Many farmers will be forced to adapt to a changing climate. Geoffrey Ndung’u, from Kanyonga village in semi-arid Eastern Kenya, earns a living growing watermelons on his dry land. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Lester R. Brown
WASHINGTON, Aug 21 2013 (IPS)

Agriculture as it exists today developed over 11,000 years of rather remarkable climate stability. It has evolved to maximize production within that climate system. Now, suddenly, the climate is changing. With each passing year, the agricultural system is becoming more out of sync with the climate system.

In generations past, when there was an extreme weather event, such as a monsoon failure in India, a severe drought in Russia, or an intense heat wave in the U.S. Corn Belt, we knew that things would shortly return to normal. But today there is no ‘normal’ to return to. The earth’s climate is now in a constant state of flux, making it both unreliable and unpredictable.

Since 1970, the earth’s average temperature has risen more than one degree Fahrenheit. If we continue with business as usual, burning ever more oil, coal, and natural gas, it is projected to rise some 11 degrees Fahrenheit (six degrees Celsius) by the end of this century. The rise will be uneven. It will be much greater in the higher latitudes than in the equatorial regions, greater over land than over oceans, and greater in continental interiors than in coastal regions.

As the earth’s temperature rises, it affects agriculture in many ways. High temperatures interfere with pollination and reduce photosynthesis of basic food crops. High temperatures can also dehydrate plants. When a corn plant curls its leaves to reduce exposure to the sun, photosynthesis is reduced.

The earth’s rising temperature also affects crop yields indirectly via the melting of mountain glaciers. As the larger glaciers shrink and the smaller ones disappear, the ice melt that sustains rivers, and the irrigation systems dependent on them, will diminish. The continuing loss of mountain glaciers and the resulting reduced meltwater runoff could create unprecedented water shortages and political instability in some of the world’s more densely populated countries.

Scientists also expect higher temperatures to bring more drought – witness the dramatic increase in the land area affected by drought in recent decades. A team of scientists at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in the United States reported that the earth’s land area experiencing very dry conditions expanded from well below 20 percent from the 1950s to the 1970s to closer to 25 percent in recent years.

As the earth’s temperature rises, scientists expect heat waves to be both more frequent and more intense. Stated otherwise, crop-shrinking heat waves will now become part of the agricultural landscape. Among other things, this means that the world should increase its carryover stocks of grain to provide adequate food security.

From “Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity” by Lester R. Brown (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.) Supporting data, video, and slideshows are available for free download at www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep.

Tikal Mayan ruins in Guatemala. The Sumerians and Mayans are just two of the many early civilisations that declined apparently because they moved onto an agricultural path that was environmentally unsustainable. Credit: cc by 3.0

By Lester R. Brown
WASHINGTON, Feb 7 2013 (IPS)

The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity. Over the last decade, world grain reserves have fallen by one third. World food prices have more than doubled, triggering a worldwide land rush and ushering in a new geopolitics of food.

Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold.

This new era is one of rising food prices and spreading hunger. On the demand side of the food equation, population growth, rising affluence, and the conversion of food into fuel for cars are combining to raise consumption by record amounts.

On the supply side, extreme soil erosion, growing water shortages, and the earth’s rising temperature are making it more difficult to expand production. Unless we can reverse such trends, food prices will continue to rise and hunger will continue to spread, eventually bringing down our social system.

Can we reverse these trends in time? Or is food the weak link in our early twenty-first-century civilisation, much as it was in so many of the earlier civilisations whose archeological sites we now study?

This tightening of world food supplies contrasts sharply with the last half of the twentieth century, when the dominant issues in agriculture were overproduction, huge grain surpluses, and access to markets by grain exporters. During that time, the world in effect had two reserves: large carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) and a large area of cropland idled under U.S. farm programmes to avoid overproduction.

When the world harvest was good, the United States would idle more land. When the harvest was subpar, it would return land to production. The excess production capacity was used to maintain stability in world grain markets. The large stocks of grain cushioned world crop shortfalls.

When India’s monsoon failed in 1965, for example, the United States shipped a fifth of its wheat harvest to India to avert a potentially massive famine. And because of abundant stocks, this had little effect on the world grain price.

