Progreso's economy is based on tourism, fishing and the port. Although it is highly vulnerable to climate change, it still has no local plan. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
PROGRESO, Mexico , Jul 12 2013 (IPS)

Towns on Mexico’s Caribbean coast are behind schedule on the design and implementation of plans to face the challenges of climate change, in spite of the urgency of measures to reduce vulnerability.

The country’s 2012 General Law on Climate Change requires state and municipal governments to implement programmes addressing issues like greenhouse gas inventories and adaptation and mitigation policies.

IPS visited 37 coastal municipalities in the southeastern states of Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo, and found that only six had specific programmes, 10 were in the process of creating them, and the rest said they were unaware of the requirement.

“The municipalities are waiting for the federal government to act, because they are completely overwhelmed,” said Lourdes Rodríguez, the founder of Marea Azul, an NGO working since 1992 to protect the ecosystem of Laguna de Términos, part of the country’s largest river basin, in Campeche. “They are doing very little; it’s all pretence,” she told IPS.

“The worst problems are on the coast, where there is erosion. There is a very serious demographic problem, because a lot of people are coming to work in the oil industry, and they are invading mangrove swamps to build houses and using just any materials as infill,” said the activist.

“The oil companies are settling in the mangrove swamps,” she said.

The Laguna de Términos, 705,016 hectares in area, was declared a flora and fauna protection area in 1994. It harbours at least 300 animal and plant species, including red, white and button mangroves, manatees, turtles and tapirs.

Ciudad del Carmen, a city of 221,000 people located 925 kilometres southeast of the Mexican capital, is an example of the uphill struggle climate change poses for municipalities. Start with the oil industry, add some tourism and deforestation, blend in liquid and solid wastes, and you have an environmentally unsustainable mix that fuels climate change.

Mexico’s Caribbean coast is exposed to increasingly destructive hurricanes and storms and to the threat of rising sea levels, which may flood extensive areas, according to experts. Biodiversity is also menaced by the tourist industry, deforestation, intensive cattle farming and oil industry activities.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is forecasting between 13 and 20 tropical storms in the Atlantic hurricane region for the season that began in June, of which seven to 11 could become hurricanes.

“It is a major challenge,” said Itzel Alcérreca, the coordinator of the municipal climate action plan, PACMUN, which is charged with preparing municipal administrations to draw up policies on climate change. “But we are seeking to strengthen local capabilities and the local level is an excellent field of action, because there can be short-term results and spin-offs,” she told IPS.

PACMUN was launched in 2011 with pilot programmes in nine municipalities, and now covers 253. Thirty local governments have already drafted their climate plans, and another 30 are expected to complete theirs this year.

The plan is promoted by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI)-Local Governments for Sustainability, the National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (INECC) and the British embassy in Mexico.

INECC reports that 1,300 out of the more than 2,500 municipalities in the country are particularly vulnerable to climate change, with 27 million people at risk, out of a total population of 117 million.

PACMUN has identified problems such as disproportionate population growth, inadequate planning, urbanisation, land use changes for housing or cattle ranching, and a lack of basic infrastructure, like sanitation.

The most sensitive sectors include tourism, health, agriculture, biodiversity, human settlements and energy, according to PACMUN.

In spite of this, the states of Quintana Roo, Yucatán and Campeche have barely started work on their climate change plans, although Tabasco’s is ready.

These four states emit more than 100 million tonnes of polluting carbon dioxide, out of the 748 million tonnes produced nationally, according to Mexico’s environment ministry.

“We are facing coastal erosion because of deforestation of the mangroves, and we are affected by stronger heat waves and heavier rainfall, but we don’t have the capacity to design a plan,” complained Javier Couoh, the head of Civil Protection which provides disaster relief in the town of Progreso, in Yucatán, 1,150 kilometres southeast of Mexico City.

“We need a programme, so we are seeking support to learn how to create one. It is a big problem,” added Couoh, who told IPS he had never heard of PACMUN.

The town, with a population of 54,000, celebrated the 142nd anniversary of its foundation as a trade port on Jul. 1. Its economy is based on tourism, fishing and the port itself, which potentially endangers its 1,251 hectares of mangrove swamps.

Progreso is similar to many towns along the coast that are still in the dark about climate change.

The national authorities view renewable energies, energy efficiency, non-motorised transport and ecotourism as feasible options to mitigate polluting emissions. But money is a limiting factor, so one goal of PACMUN is to raise funds for implementing the plans.

“We need to create a culture of local financing, with the municipalities raising resources. We must show that we can distribute resources efficiently,” said PACMUN’s Alcérreca. One source could be the climate fund for adaptation and mitigation initiatives, created by the General Law.

In places like Ciudad del Carmen, environmental depredation is a problem.

“It’s being dealt with very badly. It’s a recipe for disaster with no one to pick up the pieces. There is no coordination of actions and no one admits that we are behind. We don’t want to see what’s going on,” said Rodríguez of Marea Azul. In partnership with other environmentalists, the group has prevented state oil firm PEMEX from drilling wells in the Laguna de Términos.

“The national authorities should participate and society should be involved, because citizens are the final beneficiaries and the ones who have to learn. There must be awareness-raising among students,” said Couoh.

Local residents cleaning up a river in the Lower Lempa River Basin. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN NICOLÁS LEMPA, El Salvador , Oct 17 2012 (IPS)

Armed with chainsaws, machetes and shovels, local residents of El Salvador’s Lower Lempa River Basin, near the Pacific Ocean, are unblocking the flow of rivers and pruning the branches of trees on riverbanks to keep them from falling into the chocolate-colored water.

One team is working on clearing the El Espino River. Another is doing the same in El Borbollón, also located in the Lower Lempa River Basin in the department of Usulután, in southwest El Salvador.

When the water flows more freely, there is less chance of the rivers overflowing and flooding nearby crops, an increasingly frequent occurrence due to alterations in the cycle of rains and dry spells.

Several kilometres to the south, in the mangrove forests of Jiquilisco Bay, Brenda Arely Sánchez walks waist-deep in water along a channel in the Cuche de Monte swamp, which she and a small army of women have reopened with machetes in order to improve the flow of saltwater and promote the recovery of the mangrove trees.

The channel, blocked for years by roots and sediment, no longer allowed seawater to flow in during high tide. As a result, 70 hectares of mangrove trees were slowing dying, because these species need a saltwater environment to survive.

“With pure hard work, we removed all of the mud and roots from the channel in plastic containers,” said Sánchez, one of 30 women who participated in the effort.

These women and men are part of the Mangle Association, based in the Lower Lempa River Basin and Jiquilisco Bay, an area declared as the Xiriualtique Jiquilisco Biosphere Reserve in 2007 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

The Mangle Association’s efforts range from the protection of biological diversity to risk management to reduce vulnerability to the floods that are growing more severe year after year.

The once-fertile lands of the Lower Lempa basin – a coastal plain that encompasses the largest stretch of mangroves in El Salvador – were used by large landholders for cotton plantations until the 1970s, when production declined.

When the Salvadoran civil war was ended by the peace agreements of 1992, many former combatants from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), then a guerrilla group and now the ruling political party, were given parcels of land in this area to facilitate their reintegration into civilian life.

This explains the abundance of community organisations. Local residents say that the organisational traditions developed in times of war are now being applied to social and environmental projects, primarily to confront what everyone identifies as the effects of climate change.

“In the past we knew that the rains would start in May and end in October. Now nobody knows when they will start or end, if there is going to be a drought or a storm,” Carlos Barahona, the coordinator of the river clean-up work and the opening of the channel in Cuche de Monte, told Tierramérica.*

Up until now, half of the dredging of 4.2 km of the El Espino and El Borbollón Rivers has been completed. The work began in July and was financed by the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources after the destruction wrought by Tropical Depression 12-E in October 2011.

The storm was the most severe weather event ever recorded in El Salvador, dumping 1,513 mm of rain, the equivalent of 42 percent of the average annual rainfall during the 1971-2000 period, according to an October 2011 assessment by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

There were 35 deaths and an estimated 900 million dollars in losses and damages. The area hardest hit was the Lower Lempa basin.

“Hurricane Mitch (1998) was bad, but this was worse. We left our houses and headed for the shelters when the water was almost up to our necks,” recalled Sánchez.

Climate change has been linked to the variations in precipitation patterns and heavier rainfalls. But flooding in this area lasts longer because the drainage channels, constructed during the cotton boom, are unable to empty out properly in the sediment-filled El Espino and El Borbollón Rivers.

Another cause of flooding is the water released from the 15 de Septiembre hydroelectric dam, located upstream on the Lempa River, when torrential rains make it necessary to open the floodgates to prevent it from collapsing.

The gates are often opened without prior warning, the local residents complain. As a result, the lower stretch of the Lempa, the country’s longest river, overflows and floods some 20 communities.

“We are always going to have floods, but now that the rivers have been cleared, the water will drain away more quickly,” stressed Barahona.
In addition, these rivers will be navigable once again, which means farmers and fisherfolk will be able to transport their products in canoes.

The opening of the channel in the Cuche de Monte swamp, stretching four kilometres, has been bearing fruit since the work began in July. The death of 70 hectares of mangrove trees has been halted; new mangrove shoots have begun sprouting, and the fish and shellfish that disappeared when the channel was blocked have returned.

Red snapper, catfish, bass and shrimps are among the species observed in the waters of the swamp, said José Manuel González, a biosphere reserve warden and Lower Lempa native.

Due to the importance of the species found here, the reserve has been protected since 2005 by the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, signed in Ramsar, Iran in 1971.

“The project is already helping people, because everyone benefits from the recovery of the mangrove forest, and at the same time, it is providing employment for the families involved in the work,” González told Tierramérica.

The efforts are supported through the El Salvador Fund for the Americas Initiative, an agreement signed in 1993 by the governments of El Salvador and the United States to provide debt relief for the Central American country in exchange for investment in environmental projects.

The fund created for this purpose is endowed with 41.4 million dollars.

The goal in Cuche de Monte is for the ecosystem to regenerate naturally through ecological mangrove restoration (ERM). Instead of manual planting of one or more species of mangrove trees, this method involves identifying the causes of damage and subsequently working to remedy them.

ERM is taught in the area by experts from the Mangrove Action Project (MAP). “Nature knows best which mangrove species should be growing there,” said Barahona.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

The sudden shift from drought to heavy rainfall that caused severe flooding in central Cuba drove home to the authorities the need to redesign preparedness and prevention plans for climate-related emergencies.

“These unusually heavy rains in such a short period of time made it necessary for us to update our plans and modify procedures to adapt to climate change-related phenomena,” said Inés María Chapman, president of the National Institute of Water Resources (INRH).

The rainfall accumulated in just 48 hours made it necessary to open the floodgates of the Zaza reservoir in central Cuba. Credit:Vicente Brito-AIN/IPS

The INRH’s responsibilities include acting in a timely manner, with foresight, and the constant monitoring of every dam and reservoir in Cuba.

For example, Chapman described the measures taken to keep the Zaza reservoir and others in the central province of Sancti Spíritus stable as “a real-time exercise in how to act in the face of weather events.”
During a tour of the Zaza reservoir, the largest man-made reservoir on the island, the official pointed out that just a few days ago, INRH experts were discussing the possible need to accelerate the well-drilling programme in order to keep up rice production.

The problem was the low level of water in the reservoir, because the forecasts indicated that the drought would continue over the next few months. But the situation changed abruptly, and in less than 48 hours, the Zaza reservoir received more than 800 million cubic metres of water.

Official sources say the danger presented by the reservoir has been documented in the civil defence system’s contingency plans since a storm filled it in an unexpectedly short time in June 1972, while it was still being built, causing severe cracks.

But never before had the reservoir filled up as quickly as it did from Wednesday May 23 to Friday May 25. Last week’s rains made this the rainiest month in the history of the region, with 500 mm of accumulated rainfall – more than 300 percent of the monthly median.

Although May marks the start of the rainy season in Cuba, which runs through October, this month actually ended with a major rainfall deficit on a national level, far below the totals registered in the same month in 1995, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2005 and 2008, according to sources at the Meteorology Institute’s Forecast Centre.

The forecast for this month was for near normal precipitation in all of the country’s regions. And in the case of central Cuba, estimates ranged from 135 to 265 mm – far below the total accumulated after last week’s heavy rains.

Scientists say the effects of climate change will include a rise in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. The biggest threats to Caribbean island nations like Cuba are hurricanes, drought, heavy rainfall and a rise in the sea level.

Timely evacuation

Some 6,000 people were urgently evacuated from areas near the Zaza reservoir last week due to the need to open the floodgates when the reservoir’s capacity was exceeded.

The local press reported that the bodies of two men who had been reported missing were found on Saturday May 26: French citizen Alain Manaud and Silvestre Fortún of Cuba, whose car was swept away when the Santa Lucía river flooded in the municipality of Cabaiguán.

“A lot more could have happened,” Marta Pérez, a homemaker who lives in the city of Yaguajay in the province of Sancti Spíritus, told IPS by phone. “In my house, the water rose more than a metre, but that was the least of our problems. I have family near the Zaza reservoir and I didn’t stop worrying until I knew they were safe.”

When she woke up on Thursday May 24, Pérez found that the water was up to her knees because the Máximo river had flooded its banks.

The flooding occurred less than a week after the “Meteoro” emergency preparedness and evacuation drills that are organised every year in Cuba by the civil defence system and other authorities, based on the specific vulnerabilities faced in each region.

Last week, the civil defence system kicked into action again when rivers and reservoirs overflowed their banks, flooding sugar cane and other crops, damaging bridges and railways, and cutting off land communications between western and eastern Cuba.

Preliminary damage assessment

A preliminary damage assessment presented by the provincial defence council of Sancti Spíritus includes the collapse of 47 homes and damage to another 1,156 – at a time when the country is still recovering from the devastation caused by hurricanes Ike, Gustav and Paloma in 2008.

Added to this is the damage to more than 3,350 hectares of crops and 5,700 urban farming lots, as well as recently planted sugar cane and 1,400 hectares of rice that are in need of draining. Fish farming, beekeeping and dairy production were also affected.

Although more than 20,000 head of cattle were taken to safe areas, the preliminary reports indicate that at least 100 died of cold.

In the city of Trinidad, a popular tourist destination, damage was caused to the channel of the San Juan de Letrán river, causing serious problems in the water supply system. The authorities said reparations depend on access to difficult-to-reach areas.

José Ramón Monteagudo, president of the provincial defence council, called for recovery work to begin, and for vital services like electricity to be restored. He also issued an alert on hygiene and sanitation.

“We need to improve the rational use of water to ensure local supplies and cover the needs of agriculture and industry,” said the president of the INRH, noting that despite the rainfall in the central region, drought conditions continued to prevail in the rest of the country

A growing appetite for oil and some of the Caribbean region’s highest electricity rates and petroleum prices are driving Jamaica’s thrust toward clean energy alternatives.

Inefficient distribution systems and losses contribute to Jamaica’s high electricity charges. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

This country of 2.7 million people now spends more than it earns on imported oil.

Between January and June 2011, Jamaica spent 1.48 billion dollars on oil imports, while export earnings for January to September 2011 were 1.3 billion.

In the words of environmentalists, the situation is increasing the nation’s vulnerability to external shocks and putting pressure on the local environment.

Most of the island’s electrical installations lie inside the 10-metre vulnerability zone that experts say will be impacted by sea level rise due to climate change. The increasing demand for electricity is also increasing Jamaica’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Thinking outside the grid

Experts have described Jamaica’s economy as “highly energy inefficient” because 95 percent of the island’s energy needs comes from imported petroleum. Electricity generation uses 23 percent of oil imports, in part because of ageing equipment, theft and inefficiencies in the distribution system.

According to the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, the inefficiencies are the result of the high cost of energy conversion and high transmission and distribution losses. Other contributing factors include the demands of the bauxite and alumina industry.

“We are not producing enough and at the present rate we will be borrowing more just to pay for oil,” said Northern Caribbean University lecturer Dr. Vincent Wright.

The World Bank validated the complaints of the local business community when it identified high energy costs as one of the main hindrances to economic growth. Electricity rates have increased by 135 percent in 10 years, outpacing the annual economic growth rate of about one percent per annum over the same period.

Even though more than nine in 10 Jamaican households have access to electricity, soaring rates have made the commodity too expensive for many. So in addition to high levels of theft, reports are that electricity usage has fallen because people are cutting back.

Taxi driver John Thompson has opted to cut back on luxuries like the use of his washing machine.

“We can’t afford to pay light bill so we turn off the fridge at nights, turn off the lights and now the wife wash mainly by hand,” he said.

In a bid to increase the use of alternative energy and cut spending on oil, government changed the rules. In November 2011, the Office of Utilities Regulations (OUR) announced that individuals could generate their own electricity from alterative energy sources and sell the excess energy to the local electricity supplier.

So far, 10 applications have been made to sell excess power, the head of communications at OUR Michael Bryce told IPS.

“The Electric Lighting Act empowers the minister to issue licenses to persons wishing to supply electricity for any public or private purpose. Persons wishing to sell electricity must therefore first obtain a licence from the minister before their facility can be connected to the national grid,” he explained.

Ambitious plan or “pipe dream”?

Pressured by the need to cut spending and cushion the effects of spiraling oil prices, Minister of Energy, Science and Technology Phillip Paulwell in January promised to reduce electricity rates by up to 50 percent over the next four years.

Technocrats have described the minister’s plan as a “pipe dream”, but Paulwell is undaunted. He is pushing ahead with plans that he hopes will slash oil imports by 60 percent.

He also hopes to boost the contribution of alternative fuels to electricity generation from the 20 percent committed to in the country’s 2009 energy policy to 30 percent by 2030.

Wright is among those who see the minister’s vision as “extremely difficult” to realise.

Other strategies have included a National Energy Policy, several sub- policies and programmes to guide the government’s goal of “a modern and efficient energy sector that does not harm the natural environment”.

Since 2008, E10 gasoline, a blend of 10 percent sugarcane ethanol and 90 percent petroleum, has been sold at service stations island-wide.

Harnessing wind and water

And the state-owned Wigton Wind Farm has added more than 40 megawatts of generating capacity to the grid. This represents 2.6 percent of the island’s electricity generation and is enough to serve 50,000 homes per month.

“Wigton is helping the country to reduce its ecological footprint by reducing emissions,” said Nicole O’Reggio, head of pollution control in the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.

The wind farm’s 32 turbines are expected to reduce emissions by an estimated 85,000 tonnes a year, offsetting some 60,000 barrels of oil per year. In the five months between April and August 2011, Wigton shaved 2.7 million dollars from the oil bill.

Jamaica uses 77,000 barrels of oil a day.

The region’s first designated Clean Development project, Wigton also benefits from a carbon credit trading arrangement with the Netherlands, O’Reggio told IPS.

There are already independent suppliers producing electricity at lower rates than the sole distributor the Jamaica Public Service (JPS).

And faced with legal challenges to its supply monopoly from an increasingly disgruntled customer base, the company has begun diversifying its generation. Nine hydroelectricity generators and a wind farm have been added to its 840 megawatts of capacity in recent years.

The company is also installing another two hydropower stations and was recently given permission to build a 360-megawatt combined-cycle to be powered by liquid natural gas. The new plant is scheduled for completion by 2014 and according to the JPS, will cut electricity costs by between 31 and 45 percent.

There is consensus that Jamaica’s alternative energy potential is immense, but how to exploit it may prove challenging to a cash- strapped government. And meeting the targets could be problematic.

According to Wright, Jamaica can meet its targets if there is government commitment and “incentives for the installation of alternative energy systems, improved use of technology, more efficient use of energy by all Jamaicans as well as good conservation policies.”

Even as many agree that reducing the cost of energy should go a long way to boost Jamaica’s productivity, some say that Paulwell’s plan won’t work.

“Until we can do something about fuel, I don’t see any action that can be taken to produce that kind of energy reduction in the cost to consumers that the minister speaks about,” Winston Hay, a former head of the Office of Utilities Regulation, told journalists at a recent Gleaner Forum

To make it work, many experts agree that there must be a drastic reduction in the price of fuel. The government must also sell its plans to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since the removal of duties from alternative energy devices will cost Jamaica much-needed tax revenue and the conversion of street lamps will increase government spending.

But despite the challenges, Worldwatch noted, “Jamaica is in an enviable position because it has the potential to move quickly from being an oil-dependent country to a renewable energy-independent country.”

*This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

Rayagada's tribal women look after community grain banks. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
RAYAGADA, India, Apr 27 2012 (IPS)

Tribal farmer Harish Saraka has rediscovered the key to sustainable farming in this rain-dependent hinterland of eastern Odisha state – mixed cropping.

