for people around the world.”

Global governance is weak and needs support not abandonment, says Fox. “The U.N. is a tough place to get things done but the solution is not to simply walk away.”

Canada recently committed 250 million dollars annually in food assistance under the new U.N. Food Assistance Convention to help millions facing hunger. It has also been generous in terms of humanitarian aid for crisis like the Horn of Africa drought, he says.

Ironically, the Harper government is rejecting the very U.N. body whose primary objective is to prevent and reduce hunger and the impacts of drought. With this decision, Canada is saying it’s not interested in prevention or solving the problem, Fox says.

“I hope there will be enough domestic and international pressure that the government will re-consider. It is simply the wrong move.”

Piped water has made life easier for this Laotian boy, who no longer has to help his parents fetch water from afar. Up to 1.7 billion people face scarcity. Credit: Vannaphone Sitthirath/IPS

We are surrounded by an unseen world of water: furniture, houses, cars, roads, buildings – practically everything we use and make needs water.

“There is no way to generate energy without water,” said Zafar Adeel, co-chair of the UN-Water Task Force on Water Security and director of the Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Canada.

Even solar panels need regular washing to perform well. Wind energy might be an exception, Adeel told IPS from a water conference in Beijing being held during World Water Week.

There is growing recognition that peak oil is nowhere near as important as peak water because there is no substitute for water. The growing shortage of water — 1.2 to 1.7 billion people face scarcity — has alarmed many. Water has been identified as an “urgent security issue”, by a group that last year included both former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the InterAction Council, an association of 37 former heads of state and government.

It’s important that “water security” be recognised by the U.N. Security Council as either as a trigger, a potential target, or a contributing factor to insecurity and potential conflict in many parts of the world, said Adeel.

Defining exactly what the term “water security” means has been challenging, but UN-Water, the United Nations’ inter-agency coordination mechanism for all water-related issues, now has a working definition.

They have defined water security as: “The capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of and acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being, and socio-economic development, for ensuring protection against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters, and for preserving ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability.”

The definition was released Friday on World Water Day along with an analytical brief “Water Security and the Global Water Agenda“.

“Water fits within this broader definition of security — embracing political, health, economic, personal, food, energy, environmental and other concerns — and acts as a central link between them,”says Michel Jarraud, Chair of UN-Water and secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

It is important to note that conflicts over water are rare. “Historically there hasn’t been a war between nations over water,” said Harriet Bigas, a co-author of the brief and colleague of Adeel at the Institute for Water, Environment and Health.

Water issues do create friction between nations and have led to local internal conflicts, she said in an interview.

Driven largely by water and food shortages linked to drought in the Horn of Africa, almost 185,000 Somalis fled to neighbouring countries in 2011. In Sudan, violence broke out in March 2012 in the Jamam refugee camp where large numbers of people faced serious water scarcity. And in South Sudan, entire communities were forced to leave due to scarce water resources as a result of conflict in 2012.

Water insecurity can lead to cascading political, social, economic and environmental consequences, she said.

However, the norm is for nations and regional partners to work out water-sharing agreements, offering important opportunities for dialogue amongst traditional enemies.

“Water is a greater pathway to peace than conflict,” writes noted international water expert Aaron Wolf of Oregon State University.

Even when nations are at war, they negotiate water-sharing agreements, Wolf says. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos continued the successful Mekong Committee to manage the Mekong River even during the Vietnam war.

In 2010 Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina signed an agreement to share the management of the Guaraní Aquifer, which extends over more than one million sq km. A population of 15 million today relies on the aquifer because surface water, though abundant, is often polluted, the UN-Water brief noted.

There’s also rising international support for adopting “universal water security” as one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — a set of mid-term global objectives to succeed the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, agreed by world leaders in 2000 for achievement by 2015.

“Water encompasses all aspects of development. We’re hopeful water security will be one of the main SDGs,” said Adeel.

Water, food and energy are sides of the same triangle – shrink one side and it affects the other two, he said.

An SDG for water security should include targets and indicators that reflect this. It needs to specific to various countries’ needs and indicate what resources will be needed to achieve water security. “It’s important to explicit state how each country can get there.”

The draft SDGs will be presented at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly this September.

The biggest challenge in achieving universal water security is not money or technology but human institutions, said Bigas. Simply getting government departments in the same country to coordinate on water issues is “an enormous challenge”.