When this period of food abundance began, the world had 2.5 billion people. Today it has seven billion.

From 1950 to 2000 there were occasional grain price spikes as a result of weather-induced events, such as a severe drought in Russia or an intense heat wave in the U.S. Midwest. But their effects on price were short-lived. Within a year or so things were back to normal. The combination of abundant stocks and idled cropland made this period one of the most food-secure in world history.

But it was not to last. By 1986, steadily rising world demand for grain and unacceptably high budgetary costs led to a phasing out of the U.S. cropland set-aside programme.

Today the United States has some land idled in its Conservation Reserve Program, but it targets land that is highly susceptible to erosion. The days of productive land ready to be quickly brought into production when needed are over.

Ever since agriculture began, carryover stocks of grain have been the most basic indicator of food security. The goal of farmers everywhere is to produce enough grain not just to make it to the next harvest but to do so with a comfortable margin. From 1986, when we lost the idled cropland buffer, through 2001, the annual world carryover stocks of grain averaged a comfortable 107 days of consumption.

This safety cushion was not to last either. After 2001, the carryover stocks of grain dropped sharply as world consumption exceeded production. From 2002 through 2011, they averaged only 74 days of consumption, a drop of one third. An unprecedented period of world food security has come to an end. Within two decades, the world had lost both of its safety cushions.

In recent years, world carryover stocks of grain have been only slightly above the 70 days that was considered a desirable minimum during the late twentieth century. Now stock levels must take into account the effect on harvests of higher temperatures, more extensive drought, and more intense heat waves.

Although there is no easy way to precisely quantify the harvest effects of any of these climate-related threats, it is clear that any of them can shrink harvests, potentially creating chaos in the world grain market. To mitigate this risk, a stock reserve equal to 110 days of consumption would produce a much safer level of food security.

The world is now living from one year to the next, hoping always to produce enough to cover the growth in demand. Farmers everywhere are making an all-out effort to keep pace with the accelerated growth in demand, but they are having difficulty doing so.

Food shortages undermined earlier civilisations. The Sumerians and Mayans are just two of the many early civilisations that declined apparently because they moved onto an agricultural path that was environmentally unsustainable.

For the Sumerians, rising salt levels in the soil as a result of a defect in their otherwise well-engineered irrigation system eventually brought down their food system and thus their civilisation. For the Mayans, soil erosion was one of the keys to their downfall, as it was for so many other early civilisations.

We, too, are on such a path. While the Sumerians suffered from rising salt levels in the soil, our modern-day agriculture is suffering from rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. And like the Mayans, we too are mismanaging our land and generating record losses of soil from erosion.

While the decline of early civilisations can be traced to one or possibly two environmental trends such as deforestation and soil erosion that undermined their food supply, we are now dealing with several. In addition to some of the most severe soil erosion in human history, we are also facing newer trends such as the depletion of aquifers, the plateauing of grain yields in the more agriculturally advanced countries, and rising temperature.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the United Nations reports that food prices are now double what they were in 2002-04. For most U.S. citizens, who spend on average nine percent of their income on food, this is not a big deal. But for consumers who spend 50-70 percent of their income on food, a doubling of food prices is a serious matter. There is little latitude for them to offset the price rise simply by spending more.

Closely associated with the decline in stocks of grain and the rise in food prices is the spread of hunger. During the closing decades of the last century, the number of hungry people in the world was falling, dropping to a low of 792 million in 1997. After that it began to rise, climbing toward one billion. Unfortunately, if we continue with business as usual, the ranks of the hungry will continue to expand.

The bottom line is that it is becoming much more difficult for the world’s farmers to keep up with the world’s rapidly growing demand for grain. World grain stocks were drawn down a decade ago and we have not been able to rebuild them. If we cannot do so, we can expect that with the next poor harvest, food prices will soar, hunger will intensify, and food unrest will spread.

We are entering a time of chronic food scarcity, one that is leading to intense competition for control of land and water resources – in short, a new geopolitics of food.

*Lester Brown is the president of Earth Policy Institute. For further reading on the global food situation, see Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, by Lester R. Brown (W.W. Norton: October 2012). Or read more here.