Saraka, 38, is careful not to take credit for helping to turn around farming in this area, in the news just a decade ago for starvation deaths. “All we are doing is returning to our grandfathers’ practices,” says this member of the Kondh tribe.

Saraka recalls that his forebears sowed three different seeds in the same field: millet, legume, oilseed and maybe a creeper bean.

The 72 Kondh households in Saraka’s village of Munda, in Rayagada district, reside in the foothills of the Niyamgiri Hills, stretching over 250 km, that the London-based mining major Vedanta Resources Plc has been trying to exploit for its bauxite deposits.

“The environs, the climate and the forests have changed drastically,” murmurs Bhima Saraka, 65, almost to himself, resting on a sagging string cot in front of the thatched house where he lives with 23 of his kinsmen.

The rains, he observes, are “regularly irregular”, resulting in crop losses year after year while Kondh families have grown in numbers, putting pressure on the forests they once shared with tigers and where they harvested tubers and fruits.

In 2010, amidst public outrage over a spate of farmers’ suicides over poor harvests and high interest on loans taken for farming inputs, the then agriculture minister Damodar Rout admitted that Odisha’s agriculture was in crisis, “impacted by climate change, erosion, dryness, soil acidity and falling ground water levels.”

For Harish Saraka and other subsistence farmers in 70 Niyamgiri villages in Rayagada, adapting to changing conditions meant reverting to traditional farming methods such as mixed cropping, the use of organic fertilisers and trusted seed varieties.

So, while farming has been failing elsewhere in Odisha, Harish Saraka has been cultivating not three but 14 crops on his half-hectare land since the last two years – enough to see his family through the lean August-December season.

“I now harvest 300 kg of food grains, a 200 percent increase from the earlier single-crop high-yield paddy farming,” says Saraka.

In Kerandiguda village, Loknath Nauri, 58, is the first to try mixed farming on a portion of his one-hectare hilly stream-fed land that he got under a government programme for the landless rural poor.

“Seeing my good harvest, ten other households here have decided to try their luck this year,” says Nauri, who is ready to share his seeds with them.

“The Kondhs’ once self-sufficient and local resource-based agriculture system was affected by the introduction of commercial high-yielding paddy,” says Debjeet Sarangi who heads ‘Living Farms’, a non-government organisation (NGO) that works with marginal farmers.

Bhima Saraka told IPS that a few years back, Munda villagers were lured into planting high-yielding paddy seeds given free by the government along with chemical fertilisers. “The seeds were old and many did not sprout, while the fertilisers demanded water, and we have no source except the rains,” he says.

“None got much out of this ‘free gift’ except an important lesson, that their local seeds – acclimatised to their dryland soil and more able to withstand monsoon’s unpredictability – were indeed their lifeline,” says Sunamajhi Pidika, Living Farms’s local field organiser.

Sarangi said tribal communities, “who neither cultivated nor ate rice traditionally, are now trying to re-establish their food sovereignty.”

‘Ailing Agricultural Productivity in Economically Fragile Region of India’ – a recent study published by the Bhopal-based Indian Institute of Soil Sciences found that the cultivation area for small millets in Odisha had declined by 500 percent over the last 40 years.

The popular perception is that the government policy is pushing in cash crops to the detriment of subsistence millet-farming practiced by communities like Bhima Saraka’s.

“The government is not coercing the tribal people, just putting intelligent choices before them,” said Nitin Bhanudas Jawale, administrative head of Rayagada district.

However, in April, it was decided to procure millet and make it available at fair price outlets, so that the tribal people could go back to their traditional food, Jawale said. “The U.N. World Food Programme is collaborating with us.”

“In discussions with village elders we came to know there are varieties of millets and pulses which can tolerate heat and water stress,” says Sarangi.

“I have heard my grandfather talk of the 11 varieties of millet that his father cultivated,” recounts 24-year-old Prasant Wadraka from Gandili village while waiting at the government’s tribal development office to collect free tin sheet roofing.

According to Wadraka, near-extinct millet varieties include one called ‘kodo’ which has medicinal properties to control diabetes. Millet is packed with protein, B-complex vitamins and minerals, nutritionists say.

“The movement in India to return to traditional seeds is growing stronger and at country inter-NGO level too we exchange seeds to supplement local communities’ seed needs,” says Sarangi.

In 2008, Living Farms began a programme of giving poor families seeds on condition that after harvest the same quantity would be returned plus 10 percent ‘interest’ to be put into grain banks.

Simple woven bamboo baskets sealed with thick clay-and cow dung daub, the grain banks are managed by Kondh women and opened only in times of need.

Just before the monsoons all the seed varieties are sown on the same field. These are a combination of niger (an oilseed), sorghum, millet varieties like finger, foxtail, pearl, pigeon pea and horse gram along with creeper beans.

Some of these will ripen in 90 days while others will take 120 days before harvest.

According to leading Indian agro-scientist M.S. Swaminathan, mixed cropping – that involves several cereals, pulses, oilseeds, vegetable and fodder crops – retards buildup of insect pests.

It is significant that tribal communities never use chemical inputs or even diesel irrigation pumps, and sell their produce in the local market.

“Their products have minimum carbon footprints,” Sarangi said. “In the imminent global climate crisis, we have much to learn from indigenous communities.”

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

Trees uprooted by the storm in the neighborhood of Barracas, Buenos Aires. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 17 2012 (IPS)

The 18 deaths caused by a storm that hit Buenos Aires earlier this month tragically demonstrate the lack of preparedness for the ever more frequent and powerful weather events faced by the Argentine capital and its suburbs.

“Argentina should be accustomed to severe storms because it has always had them. What is accelerating now is the intensity and frequency of rains,” meteorologist Carolina Vera told Tierramérica.

In addition to the fatalities, the Apr. 4 storm placed 32,000 families living in vulnerable neighborhoods in a state of emergency. More than 200 schools were totally or partially destroyed, thousands of people were left without electricity or water, and around 40,000 trees were toppled.

“In our neighborhood two kids died. A tree fell on top of a 13-year-old, and a wall fell over onto a teenager who was sleeping on the street,” reported Lorenzo de Vedia, a Catholic priest in a precarious area on the south side of the capital.

The neighborhood in question, known as Villa 21-24 de Barracas, was one of the hardest hit. “Roofs were blown off, mattresses were soaked… These are the results of the structural poverty in which these people live,” de Vedia told Tierramérica.

The federal capital district, the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, and its metropolitan area comprise a total area of 3,833 sq km with a population of 12.8 million people, according to the 2010 census.

The storm broke out suddenly, bringing torrential rain, hail and winds of almost 100 km an hour in some parts of the west and south sides of the city and its surrounding area.

The most precise and continuous meteorological records kept in Argentina correspond to rainfall, and date back more than a century. These records “demonstrate a tendency towards an increase in the abundance and frequency of precipitation,” said Vera.

The natural variability of the atmosphere could account for these types of storms on its own, but in this case “there is evidence of an association with climate change,” she added.

Vera, who is the director of the Centre for Marine and Atmospheric Research at the University of Buenos Aires, is also one of the authors of the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX), released Mar. 28 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Numerous research reports compiled by the IPCC show a relationship between extreme events and climate change, but for other phenomena, such as heat waves, said Vera.

However, climate modeling based on future scenarios of increased greenhouse gas emissions result in predictions of increased precipitation in central and east Argentina, she noted.

Given these projections, Argentina is not very well prepared, said Vera. The country needs more weather radars, more human resources to operate them, and contingency plans to deal with disasters.

“The government has purchased radars that allow us to improve forecasting, but there is a lack of qualified personnel. People need to be trained. There are plans to do it, but today the National Meteorological System is not fully prepared,” said Vera.

Accurate forecasts alone are not enough, either. Once an alert is issued, the population needs to know what to do. “We still don’t see disaster management actions. People panic, and many of them live in houses with sheet metal roofs that blow away,” she commented.

For Claudia Natenzón from the Research Programme on Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Buenos Aires, the main problem is that “preventive actions are not being developed.”

Natenzón, who holds a PhD in geography, specialises in the study of social vulnerability to climate change. She explained to Tierramérica that prevention implies anticipating a weather event in order to prevent serious damage when it occurs.

This requires scientific knowledge about what can happen – although there is always some degree of uncertainty involved – and the use of that knowledge to develop prevention plans.

In a storm, the “entry points” that increase risks include old or diseased trees that have not been pruned, electric cables, sheet metal roofs that get blown off by the wind, and polycarbonate roofs that are destroyed by hail, she explained.

Other risk factors include ever more abundant billboards held up by structures that cannot withstand gale-force winds, and free-standing roofs not supported by walls, such as in gasoline stations and market stalls. One of these roofs collapsed during the last storm and crushed a young man.

The failure to implement preventive actions was clearly demonstrated by the storm, said Natenzón.

One of her Research Programme colleagues, anthropologist Ana Murgida, acknowledged that “some measures can be costly,” but stressed that “the cost of a disaster is always greater, and must be borne by the public coffers. And disasters always impact more seriously on the most vulnerable sectors.”

Buenos Aires is a coastal city, and as a result, it needs to be prepared for more frequent and more damaging flooding related to storm events in the future, due to sea level rise, warns the study Climate Change and Cities: First Assessment Report of the Urban Climate Change Research Network, in which Natenzón participated.

Damage to real estate from flooding in Buenos Aires is projected to total 80 million dollars per year by 2030 and 300 million dollars per year by 2050. “This figure does not account for lost productivity by those displaced or injured by the flooding, meaning total economic losses could be significantly higher,” adds the report, published in June 2011 by Cambridge University Press.

Prevention also implies developing “strategies for rapid response and recovery,” Murgida told Tierramérica. Otherwise, successive disasters “will increasingly exacerbate the vulnerability of the poorest sectors.”

The magnitude of the last storm would have been inconceivable in other times, given the number of people affected and killed, the number of houses destroyed, the services interrupted and the state’s effort to assist the victims, said Murgida.

A week after the storm, thousands of families remained homeless, without electricity or water, and thousands of children and teenagers in the same neighborhoods still had no schools where they could go and have a roof over their heads, at least for a while.

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network, which does not necessarily agree with its content.

**The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

The slopes of the Blue and John Crow Mountains show the signs of deforestation and erosion. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Apr 2 2012 (IPS)

A public awareness project that aims to foster wider understanding among locals about the linkages between the global climate and their social and economic wellbeing is Jamaica’s newest adaptation strategy.

Launched on Mar. 23, the yearlong public awareness and education (PAE) campaign is a component of the 30-month European Union funded Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction project.

Its purpose is to eliminate the knowledge and awareness gaps identified in Jamaica’s Second Communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), climate change negotiator Jeffery Spooner told IPS.

Writing in both the First and Second National Communication, local climate experts identified the urgent need for a PAE campaign to target and educate decision and policy makers as well as the wider community about climate change issues.

They noted that an understanding of the problems was key to implementing successful adaptation measures, particularly in relation to the “attitudes, perceptions and lack of information that were key barriers to technology transfer”.

Communications specialist Gail Hoad explained that people “need to understand the signs in order to respond effectively”.

The PAE project has partnered with “Voices for Climate Change,” a national public awareness initiative that utilises the “expertise, talents and influence” of 30 or so established popular entertainers to break down social barriers and educate Jamaicans on adaptation techniques.

The campaign will also include stakeholder consultations, workshops, training sessions and a range of tools to strengthen capacity within government, state agencies and among stakeholder groups.

Hoad hopes to increase the PAE’s chances of success by tapping into Voices’ inventive use of culture, music and drama to educate communities about the effects of climate change as well as to reinforce resilience methodologies in high-risk communities.

Speaking at the launch, Minister of Water, Land, Environment and Climate Change Robert Pickersgill, spoke of the national commitment to “have dialogue and communicate at all levels to share information on climate change, its impacts and on appropriate responses to those threats”.

Scientists believe that climate change will amplify Jamaica’s vulnerability to the effects of tropical storms and hurricanes, cause economic fallout, outbreak of diseases and loss of unique Jamaican plant and animal species.

A survey in support of the Second Communication found that less than one third of the islanders knew what climate change was, or the associated risks.

Environmental activists have long argued for adequately funded and consistent public education campaigns to change local perceptions and create an appreciation of nature, the environment and their long-term economic and aesthetic value. Most Jamaicans, they argue, have no idea of the value of the island’s natural ecological resources.

They accuse government of “selling out” Jamaica’s natural wealth by approving massive development projects that call for large-scale alteration of the physical environment.

The touchiest developments have been associated with the 2,560 additional hotel rooms constructed between 2007 and 2010 to support the hotel industry.

The yearlong public awareness plan should address some of these concerns.

According to Hoad, it aims to “educate communities that are vulnerable in both the ecological and economic sense, as well as to educate leaders and policy makers in both the public and private sectors”.

Long overdue, scientists say, because they are already seeing the signs of change.

The 2nd National Communication reported, “Climate change may have already affected the island’s coral reefs. Widespread coral bleaching in 1988 and 1990 has been attributed to the increases in the temperature of coastal waters.”

According to the 2010 State of the Environment report, there are changes along the shorelines of Hellshire Bay, the Great Salt Pond and Half Moon Bay in St. Catherine. Environmental data show that since 2007, more than 40.6 hectares of wetlands have been removed or relocated to facilitate development projects.

It is not uncommon for the authorities here to grant development approvals subject to the creation or restoration of previously degraded wetlands to replace those that have been damaged or removed to facilitate the projects.

In 2008, it was reported that in addition to hillside farming, the biggest threats to the island’s 26 watersheds were poor agricultural practices, squatting and pollution – 10 watersheds are severely degraded.

Conservator of Forests Marlyn Headly told IPS in a recent interview that many farmers cultivate the often thin and erosive soils in some upper watershed areas on slopes of more than of 20 degrees.

Estimates are that more than 170,000 farmers cultivate less than 245,000 hectares using techniques that contribute to massive soil loss and the siltation of waterways.

Warmer sea temperatures may have driven the widespread destruction wrought by hurricanes Michelle (2001), Ivan (2004), Dennis, Emily and Wilma (2005) Dean (2007) and Gustav in 2008.

An increase in seawater temperatures may also have caused the bigger than normal storm surges that destroyed homes in Kingston’s seaside community of Caribbean Terrace in 2004 and 2007.

A major construction project is now underway to raise the Palisadoes road by six feet. The road that leads to Kingston’s Norman Manley Airport has been repeatedly inundated since 2004 when it was made impassable by the sea during Ivan.

Climate experts also say the resurgence of malaria in December 2006 after 40 years of absence may be another sign of a changing climate. More than 400 people in depressed areas of inner city Kingston were affected.

People living along the coast will be most impacted. An estimated 60 percent of Jamaica’s 2.7 million people live less than two kilometres from the shore. Most will lose their homes, livelihoods and incomes as commercial activities and infrastructure are damaged or destroyed by extreme conditions.

Experts and activists are agreed that an uninformed population will aggravate the problems of climate change. Spooner acknowledges that there are challenges ahead.

In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that it would take about 462 million dollars, or roughly 197 dollars per person, to protect Jamaica from sea level rise. Today, the cost would be 531.9 million dollars.

The creation of a Climate Change Ministry is seen as affirmation that the new government is committed to the process. A climate change department to coordinate and streamline activities has also been announced.

Spooner also pointed out that Jamaica’s climate fund application was advanced. “It is already before the board. The concept has been endorsed and the government has been given permission to apply for funding,” he told IPS.

“There is need to ensure that an action plan is in place, that a climate policy is developed as quickly as possible and that things are in place so we can start doing what needs to be done,” the meteorologist added.

“The need for public awareness is critical and urgent…climate change is real,” Spooner said.

*This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

By Peter Richards
ROSEAU, Dominica, Mar 23 2012 (IPS)

Dominica presented its “2012-2020 Low Carbon Climate Resilient Development Strategy” to donors including the World Bank on Wednesday in a bid to gain wider access to funding and position itself as a regional leader in renewable energy.

“Dominica, the Nature Island of the Caribbean with an excess of 60 percent forest cover, has the potential to continue to be one of the few-carbon neutral countries in the world as we today explore the possibilities of harnessing our tremendous geothermal potential,” said Environment Minister Dr. Kenneth Darroux.

By the end of the donors’ conference on Friday, Dominica hopes to obtain pledges totalling 60 million dollars to undertake projects ranging from sea defence walls to food security, renewable energy and water resources in the short to medium-term, along with as much as 200 million dollars for long-term projects.

Consultant George Romelli, who helped draft the document, said it is focused on low-carbon growth, sustainable development, poverty alleviation, and a range of other issues.

“It’s not just the technocrats saying, ‘yes we must look at the climate change risks’, it’s also the people who say ‘how do we address the needs of the everyday people, how do we address the concerns of food security, livelihoods, how do we address poverty, education, health issues’,” he told a news conference ahead of the conference.

The strategy, which is being supported by the nine-million-dollar loan envelope available to Dominica under the World Bank’s Pilot Programme for Climate Resilience (PPCR), outlines the island’s determination to have a “green economy” by 2020.

Romelli warned that while Dominica is fortunate to be in a position of being carbon-neutral, it is losing forested areas because of natural and human events.

In 2011, flooding and landslides due to unseasonable intense rainfall caused in excess of 100 million dollars in damage. The previous year, the island suffered its most severe drought, followed by a hurricane.

Local authorities say that these combined events inflicted a severe shock on the agriculture sector, which employs 25 percent of Dominica’s labour force, and generates some 15 percent of gross domestic product.

Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit said that the island’s vulnerability to climate change is exacerbated by its present economic situation, socioeconomic structure, and high concentration of infrastructure along the coastline.

“To date, narrowly-defined mitigation and adaptation projects have dominated climate change action policies taken by Dominica. This has resulted in the accumulation of many efforts, isolated in nature, to respond to a crosscutting issue,” he said.

Skerrit said that new and innovative programmatic approaches are necessary to meet the challenges and uncertainties of climate change, and that development processes must be rendered more climate- resilient and lower in carbon emissions.

“The Low-Carbon Climate-Resilient Development Strategy will not only serve as the programmatic nexus for capturing conventional and innovative sources of sustainable development and climate financing, but should also assist facilitate Dominica’s transformation to a climate-resilient economy while implementing, monitoring and building upon existing low-emission climate-resilient development projects and programmes,” he added.

The 69-page document notes that Dominica is amongst few countries that can be termed “carbon neutral” in light of its limited use of fossil fuels – 28 percent of the island’s energy comes from renewable sources – and system of protected areas that serve as carbon sinks.

Dominica is not likely to go the route that Guyana has taken in terms of trying to get climate change funds in exchange for not cutting down its forests.

Darroux said Dominica does not have the kind of vast expanses of forest that Guyana does, and such a project in Dominica would not be as lucrative, but that the island would most likely adopt its own “Redd-Plus” programme.

The general pattern of land use has been dictated by topographic limitations. The highest, most rugged elevations in the interior have remained inaccessible and therefore forest cover predominates, although there has been gradual loss of forest cover in the lower elevations.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) Country Profiles on Forests, Grasslands and Dry Lands cites a percentage reduction in forest cover relative to land mass area of 65 to 61 percent over the period 1990 to 2000.

Much of the recorded forest loss is due to the sale of state lands and subsequent conversion of forest cover. Most of these lands were given over to agricultural production and ultimately to housing.

“By extension, the transition from larger-scale agriculture to small farms has also had implications for implementation of land conservation measures and efforts to enhance the resilience of natural ecosystems to address climate change concerns. As holdings become smaller, farmers tend to cultivate the full acreage within the holding in short-term crops to maximise financial returns,” the report says.

“Trees that would otherwise maintain the soil and serve as carbon sinks are often removed resulting in accelerated land degradation in fragile environments.”

It states also that climate change, including increasing ocean acidification and changes in sea temperatures, are affecting fishery resources and migration patterns with consequent impacts on the sustainability of Dominica’s fishery sector, livelihoods, human health and prospects for food security.

In addition, due to the island’s vulnerability to hurricanes, the fisheries sector is continuously trying to recover from the damage caused by these storms.

Dominica has no petroleum resources and all the energy required to sustain development is imported. Electricity constitutes the primary source of commercial energy for industrial and other uses, while approximately 8,000 cubic metres of wood fuel are used domestically.

Darroux said the goal is to move away from the importation of petroleum products.

“By developing and utilising renewable energy, we intend to reduce and eliminate the importation of petroleum products which are becoming more and more expensive while at the same time emitting greenhouse gases that causes climate change,” he said.

Darroux said the tests being carried out to determine the extent of the island’s geothermal reserves are part of the new strategy of being less dependent on petroleum.

“The vision is that the funds saved by exploiting this clean and cheaper form of energy can be used to build sea defence walls and other critical infrastructure that are required to withstand the damaging and destructive effects of climate change.”