The Empire State Building viewed at night. Credit: NLNY/cc by 2.0

As usual, midtown Manhattan is packed with whisper-quiet cars and trams while thousands walk the streets listening to the birds of spring sing amongst the gleaming, grime-free skyscrapers in the crystal-clear morning air.

Welcome to New York City in April 2030.

This is not a fantasy. It is a perfectly doable goal, said Stanford University energy expert Mark Jacobson. In fact, the entire state of New York could be powered by wind, water and sunlight based on a detailed plan Jacobson co-authored.

It’s not only doable, powering New York on green energy is “sustainable and inexpensive” and would save lives and health costs, Jacobson told IPS.

Each year, air pollution kills 4,000 people in New York State and costs the public 33 billion dollars in health costs, according to the study Jacobson co-authored with experts from all over the U.S. It will be published in the journal Energy Policy.

“Converting to wind, water and sunlight is feasible, will stabilise costs of energy and will produce jobs while reducing health and climate damage,” said Jacobson.

Under the plan, 40 percent of New York State’s energy would come from local wind power, 38 percent from local solar and the remainder from a combination of hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal and wave energy.

All vehicles would run on battery-electric power and/or hydrogen fuel cells. Heating and cooling for homes and businesses would come from air- and ground-source heat pumps, geothermal heat pumps, heat exchangers and backup electric resistance heaters – replacing natural gas and oil. Water heaters would be powered by the same heat pumps while solar hot water preheaters would provide hot water for homes.

High temperatures for industrial processes would be obtained with electricity and hydrogen combustion.

All of this can be accomplished with existing technology. The latest electric cars can travel 300 kilometres between charges, said Jacobson.

The significant costs of building renewable energy power plants, buying vehicles, heat pumps and other equipment are more than made up over time through savings in health costs and elimination of fuel costs by not having to buy any coal, oil or gas. The break-even point would be between 10 and 15 years, the study estimates.

The study also found that because green electricity is more efficient than burning fuels, New York’s end-use power demand would be 37 percent lower.

“Electric vehicles are five times more energy efficient than gasoline-powered cars and buses,” Jacobson said.

Electric vehicles convert 90 percent of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels while conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 20-25 percent, while the rest is lost as heat and noise. Coal and oil-fired electric power plants average just 33 percent efficiency and are major sources of air pollution and global warming.

Pollution costs from burning fossil fuels have largely been underestimated, according to new research. Canadian researchers found that the health cost to the public of driving a car or truck is 300 to 800 dollars per year per vehicle.

The public’s conception and official costs of pollution may be drastically undervalued, said Amir Hakami at Carleton University in Ottawa.

“While reducing emissions from vehicles and power plants is costly, not reducing emissions also costs money. Our research suggests that ignoring pollution will cost much more in the long term,” said Hakami in a statement.

When the sun doesn’t shine or wind doesn’t blow, there are many ways to match energy supply with demand, the study found. All electrical grids rely on a number of power sources and fossil-fuelled and nuclear power plants are taken off grid sometimes for months and years for repairs. Geographically-dispersed renewables can be networked with hydroelectric power to fill in remaining gaps. Energy can be also be stored in various ways including as heat, water pumped uphill, and batteries.

Improvements in energy efficiency would make New York’s conversion to 100 percent green energy easier, faster and less costly, Jacobson acknowledged.

Governments have invested very little in improving energy efficiency. The majority of research investment is devoted to generating more energy, said Charlie Wilson, a scientist with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenberg, Austria.

Creating a low-cost, high efficiency refrigerator would do much to reduce energy and reduce carbon emissions, Wilson said.

“There are also enormous energy savings potential in buildings,” Wilson told IPS.

But politicians don’t think building retrofits are sexy so public money goes into new power plants. The market won’t drive retrofits because the cost of energy is too low in most countries, he said.

Changing this won’t be easy. By far the world’s biggest corporations are the fossil fuel energy and power producers, who have enormous political influence, he said.

Leadership is needed to create a clean and healthy, pollution-free New York City by 2030, said Jacobson. “I think the public will be 100 percent behind this, if they know about it.”

“The economics of this plan make sense,” said Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell engineering professor and a co-author of the study. “Now it is up to the political sphere.”