The 16-fold increase in the global soybean harvest has come overwhelmingly from expanding the cultivated area. Credit: public domain

By Lester R. Brown
WASHINGTON, Jan 8 2013 (IPS)

Global demand for soybeans has soared in recent decades, with China leading the race. Nearly 60 percent of all soybeans entering international trade today go to China, making it far and away the world’s largest importer.

The soybean was domesticated some 3,000 years ago by farmers in eastern China. But it wasn’t until well after World War II that the crop gained agricultural prominence, enabling it to join wheat, rice, and corn as one of the world’s four leading crops.

This rise in the demand for soybeans reflected the discovery by animal nutritionists that combining one part soybean meal with four parts grain, usually corn, in feed rations would sharply boost the efficiency with which livestock and poultry converted grain into animal protein.

As China’s appetite for meat, milk, and eggs has soared, so too has its use of soybean meal. And since nearly half the world’s pigs are in China, the lion’s share of soy use is in pig feed. Its fast-growing poultry industry is also dependent on soybean meal. In addition, China now uses large quantities of soy in feed for farmed fish.

Four numbers tell the story of the explosive growth of soybean consumption in China. In 1995, China was producing 14 million tonnes of soybeans and it was consuming 14 million tonnes. In 2011, it was still producing 14 million tonnes of soybeans, but it was consuming 70 million tonnes, meaning that 56 million tonnes had to be imported.

China’s neglect of soybean production reflects a political decision made in Beijing in 1995 to focus on being self-sufficient in grain. For the Chinese people, many of them survivors of the Great Famine of 1959-61, this was paramount. They did not want to be dependent on the outside world for their food staples.

By strongly supporting grain production with generous subsidies and essentially ignoring soybean production, China increased its grain harvest rapidly while its soybean harvest languished.

Hypothetically, if China had chosen to produce all of the 70 million tonnes of soybeans it consumed in 2011, it would have had to shift one-third of its grainland to soybeans, forcing it to import 160 million tonnes of grain – more than a third of its total grain consumption. As more and more of China’s 1.35 billion people move up the food chain, its soybean imports will almost certainly continue to climb.

The principal effect of skyrocketing world soybean consumption has been a restructuring of agriculture in the western hemisphere. In the United States there is now more land in soybeans than in wheat. In Brazil, the area in soybeans exceeds that of all grains combined. Argentina’s soybean area is now close to double that of all grains combined, putting the country dangerously close to becoming a soybean monoculture.

Together they account for over four-fifths of world soybean production. For six decades, the United States was both the leading producer and exporter of soybeans, but in 2011 Brazil’s exports narrowly eclipsed those from the United States.

Although most of the growth in the world grain harvest since the mid-twentieth century is from the tripling of grain yield per acre, the 16-fold increase in the global soybean harvest has come overwhelmingly from expanding the cultivated area. While the area expanded nearly sevenfold, the yield scarcely doubled. The world gets more soybeans primarily by planting more soybeans. Therein lies the problem.

The question then becomes: Where will the soybeans be planted? The United States is now using all of its available cropland and has no additional land that can be planted to soybeans. The only way to expand soybean acreage is by shifting land from other crops, such as corn or wheat. In Brazil, new land for soybean production comes from the Amazon Basin or the cerrado, the savannah-like region to the south.

Put simply, saving the Amazon rainforest now depends on curbing the growth in demand for soybeans by stabilizing population worldwide as soon as possible. And for the world’s more affluent people, it means eating less meat and thus slowing the growth in demand for soybeans. Against this backdrop, the recent downturn in U.S. meat consumption is welcome news.

*Lester Brown is the president of Earth Policy Institute. For further reading on the global food situation, see Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, by Lester R. Brown (W.W. Norton: October 2012). Supporting data sets and PowerPoint presentations are online at www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep.

Between 2007 and 2011, carbon emissions from coal use in the United States dropped 10 percent. During the same period, emissions from oil use dropped 11 percent.