*This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

Typical drylands scenery in northwest Argentina, in Tilcara, province of Jujuy. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 14 2012 (IPS)

Researchers in Argentina have isolated a sunflower gene and implanted it into corn, wheat and soybean seeds to make them more resistant to drought and soil salinity, problems increasingly faced by this South American agricultural powerhouse as a result of global warming.

The discovery was made by a team of researchers led by molecular biologist Raquel Chan of the Agrobiotechnology Institute of the Littoral, created by the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and the public National University of the Littoral, in the northeastern Argentine province of Santa Fe.

The researchers isolated one of the 50,000 genes that make up the structure of the sunflower, known as HAHB4, which helps it to endure water shortages. They introduced the gene into wheat, corn and soybean species, then carried out three years of field testing in different regions of the country with varying climates and soils.

Chan pointed out that the genetic trait introduced in the laboratory can be combined with others, such as the resistance to herbicides already programmed into numerous genetically modified crops.

There are other benefits as well. “Not only are the improved plants drought-resistant and salt-resistant, but their productivity is significantly increased,” which is the most novel feature of the discovery, Chan told Tierramérica.

Yields are between 15 and 100 percent higher, depending on the quality of the crop, the region where it is planted and the climatic conditions. In no cases did yields decrease.

Although there are other examples in the scientific literature of plant species that are improved to better tolerate water stress, there have been no drought-resistant seeds on the market up until now, said Chan.

This is because the test results published by scientific institutions reveal that other drought-resistant plant varieties provide smaller yields when rainfall occurs. They are only productive when there is a shortage or lack of water, explained Chan.

But the new seeds do not suffer from this shortcoming, she stressed. “The plants demonstrated that productivity increases even in normal climate conditions, with more frequent rains.”

HAHB4, patented on behalf of the university and CONICET, was presented in late February, and its use and exploitation have been licensed for 20 years to the Argentine company Bioceres, which is co-owned by more than 230 agricultural producers.

Bioceres formed a partnership with the U.S. company Arcadia Biosciences to create Verdeca, the brand under which the new seeds will be sold on the international market.

Before they are released on the market, however, the seeds must still undergo a series of tests to determine their effects on the environment and nutritional value, as well as their levels of toxicity. This process will take between two and three years.

HAHB4 is an important discovery because it will help the agricultural sector in Argentina confront some of the most detrimental impacts of climate change, commented Graciela Magrin, a leading specialist in agriculture and climate change from the Climate and Water Institute.

As a result of global warming, experts predict “an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events like droughts,” Magrin told Tierramérica.

The institute where she works forms part of the National Agricultural Technology Institute (INTA), a government agency that studies the impact of climate conditions on agricultural production and means of adaptation.

Climate scenarios for Argentina foresee periods of heavy precipitation concentrated in short periods of time, and longer lapses of water shortages, said Magrin.

The lack of rain during this Southern hemisphere summer, now drawing to an end, heavily impacted the cereals harvest, which was expected to total some 111 million tons, but will likely not reach 100 million tons. Losses were especially marked in corn production.

The 2008-2009 drought, the most severe in 100 years, led agricultural production to shrink by 37 percent.

Natural climate variability and extreme events – shortages or excesses of water, frosts, severe storms, hail – have been observed with greater frequency and intensity in recent years, according to INTA studies.

In addition, there are recurring periods of insufficient or excess rainfall associated with the cold phases (La Niña) and warm phases (El Niño) of the Southern Oscillation, a global climate phenomenon marked by changes in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures and air pressure.

This is why the experts at INTA recommend crop management strategies that address these challenges and the development of more resilient species and varieties.

Magrin noted that when water becomes more scarce, the salinity of soils can increase, which makes the salt-resistant quality of HAHB4 especially welcome.

In fact, 75 percent of Argentina’s territory is drylands, with arid, semi-arid or dry sub-humid soils that are more prone to degradation and, eventually, desertification.

INTA warns of growing desertification in the southern region of Patagonia and serious threats to the southwest area of the western province of Buenos Aires.

But drylands are not barren. Half of the country’s crops are produced in these ecosystems, according to the Land Degradation Assessment in Drylands (LADA) study conducted in Argentina and published in late 2011. Nevertheless, careful management is needed.

Improved seed varieties can help agriculture better adapt to this scenario. Testing in dryland areas in the provinces of Chaco, in northeast Argentina, and San Luis, in the midwest, resulted in good yields, said Chan.

Environmental organisations are not as enthusiastic about these genetically modified seeds. The Argentine branch of Greenpeace is worried that they could fuel a new advance by agroindustry on the country’s forests. Argentina has already lost 70 percent of its original forest cover.

“Unless a policy is adopted to completely prohibit forest clearing, these transgenic seeds could mean the end of the last native forests,” Hernán Giardini, coordinator of the Greenpeace Argentina forests campaign, warns in a press release.

For the leader of the research team that developed the seeds, protection of the environment is an admirable pursuit, but it must be combined with the increase in food production needed in the world today.

“We are molecular biologists and our challenge is to produce more on fewer hectares of land,” said Chan. “It is not up to us to decide how far the planting of these crops should expand. That is up to the government,” she added.

For her part, Magrin stressed that this new development will require “very strict land zoning regulations that define where crops can be expanded and where they pose a risk.”

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network. It was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Governments and civil society organisations in Central Africa are slowly developing strategies in response to global warming. But specialists say the steps being taken seem hesitant in the face of emerging realities.

Forest elephants in the Mbeli River, Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, Congo. Central African countries are developing strategies against climate change. Credit: Thomas Breuer/Wikicommons

For some time now, smallholder farmers in many parts of Africa, but particularly in the Congo basin, have noted with alarm a slump in farm output that can be linked to climate change.

“Before 2010, we would harvest, 1,200 kilogrammes per hectare of Kasaï 1 variety of maize, for example, or 1,000 kilos of the jl24 variety of groundnut. But beginning in 2010, yields per hectare fell to 600 kg for groundnuts and 700 kg for maize,” says a worried Jean-Baptiste Mbwengele, president of a production and sales cooperative which groups forty smallholder organisations in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mbwengele explains that the drop in production has been caused by disruptions to the agricultural calendar, due to both unusually heavy or prolonged rainy periods which make fungal, bacterial and viral plant diseases worse, and to drought – which he linked to the clearing of forests.

In partnership with the United Nations Development Programme, the DRC has initiated PANA-ASA – the Programme of Action for Adaptation and Food Security – designed to counter the threat that climate change poses to agricultural output and food security.

“This project will facilitate access to genetic material (improved seed) better adapted to the anticipated climatic conditions as well as the adoption of better practices for water management and soil fertility,” explains Jean Ndembo, the national coordinator for PANA-ASA.

Reducing deforestation is also a necessity, both to bolster the resilience of local farmers and to contribute to global mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in the form of carbon stored in healthy forests.

For several years, the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo has been carrying out reforestation programmes as part of its Agricultural and Rural Sector Rehabilitation Support Programme, known as PARSAR. Supported by the African Development Bank, PARSAR has reforested some 600 hectares in the western provinces of Bandundu and Bas-Congo, planting 2.2 million trees, mostly acacias, according to the programme’s coordinator, Albert Luzayadio.

Smaller areas have also been rehabilitated by PARSAR in the east, in Orientale Province, where 44 hectares have been planted in Kisangani; and in the southeastern province of Katanga, 25 hectares in Pweto have been reforested.

The programme works in concert with civil society. Célestin Awiwi Mimbu, the national coordinator of non-governmental organisation Action de Reboisement au Congo, says his organisation has planted more than 900,000 trees across the Democratic Republic of Congo, mainly fast-growing eucalyptus and acacias – the latter tree’s leaves offer the additional benefit of fertilising the soil.

Mimbu explains that besides acacia and eucalyptus, umbrella trees – Maesopsis eminiii, a tall, fast- growing species widely found across tropical Africa – and various fruit trees have been planted at several sites in the southwestern DRC province of Bandundu, including 34 hectares at Ndunga and Ngulambondo, and another 56 hectares at Masimanimba.

“We have managed to carry out this reforestation work since the start of 2011, thanks to the National Forestry Fund established by the government. The aim is to build up resilience, support green growth, and fight global warming, which has many negative impacts,” he told IPS.

But he regrets that no budget was allocated for the care of these trees once planted, and some have been lost due to bushfires. Mimbu’s NGO is a member of the Natural Resources Network (la Réseau Ressource Naturelles), an umbrella organisation for civil society across Central Africa which works for the defence and promotion of better governance of forest resources.

“Armed conflict remains one of the major challenges in adapting to climate change in the Congo Basin. In the provinces of Maniema and North and South Kivu, in the eastern DRC, which have been plagued by conflict since 1997, shelling by armed groups has caused the degradation of forests, destroying soil fertility with the chemicals found in artillery shells,” said Corneille Lebu, a Congolese ecologist.

“The shelling cuts the leaves which in principle absorb carbon, leaving the soil bare, leading to the leaching (of nutrients) and destroying micro-organisms. There is a marked acceleration in the loss of moisture from the soil and the rapid release of greenhouse gases,” Lebu told IPS. “Since 1997, conflict in DRC have resulted in more than five million deaths.”

Lebu believes that for adaptation measures to succeed, it is essential to bring peace to war-ravaged zones, and to restore the soil using manure.”

Cameroon, the DRC and the Central African Republic have all begun implementing their National Adaptation Programmes, according to a 2010 report of COFCCA, the Congo Basin Forests and Climate Change Adaptation project.

Launched in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in 2008, COFCCA aims to identify and set joint priorities at the national and regional levels for forests and forest services that are vulnerable to climate change. The project also supports the sharing of experiences on adaptation strategies for a transfrontier resource such as the Congo Basin forests.

Elsewhere in the region, in 2010 the Gabonese government established an agency for research and observation of the climate from space, involving a tripartite accord with the French Institute of Research for Development (IRD) and the Brazilian Institute for Space Research.

Gabon has set up a station to receive satellite images, with the primary task of monitoring the state of health of tropical forests of the Congo Basin – 1.8 million square kilometres of forest, and constituting a “green lung” for the planet, second in size only to the Amazon.

In Burundi, deforestation is being countered by planting jatropha. Since 2010, the shrub has been planted on dozens of hectares in the Rukoko conservation area, which lies on the country’s border with DRC. The work has been done by the Tubane Association of Gikuzi with support from the Congo Basin Forest Fund.

A second phase of the project will be supported by the African Development Bank; the aim is to simultaneously combat poverty and protect the environment, with an integrated plan for exploitation of jatropha helping to bring an end to the present “anarchic” clearing of forest in the Rukoko Nature Reserve. The jatropha will reduce the impact of forest cover already lost while reducing pressure to cut down even more trees. People living in areas adjacent to the park will gain from the harvest and sale of raw jatropha seeds – which yield a valuable oil – as well as local production of soap and fertiliser from the seeds.

It’s in line with the government’s commitment to limit the impact of climatic changes due to deforestation, which is a growing problem Burundi. In November 2011, the country’s first vice president, Thérence Sinuguruza, called on the Environment Ministry to draft a law forbidding the unregulated cutting down of trees.

But even taken together, the actions of governments and civil society in Central Africa so far are inadequate, as they have not yet produced the desired results, says Odon Munsadi, a Congolese ecologist. “Communities in our respective countries are not yet applying agro-ecological practices, and the effects of climate change remain unchanged.”

“Sub-Saharan Africa produces less than four percent of greenhouse gases, this is much less than North America, Europe, Asia and other industrialised regions,” according to experts. But, “Africa is already suffering the effects of climate change will only suffer more in the years to come.”

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

By Peter Richards
CASTRIES, St Lucia, Feb 28 2012 (IPS)

As developing countries urgently seek new sources of financing to cope with problems linked to climate change, delegates from the nine-nation Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) met here last week to evaluate potential funds and outline a more concrete vision of what is required for the subregion.

“The workshop sought to raise awareness and share experiences on instruments and best practices related to financing adaptation and sustainable energy, and to generate feedback on planned future action and partnerships,” Keith Nichols, head of the Sustainable Development Division at the St. Lucia-based OECS Secretariat, told IPS.

Supported by the World Bank, it explored carbon financing opportunities to enhance the ability of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) such as those of the OECS to respond to challenges like sea level rise and coastal erosion.

“The pursuit of a green growth agenda which promotes co-benefits in climate adaptation and mitigation, and which supports scaling-up of renewable energy and other economic resilience-building programmes, served as the vision on which this workshop was initiated,” Nichols added.

Delegates discussed case studies on sustainable land management for climate variability and climate change; adaptation challenges in the coastal and marine sectors; climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction in the OECS; as well as an adaptation finance case study from the Pacific region.

The OECS comprises Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Montserrat, St. Kitts-Nevis, Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands.

Chrispin D’Auvergne, chief sustainable development officer for St. Lucia, believes that as a grouping, the OECS can better negotiate access to global climate funding – for which there is plenty of competition among developing nations.

“Recently there was an international fund launched, the Green Climate Fund, but I believe there will be a lot of demand on that fund. There is also an existing Adaptation Fund, but again I think the demand for that fund will outstrip the supply,” he said.

Approved at a U.N. conference in South Africa, the Green Climate Fund is supposed to raise 100 billion dollars a year from rich nations by 2020 for climate adaptation in poorer countries.

“There is also bilateral and multilateral sources available through the international development banks for countries interested,” D’Auvergne said.

“There is loan financing. But for many developing countries, the argument is that we are not the cause of this, so ideally we are not supposed to be borrowing money to finance climate change adaptation needs,” he added.

D’Auvergne argues that “one of the things we have to do as Small Island States is press these developed countries to live up to those pledges and some of them have started doing so.

“But also for our part we really have to try to crystallise exactly what we are seeking in relation to climate change funding, because it’s one thing to go out and say we need funding to adapt to climate change, but it’s another thing to say ‘I have put together a package of what we need’ and say to our bilateral and multilateral sources ‘this is it’, but if it is a generic request we are less likely to receive assistance,” he said.

There was a general consensus that the approach to climate resilience and low carbon development should be embedded into national/sectoral, regional and private sector development plans, and that there is need for additional investment in capacity and public education so that communities shift from “understanding” the key issues to “ownership”.

The main obstacles remain the lack of needed financing, the absence and inaccessibility of data, human resources and mapping capabilities, and a lack of political will and cooperation amongst stakeholders.

Nichols said that among the recommendations outlined to deal with financing climate change adaptation and sustainable energy were the need to link climate change adaptation with disaster risk management and to engage the private sector, particularly insurance companies.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), as envisioned under the now- expired Kyoto Protocol, in which richer countries pay poorer countries to reduce emissions on their behalf, is one possible solution.

But the workshop noted that while the CDM has established credibility as a market mechanism in terms of size, value and types of participants, “it has limitations for sustainable development and GHG (greenhouse gases) reductions in small island states”.

Serious doubts have also been raised about whether many of the CDM projects meet the requirement that they be “additional” – in other words, that the net reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is greater than the cuts that would occur anyway without the initiative.

Other instruments, such as Green NAMA bonds (short for Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions) and the Green Climate Fund, which encourage upfront financing for low carbon development objectives, are also promising to encourage private sector participation.

The workshop was the second initiative by OECS this month on environmental issues.

The first dealt with efforts to strenthen the management framework for ocean resources so as “to ensure their maximum contribution to economic development goals of OECS member states”.

The St. Lucia-based grouping said that the sustainable development of ocean resources represents a key aspect of the economic development of the OECS region, in conformity with best international practices, the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and other related instruments.

“OECS states see a need to consider the possibilities for other resources within OECS waters such as the implications of the recently endorsed CARICOM Common Fisheries Policy, marine transportation tourism, and the exploration for petroleum products.

“The current OECS ocean governance programme is geared towards enabling the OECS Secretariat to create an institutional framework for regional cooperation in trans-boundary oceans management; strengthening national and regional capacities for the development and implementation of ocean law and policy within the framework of sub-regional cooperation,” the Secretariat added.

*This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

Excerpt:

The gas pipeline would cross the central mountain range and the ecologically delicate karstic zone. Credit: d3b/CC BY 2.0

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
SAN JUAN, Jan 24 2012 (IPS)

As Puerto Rico seeks to lower soaring utility rates while simultaneously shifting toward cleaner energy sources, it faces grassroots opposition to two major projects even though at least one is 100-percent renewable.

Objections to the projects – a natural gas pipeline and wind installation – revolve mostly around their locations, underlining the complex interests involved in actually implementing changes to the island’s power grid.

The pipeline would start on the island’s south coast, head northwards through the central mountain range and the ecologically delicate karstic zone, and then eastwards into the densely populated San Juan metropolitan area.

Dubbed “Vía Verde” (Green Way) by the government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) and “el tubo de la muerte” (the tube of death) by its opponents, the project is more generally known as “el gasoducto” (the gas duct or pipeline).

PREPA holds a monopoly on electricity generation in the island, but since the 1990s it has purchased power from private facilities.

The government claims the gas pipeline will lower utility rates, which have skyrocketed in recent years, and reduce dependence on dirtier fossil fuels.

Most of the utility’s power is currently produced by thermoelectric facilities which use highly polluting petroleum-based fuels, like Bunker C and “destilado #2”.

“Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel there is,” PREPA says, adding that it generates 64 percent less atmospheric pollutants than oil and is more economical.

Citing data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the utility says that natural gas will remain cheaper than oil and that world supplies will be sufficient for decades to come.

But Puerto Rico will be doing no more than trading one dangerous, non-renewable fossil fuel for another, says University of Puerto Rico professor Arturo Massol-Deya, one of the gas project’s most outspoken opponents.

“As an island we are in the dead end of oil dependence, and the government is trading that for the dead end of natural gas, when we have abundant sun, wind and water resources with which to generate the energy we need,” Massol-Deya told IPS.

Massol-Deya is spokesperson of Casa Pueblo, a grassroots community organisation in the mountain town of Adjuntas, which the proposed pipeline would bisect from south to north.

“We have strong, well-founded objections with regards to environmental impact, as well as safety in the face of inevitable natural challenges like steep slopes, flood-prone areas, high rainfall, geological faults and many more,” said Massol-Deya. “And besides, the savings of switching from one fuel to another will barely amount to one cent per kilowatt hour.”

Casa Pueblo and other groups opposed to the gas line are at pains to make clear that they do not necessarily oppose natural gas. They believe a transition can be made from thermoelectric power to natural gas without building a tube across the island.

The proposed “gasoducto” will begin in Ecoelectrica, a natural gas generator in Puerto Rico’s south coast that provides the island with about 13 percent of its electricity. Ecoelectrica, which commenced operations in 2000, is barely two kilometers away from Costa Sur, a PREPA thermoelectric complex that generates 30 percent of Puerto Rico’s electricity.

“Switching Costa Sur to natural gas would require no major modifications,” geographer Alexis Dragoni told IPS. “It would only require that the facility’s burners be replaced.”

Dragoni is a member of Casa Pueblo’s technical team.

Retrofitting Costa Sur to run on natural gas would have PREPA use gas for no less than 43 percent of its electricity, with no need for a “gasoducto” cutting across Puerto Rico. A pipeline has indeed been built from Ecoelectrica to supply gas to Costa Sur but its final segment, of about 50 metres, has yet to be built, said Dragoni.

The “Via Verde” pipeline is to be built by the Spain-based Fenosa Corporation, which bought Ecoelectrica from the controversial U.S.- based Enron in 2003.

The Casa Pueblo leaders are strong advocates of solar energy. All the organisation’s facilities in the town of Adjuntas have been powered by photovoltaic panels since 1999.

Renewables currently comprise a tiny fraction of Puerto’s Rico’s energy, with hydroelectricity the main source. Twenty-one hydro dams produce 1.8 percent of the island’s electricity.

However, the Santa Isabel wind power project is under fire from farmers, local communities and environmental groups, who have created an Agriculture Resistance Front (FRA).

The civil society coalition advocates for the protection of Puerto Rican farmland from threats like urban sprawl and the windmill project, which entails 44 to 65 windmills being built by the U.S.- based Pattern Energy Corporation in the heart of Puerto Rico’s fertile southern plains.

The windmills are expected to generate 75 megawatts, which Pattern claims can power 25,000 homes.

Construction of the wind project began in November. “They have already compacted the soil with their heavy machinery, they have destroyed the drip irrigation system and damaged the topsoil, which takes centuries to form. The best agricultural lands are slipping from our hands,” said FRA member Karla Acosta.

According to FRA spokesman and UPR student Warys Zayas, “The project will impact between 3,500 and 3,700 cuerdas.” (3,700 cuerdas equals 3,594 acres) “The area affected will include not only the windmills’ bases, which together would occupy 21 cuerdas, but also the area within a radius of 1.6 kilometers of each windmill base.”

FRA cites U.S. Agricultural Census data that indicate that Puerto Rico has already lost 19 percent of its farmland between 2002 and 2007, as well as studies by University of Puerto Rico professor Myrna Covas on food security, which estimate that local agriculture produces no more than 15 percent of the food Puerto Rico residents consume – the rest is imported.

Food security advocates are alarmed by these figures, given that with approximately 350 inhabitants per square kilometre, Puerto Rico is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Population has more or less doubled in the last 40 years, environmentalist Juan Rosario of Mision Industrial told IPS.

Santa Isabel has some of Puerto Rico’s top farmland, generating some 30 million dollars in crops per year including tomatoes, peppers, melons, mangoes and onions. Farms provide about 3,000 jobs in the region, according to farmer Ramón González, president of the PR Farm Bureau (Asociación de Agricultores).

“We must not destroy the few lands that feed us,” added FRA spokesperson María Viggiano. “We suggest that the windmills be placed on lands that have already been industrialised and have no agricultural value.”

With regards to energy alternatives, there is no consensus among local experts and activists as to what would work. FRA does not oppose wind energy, just as long as such projects are not placed on farm land.

However, other groups do not favour wind power and see better alternatives elsewhere.

“We oppose wind energy projects. Wind is an intermittent, unpredictable energy source,” activist José Francisco Sáez-Cintrón told IPS. “We support other options like solar, hydroelectric, tidal power and ocean thermal energy.”

Sáez-Cintrón is spokesperson for the Coalición Pro Bosque Seco, a group that seeks the protection of the Guánica Dry Forest, in the island’s southwest. The organisation opposes a wind energy project proposed for the forest’s immediate vicinity.

“But what is even more important is to educate about energy consumption,” he added. “Renewable energies can be no more than a complement to fossil fuel sources.”

“By implementing policies to save energy we can get six to 10 times the cost savings of renewable energy,” said Luis Silvestre of the Puerto Rico Ornithological Society. “They require a much smaller investment and do not lead to debt.”

“Renewable energies cannot possibly lower utility rates. That can be achieved with operational improvements in the utility, as well as modifications of the currently existing grid.”

*This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

Peter Nyaga surveys his four-year-old eucalyptus woodlot. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
NAIROBI, Dec 11 2011 (IPS)

On a steep slope of land in Thangathi village in Central Province, Kenya, Peter Nyaga surveys his four-year-old eucalyptus woodlot. He calculates the value of every tree on his two-hectare piece of land at maturity in three years.

At the prevailing price of 90 dollars per tree, for 600 trees per half hectare, it totals an amount he thinks he could use to buy another piece of land.

“I planted them just four years ago as a means of controlling soil erosion on this sloping land. And here they are, already grown into huge trees that one can use for timber, charcoal making or some other business,” the 39-year-old father of three told IPS.

While his trees may be able to earn him an income, Nyaga has no idea that by planting them he is helping the world remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Yet to be released findings from an ongoing study by the Kenya Forest Research Institute (KEFRI) reveal that the tree could be used to mitigate the devastating impact of global warming.

The study aims to estimate the carbon sequestration ability of Kenya’s three-most common exotic tree species; the eucalyptus, pine and cypress trees, compared to one of the most common indigenous tree species in the same area – the indigenous cedar.

The study found that in Central Province, a one-hectare piece of land with 840 eucalyptus saligna trees sequestered 337 tonnes of carbon over eight years.

Sweden, which was recently ranked the world’s top country in fighting climate change according to the 2012 Climate Change Performance Index, produces 50,600 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.

“The result was determined by calculating the amount of carbon that had been sequestrated by Eucalyptus saligna and two other different types of exotic tree species, namely; Pinus patula (pine), which sequestered 99.4 tonnes of carbon in a period of 10 years, and Cupressus lusitanica (Cypress), which sequestered 73.3 tonnes of carbon in eight years. This was then compared to the indigenous cedar tree species grown in their favourite ecological zones,” said Dr. Vincent Onguso Oeba, the lead investigator of the study who also heads the Biometrics division at KEFRI.

“The indigenous cedar (Juniperus procera) in its best ecological zone in Central Province, with 587 trees on a one-hectare piece of land, was able to sequester only 55 tonnes of carbon in a period of 19 years,” said Oeba.

However, the exotic eucalyptus tree is not very welcome in Kenya. In 2009, Kenya’s Minister of Environment John Michuki issued a directive that all eucalyptus trees growing near water sources in the country be uprooted in an attempt to lessen the impact of the country’s drought.

In Central Province, some farmers who had invested in improved eucalyptus tree species had no choice but to cut them down. However, Nyaga’s woodlot survived because it was more than 30 metres away from the nearest stream. In Kenya, the law allows for exotic trees to be planted in excess of 30 metres away from a watercourse that is more than two metres wide.

“If you plant eucalyptus trees near waterbeds, the roots will sense the presence of moisture, and will thus open the stomata very wide allowing a lot of water to be lost from the soil. But if the same trees are planted in a high-land area, they will sense the reduced soil moisture content, and thus close the stomata as much as possible to retain the little available water,” explained Muraya Minjire, a tree nursery expert working for the Tree Biotechnology Project in Kenya.

(Stomata are microscopic pores on the surface of land plants. They act as gateway for efficient gas exchange and water movement.)

At the moment, KEFRI is monitoring the carbon sequestration ability of 10 more indigenous tree species.

“We are also in the process of developing internationally-accepted equations that will be used locally to accurately estimate the amount of carbon a given tree is able to sequester from the atmosphere at a particular age so that people who are involved in the carbon business will be able to understand the trade,” said Oeba.

According to the study, carbon quantification should be species specific in order to strengthen accounting systems for greenhouse gas emissions.

“We also need to include the aspect of tree species in climate change adaptation policy,” said Oeba.

Meanwhile, Nyaga is still planning to cut down his trees once they mature.

“My ultimate goal is to sell them to the Kenya Power and Lighting Company as electricity supply poles when they get to seven years old,” he told IPS.

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

School children plant mangrove seedlings on Dec. 2, 2011 to fortify coastal areas from the effects of climate change. Credit: Courtesy of the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation

By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Dec 9 2011 (IPS)

As increasingly extreme and erratic weather driven by the earth’s changing climate exacts a heavy toll on Jamaica’s population, economy and infrastructure, a consensus has emerged among scientists and policy makers here that adaptation measures must include hazard mitigation.

Despite an array of projects, there is no single unit to coordinate the country’s policy initiatives. But under a document dubbed the second national communication on climate change, agencies are now working more closely together to forge sustainable solutions, and acknowledge the critical involvement of local communities.

Over at the Forestry Department, conservator and chief executive officer Marilyn Headley outlined several initiatives aimed at enhancing efforts to cope with the effects of climate change.

“Half the people tend to forget that without forest cover, you can’t mitigate against climate change,” Headley told IPS, pointing to the importance of forests on the steep hillsides that makes up much of this northern Caribbean isle.

Since the project started in February this year, Headley said, the Forestry Department has begun the rehabilitation of 300 hectares of degraded watersheds; assessment of the additional 2,600 hectares of forest to be given protected status; as well as the production of 300,000 timber and fruit tree seedlings to be used in a replanting programme.

Plans are also in place for the installation of river training structures and for equipping and training local communities to prevent and control wild fires.

Also underway is an assessment of forest land use cover change to determine the rate of deforestation on the island. One drawback, Headley rued, is that only a third of Jamaica’s 336,000 hectares of remaining forests are controlled by government.

More worrying, some say, is that agriculture – the sector which has been most impacted by extremes of rain and drought – is yet to benefit from strategies to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Entire agricultural sub-sectors are in decline. In 2008, banana exports ceased due to the damage caused by years of consecutive storms. Farmers were too broke to bounce back, and it is the same story in the coffee industry.

At the same time, the second national communication on climate change, which guides climate change policy, identifies agriculture as “one of the key economic sectors in Jamaica”. The document warns that changes in temperature, rainfall and atmospheric carbon dioxide are likely to affect production.

Jamaica’s vulnerability to the impacts of climate change can only be exacerbated by its inability to finance maintenance and repairs to its infrastructure and lack of knowledge in communities. It is why community engagement and awareness have been central pillars in the adaptation works now being undertaken, Headley said.

But despite a high level of knowledge among Jamaicans, a staggering 73 percent have no insurance on their homes, a Knowledge and Attitude Survey undertaken by the Meteorological Service found.

Both the Forestry Department and the National Environment and Planning Authority (NEPA) – the agency responsible for environmental protection – have formed community-based groups that they say are critical to the success of the mitigation process.

This includes programmes to encourage community-level management, and to find and fund alternate “livelihood activities” for those who live off the resources, NEPA’s director of Policy and Planning Anthony McKenzie told IPS.

Come next January, the Forestry Department will add three Local Forest Management Committees to the eight already in existence.

“These communities will become legal entities for primarily management and protection of the forest,” Headley said.

The consequences of Jamaica’s lack of preparedness were dramatically illustrated earlier this year, when one day before the start of the 2011 hurricane season the road network buckled under eight days of heavy rains. Already seriously damaged by more than 12 extreme weather events in five years, bridges and roadways collapsed, threatening lives, homes and marooning communities.

Drains overgrown by weeds and made useless by debris, and the walls of the gullies – built to carry water from the interior – broke up from decades of neglect, resulting in widespread flooding, property damage and loss of income.

An assessment of 900 communities by the Jamaican authorities at the start of 2011 found that 310 were highly vulnerable to natural disasters, Ronald Jackson, the island’s disaster response chief, said in June.

Jackson, who heads the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM), blamed “poor development practises” which, he said had retarded development by continuously shifting resources to the provision of relief and reconstruction.

“We can no longer use the very limited resources to chase the purchase of relief supplies for the large number of persons who reside in vulnerable conditions. We need to look at reducing the number of people in the country who are vulnerable,” he said.

Technocrats say that preparation for climate change here means fortifying communities against natural disasters, formulating strategies, and educating citizens on how to deal with the effects of these events.

International organisations have funded a range of initiatives to help local communities better prepare themselves. At the national level, there are efforts to “mainstream” climate change into government policies.

Forestry and coastal protection are two of the areas being funded by a European Union grant to increase resilience and reduce natural hazard risks in vulnerable areas.

The 4.13-million-euro project will, among other things fund institutional strengthening for climate change adaptation and risk reduction projects across eight agencies and ministries.

Already in its first year, the 30-month project is being managed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ).

Among the government agencies, NEPA is charged with shoring up the island’s natural coastal protection systems and protecting biodiversity, while the Forestry Department, which manages the state- controlled forest areas, will rehabilitate watersheds and bolster the management and protection of forests.

To carry out its mandate, NEPA is overhauling its processes to include policies that highlight climate change issues, McKenzie told IPS.

Some examples include replanting sea grass beds and mangrove forests, reducing pollution, and ensuring that its guidelines promote sustainable use of the natural environment.

In Portland Cottage, a fishing village on Jamaica’s south coast, NEPA has worked with the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation to plant more than 3,000 mangrove seedlings along the coast, to fortify the community’s coastal defense.

According to reports, in 2004, thousands of lives were saved because the mangroves prevented storm surges associated with Hurricane Ivan from destroying homes in that community.

NEPA and Panos Caribbean are also collaborating on climate change through education in the communities of Portland Cottage and Mocho “to lessen the gap” between policy and the transmission of information, Panos’s regional director of media, Indi Maclymont Lafayette, told IPS.

“The policymakers are doing a good job trying to get the region prepared for the impacts of climate change but more needs to be done to share the information with the most vulnerable sectors and persons in the region to ensure that they are also prepared for the impacts,” she said.

*This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

Olonana Ole Pulei’s community is a sub-tribe of Kenya’s Maasai ethnic group. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
DURBAN, South Africa, Dec 8 2011 (IPS)

For the Laibon community, a sub-tribe of Kenya’s Maasai ethnic group, the 33,000-hectare Loita Forest in the country’s Rift Valley Province is more than just a forest. It is a shrine.

“It is our shrine. Our Gods live there. We gather herbs from the place. We use it for bee- keeping. It therefore forms part of our livelihood,” said Olonana Ole Pulei, who is in Durban, South Africa, to represent his community at the ongoing 17th Conference of Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

According to Nigel Crawhall, the Director of Secretariat for the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Co-ordinating Committee (IPACC), different African communities have incredible indigenous knowledge that they use in the conservation of forests and biodiversity in general, and this should be recognised during the negotiations in Durban.

“Different communities have different practices that they use in forestry conservation,” he said.

Crawhall gave an example of how the Bambuti and Batwa pygmy communities, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, conserved the forest using traditional methods. Both communities depend on the biodiversity of animal life in the equatorial forests in order to survive.

“Usually, they know how to identify particular trees that can be cut down in order to create a unique opening on the canopy, which attracts light in the closely-packed Congo forests. The light then attracts animals, birds and insects, thus giving them an opportunity to hunt,” Crawhall told IPS.

This helps conserve the biodiversity, as well as the forests because this method can only work if the forest canopy is intact.

In Kenya, the Maasai culture forbids any community member from cutting down a tree, either for firewood or any other purpose. People are also forbidden from interfering with the taproots or removing the entire bark of a tree for herbal extraction.

According to their cultural belief, one can only use tree branches for firewood, and fibrous roots for herbs. If the bark of a tree has medicinal value, then only small portions of it can be removed by creating a “V” in the bark. The wound is then sealed using wet soil.

“We believe that the soil helps in healing the wound on a tree. This is cultural, and we all believe that it is an abomination for one to injure a tree, and not help it heal,” said Ole Pulei.

It is a practice that has been passed down from generation to generation among Maasai community members. Among the Laibon community, it is this indigenous knowledge that has aided in the conservation of the Loita Forest.

“All logging activities observed on Maasai land, including the destruction of the Mau Forest, are done by foreigners because the Maasai culture does not allow such activities. This is the indigenous knowledge that helps in forest conservation,” Ole Pulei told IPS.

Such beliefs make the forests part of the community, where community members have feelings for the trees, and where cutting down a tree could amount to an offence against the Gods and their culture.

“We have several other communities all over the continent who co-exist with forests. They include the Tuareg community in Algeria, Yiaku community in Kenya’s Laikipia region, the Ogiek community also in Kenya, the Kung community in Botswana among others,” said Crawhall.

Though according to Crawhall, all Africans are indigenous although there are some groups who live by hunting and gathering, while other groups practice pastoralism, and others practice dry-land farming.

Despite the fact that there is no standard definition of indigenous people, the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognises that particular communities, due to historical and environmental circumstances, have found themselves outside the state system and underrepresented in governance.

“The Bushmen of the Southern African region, or the Ogiek community in Kenya who live in forests are a typical example of groupings categorised as indigenous,” said Crawhall.

He points out that Africa has more than 40 groupings in different countries that survive entirely on hunting and gathering. However, IPACC works closely with 155 communities from 22 African countries who are recognised as indigenous because of their historical and environmental circumstances.

As a result, representatives from these communities have joined the rest of the world in Durban to have their voices heard, so that their contributions to forest conservation are recognised as part of the climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts.

“We believe that African traditional ecological knowledge is the foundation for appropriate and effective national adaptation policies,” said Crawhall.

Through the IPACC secretariat, the 155 community-based organisations in Africa have drafted their position for the Durban negotiation platform. They want the negotiators to come up with a position that is representative to African parties, indigenous African people’s organisations, traditional institutions, traditional authorities and value systems.

They are calling for the formation of a regional body that is legally binding under the United Nations, to handle issues on conservation that are difficult to deal with at national level.

“One of the prevailing gaps in most of the IPACC-member countries is that there is no land tenure for communities who live in forests, or depend on forests,” said Crawhall.

However, different countries have started responding to the needs of their local communities by including them in their national climate change adaptation strategies, with Kenya taking the lead.

The country is in the process of drafting the Climate Change Adaptation Bill. And the indigenous communities will have their say on the bill because according to the constitution, they must be consulted on draft legislation so that they can make contributions.

“We have traversed the entire country seeking views on this bill, where local communities have been able to give their contributions. Our vision is to participate and lead in the development and implementation of climate change sensitive policies, projects and activities within and outside our Kenyan borders,” said John Kioli, the chairman for the Kenya Climate Change Working Group, who is attending the Durban climate change negotiations.

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

Monks at a prayer session against climate change. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KAVRE, Nepal , Dec 2 2011 (IPS)

There are gasps from the audience as a series of shocking images flash across the screen: human hands eaten away by arsenic, the carcass of a cow so emaciated that it looks two-dimensional, a starved child with matchstick legs grasping at the udder of an animal for sustenance.

“I am showing you these images to make you understand why we need to focus on the environment,” says the red-robed Tibetan Buddhist monk who has put together a chilling collection of photographs titled ‘A true story of Mother Earth’ on his laptop.

Karma Samdup Lama, a poor peasant’s son who became a Buddhist monk at the age of 12, now the vice-principal of a school for Buddhist novices, is showing the documentary to nearly six dozen monks and nuns gathered at the Thrangu Tashi Yangste monastery in Namo Buddha village, about 40km east of the Nepali capital.

It’s an unusual gathering. Though it started with the ‘Tashi Tsikgye’, Tibetan prayers chanted as benediction, it is a meet on climate change.

The ‘Monks’ Meet on Climate Change’ in November brought together renunciates from different monasteries and nunneries in Nepal to discuss what they can do to reduce their carbon emissions and why they need to do it.

The meet was the brainchild of The Small Earth Nepal (SEN), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) promoting sustainable lifestyles and conservation. It had support from the Korea Green Foundation, a Seoul-based organisation working on environment conservation.

“We decided to start a climate change awareness programme with the monks and nuns because Nepal is a deeply religious place,” says Niranjan Bista, SEN’s coordinator for the project. “It looks up to the religious communities for inspiration and role models.”

Though Nepal is home to diverse religions, SEN chose the Buddhist community after research by Sundar Layalu who, as part of a British Council project, made the surprising discovery that monasteries have higher than normal carbon emissions.

Buddhism rejects physical luxuries to achieve spirituality and monks live an austere life. Yet Layalu, who chose the Thrangu Tashi Yangste monastery for his 2009-2010 research, found its carbon emissions unusually high due to a combination of fossil fuel use and a regular stream of visitors.

“The monasteries are often located at remote, high places; transporting food and other things require more car fuel. They also use generators to pump up drinking water. Besides, there is also the heavy use of incense,” says Sudarshan Rajbhandari, vice-president at SEN.

SEN trained monks to cook their food using briquettes made out of waste materials. In addition, the monastery has started using solar panels to heat water, replaced tea cups with bio-degradable earthen mugs, stepped up tree plantation and banished plastic bags.

“The Buddha taught to protect the environment,” says Karma Sandup. “He said we owe our existence to the four elements – water, earth, air and fire – and we have to conserve them. He also said plants should be nurtured till they became trees, like a mother protects her child.”

Karma Drolma a 55-year-old nun from Nepal’s remote, mountainous Manang district, who joined the Thrangu Tara Abbey for Tibetan Buddhist nuns when in her early teens can read and write only in the Tibetan language and remains cloistered, but she is aware of the changes taking place due to global warming.

“The mountains are melting and rivers are receding,” she says. “If this continues, all water would vanish one day and both people and animals will die.”

Bista says there was a special reason to choose the monastery at Namo Buddha for the climate awareness meet. “It is a well-known trekking and tourist destination and we hope the message will go out to these people as well.”

The monks’ meet ends with a pledge to do whatever is possible to resolve the global threat of climate change “which will ultimately entail ever greater human suffering, inequity, and irreversible damage to the earth.”

A billboard, standing sentinel at the monastery entrance, reminds residents and visitors of the Buddha’s teachings.

“The Buddha taught that the well-being of all life on earth, not just humans, is important and equally valuable,” the billboard says. “Hence we have an obligation to adhere to a more thoughtful way of living, which results in a natural balance and a harmonious future.”

*This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

As climate talks get underway in Durban, South Africa this week, progress on a Green Climate Fund is one of the hottest, most contentious tickets in town. It is also one of the great prizes to be won.

Climate change wreaks damage on infrastructure, ecosystems, livelihoods and lives in developing countries. Credit: Zukiswa Zimela/IPS

The fund would, in theory, provide a new, substantial source of funds to help developing countries adapt to the negative impacts of climate change and pursue low carbon development; it is meant to be a major vehicle for delivering 100 billion dollars a year in climate finance to developing countries by 2020.

Agreement on the structure of the fund and on sources of cash (at least for the medium term) must be secured in Durban, to keep this ambition on track. Developing country observers believe such an agreement on climate finance is vital. Why is it so urgent?

The Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period expires late next year, and international leaders have not yet agreed a framework to succeed it. With the clock ticking on this legal deal, there will be a gap until any new version is adopted.

As developing countries press for a new global deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions, caution dictates that they must prepare to adapt to a world in which climate change wreaks damage on infrastructure, ecosystems, livelihoods and lives.