Emissions at a manufacturing complex in North America. Credit: UN Photo/Kibae Park

In contrast, carbon emissions from natural gas use increased by six percent. The net effect of these trends was that U.S. carbon emissions dropped seven percent in four years. And this is only the beginning.

The initial fall in coal and oil use was triggered by the economic downturn, but now powerful new forces are reducing the use of both. For coal, the dominant force is the Beyond Coal campaign, an impressive national effort coordinated by the Sierra Club involving hundreds of local groups that oppose coal because of its effects on human health.

In the first phase, the campaign actively opposed the building of new coal-fired power plants. This hugely successful initiative, which led to a near de facto moratorium on new coal plants, was powered by Americans’ dislike of coal.

An Opinion Research Corporation poll found only three percent preferred coal as their electricity source – which is no surprise. Coal plant emissions are a leading cause of respiratory illnesses (such as asthma in children) and mercury contamination. Coal burning causes 13,200 U.S. deaths each year, a loss of life that exceeds U.S. combat losses in 10 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The campaign’s second phase is dedicated to closing existing coal plants. Of the U.S. total of 492 coal-fired power plants, 68 are already slated to close. With current and forthcoming U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air quality regulations on emissions of mercury, sulfur, and ozone precursors requiring costly retrofits, many more of the older, dirtier plants will be closed.

In August, the American Economic Review – the country’s most prestigious economics journal – published an article that can only be described as an epitaph for the coal industry. The authors conclude that the economic damage caused by air pollutants from coal burning exceeds the value of the electricity produced by coal-fired power plants. Coal fails the cost-benefit analysis even before the costs of climate change are tallied.

In July 2011, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a grant of 50 million dollars to the Beyond Coal campaign. It is one thing when Michael Brune, head of the Sierra Club, says that coal has to go, but quite another when Michael Bloomberg, one of the most successful businessmen of his generation, says so.

The move to close coal plants comes at a time when electricity use for lighting will be falling fast as old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs are phased out. In compliance with the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, by January 2012 there will be no 100-watt incandescent light bulbs on store shelves.

By January 2014, the 75-watt, 60-watt, and 40-watt incandescents will also disappear from shelves. As inefficient incandescents are replaced by compact fluorescents and LEDs, electricity use for lighting can drop by 80 percent. And much of the switch will occur within a few years.

The U.S. Department of Energy projects that residential electricity use per person will drop by five percent during this decade as light bulbs are replaced and as more-efficient refrigerators, water heaters, television sets, and other household appliances come to market.

Even as coal plants are closing, the use of wind, solar, and geothermally generated electricity is growing fast. Over the last four years, more than 400 wind farms – with a total generating capacity of 27,000 megawatts – have come online, enough to supply eight million homes with electricity. (See data at www.earth- policy.org.) Nearly 300,000 megawatts of proposed wind projects are in the pipeline awaiting access to the grid.

Texas, long the leading oil-producing state, is now the leading generator of electricity from wind. When the transmission lines linking the rich wind resources of west Texas and the Texas panhandle to the large cities in central and eastern Texas are completed, wind electric generation in the state will jump dramatically.

In installed wind-generating capacity, Texas is followed by Iowa, California, Minnesota, and Illinois. In the share of electricity generation in the state coming from wind, Iowa leads at 20 percent.

With electricity generated by solar panels, the United States has some 22,000 megawatts of utility-scale projects in the pipeline. And this does not include residential installations.

Closing coal plants also cuts oil use. With coal use falling, the near 40 percent of freight rail diesel fuel that is used to move coal from mines to power plants will also drop.

In fact, oil use has fallen fast in the United States over the last four years, thus reversing another long-term trend of rising consumption. The reasons for this include a shrinkage in the size of the national fleet, the rising fuel efficiency of new cars, and a reduction in the miles driven per vehicle.

Fleet size peaked at 250 million cars in 2008 just as the number of cars being scrapped eclipsed sales of new cars. Aside from economic conditions, car sales are down because many young people today are much less automobile-oriented than their parents.

In addition, the fuel efficiency of new cars, already rising, will soon increase sharply. The most recent efficiency standards mandate that new cars sold in 2025 use only half as much fuel as those sold in 2010. Thus with each passing year, the U.S. car fleet becomes more fuel-efficient, using less gasoline.