In the words of Professor Robert Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, developing country decision makers are calling for a “two degree world” – where the average global temperature is curbed at two degrees above pre-industrial levels – but must prepare to adapt to a “three or four degree world.”

For developing countries, this means bracing for rising sea levels that will make atolls and coastal settlements less habitable. Droughts will become more prolonged and frequent, and rainfall patterns far more erratic.

The current drought in the Horn of Africa, and the devastating floods in El Salvador last month and Durban, South Africa this week are indicative of the weather extremes that will become more frequent by mid-century as climate change takes hold. These impacts will be felt even in a “two degree world”, but in a “three or four degree world” they will become even more severe and unpredictable.

Climate finance is not just a story about preparing for the worst, though. Developing countries also recognise opportunities to attract investment in low carbon technologies, which will increase their global competitiveness.

What could be a more compelling prospect that to leapfrog past soon-to-be obsolete technologies that guzzle fossil fuels, and avoid some of the carbon lock-in experienced by industrialised nations?

The Government of Rwanda will launch its National Green Growth and Climate Resilience Strategy at the 17th Conference of the Parties in Durban next week.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame has said he sees low carbon development as a win-win situation for Rwanda. It could reduce Rwanda’s dependence on foreign imported oil and create an economic stimulus by redirecting payments toward clean energy production at home, as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

However, financial support from foreign governments and the private sector will be needed in order to realise such ambitions.

Developing countries’ hopes for progress on climate finance in Durban are set against a background of frustrated ambition. They are approaching the end of the so-called “fast-start finance” commitment period that was agreed in Copenhagen in 2009.

The aspiration set out in the Copenhagen Accord was to raise 30 billion dollars of new and additional funding over the three years until 2012. Have industrialised countries even delivered on this deal?

The trouble is fast-start finance has no easily identifiable form, being typically delivered through existing channels of delivery and disbursement. Therefore, trying to track that funding has proved difficult and confusing.

Even seasoned observers cannot get an accurate handle on how much money has been allocated, and for what ends. While some “new and additional” funding has certainly been allocated, examples abound of projects being re-branded “fast-start” even when they pre-date Copenhagen and there is a large gap between pledges and good intention, and disbursement.

Chair of the African Group of Negotiators in the climate negotiations, Tosi Mpanu Mpanu has simply put it: “Fast start has not really delivered – only 10 percent of fast start is new and additional.”

A new online portal developed by the United Nations may start to address these issues but in the current circumstances, mistrust pervades.

The 2010 to 2012 fast start period was only ever just that: a start. Currently, we do not know where the money is going to come from to reach the loftier ambition to provide developing countries with 100 billion dollars a year by 2020.

Ideas for specific sources of revenue have been proposed, such as an air passenger levy, a tax on financial transactions and a carbon levy on polluting emissions from shipping.

Yet, mobilising such sources could take several years, which raises the prospect of a serious funding gap after the fast start period ends in 2013.

We know for sure that public sources will not fulfil that promise alone, and private sector money will be needed. In the meantime, developing countries expect public sources to lead the way.

The private sector role in the GCF is not a question of syphoning off scarce public funds. It is about using at least some of this public money to catalyse private investment at scale, to accelerate low carbon development. With public funds under pressure in many Annex 1 countries, the private sector role is going to be critical.

As well as hard cash, the institutional set up for financing climate compatible development is important. A good outcome from Durban would be if the GCF were formally established in line with the recommendations put to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by its Transitional Committee on Finance.

Having the fund’s operational structure agreed would enable commitments made in Copenhagen and Cancun to be taken forward while meeting aid effectiveness principles.

A variety of other climate finance mechanisms already in operation, such as the Adaptation Fund, will also need to be shored up, and this would need to be done in parallel with agreements on the capitalisation of the GCF.

The prevailing economic climate makes discussions of climate finance difficult, but the time to deliver this fund is now.

World leaders must leave Durban with a clearer picture on what climate finance can be delivered between 2013 and 2019, beyond the fast-start period.

The form of the GCF and its capitalisation could be the “crown jewels” of a South African climate conference. They would provide real impetus for developing countries to step up climate action themselves.

* Tim Ash Vie is Head of Negotiations at Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

Kashmir's rice paddies are giving way to horticulture for water shortages. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, Nov 30 2011 (IPS)

Sammad Sheikh of Tangchekh village in north Kashmir cannot understand why the rice fields that his family cultivated for generations are drying up.

“It is a mystery as to why water is getting scarcer in summers,” he says. “This has been happening for the past few years though there have been one or two good summers in between.”

With no assurance of water availability, Sheikh, like his fellow farmers in the region, is looking for alternatives to paddy cultivation.

“I have heard that most of the farmers in central and south Kashmir have switched from agriculture to horticulture. I am now seriously thinking of putting a portion of my seven acres under crops that are not water-intensive,” he told IPS.

Farmers in this Himalayan region have heard of climate change. They wonder why the government is yet to step in with improved irrigation facilities to help them tide over the summer months.

“The government has constructed water ponds in some areas for water harvesting, but much more has to be done to cover the entire area,” says Mukhtar Naikoo. “Anyone can see that the droughts have become frequent and rainfall scarcer and more erratic.”

According to the study, ‘Recent Trends in Meteorological Parameters over Jammu & Kashmir (1976 to 2007)’, by A. K. Jaswal and G. S. Prakasa Rao of the Indian Meteorological Department, temperatures are increasing over this state – often likened to Switzerland for its alpine charms and snow-capped mountains.

The study showed an annual increase in the maximum temperature in the Kashmir region from 0.04 to 0.05 degrees Celsius over the period and a corresponding rise in the minimum temperature in the Jammu region from 0.03 to 0.08 degrees C per year.

“Annual rainfall and rainy days are decreasing in both the regions of the state except at Jammu where rainfall trend is significantly increasing (12.05 mm per year),” says the study.

Naikoo has vivid memories of the farmer-friendly weather in Kashmir: “It would rain for days together. And, at times, we would perform a ‘bandar’ (an oblation) seeking God’s pleasure for cessation of rains.”

Like Sheikh, Naikoo is baffled at the creeping dryness. “Maybe God is not happy with our deeds. We are a sinful lot.” Naikoo is not yet ready to switch to horticulture. “I am still hopeful that God will not let us down. Things will get better.”

Scientists in Kashmir are worried at the rapid conversion of paddy lands for horticultural use and the mushrooming of commercial establishments and residential colonies in the areas which were farming lands.

According to official figures, 80 percent of Kashmir’s seven million people are directly or indirectly engaged in agriculture and allied sectors. Much Kashmir’s total area of 2.4 million hectares is mountainous or forested.

Official statistics indicate the 151,352 hectares of land that used to be under cultivation in the state, a few decades ago, has now shrunk to 46,943 hectares.

“This is a dangerous trend,” warns Zaffar Ahmad Reshi, a professor in Kashmir University’s Botany department. “The government in Kashmir has no land-use policy and has failed to provide proper irrigation facilities to the farmers.”

Reshi told IPS that necessary adaptation to climate change in Kashmir includes augmentation of the irrigation network for farming.

According to the Kashmir government’s Economic Survey report for 2010-11, only 41 percent of agricultural land is covered by irrigation facilities with the rest dependent on rain.

Reshi stresses that Kashmir cannot afford to lose all its agricultural land to horticulture and built-up areas. “Rice is the staple food of Kashmiris and it is a primary commodity here. We are already importing more than 50 percent of our rice,” he said.

Naikoo has a similar perception, though from a personal point of view. “For generations our family never bought rice in the market. We grow what we need and more in our rice fields. We can’t think of any other way,” he told IPS.

But, other farmers are more adventurous and have been shifting away from paddy to cash crops like apple, almond and walnuts.

“The trend could be a consequence of climate change as farmers find it increasingly difficult to irrigate their rice fields,” says Shafiq Ahmad Wani, director of research at Kashmir’s Agriculture University.

“In the Brang area of south Kashmir, we have observed an almost total conversion from agriculture to horticulture with farmers attributing it to lack of irrigation facilities and the absence of a marketing system.”

According to Akhtar Hussain Malik, a botanist at Kashmir University, the drop in rice and maize cultivation has resulted in a lack of fodder for cattle. “Our animals are already suffering from insufficient fodder with the degradation and shrinking of pastures in Kashmir.”

Farooq Ahmad Lone, director at Kashmir’s agriculture department says the state government has plans to providing bore wells to farmers whose lands are dependent on rains.

“We suffered a 25 percent loss in maize production this year. We intend to mitigate these losses by providing bore well facilities to farmers in the hilly areas,” Lone told IPS.

*This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

The San Juan River in Nicaragua. Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Nov 28 2011 (IPS)

The foreseeable absence of binding agreements to stabilise the global climate could give rise to increased regional cooperation to help Latin American countries adapt to the severe effects of climate change.

A few initiatives have taken the first steps. But the results of the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 17), taking place Nov. 28 to Dec. 9 in Durban, South Africa, could act as a catalyst for faster movement in this direction.

In August, Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama joined forces to establish the Intergovernmental Programme for Climate Change Cooperation-Opportunities and Challenges in Agriculture (PRICA-ADO), which seeks to create a scientific-technical network, build the capacities of national and regional agencies, and support governments in the design and implementation of public policies.

The changes already observed in the agricultural sector highlight “the need for land management and agriculture models with the capacity to foresee and adjust to these changes,” project leader Martha Alviar, a specialist in geomatics and land planning, told Tierramérica at the Mexican offices of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture.

Also crucial are public policies for climate change adaptation in areas such as land planning, technological development, risk financing, infrastructure, conservation strategies, and knowledge and use of environmental assets, explained Alviar.

The Caribbean and Mesoamerica (southern Mexico and Central America) are particularly exposed to severe droughts and devastating hurricanes. Agriculture is impacted by changing patterns in the frequency and intensity of rainfall, alterations in soil conditions and variations in crop yields.

Central America, Mexico and northeast Brazil are among the regions for which there is “medium confidence” that droughts will intensify during this century, according to “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation”, a special report approved by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Nov. 18.

There is a 66 to 100 percent probability of increased maximum wind speed of hurricanes like the ones that form every year in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, although it is also “likely” that the global frequency of tropical cyclones will remain unchanged or even decrease, the report states.

In 2012, PRICA-ADO will carry out a diagnostic assessment of the sub-region, based on agro-ecosystems, to develop units for management of adaptation actions.

“The definition and evaluation of agro-ecosystems, the generation of geo-prospecting scenarios and the formulation of public policies are the three dimensions through which the programme will foster collective decision-making and action by governments, scientists and agricultural producers in the countries involved,” said Alviar.

But a great many challenges lie ahead.

“The region’s institutions have not evolved sufficiently to tackle the challenges of adaptation or risk and vulnerability reduction,” Nelson Cuéllar, an economist from the Salvadoran Research Programme on Development and Environment (PRISMA), told Tierramérica.

There is a tendency in the region to address issues on a sector-by-sector basis, “and climate change cannot be confronted this way,” he stressed.

The 2009-2024 Regional Agro-Environmental and Health Strategy for Central America was adopted in 2008, followed two years later by the 2010-2014 Central American Regional Environmental Plan and this year by the Regional Climate Change Strategy.

It is unlikely that COP 17 will adopt a binding agreement for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions or a second period of commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, currently the only binding international agreement for climate change mitigation, whose original term will elapse in 2012.

Based on the view that the release of greenhouse gases through human activities is responsible for climate change, the Kyoto Protocol obliges the wealthy countries who have ratified it to reduce their emissions by 5.2 percent from 1990 levels. But this target will not be met by the protocol’s deadline of 2012.

In South America, meanwhile, there is no sign of a regional mechanism or forum to confront the climate drama, despite the torrential rains that hit Colombia and Venezuela this year, the increased melting of the glaciers in the Andes region, and deforestation in the Amazon region.

This is because “individualism prevails,” and the regional power, Brazil, “as a half-developed and half-developing country, is walking a tightrope, wanting to enjoy the benefits of both the Group of 77 and the developed countries,” Morrow Gaines, an expert on international climate change negotiations at the Brazilian non-governmental organisation Vitae Civilis, told Tierramérica.

Maureen Santos, a specialist in international negotiations at the Brazilian Federation of Agencies for Social and Educational Assistance (FASE), called for the creation of a fund for climate change adaptation projects within the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), as well as a specialised meeting on the environment within the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) and other forums for regional integration.

Promoting debate on energy in Mercosur (made up by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) and UNASUR could contribute to the development of a regional climate change plan, she said.

In the past, she noted, numerous proposals from specialised Mercosur meetings have subsequently been adopted as regional policies. “Why not a meeting on the climate?” she asked.

For Gaines, who is also co-chair of the board of directors of the International Climate Action Network, the “most appropriate forum” for addressing climate change adaptation would be the Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean (ECLAC), since it has already promoted discussions on the subject.

In the most vulnerable areas, such as Central America, there are government initiatives aimed at reducing damages.

On Dec. 16, El Salvador will host a meeting of the Consulting Group for Reconstruction, formed by the presidents of the Central American countries, to address the effects of the devastating rains these countries suffered in September and October.

“Much of what is done will depend on how much financing can be mobilised, although financing is not enough. There are institutional challenges that act as a strong impediment to the implementation of more integrated actions,” Cuéllar stressed

But money is also important.

Of the 30 billion dollars pledged by the wealthy countries for adaptation and mitigation measures, only 8.585 billion have actually been delivered, according to figures from the United Kingdom’s Overseas Development Institute. In Latin America, only Mexico and Peru have received funding for four programmes.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. Additional reporting by Edgardo Ayala (El Salvador) and Mario Osava (Brazil). This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

** This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

Rooibos plants are severely threatened by climate change. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Kristin Palitza
CAPE TOWN , Nov 24 2011 (IPS)

South Africa’s Rooibos tea has become a popular drink all around the globe. But prices of the herbal brew could shoot up within the next decade, as the Rooibos plant can only grow in one small region in the world – which is severely affected by climate change.

Pieter Koopman stoops down to inspect a young Rooibos bush. The farmer, who owns an 850-hectare tea farm in the Suid Bokkeveld, in western South Africa, is greatly concerned about the upcoming harvesting season. Droughts and erratic rainfall have destroyed more than half of his crop over the past decade. But he has hope that this year will be a better one.

“The last 10 years have been very hard. We had to learn to adapt to new weather conditions, and we still do. We can’t sit back and wait,” says Koopman. Vital rain, which usually occurs in the South African winter between May and August, the traditional Rooibos planting season, has not been falling. “All our seedlings died. We made losses every season,” the farmer sighs.

In response, Koopman and other farmers in the area started to change their farming techniques. They planted windbreaks with indigenous plants to stop soil erosion, built water catchments and, perhaps most importantly, started to plant seeds instead of seedlings. “Seeds take longer to grow, but are less sensitive to lack of rain,” Koopman explains. “It was a tough lesson to learn.”

If Koopman and his peers manage to successfully adapt to climate change, Rooibos lovers all over the world can breathe a sigh of relief: because the entire global supply of the red bush tea comes from a single production area, the South African Suid Bokkeveld, which measures just 20,000 square kilometres.

Attempts to cultivate it outside of this region have failed, as the plant needs the harsh conditions of the region, where temperatures drop to zero degrees Celsius during winter and rise to a blistering 48 degrees Celsius at the height of summer.

The farmers’ concerns are justified. Experts predict that agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa will be severely affected by climate change. By 2050, changes in weather patterns will cause average rice, wheat and maize yields to decline by up to 14 percent, 22 percent and five percent, respectively, according to the Washington DC-based International Food Policy Research Institute.

“That’s why the long-term prosperity of Rooibos farmers will depend greatly upon their ability to change their farming practices to these new weather conditions,” says Noel Oettle, rural programme manager of the Environmental Monitoring Group (EMG), a non-governmental organisation helping Rooibos farmers increase their resilience to climate change through natural resource management, monitoring weather patterns, soil and water conservation as well as promoting agricultural biodiversity.

“Only if farmers include in their decision making the likelihood of extreme weather events and focus on sustainable production, can the rest of us continue to enjoy Rooibos tea,” reckons Oettle.

Rooibos tea has become a popular drink around the globe not only because of its sweetish nutty taste, but due to its many health benefits. Caffeine-free and rich in anti-oxidants, Rooibos contains a wealth of minerals, such as zinc, copper, calcium, magnesium and potassium and is known to act as a digestive aid as well as an anti-carcinogenic, anti-inflammatory and anti-viral.

According to the South African Department of Agriculture, the country exports about eight tonnes of Rooibos tea per year to key foreign markets, such as Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Japan and the United States, but also to Chile, Poland and Russia.

Rooibos tea farming remains a small industry, with about 300 farmers, most of them smallholders who employ a handful of workers full-time, plus seasonal workers during harvest. The Suid-Bokkeveld is a poverty-stricken area that has seen slow economic improvement since Rooibos has become popular in foreign countries.

“Climate change is likely to have a negative impact on those exports because of the plant’s geographic limitation, but also because there exists only one species of Rooibos. If it gets wiped out, that’s it,” warns Rooibos expert Dr. Rhoda Malgas, a researcher at the Department of Conservation at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. By comparison, there are 25 species of Honeybush, another South African herbal tea of the fynbos variety.

One option to save South Africa’s Rooibos plant is to conserve the wild Rooibos plant, Malgas believes, which has been growing naturally in the Suid Bokkeveld for centuries. Wild Rooibos is hardier and more heat resistant than its cultivated cousin, with a more elaborate root system that can survive less rainfall.

“It would be wise to start building seed banks. If you conserve wild Rooibos, you can conserve the genetic material from which the cultivated Rooibos tea is derived,” the scientist suggests.

Some Rooibos farmers have already caught on to the idea. Laurenz Dworkin, who owns a 100-hectare tea field in the Suid Bokkeveld, says he has considered harvesting wild Rooibos in addition to the cultivated variety. He also plans to collect its seeds to be able to protect his farm from the effects of climate change. “Wild Rooibos has not become a commercially viable product yet, but it has potential,” he believes.

But Dworkin is concerned that the trend to commercialise the wild variety will ultimately do more harm than good. Because it grows more slowly, wild Rooibos cannot be harvested on the same scale as cultivated Rooibos – it can only be picked every two years. Yet, farmers desperate for quick profits might harvest the plant annually all the same, and ultimately destroy it.

“We desperately need responsible farmers who think long term and don’t kill the plants for fast profits,” says Dworkin. “Instead, we should work on the assumption that Rooibos prices will keep going up. The plant might become more valuable because yields will decrease due to changing weather patterns.”

Although EMG supports the farmers, it remains their own decision what farming practices they apply. Farmers are often reluctant to take the risk to try new approaches and Rooibos farming remains a small industry, without large amounts of research money behind it.

If Dworkin is right, a hot cup of Rooibos tea might soon cost consumers a premium.

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

Residents of Kalacha proposed that water from a rare fresh-water desert spring be used to irrigate indigenous grass, which could be used as fodder. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
NAIROBI , Nov 17 2011 (IPS)

When donor-funded horticultural projects failed in Kalacha village at the edge of the Chalbi Desert in North Eastern Province, Kenya, the local pastoralist community proposed their own idea, which turned out to be the solution to their problems.

“When horticulture was introduced by a host of non-governmental organisations five years ago, we really got excited because it was going to be an alternative to our pastoralist lifestyle that is already threatened by the changing climatic conditions.

“But before long, we discovered that all was useless because monkeys and other animals fed on the crops,” said Abdi Tuya, a resident of Kalacha.

However, after consultation with community members, the Kenya Arid and Semi Arid Lands Research Programme (KASAL), which is being implemented by the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), discovered that the community already had a viable idea for a project.

“They insisted that they wanted to use the water and the land to grow grass to fatten (their) malnourished goats and camels, especially during the drought,” Dr. David Miano, the head of KASAL told IPS.

The North Eastern Province is generally an arid region, which has always been dry. But in the wake of the changing climate, the situation has worsened with erratic and unpredictable rainfall.

The government estimates that over 50 million domestic animals in the region are at risk of dying, while more than 1.4 million people are in dire need of relief food due to the worsening drought.

But residents of Kalacha proposed that water from a rare fresh-water desert spring be used to irrigate indigenous grass, which could be used as fodder. “This forced our scientists to start a new research (project) to identify the different types of indigenous grasses that are drought tolerant, and which have sufficient nutritional values for animal fattening purposes,” said Miano.

And now two years on, farmers can point to thousands of animals that would have succumbed in the recent drought in the region, had they not had the means to feed them.

“Grass farming is the best thing that happened to me. All the malnourished animals are brought back home from the pastoralists’ grazing grounds for fattening. In the past year, I have been able to save up to 80 goats that were succumbing to the drought,” said Tuya, who owns 450 goats and 15 camels.

Earlier the only solution would have been to slaughter the animals.

Home grown successes, like this one in Kalacha, has climatologists and African think tanks saying that an African solution is the only way that Africa can adapt to changing climatic conditions. The call comes ahead of the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to be held in Durban, South Africa from Nov. 28 to Dec. 9.

“We have come to terms with the reality that however successful a project can be in one area, it does not mean that it will succeed in a different area, even if the climatic and geographical features are the same,” said Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“Projects with a huge impact in Mongolia, for example, may not succeed in Africa,” Pachauri told IPS.

Experts say that African research institutions and centres of excellence must scale up Africa-focused climate research to improve the science base and reduce prediction uncertainties in user-relevant climate variables.

“In this regard, research should be relevant to local needs, (it should be) more practical and policy driven,” said Pachauri.

This comes after several climate change adaptation projects in Africa have proved irrelevant to local needs.

Examples include the introduction of Prosopis juliflora, a shrub or small tree native to Mexico, South America and the Caribbean, which was supposed to provide forest cover in dry-land areas, but turned out to be a menace.

In Ethiopia, studies indicate that the shrub has had a negative impact on people’s food security and livelihoods, especially in the Afar region in northern Ethiopia, where it has colonised arable lands.

“Though we have different uses of the tree, which include fuel, fencing, construction, and charcoal making, we would be happy if someone taught us how to eradicate Woyane hara (the local name for prosopis),” Ato Kebele, a resident from Afar who works in the country’s capital Addis Ababa, told IPS.

“We would prefer to grow indigenous trees instead of this ‘enemy’ (shrub),” said Kebele.

In Kenya, residents of Baringo County in the Rift Valley region took the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to court in 2007. They claimed that after the organisation introduced prosopis, also known as Mathenge, to the area it colonised their farms, and affected the teeth of goats that fed on the pods. They produced a toothless goat as evidence.

Following the case, the court declared the tree poisonous and ordered the government to destroy it and set up a commission to recommend the level of damages payable as compensation to the community. However, Alexander Alusa, the climate change policy advisor in the Kenyan prime minister’s office, warns that even after African solutions are adapted to African climate change problems, policies need to be cohesive in order for them to work effectively.

“In Kenya, for example, the government that allocated people land in the Mau forest through the Ministry of Lands is ironically the same government that strives to protect forests through the Ministry of Environment. But if the policies were harmonised, (this) confusion would not have occurred,” he told IPS.

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

By Rousbeh Legatis and - -
NEW YORK, Nov 16 2011 (IPS)

Asian countries, home to about 60 percent of the world’s population, will be hit hardest by changing weather patterns and a degrading environment, research indicates.

A whopping 90 percent of all disaster displacement within countries in 2010 was caused by climate- related disasters, the international body Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) reported. That year, 38.3 million women, men and children were forced to move, mainly by floods and storms.

Out of 16 countries with the highest risk of being severely affected by environmental changes in the next 30 years, ten are in Asia, according to the 2010 Climate Change Vulnerability Index, released by global risks advisory firm Maplecroft.

In Southeast Asia alone, extreme weather events like rising sea levels and storm surges “could cause economic losses of 230 billion dollars, or equivalent of 6.7 percent of GDP, each year, endangering the livelihoods of millions of people”, as Bart Édes, director of the Poverty Reduction, Gender and Social Development Division of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), told IPS.

Climate change adaptation costs for Asia and the Pacific are estimated in the order of 40 billion dollars annually, the expert said.

Sea level rise particularly affects the poorest of the poor living in coastal areas 10 metres above sea level and in small island states.

Already facing the consequences of a changing environment, some Pacific Islands, including Kiribati, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu, are also considered among the least developed countries, meaning they possess limited resources to implement measures to effectively support those in need.

“About 100 million people would be affected by sea level rise of one metre. There are more than 30 small island developing states that would be impacted by sea level rise as well as the populations of large delta systems in Egypt, Bangladesh, Niger and Vietnam,” said Mary-Elena Carr, associate director of the Columbia Climate Centre in New York.

In the early 21st century, frequent flooding in most small island states is likely to be a reality, added Carr.

Off the radar

A clear understanding of the situation of people’s livelihoods in the Pacific region remains elusive so far due to a lack of data. Although the Islands are spread over a vast geographical area, their population and combined area make them an otherwise comparatively small region that tends to be overlooked in international discussions on climate change.

The infrastructure and housing of the poor cannot withstand cyclones, floods, landslides or king tides, all of which have been exacerbated by accelerated sea level rise.

In the region, climate change-related migration follows inward paths, meaning people flee from outer to main islands, as they typically lack the means to move abroad.

Protection issues can arise from this situation. Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are not protected by any internationally binding legal framework. They frequently face discrimination as well as increased vulnerability to exploitation and violence.

IDPs are often deprived of rights to social services, livelihoods, housing and property.

“Specific strategies need to be developed to ensure that disaster-displaced find durable solutions, including in situations where return is not an option,” explained Kate Halff, head of IDMC, in an interview with IPS.

Such methods include displacement monitoring systems to track population movements and ensure timely and adequate responses as well as joint approaches by disaster risk reduction, development and humanitarian actors.

The struggle to take action

To highlight the key characteristics and challenges of displacement, “Protecting the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons in Natural Disasters – Challenges in the Pacific”, a study recently published by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), compared cases and responses in Samoa, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.

Indicating major flaws in governmental responses to the needs of IDPs, the study determined that planning and prevention measures to assist the displaced were inadequate.

Political decision-makers have not taken into account complaints from the displaced or even acknowledged them as “internally displaced”. They refer to them instead as “affected” or “homeless”, the UN report showed.

“A lot of change is happening within a country because of climate change. Lots of decisions need to be made about where, how and who to resettle,”  Matilda Bogner, regional OHCHR representative for the Pacific, told IPS.

Additionally, hierarchical traditional systems in some countries exclude certain groups from decision- making. “Women are fairly systematically excluded from decision-making within most countries of the Pacific,” Bogner said.

Resettlement efforts are further complicated by land issues on the Islands, where the majority of territory is commonly owned by different communities and individuals and not available for public use.

Since regional governments depend heavily on international development assistance, “donor governments in the region also have a particular responsibility to promote and protect human rights within the Pacific,” the OHCHR study emphasised.

Understanding environmental migration in Asia and the Pacific is of paramount importance in adopting policies and programmes capable of coping with future migration flows in the region, stated an ADB paper in September.

As the number of people displaced from their homes by both sudden and slow-onset climatic events will increases, multiple aspects of migration policies – including financial – will have to fall into place to create solutions beneficial to both guest and host communities.

*This is the second in a three-part series on the impacts of climate change in the Pacific region.

Excerpt:

By Marwaan Macan-Markar and - -
BANGKOK, Nov 16 2011 (IPS)

No guns are needed in this battle. Only the muscle of Thai soldiers defending a sprawling industrial estate on the eastern end of this city from an advancing enemy – flood waters.

Over 400 men in fatigues have been engaged for this mission, to build a wall of sandbag and plastic sheets over two metres high. Other stretches of the Lat Krabang industrial estate have been fortified by empty shipping containers and barrels filled with stones.

“The water is here already,” said Somjet Thinaphong, the former governor of the Industrial Estate Authority of Thailand. “One breach in the wall will make this new embankment useless.”

“We have reached the level we can defend,” he added with an air of resignation as he looked in the direction of the brackish flood waters, nearly a metre high, lapping at this estate of 231 factories. “The situation keeps changing every day.”

Defending the industrial estate from Thailand’s worst floods is important firstly because 50,000 people work and produce global brands such as Johnson and Johnson and Cadbury.

Lal Krabang industrial estate is a vital bridge that links Thailand, one of Southeast Asia’s major manufacturing hubs, with the global market. Its container yards serve nearly half of the four million containers shipped out every month through Bangkok’s major port.

Many of these containers are expected to lie empty in the wake of the havoc caused by the floods. Six of this kingdom’s largest industrial estates, in the provinces of Ayuthaya and Pathum Thani, have been submerged.

Worst affected by the floods, which have claimed 500 lives since late July are Japanese manufacturing companies.

Over 400 Japanese factories are located in the industrial parks north of Bangkok, the manufacturing heartland of this kingdom where nearly 600,000 people have lost their jobs. They include workers on the automobile and information technology production lines.

Carmakers Toyota, Mitsubishi and Honda are among those that have been forced to suspend production, and foreign companies that use Thailand to manufacture hard-disk drives.

The computer world has already been put on notice that there will be shortage of hard disk drives since Thailand accounts for 40 percent of the world’s supplies.

While the full impact of the floods on the Thai economy will be known only after a further three billion cubic metres of water have drained out through Bangkok into the Gulf of Thailand, the country’s central bank has slashed the country’s growth forecast from 4.1 percent to 2.6 percent.

“This significant downward revision reflects the severity and the broad-based impacts of the floods,” Prasarn Trairatvorakul, governor of the Bank of Thailand, told foreign reporters. “(The floods have) brought about a halt in agriculture and manufacturing production in affected areas, and have also disrupted production chains in other areas as well.”

A heavy insurance bill on some 800 companies in affected manufacturing parks, estimated to be 16 billion dollars or higher, awaits payment. “The affected industrial estates will face a severe insurance problem,” Masato Otaka, economic minister at the Japanese embassy in Bangkok, told IPS. “The magnitude is beyond the estates.”

Otaka fears that Thailand may lose its competitive edge as a regional manufacturing base. “International insurers will not provide insurance … not take the risk now that Thailand has become known as a severely flood-prone country.”

Economists question the country’s development model, where industry accounts for 44.7 percent of economic growth. Also brought to relief is the lopsided rise of Bangkok, accounting for 41 percent of the Thai economy, when the country shed its largely agrarian identity to embrace a manufacturing one from the 1970s.

“It is an economy of extremes between Bangkok and the rest of the country,” says Craig Steffensen, head of the Thai office of the Asian Development Bank, the Manila-based financial institution. “Everything has been developed in and around Bangkok, giving it drawing power for investors to set up here than anywhere else.”

Attempts to push foreign investors to other parts of the country since 1985 have “not worked because Bangkok is close to the major airport and ports and has the best schools, best hotels and best shopping,” he explained to IPS. “Maybe the floods will serve as a tipping point for change.”

The current floods, the result of unusually heavy monsoon rains, four storms and mismanagement of two major dams north of Bangkok, have exposed the vulnerability of the Thai economy in a region competing for foreign investment, adds Pavida Pananond, a professor at the business school in the Bangkok-based Thammasat University.

“Thailand may now appear less attractive for investors than before,” she told IPS. “We may pay a price for not placing environmental issues as a priority when trying to attract foreign companies to invest in factories here.”

Excerpt:

By Busani Bafana
PRETORIA, South Africa, Nov 15 2011 (IPS)

While Africa has successfully avoided conflict over shared water courses, it will need greater diplomacy to keep the peace as new research warns that climate change will have an effect on food productivity.

Climate change will increase water pressure on the stressed Limpopo, Nile and Volta River Basins on which more than 300 million people depend. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“Climate change introduces a new element of uncertainty precisely when governments and donors are starting to have more open discussions about sharing water resources and to consider long-term investments in boosting food production,” Alain Vidal, director of the CGIAR’s Challenge Programme on Water and Food (CPWF) told more than 300 delegates attending the Third International Forum on Water and Food being held in Pretoria, South Africa from Nov. 11 to 18. GCIAR unites agricultural research organisations with the donors.

“To prevent this uncertainty from undermining key agreements and commitments, researchers must build a reliable basis for decisions, which takes into account the variable impacts of climate change on river basins.”

Scientists at the global water forum added that climate change will increase water pressure on the already stressed Limpopo, Nile and Volta River Basins on which more than 300 million people depend.

Vidal said new insights on the effect of climate change on river basins calls for a rethink on assumptions about water availability. However, investment in research to support far-sighted water policies will give decision makers the information they need to address challenges introduced by climate change that could otherwise impede agreements and investments in food security, he said.

As part of a five-year global research project scientists from more than eight major research institutions around the world examined the potential effect higher temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns, caused by climate change, had on river basins around the world in 2050. CPWF scientists say some unsettling scenarios have emerged for parts of Africa, particularly in the Limpopo Basin, in Southern Africa, which is home to 14 million people.

Using data averages from climate models by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, CPWF scientists found that rising temperatures and declining rainfall in the Limpopo Basin over the next few decades would affect the already marginal environment, depressing food production while intensifying poverty.

“We need to ask whether current agriculture development strategies in the Limpopo Basin, which are predicated on current levels of water availability, are in fact realistic for a climate future that may present new challenges and different opportunities,” said Simon Cook, a scientist with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture and head of CPWF’s Basin Focal Projects.

“In some parts of the Limpopo Basin even widespread adoption of innovations like drip irrigation may not be enough to overcome the negative effects of climate change on water availability,” Cook added. “But in other parts, investments in rain-fed agriculture such as rainwater harvesting, zai pits (deep planting pits) and small reservoirs might be better placed.”

The key, said Cook, was data for informed decision making.

Rainwater management is viewed in Africa as the key to improving both crop and livestock farming. Innovative ways to make productive use of rainwater are also being touted as a new “climate smart” approach to agriculture. For example, small reservoirs can be used to store water during dry periods or to help control flooding.

“These decentralised approaches to farming with rainwater are inexpensive, highly adaptable and provide immediate options for farmers to be their own water managers,” said Lindiwe Sibanda, CEO of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network.

“Enhancing farmer’s adaptive capacity to respond to current challenges is smart even without climate change, but it is an absolute imperative now that we see what the future hold,” she added.

The CPWF research has highlighted the important role of effective water management to ensure food production stays abreast of population growth, even in times of climate uncertainty.

Experts are arguing that the strong link between climate change and food security should give agriculture a boost in the global climate talks at the forthcoming 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to be held in Durban, South Africa.

“But water for food and agriculture and the impact of climate change on global food security is barely a blip on the radar for the negotiators meeting in Durban later this month,” added Sibanda.

She said that the first step towards climate security was ensuring farmers and the world’s poor would be able to feed themselves under rapid environmental change that puts the local and global food system at risk.

Findings to be presented at the global forum indicate that climate change could also introduce uncertainties into the water politics of the Nile Basin. The CPWF analysis shows that higher temperatures — temperatures are expected to rise by two to five degrees Celsius by 2050 — could result in increased water evaporation and could “reduce the water balance of the upper Blue Nile Basin.”

Excerpt:

By Manipadma Jena and - -
NEW DELHI, Nov 13 2011 (IPS)

Designated Drylands Ambassador, United Nations Convention for Combating Desertification (UNCCD), at its 10th Conference of the Parties (COP10) in South Korea in October, Dennis Garrity is mandated to raise awareness of land degradation.

UNCCD's Dennis Garrity Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Speaking with IPS correspondent Manipadma Jena over telephone from Melbourne, Australia, Garrity outlined steps the UNCCD and governments need to take on issues such as land-grabbing, climate change vulnerability, and loss of biodiversity through genetically modified (GM) seeds.

Q: What policies should predominantly agricultural economies, such as those in India and Africa, adopt to give drylands due importance? A: Scientific evidence is proving that governments are able to recover higher returns from investments in drylands than investments in rain-fed areas. Now we have technologies like ‘evergreen agriculture’ or ‘double-storey’ agricultural where much of the annual crop production occurs under a full canopy of specific trees species – many of these are ‘fertilizer trees’ that capture atmospheric nitrogen thus dispensing with the use of chemical fertilisers. This benefits food production and the environment.

Q: How farmer-friendly and cost-effective is this technology? A: In Africa, millions of hectares have been reclaimed by farmer communities through evergreen agriculture. There is great enthusiasm because it not only builds on traditional practices but also gives high yields. We have proof that this can be done on a huge scale. With investment it can be extended to tens of millions of farmers in Africa and India.

Q: There is growing loss of arable land to slow desertification and land degradation. Why is it that UNCCD is focusing more on drylands? A: Indeed the focus of the Convention should be desertification and land degradation across all agricultural land. The problem is that some countries that are party to the Convention are not comfortable with too much scrutiny in terms of their other areas of deforestation; for e.g. the management of forest lands that have been cleared for agriculture. These countries have argued for a narrow interpretation of the Convention and hindered its ability to deal with issues in a comprehensive way.

Q: Which are these countries? A: Mainly Brazil. Other countries also feel that all aspects of land degradation should be covered as they are important for global agriculture and food security. The debate carries on from one COP to the next. We are trying to make widely available evidence of problems arising from unsustainable land management.

Q: What would be the most productive way to deal with the stewards of drylands who are the communities themselves? A: Investments should be skewed towards developing the capacity of the tiller of the land, of communities to enable them to manage their own land. Local grassroots participation has proven to be an absolute, fundamental condition in areas where land regeneration has been successful. Investments need to focus on capacity building and knowledge sharing. Building social capital is the key to future land regeneration, really.

Q: Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can play a major role? A: Absolutely fundamental role. Often NGOs can be the networking connections between communities. They can bring in the kind of services and support that communities need.I believe the UNCCD secretariat is recognising this fact and seeking to bring in the NGO community to a greater degree.

The original concept of land regeneration in the UNCCD was top-down, and for many years that concept dominated discussion and government interactions. However, in recent years the real focus has been on grassroots participation.

Q: Land grabbing of traditional drylands, in Africa particularly, is emerging as a major growing concern. A: The concerns around land grabbing, in Africa particularly, are valid and very serious. Large areas are being set aside or sold to outsiders – many of these areas are populated by communities that live off the land and have no alternative livelihood.

Most of these land investors have absolutely no idea what they are getting into. They often take the simplistic approach of using big technology to make large-scale plantations and traditional communities are simply discarded. This is totally unacceptable.

Q: One opinion at the COP 10 was that these investors would squeeze dry the land and just leave. A: This certainly is a possibility, because outside investors have no stake in the land. The possibility of degrading the land through unsustainable practices is very high. It is also quite likely that they use the land investment for speculative purposes.

Governments should be protecting local communities. All too often these land deals with governments are non-transparent – which is why land grabbing has become such a big deal.

Q: At COP 10, the business sector was encouraged in a big way as investment partners in desertification, land degradation and drought (DLDD) projects. A: The private sector was invited to build their conscientiousness and their responsibility. Companies are involved in a gamut of agricultural activities – processing, marketing, distribution; they all need to be thinking of how their activities may be degrading or improving the land. With the private sector we are now searching for a certification process that in future can evaluate and monitor business-chains on their land regeneration impact.

This was the first attempt of the Convention to start a dialogue with the Business Forum ( COP 10 had 90 participating companies); it will take some time to level off in terms of benefits for both sides.

Q: Genetically modified (GM) seed companies’ entry into some drylands and the subsequent loss of traditional seed varieties, which are in fact best adapted to the local soil and climate conditions, is yet another escalating concern. A: The GM seed question is a very big concern. While GM seeds may improve the quality and yield of crops, the real concern is the concentration of the seed industry into just a few firms who hold the patents which allow them to control the future of seeds. We need figure out how we can protect the small farmer and seed diversity.

Q: Do you think the role of women and their contribution is being recognised by governments, policy makers and by their own communities? A: In many dryland areas males do off-farm work, leaving the farming to women. So, we need to restructure our whole thinking and reach women farmers in terms of extension services, participation in community groups and so on.

Q: In the context of climate change how do you see the future of natural drylands (increasing out-migration being one of the fallouts) and what should governments do about this? A: It is certainly a critical issue. Our drylands are set to become drier with climate change. We have to look at agricultural systems that are more resilient. Since many of these areas have gone through some of the worst cycles of drought from climate change, we can actually learn from these systems.

Q: How do you see governments adopting DLDD programmes in terms of a time frame? A: Governments are beginning to respond. In India, the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and I are going to launch an evergreen agriculture programme soon under which a billion fertilizer and fodder trees will be planted in drylands of small farmers. India’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-2017) has accorded high priority to agroforestry. In Africa, 20 countries are developing evergreen agriculture programmes and more are slated to join.

I believe we have a possibility now of having a huge new area of action, dealing with hunger in drylands – through ways that are low cost, no cost and no regrets!

Excerpt:

Char Nongolia village is a basket case when it comes to climate change impacts such as increasing salinity, frequent cyclones, tidal surges, erratic rainfall and extended droughts.

Arzu Begum testifies at the climate hearings for women in the deltaic village of Char Nongolia. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

Yet, the 40,000 people of this village, sitting on a delta that drains the sub-continent’s major river systems, have endured the creeping devastation of their homeland in southeastern Bangaldesh with no help from anywhere.

There is no drinking water supply, no land to grow food crops on, no healthcare facility, no roads, no jobs and absolutely no sign of any security or authority. Any natural protection afforded by forests has long ago been stripped away.