Miles driven per car are declining because of higher gasoline prices, the continuing recession, and the shift to public transit and bicycles. Bicycles are replacing cars as cities create cycling infrastructure by building bike paths, creating dedicated bike lanes, and installing sidewalk parking racks. Many U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York, are introducing bike-sharing programmes.

Furthermore, when people retire and no longer commute, miles driven drop by a third to a half. With so many baby boomers now retiring, this too will lower gasoline use.

As plug-in hybrid and all-electric cars come to market, electricity will replace gasoline. An analysis by Professor Michael McElroy of Harvard indicates that running a car on wind-generated electricity could cost the equivalent of 80-cent-a-gallon gasoline.

With emissions from coal burning heading for a free fall as plants are closed, and those from oil use also falling fast – both are falling faster than emissions from natural gas are ramping up – U.S. carbon emissions are falling.

We are now looking at a situation where the seven percent decline in carbon emissions since the 2007 peak could expand to 20 percent by 2020, and possibly even to 30 percent. If so, the United States could become a world leader in cutting carbon emissions and stabilising climate.

*Data and additional resources available at www.earth-policy.org. Lester R. Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of “World on the Edge”.

People do not normally leave their homes, their families, and their communities unless they have no other option. Yet as environmental stresses mount, we can expect to see a growing number of environmental refugees. Rising seas and increasingly devastating storms grab headlines, but expanding deserts, falling water tables, and toxic waste and radiation are also forcing people from their homes.

Advancing deserts are now on the move almost everywhere. The Sahara desert, for example, is expanding in every direction. As it advances northward, it is squeezing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria against the Mediterranean coast.

The Sahelian region of Africa – the vast swath of savannah that separates the southern Sahara desert from the tropical rainforests of central Africa – is shrinking as the desert moves southward. As the desert invades Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, from the north, farmers and herders are forced southward, squeezed into a shrinking area of productive land.

A 2006 U.N. conference on desertification in Tunisia projected that by 2020 up to 60 million people could migrate from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and Europe.

In Iran, villages abandoned because of spreading deserts or a lack of water number in the thousands. In Brazil, some 250,000 square miles of land are affected by desertification, much of it concentrated in the country’s northeast.

In Mexico, many of the migrants who leave rural communities in arid and semiarid regions of the country each year are doing so because of desertification. Some of these environmental refugees end up in Mexican cities, others cross the northern border into the United States. U.S. analysts estimate that Mexico is forced to abandon 400 square miles of farmland to desertification each year.

In China, desert expansion has accelerated in each successive decade since 1950. Desert scholar Wang Tao reports that over the last half-century or so some 24,000 villages in northern and western China have been abandoned either entirely or partly because of desert expansion.

China is heading for a ‘Dust Bowl’ like the one that forced more than 2 million “Okies” to leave their land in the U.S. in the 1930s. But the dust bowl forming in China is much larger and so is the population: China’s migration may measure in the tens of millions. And as a U.S. embassy report entitled ‘Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolia’ noted, “unfortunately, China’s twenty-first century ‘Okies’ have no California to escape to – at least not in China.”

With the vast majority of the 2.3 billion people projected to be added to the world by 2050 being born in countries where water tables are falling, water refugees are likely to become commonplace. They will be most common in arid and semiarid regions where populations are outgrowing the water supply and sinking into hydrological poverty.

Villages in northwestern India are being abandoned as aquifers are depleted and people can no longer find water. Millions of villagers in northern and western China and in northern Mexico may have to move because of a lack of water.

Thus far the evacuations resulting from water shortages have been confined to villages, but eventually whole cities might have to be relocated, such as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.

Sana’a, a fast-growing city of more than 2 million people, is literally running out of water. Quetta, originally designed for 50,000 people, now has a population exceeding 1 million – all of whom depend on 2,000 wells pumping water from what is believed to be a fossil aquifer. In the words of one study assessing its water prospect, Quetta will soon be “a dead city”.