“Today we have nothing left. Even the last piece of land we had was lost to river erosion,” said Salma Khatun, 72, narrating at a climate hearing for women in this village, late October, how her family steadily lost its farming lands to erosion.

“We moved to this place from nearby Hatiya island about nine years ago after we lost our ancestral home to river erosion. After settling here the same disaster hit us five more times,” said Arzu Begum, 35.

Arzu and her husband Anwar Hossain and their extended family of ten lost all their belongings to river erosion and floods and now live in a flimsy bamboo hut perched on the river bank.

Khadiza Akhtar, 24, moved with her husband to Char Nongolia five years ago, hoping to build their lives here. But, last year’s flood and the incessant river erosion washed away all her dreams.

“We had a decent living with steady earnings from selling milk,” said Akhtar. “We had three dairy cattle and about four dozen ducks. All of them disappeared when the floods inundated our village.”

Rumani Akhtar,27, said: “About 15 years ago my husband used to earn about Bangladeshi taka 25,000 to 30,000 (327 to 392 dollars) every season by selling paddy cultivated on leased land. He gave up farming due to increasing soil salinity and we now live a hand-to-mouth existence.”

Several other women, victims of climate change, told stories of lost livelihoods to a mock jury at Char Nongolia organised by a local non-government organisation, Noakhali Rural Development Society and the People’s Forum on the Millennium Development Goals with support from the Global Call for Action Against Poverty.

Lawyers from Noakhali town patiently heard the women’s stories of sufferings amid a crowded audience at a site where many victims had lost their homes. The women hope that their voices will reach the United Nations climate conference starting in Durban on Nov. 28.

“How many more times do we have to suffer? We have lost all our belongings eight times in the past three years. I cannot take it any more, God help us,” cried out Jannatul Ferdous.

Ferdous, 26, lives on a piece of land not far from the river bank with her husband and two young daughters. Once a successful fisherman, Ferdous’s husband has been reduced to penury.

“No one comes to inquire about our miseries,” said Shumi Akhtar. “This place is hell. We are being tested to see how we much more of this torture we can tolerate.”

Once known for its rich forests, Char Nongolia is now barren and surrounded by similar islands of accumulated silt. Farming is now rare, although riverbeds and embankments are known to be naturally fertile.

For centuries, the people in this area coped with cyclones, floods and droughts but the adaptation to increase in frequency and intensity of adverse climatic events has reached the limit.

“We never had extreme cold or high temperatures. In fact, we never experienced drought and fog during our childhood,” said Nurul Islam, a 74-year-old shopkeeper.

Char Nongolia and the surrounding dried-up riverbeds (locally called char), were once famous for an abundance of freshwater fish. People would sail in from all over the country during the peak season to buy up the fish.

“We used to sell several tons of fish every season and the cash would flow in. But now the catch has reduced drastically,” said Syed Abdullah, 68, who now puts out to sea to continue with his profession.

“During those days people in Char Nongolia were relatively well-off. But look at what nature has done to us. Today we have no work,” Abdullah said.

Most of the able-bodied men have migrated to the port city of Chittagong to find jobs, leaving the women to fend for themselves. Even the microfinance institutions that have helped women across Bangladesh is missing from these parts.

The district commissioner, Sirajul Islam, told IPS that he would soon launch ‘vulnerable group feeding’ entitlement cards for the poor in Char Nongolia to enable them to survive. A reforestation campaign to protect the survivors from cyclones and river erosion is also on the cards.

“I have already requested the concerned officials to release the funds,” said Islam.

Islam admits that even basic needs have been neglected for decades and promises that the “families of the local fishermen would be given food entitlements on an emergency basis.”

But past promises on reforestation and the construction of embankments, to mitigate natural disasters and the effects of climate change events remained unfulfilled.

Such is the air of helplessness in the coastal regions that Bangladesh’s junior minister for environment, Hasan Mahmud, admitted at a recent public meeting that close to 30 million people are likely to be displaced soon by the relentless loss of land.

According to the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, given a business as usual scenario, 17 percent of Bangladesh would be submerged uder seawater by 2050 with several hundred million people forced to migrate from the coastal zone.

Suntali Shrestha wrings her hands in tension and despair as she recounts how she has been spending sleepless nights fearing that the flood alarm in her village would go off while she slept and she would be submerged.

Women in Nepal’s Dolakha district testify to living in fear of being submerged by a glacial lake outburst flood. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS

“The sirens are always there at the back of my mind, they won’t let me have any peace,” the 45-year-old farmer’s wife cries out addressing a crowd of people, mostly women, who have gathered in this town to talk about the hardships they have been facing due to changes in the climate.

It is one of Nepal’s “women and climate justice hearings” and the village women, some of whom had walked for hours to reach the venue, are hoping their voices would be heard by the authorities, perhaps also at the U.N. conference on climate change to be held in Durban this month.

Organised by Jagaran Nepal, a Kathmandu-based non-profit working to promote women’s rights, peace and governance, and local host Mahila Utthan Kendra (Centre for Women’s Upliftment), the tribunal, held on Oct. 30, was supported by the feminist task force group of the GCAP (Global Call for Action Against Poverty) Foundation.

It focused on select villages in Dolakha, a mountainous district about 135 km northeast of the capital city of Kathmandu, which lives with the threat of potential submergence.

Nagdaha, the village Suntali comes from, lies under the shadow of Tsho Rolpa, the largest glacial lake in Nepal and now, the most potentially dangerous. Lying at 4,580 m at the foot of the 7,146 m high Gauri Shankar peak in the Himalayas, Tsho Rolpa was formed by the gradual melting of the Trakarding glacier.

Though walled in by a natural moraine dam, the 1.76 sq km lake has been swelling as the Trakarding is melting due to the rise in temperature. Nepal’s annual mean temperature has been rising by 0.06 degrees Celsius per year with the mountains warming even faster by an additional 0.08 degrees Celsius.

This has caused glaciers to recede and glacial lakes in the Himalayan region to grow in number as well as in size. With the Trakarding retreating at the rate of 66 m per year, frequent avalanches now pose a greater threat to Tsho Rolpa’s natural dam.

Since the 1960s, Nepal has seen 17 glacial lakes breach their boundaries, causing death and destruction. Studies had forecast that Tsho Rolpa would also cause a GLOF – glacial lake outburst flood – in 1997. If the dam gets breached, a flood of nearly 80 cu m of water could put the lives of over 6,000 people at risk and destroy a 60 megawatt hydropower project.

Villagers say in the worst-case scenario, a Tsho Rolpa GLOF could also affect the Tamakosi river that flows through the region. The Tamakosi is a tributary of the mighty trans-border Kosi river that flows through Tibet, Nepal and China. The Kosi creates frequent monsoon flood havoc in Nepal and India and a GLOF could increase its power to devastate.

Though Nepal’s government installed 17 stations to issue early flood warnings – through air horns backed by sirens – villagers say some of them were disabled during the 10-year civil war fought by the Maoist insurgents. Also, while people from the at-risk zone moved to safer areas in 1997, they returned to their villages when nothing happened.

The warning signs put up by the government mean nothing to people like Suntali, who cannot read or write.

“There is no school in Nagdaha,” Kamala Shrestha, a 24-year-old poultry farmer, tells the tribunal. “The nearest school is in Charikot, which is two hours drive. So only two or three women in this village can read and write.”

There are no health posts either. “Even to buy paracetamol we have to go to Charikot,” Kamala adds. “Plus, there is no motorable road, which means we have no access to the market. We wish the tribunal will make the government build a school, health post and road.”

Sharmila Karki, Jagaran Nepal’s president, says the tribunal’s report will be forwarded to COP 17 when it starts in Durban on Nov. 28.

“We want a member of the community to raise the issues in Durban but it is a tough challenge,” Karki says. “Though Nepal is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, people here are still not aware of the dangers. Also, there is a huge deficit in gender perspective when it comes to making policies.”

When the first tribunal was held in Kathmandu in 2009, a participant told the audience she was suffering from a prolapsed uterus due to climate change.

“She said the streams in her village were drying up and she had to walk for nearly five hours to fetch water,” Karki said. “Doctors affirm that carrying heavy burdens for long periods can cause uterine prolapse in women; yet many people in the audience, unaware of that, laughed in derision when they heard her.”

Karki finds an ominous development since the last hearing. In 2009, women talked about physical problems: being displaced by floods, food insecurity and poor health. But this time, they talked of mental stress as well.

While the government last year made policies to prevent domestic violence, there is no policy to help women get climate justice.

“Living in an environment of psychological terror is also a violation of women’s basic rights,” Karki warns.

“Women who have to manage households are under growing stress, especially since there is no policy to ensure their access to natural resources like water, healthcare or the education that they need in order to be able to cope with change.”

By Marwaan Macan-Markar and - -
BANGKOK, Nov 3 2011 (IPS)

This sinking mega-city’s eight million people are paying the price of ignoring warnings over many years concerning its climate vulnerability and the incapacity of its soggy foundations to handle flooding.

Early morning in submerged Bangkok on Nov. 1, 2011. Credit: Withit Chanthamarit/CC BY 2.0

Only the upper floors of houses, factories and shopping malls are now visible with no sign of the waters receding in the next few weeks.

Anupong Taduon, scratches his head for answers to a deluge that has affected thousands. “The water level has not dropped since the first day,” says the 52-year-old from behind the sandbagged entrance to his karaoke bar. “We may have to live like this for three or four weeks.”

Warnings by the kingdom’s central government and local authorities that the worst is not over are greeted with anger and frustration. It is common knowledge that this tsunami in slow motion must flow through the city before it can drain out into the Gulf of Thailand.

After all, flood management experts have warned that the city – complacent in its economic prosperity visible in the constantly changing skyline – is one of the Southeast Asian capitals most vulnerable to climate change.

“Bangkok is particularly vulnerable when compared with other cities like Manila, Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur,” says Aslam Perwaiz, head of disaster risk management at the Bangkok-based Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre. “The current floods confirm concerns about the need to improve the city’s water management.”

“The record of bad floods in the past show that Bangkok’s water channels are unable to drain inundated streets and neighbourhoods for weeks,” Perwaiz told IPS. “Floods have lasted for nine weeks in this city.”

“Bangkok ranks first in the climate vulnerability ratings of (all provinces) in Thailand,” says Hermina Francisco, director of the Economy and Environment Programme for Southeast Asia, a Singapore-based research group. “The high degree of vulnerability of Bangkok is due largely to high exposure to frequent flooding and sea-level rises.”

“What is probably making the situation even more serious is the claim that Bangkok is sinking,” she told IPS. “(It has been) observed in parts of Bangkok, probably more visible than in other (places), and is something that has been taking place for many years now.”

A reminder of this city’s inability to cope with major flooding was made in February by a team of Dutch water management after surveying Bangkok’s flood defences, pronouncing the flood protection networks inadequate.

“Current flood protection levels for urban areas like Bangkok amount to one percent flooding probability in any given year, which is relatively low by international comparison,” the Netherlands Water Partnership (NWP) noted in a report. “For a large metropolitan area like Bangkok …we anticipated much better flood protection.”

The NWP’s warning was to prove prescient eight months later, with both national and local government officials giving mixed messages and appearing increasingly helpless at saving Bangkok from six billion cubic metres of water bearing down on it in a sheet.

Nearly 400 people have died and some 2.5 million displaced in Bangkok and the provinces to its north since this natural disaster began to unfold following heavy monsoon rains, three tropical storms and a typhoon three months ago.

The city’s much talked about network of canals, which earned it the name “Venice of the East,” has proved inadequate. Most of the 1,650 ‘khlongs,’ as the waterways are known, are either brimming with water or overflowing.

Yet, many of the khlongs, including the 100 navigable ones that helped Bangkok tide over a severe flood in 1940, have been filled in to make way for roads and high-rise buildings and accommodate an economic boom that began in the 1970s.

Recommendations that the canals should not be filled in to accommodate vehicular traffic were ignored, says George Olson, a former corporate manager of a United States engineering firm that had worked on flood protection projects in Bangkok.

That negligence “certainly made all the floods after 1974 much worse for the Bangkok metropolitan area,” said Olson. “The recommendations to build waste water and flood protection tunnels were also met with limited approval.”

Excerpt:

By Manipadma Jena
CHANGWON, Oct 21 2011 (IPS)

Luc Gnacadja, in his second three-year term as executive secretary, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), is widely seen as delivering on his commitment to manage the world’s drylands.

Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the UNCCD, at Changwon. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Passionate about his mission, this Benin-born architect was minister of environment, housing and urban development in his country from 1999 to 2005 and received the World Bank’s ‘2002 Green Award’.

In this interview with IPS correspondent Manipadma Jena, Gnacadja argues in favour of private investment in land management.

Q: Drylands are overwhelmingly regarded as marginal lands, whereas they are precious gene pools for desertification, land degradation and drought (DLDD). What is UNCCD’s strategy to change this thinking into a positive one? A: I think we have to get better at using the wisdom, knowledge and the successes of people living in drylands.

For climate change to pick up that overarching momentum in the late 90s, scientists did good work in communicating related facts and figures. Some outstanding people, some policy makers understood the serious implications and presented the information in a way that challenged the world.

COP 10 is an opportunity to pick up information about food security and act on it before it gets too late to remedy the situation. The economic crises of 2007-08 and again in 2010-11 have shown that if we go on doing business as usual, degrading land at 25 times the historical pace, losing 12 million hectares – areas larger than my country Benin – to drought and desertification, it is ‘mission impossible’ to feed nine billion people by 2050.

Q: You just mentioned that scientists are getting better at communicating the science of climate change. How people-friendly are they getting at communicating the science of desertification and land degradation? A: Till as late as 2009, a commonly agreed platform to measure desertification was not available to us. Countries had not agreed on any impact indicators that could measure and monitor stress. At COP 9 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, we got the required input from scientists and the decision to make two (percentage of green cover and percentage above the poverty line) of the 11 DLDD indicators were made mandatory for reporting. These scientific indicators will be made further people-friendly; but you are right, we need to do more because soil is much more complex, diverse and site-specific.

Soil is the answer to global warming – it is the second largest carbon sink next to the oceans. When carbon is sequestered in the oceans it acidifies the ecosystem, but when sequestered in the soil, carbon benefits food security and the biodiversity. Why are we not able to appreciate this?

Q: What could be the reason for the world not appreciating and acting on this? A: We only see what our spectacles allow us to see. When one does not see what one needs to see, we need to change our spectacles and it is our responsibility to provide the appropriate one – one for the general public and yet another for policy makers.

Q: The involvement of the private or business sector evolved substantially during COP 10. Incentives for the business community are expected; how will the checks and controls be exercised? A: We need the private sector in sustainable land management (SLM). Governments world over spend some one percent on this, the rest comes from the private sector that includes small farmers to large corporates. The governments must create a conducive atmosphere to harness private investment in SLM and guide the investment in the correct direction.

At COP 10, for the first time a 90-company strong business forum has taken the initiative to be part of the UNCCD call to create a land degradation neutral world and voluntarily declare their commitment to work to this end. This dialogue between the private sector and the governments will exercise the checks and balances. We need to maintain and sustain this dialogue.

The private sector needs to understand that any investment it makes has to be win-win – beneficial for the local population- even what is being called ‘land-grab’; beneficial to the resource base and ecosystem and of course profitable to themselves as well. And, this is possible.

Q: How and how much do you see the Changwon Initiative helping to combat DLDD? A: The Changwon Initiative is a political initiative of the Korean government which will be chairing the COP bureau for the next two years till COP 11. It will help the UNCCD mission because it is focused on the three pillars that we need to accelerate the action to combat desertification.

The first pillar that the Changwon Initiative will be helping with would be strengthening the scientific input in policy making and strategy formulation by building up a global knowledge data base on DLDD.

The second pillar is to build a stakeholder inclusive process and define each stakeholder’s scope of action. The missing stakeholder – the private sector – has been brought in by the Changwon Initiative.

Q: Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) are an important partner too and the Global Alliance of CSOs here is complaining that the Changwon Initiative does not even mention CSOs? A: Yes, but proposals for the inclusion of CSOs in the Changwon Initiative have been welcomed by the Korean government. Sometimes the CSOs are so prompt to criticise; they also need to be accountable. They need to be proactive and not just vocal. They realise that they are influential but influence calls for action, not just keeping the mike and being vocal.

I hope the government of Korea will take CSOs on board because they too will be part of the checks and balance on the private sector. Coming back to the third pillar that the Changwon Initiative will reinforce – it is rewarding those who are keeping the drylands productive. To this end they have, at COP 10, given away the first ‘Land for Life Award’. This helps replication of good practices.

I am hopeful that the Parties will take similar initiatives. Turkey and Qatar already have and the latter has formed the Global Dryland Alliance.

Q: What decisions have the Parties taken during COP 10 to more expeditiously mainstream gender into the DLDD programmes? A: None, yet. But I am hopeful they will before the conference ends Friday. Parties have agreed that women and children through their mothers are the worst affected by DLDD; that they are the invaluable custodians of traditional farming knowledge. Parties must ensure that women have access to land and the support that makes farmland productive and to capacity building. The parties too must ensure women-inclusive policies are in place through parliamentary action.

Q: How can the UNCCD intervene to ensure this? A: Countries are very zealous about their sovereignty. What UNCCD can do is provide a draft policy framework which, if approved by the country’s parliament, opens the pathway for us to facilitate its implementation. Any government that knows about statistics cannot ignore the capable and resilient half of the population and still hope to develop… it is like cutting off one of the two legs.

Q: It is not as if governments do not know the importance of women to a country’s growth. What seems to be the roadblock for action? A: There are some beliefs that are deeply ingrained. But we can do it! We must better inform and highlight success stories in lot more contexts, including programmes that have successfully implemented gender inclusion. Sharing widely is the key, so that those who do not know can learn.

Q: How do finances, funding and aid work for Parties under the Desertification Convention? A: In 1996 when the Convention was formulated, it was agreed that affected countries would design their action programme, mainstream it – in other words put their money where their mouth is. Only after the affected country has established SLM as a national priority through appropriate parliamentary action and budgetary allocation would developed countries commit technical transfer and financial support.

Both ends have failed in their commitments.

Poverty and food security are inextricably linked. If countries prioritise poverty eradication but do not integrate SLM into their programmes they are failing themselves. Countries have trade as their priority; they have 26 percent growth but find that both poverty and food insecurity have increased.

Q: Are you happy with the progress of the COP 10 over the last 11 days? Has it met your personal expectations? A: COP 10 has set milestones with many ‘firsts’ and a landmark with 6,450 registered participants from over the world. The level of participation in the high-level segment (ministers included here), the substantive quality of interactions, the importance accorded to science, the launch of the ‘Land for Life’ award, and the establishment of the business forum: all give a sense of satisfaction. But, I will wait to see the outcome of the budgets for the convention, to see that Parties honour their commitment in budgetary terms. I also wish to see the streamlining of efficiency and coherence in the set-up of the Convention solved here once and for all.

Excerpt:

Yacouba Sawadogo, a peasant farmer from Burkina Faso, is known as the “man who stopped the desert.” But when he first tried to save his arid land from desertification by planting the trees that have since grown into a 15-hectare forest, people in his village thought he was mad.

Yacouba Sawadogo, a peasant farmer from Burkina Faso, saved his arid land from desertification. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi

Some 30 years later the people of Gourga, in northwestern Burkina Faso, who left the infertile area for a better life in the city, are returning while Sawadogo travels the world sharing his success story.

Farmers, environmental experts and scientists are also flocking to Sawadogo’s home to learn about the man who singlehandedly stopped the desert.

Sawadogo’s story also attracted film director Mark Dodd who produced an award-winning film titled “The Man who Stopped the Desert”, which was showcased at the 10th session of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) Congress of Parties (COP 10) currently being held in Changwon, South Korea.

But Sawadogo had not started out trying to save the land from desertification. Thirty years ago he was merely looking for a way to harvest his crop in an area where the land had become barren and many were giving up farming and migrating to urban areas.

“There was no food because of the drought and water was very scarce in my community,” the elderly, polygamous farmer told delegates at the UNCCD.

Sawadogo then realised that it was no longer sufficient to dig ordinary holes to plant his crop, so he decided to dig bigger and wider holes in order to retain rainwater for a longer period.

He also used compost to enhance the growth of the sesame seeds and cereals – sorghum and millet – that he grew.

“The traditional farming method used in my village allowed the rainwater to be easily washed away leaving the crops to dry up within a short space of time. That’s why I thought of a technique that would counter this problem,” said Sawadogo.

He was not only worried about food security but was concerned that the land in Gourga was rapidly turning into a desert. So he began planting trees. It not only saved the land from degradation but also restored ground water to unprecedented levels.

“People thought I was mad when I started planting these trees,” he said. “It is only now that they realise how beneficial the forest is.”