Two other semiarid Middle Eastern countries that are suffering from water shortages are Syria and Iraq. Both are beginning to reap the consequences of over-pumping their aquifers – namely irrigation wells going dry. In Syria, these trends have forced the abandonment of 160 villages. And a U.N. report estimates that more than 100,000 people in northern Iraq have been uprooted because of water shortages.

A final category of environmental refugee has appeared only in the last 50 years or so: people who are trying to escape toxic waste or dangerous radiation levels.

During the late 1970s, Love Canal – a small town in upstate New York, part of which was built on top of a toxic waste disposal site – made national and international headlines. Beginning in August 1978, families were relocated at government expense and reimbursed for their homes at market prices. By October 1980, a total of 950 families had been permanently relocated. A few years later, the federal government arranged for the permanent evacuation and relocation of all 2,000 residents of Times Beach, Missouri, after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discovered dioxin levels well above the public health standards.

While the U.S. has relocated two communities because of health-damaging pollutants, the identification of more than 450 “cancer villages” in China suggests the need to evacuate hundreds of communities. China’s Ministry of Health statistics show that cancer is now the country’s leading cause of death, and with little pollution control, whole communities near chemical factories are suffering from unprecedented rates of cancer. Young people are leaving for the city in droves, for jobs and possibly for better health. Yet many others are too sick or too poor to leave.

Another infamous source of environmental refugees is the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Kiev, which exploded in April 1986. This started a powerful fire that lasted for 10 days. Massive amounts of radioactive material were spewed into the atmosphere, showering communities in the region with heavy doses of radiation. As a result, the residents of the nearby town of Pripyat and several other communities in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were evacuated – requiring the resettlement of 350,400 people.

In 1992, six years after the accident, Belarus was devoting 20 percent of its national budget to resettlement and the many other costs associated with the accident.

When a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in March 2011, the ensuing nuclear crisis at the badly damaged Fukushima Daiichi power plant forced tens of thousands of people from their homes. Whether they will be able to return or will become permanently displaced is a question that remains unanswered.

Separating out the geneses of today’s refugees is not always easy. Often the environmental and economic stresses that drive migration are closely intertwined. But whatever the reason for leaving home, people are taking increasingly desperate measures. Some of their stories are heartrending beyond belief.

As a general matter, environmental refugees are migrating from poor countries to rich ones, from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to North America and Europe. Some of the largest flows will be across national borders and they are likely to be illegal. The potentially massive movement of people across national boundaries is already affecting some countries. The U.S. is erecting a fence along the border with Mexico. The Mediterranean Sea is now routinely patrolled by naval vessels trying to intercept the small boats of African migrants bound for Europe. India, with a steady stream of migrants from Bangladesh and the prospect of millions more to come, is building a 10-foot-high fence along their shared border.

Maybe it is time for governments to consider whether it might not be cheaper and far less painful in human terms to treat the causes of migration rather than merely respond to it. This means working with developing countries to restore their economy’s natural support systems – the soils, the water tables, the grasslands, the forests – and it means accelerating the shift to smaller families to help people break out of poverty.

Treating symptoms instead of causes is not good medicine. Nor is it good public policy.

*Lester R. Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article highlights data presented in Lester R. Brown, ‘World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse’ (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), available online at www.earth- policy.org/books/wote

Many countries are facing dangerous water shortages. As world demand for food has soared, millions of farmers have drilled too many irrigation wells in efforts to expand their harvests. As a result, water tables are falling and wells are going dry in some 20 countries containing half the world’s people.

The overpumping of aquifers for irrigation temporarily inflates food production, creating a food production bubble that bursts when the aquifer is depleted.

The shrinkage of irrigation water supplies in the big three grain- producing countries – the United States, India, and China – is of particular concern. Thus far, these countries have managed to avoid falling harvests at the national level, but continued overexploitation of aquifers could soon catch up with them.

In most of the leading U.S. irrigation states, the irrigated area has peaked and begun to decline. In California, historically the irrigation leader, a combination of aquifer depletion and the diversion of irrigation water to fast-growing cities has reduced irrigated area from nearly nine million acres in 1997 to an estimated 7.5 million acres in 2010. (One acre equals 0.4 hectares.)