The trees, which he planted with the help of his family, are a thick forest of 15 hectares made up of indigenous plants, some of which are used for medicinal purposes.

He now gives away seeds for planting to farmers in Burkina Faso and in the Sahel, an ecoclimatic zone 1,000 kilometres wide that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.

"The traditional farming method used in my village allowed the rainwater to be easily washed away leaving the crops to dry up within a short space of time. That’s why I thought of a technique that would counter this problem,"
The facilitator of Africa’s Re-greening Initiatives at the Centre for International Cooperation, Chris Reij, said experts have a lot to learn from Sawadogo.

“Yacouba would have become a professor if he had been to school,” said Reiji. “Scientists come to learn from him.”

This is true.

Dorcas Kaiser, a termite specialist, has been to Gourga to learn from the smallholder farmer about the role the insects play in land restoration.

“(It) is a scientist’s dream place to study the role of termites in the land restoration process,” said Kaiser.

World experts have debated land restoration, and masses of money has been spent trying to find solutions to desertification, land degradation and droughts, but so far these efforts have been fruitless, said Reij.

“It took a smallholder farmer to come up with a system that works where global agencies have failed,” said Reij.

UNCCD Executive Secretary Luc Gnacadja also noted the role farmers play in re-greening Africa during the COP 10 opening ceremony on Oct. 17.

Gnacadja said that planting trees, and using fertiliser on farmlands and grazing lands has already been adopted in many regions and has contributed to improving over six million hectares across Africa.

“These good practices should be scaled up and governments should encourage them everywhere when relevant,” he said.

Senior environment specialist cluster coordinator for sustainable land management at the Global Environment Facility (GEF), Dr Mohamed Bakarr, agreed and added that indigenous people like Sawadogo do not need a lot of money to make a difference.

“Policies that say you can’t own trees or you can’t have land tenure make people neglect these resources,” said Bakarr.

GEF is helping governments in Africa remove these barriers in order to create an enabling environment for people to become involved in combating desertification and creating food security.

However, despite saving Gourga from becoming a desert, Sawadogo may end up losing both his land and his forest. The Burkina Faso government is in the process of repossessing Sawadogo’s land for development.

He acquired the land through the traditional system and does not have a title deed, and the government has already started with their construction plans.

In the new land plan the government claims ownership of Sawadogo’s forest and fields and divides his father’s grave into two.

Seeing his father’s grave being split to give way for the construction of a house kills him as much as the idea of letting go of his forest does, Sawadogo said.

The only way Sawadogo can retain his land is if he buys it back from government. It is an option that he feels is both unfair and unaffordable.

Sawadogo would need 100,000 Euros to buy back the forest alone.

“This is unjust,” he said. “I’ve worked so hard for this and now the government is punishing me.”

He has been to the United States where he pled his case to President Barrack Obama and asked him to consider the plight of smallholder farmers in the G8’s Global Food Security Initiative for underdeveloped countries. The initiative was a pledge by the G8 to boost world food security.

“What Yacouba has started has to be preserved,” said Reij, who is working closely with the farmer.

Gnacadja reminded delegates that if desertification, land degradation and drought occur unabated, the world would continue witnessing political instability and famine, like the one occurring in the Horn of Africa.

As streams dry out, groundwater levels dwindle, and forests and other vegetation yield to droughts or sever storms, women who live their lives in the rural areas of Ghana have to spend more time and energy finding water and food for their families.

Mercy Hlordz (l), Akos Matsiador (centre) and Mary Azametsi (r) are all victims of climate change. Credit: Jamila Akweley Okertchiri/IPS

For these women, climate change means more hard work just to survive.

However, “decisions to tackle changes in the climate, which has become a threat to livelihoods in developing countries, are void of women’s participation,” says Kenneth Nana Amoateng, chief executive officer of Abibimman Foundation.

Yet these women are also the same people who pick up the pieces, improvise solutions and provide responses to the challenges imposed by climate change.

Amoateng said that most of the women directly affected by climate change are either inadequately represented or exempted from government’s policies and programmes designed to solve the issue.

Akos Matsiador, a 40-year-old fish seller who lives in Horvi village along Ghana’s coast, is now homeless after rising sea levels led to tidal waves surging through her village almost a year ago.

“The current of the sea was so strong that it submerged the entire village. Baskets of smoked fish that I had stored to sell to other women in other villages were swept away by the sea,” Matsiador says.

She was not only displaced, but was also rendered jobless as her source of income – selling smoked fish – was destroyed.

Matsiador and other victims of the tidal wave, like Mercy Hlordzi who lost her husband and her livelihood, now live in a shed by the village chief’s house.

“We are just there, we don’t do anything because our work has been destroyed by the sea,” Hlordzi says.

They, together with other women who have suffered a similar fate because of climate change, are hoping that the Ghanaian government will intervene and help them rebuild their lives.

Their voices are currently not incorporated into the countries climate change discourse and processes as they have little or no knowledge of the issue and its effects on their livelihoods.

In their quest to give a platform to these women, Abibimman Foundation, together with Greenpeace and various other non-governmental organisations, organised the Women and Climate Justice Hearings on Monday in Tema, Ghana. Women from various towns and villages across Ghana were brought together to share their experiences.

The Ghanaian government ought to do more to involve women in the design and implementation of climate change policies and programmes, officials say. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

Memuna Sandow, an assemblywoman from the Wulugu electoral area in West Mamprusi district in northern Ghana, says the recent dry season in the region dried up water sources such as wells, streams and even some bore holes.

“The drought has lead to the loss of food, crops and animals, which are basic for human survival,” she says.

“They maintain the environment more than men, but when it comes to decisions regarding climate change, women are not represented,” Sandow adds.

She says, however, that women’s lack of knowledge on the issue of climate change has rendered them paralysed in the fight against it.

She says that it is necessary for the government to involve women in the design and implementation of climate change policies and programmes.

“Poor participation of women in the decisions has a negative effect on the efforts to combat climate change,” Sandow says.

Minister for Women and Children’s Affairs Juliana Azumah Mensah shares the same opinion.

“It is an undisputed fact that women constitute a large number of the poor in communities that are highly dependent on local natural resources for their livelihoods.”

She adds that Ghana, as a signatory to international conventions, agreed to infuse gender perspectives into ongoing research by the academic sector on the impact of climate change.

Mensah says government is considering the active participation of women in the development of funding criteria and allocation of resources for climate change initiatives.

“My expectation is that output from these climate change hearings will be communicated to appropriate agencies to inform plans at the national as well as local districts assembly,” Mensah says.

Amoateng reiterates an old Chinese proverb “we should see the earth not as an inheritance from our fathers but a borrowed asset from our children, which we will be required to give back to them.”

Sea levels on the coasts of Côte d’Ivoire and other West African countries have risen again this year, devastating houses and other infrastructure. The search for effective solutions is lagging behind accelerating coastal erosion.

Sea levels on the coasts of Côte d'Ivoire and other West African countries have risen again this year, devastating houses and other infrastructure. Credit: Fulgence Zamblé/IPS

For several years now, the third quarter of each year has brought extraordinarily high sea levels in the Gulf of Guinea.

In the Ivorian economic capital, Abidjan, a number of houses were destroyed and dozens of families made homeless in late August. The challenge is not limited to urban areas: not far from Abidjan, the artisanal fishing community at Grand-Bassam has lost valuable equipment, crippling livelihoods.

The Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, has experienced extensive flooding – by some estimates, 80 percent of the city could be waterlogged by 2020.

Thousands of kilometres south and east along the coast, the city of Cotonou, Benin’s economic centre, is also battling against erosion. A critical article published in Beninois daily Nouvelle Expression in September asked if the government had given up the fight to save the coastline, documenting the submersion of parts of the Roi de Langouste Hotel, east of the city.

Climate change-induced rises in sea levels are part of the problem, but other activities such as unregulated sand mining and the destruction of coastal mangrove forests have also played a role throughout the region.

Managing the coastline

In Côte d’Ivoire, specialists say what is needed is to reopen the mouth of the Comoé River. The Comoé, 813 kilometres long, rises between the cities of Banfora and Bobo-Dioulasso in western Burkina Faso, and flows through Côte d’Ivoire from north to south before reaching the Ebrié Lagoon not far from Abidjan.

The lagoon, which stretches for more than 100 kilometres along the coastline, is open to the sea only by means of an artificial channel, the Vridi Canal, built in 1950 to allow Abidjan to become a deep-water port. Water from the Comoé has also periodically emptied into the sea a few kilometres to the east, near Grand-Bassam, but this natural outlet is now blocked by silt from the river.

“We have 500 kilometres of coastline being eaten at by the sea, in some places receding by as much as two or three metres per year. And the sea is gaining ground,” says Cédric Lombardo, an environmental expert based in Abidjan who worked on this question for the Ivorian government for five decades.

Lombardo says the closure of the river’s natural mouth by accumulating sediment has had serious consequences. The estuary of the Comoé receives heavy deposits of silt from the river, varying between 60 and 100 centimetres per year. These deposits should reinforce natural barriers protecting the coast from erosion, but the blocked channel prevents this.

The Grand-Bassam channel has been artificially re-opened four times, most recently in 2004, only to fill up again almost immediately.

Lombardo believes that an operation to reopen the river mouth, which will cost an estimated 30 million dollars, will need to create access from the Comoé River to the lagoon, and then into the sea, in order to allow silt from the river to stabilise the shoreline. In addition to the opening of a new channel for the river, levees will need to be constructed.

He suggests an alternative solution would be the construction of a canal which would also allow the deposit of sediments from the Comoé.

Sustainable solutions

“These are the options,” agrees Abidjan-based environmentalist Frédéric Kouamé. “But it remains to be seen if they will work as long-term solutions, and without having negative consequences in the short term. Because generally, the solutions that have been put forward are only temporary.”

Kouamé recalls the construction of artificial dunes to protect the coast a decade ago, all of which have since collapsed under pressure from the sea. He added that the effects of climate change, particularly the rise in sea levels, will only aggravate the erosion of West Africa’s coast.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has also observed that the responses put forward by governments and others will likely have the effect of only slowing or displacing a process of erosion that is expected to intensify.

The IUCN stressed the need to find more sustainable answers in a presentation to a meeting of environment ministers from across West Africa held in May this year in Dakar, Senegal. At the same meeting, eleven coastal countries, from Mauritania in the west to Benin in the east, agreed on the establishment of a West African coastal observatory to reduce the risks linked to marine erosion.

These governments also acknowledged that the most effective means of stabilising the coastline include the protection and extension of natural infrastructure, such as mangroves, coastal dunes and lagoons.

By Servaas van den Bosch
WINDHOEK, Sep 29 2011 (IPS)

Climate change is increasingly playing a role in North-South trade, as carbon emissions are being used as an excuse to protect markets, with poorer countries likely to lose out.

Seventy percent of Namibians depend on agriculture. Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS

It is unlikely that the Kyoto Protocol, whose binding emission cuts for developed nations are set to lapse in 2012, will be extended.

The absence of a legally binding agreement and especially a proper enforcement mechanism for such an agreement will lead to a surge in trade disputes and heightened protectionism, predicted experts at a Sept. 27 trade meeting in Windhoek.

The meeting, organised by the Agricultural Trade Forum and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung foundation, a private non-profit German organisation that promotes democracy, social justice, and peaceful international understanding, looked at the impact of climate change on trade, especially in Southern Africa.

“Climate change will damage infrastructure and cause an increase in weather variability, which in turn impacts on primary sectors like mining and agriculture. Greenhouse gas emission caps could furthermore affect the transport sector,” explained Laudika Kandjinga from Integrated Environmental Consultants Namibia (IECN).

“These difficulties on the supply side mean that prices, especially food prices, are likely to rise. Transport cost would go up and there would be significant rehabilitation costs for infrastructure. This affects trade flows.”

These are gloomy prospects for Namibia, a country where 70 percent of the population depends on agriculture and whose foreign revenue is largely earned through the export of raw materials.

But on a global scale climate change could see tariff walls, which were painstakingly broken down over the past decades, being resurrected, thereby affecting market access for the South.

“The climate change debate is increasingly framed as a competition debate,” noted Peter Draper of the South African Institute of International Affairs. “Take the strict carbon legislation in the European Union and some states in the United States. This results in companies relocating the more pollution-intensive part of their production to countries with less stringent legislation, like China.

“Not only does this make the problem worse, because emissions are moved from a controlled to an unregulated environment, it also causes job losses. In response to this leakage the U.S. and EU are trying to level the playing field by instituting border carbon adjustments, which are essentially tariffs.”

Already, said Draper, the U.S. is reluctant to sign any climate package that does not cater for border carbon adjustment.

“For China and India this poses a huge problem…these ‘adjustments’ could easily be used to slap across the board taxes on their products.”

In the transport sector, the drive for greener, more efficient ships will also come with a price tag attached.

“The rising cost structure of ships, together with generally higher energy prices, might lead importers to cut their supply chain. Shortening of supply chains by developed markets could be a problem for countries like South Africa that are far from markets,” said Draper.

On the other hand, countries worldwide are positioning themselves to grab a piece of the growing renewable technology market and have not shied away from old-fashioned protectionism in the process.

“We will see an increase of disputes on tariffs and subsidies for renewable technology,” commented Draper.

“Recently Japan took the Canadian state of Ontario to the World Trade Organization because of discrimination against foreign suppliers of renewable energy. A similar case played out between the U.S. and China.

“The struggle over carbon emissions and renewable energy markets feeds into climate change protectionism. As long as the Doha round of trade talks (which would have reduced subsidies for developed countries’ agricultural industries, thus allowing developing countries to export) stays comatose, you are likely to see these disputes escalating.”

Border carbon adjustment could also affect Southern Africa, especially energy-intensive sectors like metal processing, chemicals and mining.

“Because 94 percent of South Africa’s energy comes from coal plants, products from sectors that use a lot of dirty energy will likely fall under some border carbon adjustment regime,” said Draper.

Countries in this region that rely heavily on agriculture could face scrutiny from importers on the carbon-intensity of their production methods and be negatively affected by the green labels that retailers increasingly use to bar imports.

Asked about whether climate change will bring opportunities for industry, Draper seemed pessimistic.

“There might be some opportunities to benefit from developed countries moving their production, but this could be negated by border carbon adjustments. It’s hard to see the silver lining, quite frankly.

“There is also a possibility South Africa will relocate industry and energy generation to neighbouring countries to cut its emissions. Or locate electricity plants closer to coal reserves in another country, to minimise transport pollution. This could create income and jobs in these countries and promote regional economic integration,” Draper said.

But independent economist Klaus Schade thinks such a development could be frustrated by rising transport costs “which would in turn argue against lengthening supply chains by locating industry outside of South Africa.” He thinks small countries need to play the green energy card more pro- actively.

“For instance by being carbon neutral in the tourism sector, which might appeal to visitors. Think of solar water heaters for lodges and electric vehicles for game drives,” Schade said.

Also much more research and development is needed in the agricultural sector to introduce breeds and varieties that can withstand extreme weather conditions. Other opportunities would arise from adopting a low-carbon development path, said the experts.

Climate change will also affect agricultural production systems and food security and lead to ecosystem changes in Namibia, said IECN’s Dr. Justine Braby.

She stressed that countries in the region mainly focus on adapting to climate change, rather than mitigating greenhouse gasses, of which they produce little. But this does not mean that green technology is irrelevant for Southern Africa.

“Namibia with its long coastline and many days of sunshine is excellently positioned to reap the benefits of wind and solar energy,” Braby said.

However, some think that Namibia is not ready for this.

“We are not ready for renewable energy,” countered the ruling South West Africa People’s Organization member of parliament, Ben Amathila. “We need to make laws that are futuristic in order to exploit wind and solar technology, but decision makers have far too little knowledge of these issues.”

Excerpt:

Gazalla Amin’s office on the outskirts of this city, capital of Jammu & Kashmir state, is redolent with the fragrance of lavender wafting up from heaps of the dried flowers in a corner bowl.

Lavender cultivation offers a viable alternative to Kashmiri farmers facing crop losses from climate change. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

There is nothing fancy or feminine about the fragrance in her office. In her late forties, Amin, a medical doctor by training, has broken into Kashmir’s male-dominated farming sector.

Amin is now leading frustrated farmers out of the conundrum of climatic uncertainties, lost crops, debt and poverty and setting examples in feasible farming alternatives.

In the Baramulla, Bandipora and Pulwama districts of the state, farmers who traditionally cultivate maize barely squeeze about 110 dollars out of each hectare annually.

With rain, temperature, snow and humidity becoming increasingly unpredictable, these smallholders, deep in debt from repeated crop failures, are selling their land to rapacious developers and abandoning their ancestral profession.

“But they need not,” says Amin. She says an answer is lavender shrubs, grown on what is locally called ‘kandi’ (semi-barren, rainfed farmlands).

“Lavender on one hand can yield Indian rupees 200,000 (4,000 dollars) yearly profit, and has a 20-year lifetime demanding minimal input. It is almost pest-free and cattle have no taste for it,” Amin said.

Farmers buy quality saplings, costing about 10 cents each, which Amin – and government and private nurseries – supply.

“More than 90 percent of medicinal and aromatic plants (MAP) used in trade continue to be sourced from the wild and two-thirds of these are harvested by destructive means,” says a federal government document on national mission on medicinal plants.

“The higher reaches of Kashmir’s mountains are a treasure house of valuable medicinal plants and the pastoral Pahari and Gujjar herder communities can easily identify them,” says Amin.

“Traders regularly use the services of these herdsmen for illegal and destructive procurement,” says Amin. “Legal cultivation will help avoid such piracy and preserve natural biodiversity.”

Amin’s foray into medicinal agriculture is a classic case of entrepreneurship. “Even as a medical professional, I was on the lookout for opportunities that would keep me close to nature.”

Eight years back, a write-up on lavender and other medicinal plants took her to the Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine (IIIM), Jammu. Amin ended up taking a batch of lavender saplings back to her ancestral farm in Bandipora district.

“Though not native to Kashmir, lavender just loves this soil and clime,” says Amin. Within a couple of years, the initial half-hectare farm expanded to nine hectares, then into three farms in the districts of Pulwama, Baramulla and Bandipora.

She quit her job and moved around the countryside motivating farmers to switch to low-risk, high-value aromatic and medicinal crops as a strategy for climate change adaptation. She cited her own success, inviting farmers to come over and inspect her farms.

In 2009, she formed the Jammu & Kashmir MAP Growers’ Cooperative with 30 farmers, now grown to 300 members. All receive planting material and training in cultivation of aromatic plants through this collective, aided by the government.

“Best of all, small farmer members are able to market, even export, their products through our cooperative’s one-stop shop and demand fair prices,” says Amin.

Abdul Rahman, 50, from Doodh Pathri village, 42 kilometres from Srinagar, who started lavender cultivation on one hectare of farmland in 2010 has this season extended coverage to 2.5 hectares.

Another farmer Ghulam Ahmed Shah, 60, shifted out of rose cultivation as he found it water-demanding and pest-prone; all his three hectares are now under lavender.

Collective harvests have been steadily rising since 2009. That year, Amin set up a half-a-million dollar, aromatic oil distillation plant with a grant from the federal government. The unit now gets enough flowers to run through the May – December season.

Seeing a potential to rejuvenate the farm sector, a national mission on medicinal plants kick-started in the state in 2009 with a federal allocation of 1.3 million dollars, followed up with an action plan costing 1.5 million dollars in 2010.

The mission is being implemented through self-help groups and farmers’ associations like Amin’s.

Meanwhile, Amin established marketing linkages within the country and in Britain. Essential oils of lavender, rose and geranium under the brand name ‘Pure Aroma’ are now being marketed by her company, Fasiam Agro Farms.

Earlier this year, the state government recognised Gazalla Amin’s contribution to entrepreneurship development in agriculture through a state award for ‘progressive farmers’.

On the difficulties she faced while nurturing her enterprise, she said “there was no precedent for this business model. I quickly learnt through trial and error.”

Amin admits that being a woman agro-entrepreneur in a male domain “felt a bit difficult in the beginning.”

A. S. Shawl, head of the Srinagar branch of IIIM, who pioneered lavender farming in the Srinagar valley some two decades ago, says: “We managed to produce five tonnes of lavender oil (2010), but have a potential to export more than 1,000 tonnes annually.”

Amin, who now produces a fifth of Srinagar’s total lavender oil output, is looking for other pastures for herself and the farmers of Kashmir.

She is looking carefully at the World Health Organisation (WHO) report, ‘The World Medicine Situation 2011’, which says the global market for traditional medicines was worth 83 billion dollars in 2008.

With an annual growth rate of 15 to 25 percent, WHO forecasts that the MAP global market will touch five trillion dollars by 2050.