In Texas, the irrigated area peaked in 1978 at seven million acres, falling to some five million acres as the Ogallala aquifer underlying much of the Texas panhandle was depleted.

Other states with shrinking irrigated area include Arizona, Colorado, and Florida. All three states are suffering from both aquifer depletion and the diversion of irrigation water to urban centers. And now that the states that were rapidly expanding their irrigated area, such as Nebraska and Arkansas, are starting to level off, the prospects for any national growth in irrigated area have faded.

With water tables falling as aquifers are depleted under the Great Plains and California’s Central Valley, and with fast-growing cities in the Southwest taking more and more irrigation water, the U.S. irrigated area has likely peaked.

India is facing a much more difficult situation. A World Bank study reported in 2005 that the grain supply for 175 million Indians was produced by overpumping water. Water tables are falling in several states, including Punjab and Haryana, two surplus grain producers that supply most of the wheat and much of the rice used in India’s massive food distribution programme for low-income consumers.

Up-to-date and reliable information is not always easy to get. But it is clear that overpumping is extensive, water tables are falling, wells are going dry, and farmers who can afford to are drilling ever deeper wells in what has been described as “a race to the bottom”.

Based on studies by independent researchers, there is ample reason to think that decades of overpumping in key states are leading to aquifer depletion on a scale that is reducing the irrigation water supply. India’s water-based food bubble may be about to burst.

In China, the principal concern is the northern half of the country, where rainfall is low and water tables are falling everywhere. This includes the highly productive North China Plain, which stretches from just north of Shanghai to well north of Beijing and which produces half of the country’s wheat and a third of its corn. Overpumping there suggests that some 130 million Chinese are being fed with grain produced with the unsustainable use of water.

Furthermore, China’s water-short cities and rapidly growing industrial sector are taking an ever-greater share of the available surface and underground water resources. In many situations, growth in urban and industrial demand for water can be satisfied only by diverting water from farmers. Although new dams being built in the mountainous southwest may offset at least some of the losses elsewhere, it is possible that the irrigated area has peaked in China – and therefore in all three of the leading grain-producing countries.

Water shortages are most immediately affecting food security in the Middle East. In 2008, Saudi Arabia became the first country in the world to acknowledge its bursting food bubble when it announced that the aquifer supporting its wheat production was largely depleted. Saudi Arabia is now phasing out wheat production and could be totally dependent on foreign grain as soon as 2013.

And in Yemen, water tables are falling by some two metres per year. The Yemeni grain harvest has shrunk by one third over the last 40 years, forcing the country to import more than 80 percent of its grain.

Both Syria and Iraq – the other two populous countries in the region – have water troubles. Some of these arise from the reduced flows of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, which both countries depend on for irrigation water. Turkey, which controls the headwaters of these rivers, is in the midst of a massive dam building program that is slowly reducing downstream flows.

Although all three countries are party to water-sharing arrangements, Turkey’s ambitious plans to expand both hydropower and irrigation are being fulfilled partly at the expense of its two downstream neighbors.

Mindful of the future uncertainty of river water supplies, farmers in Syria and Iraq are drilling more wells for irrigation. This is leading to overpumping and an emerging water-based food bubble in both countries. Syria’s grain harvest has fallen by one fifth since peaking at roughly seven million tonnes in 2001. In Iraq, the grain harvest has fallen by one fourth since peaking at 4.5 million tonnes in 2002.

Jordan is also on the ropes agriculturally. Forty or so years ago, it was producing over 300,000 tonnes of grain annually. Today it produces only 60,000 tonnes and thus must import over 90 percent of its grain. In Israel, which banned the irrigation of wheat in 2000 to save water, production of grain has been falling since 1983. Israel now imports 98 percent of the grain it consumes.

To the east, water supplies are also tightening in Iran and Afghanistan. An estimated one fifth of Iran’s 75 million people are being fed with grain produced by overpumping, making its food bubble the largest in the region. Afghanistan, a landlocked country with a fast-growing population, is already importing a third of its grain from abroad.

Thus in the Middle East, where populations are growing fast, the world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. Because of the failure of governments in the region to mesh population and water policies, each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed and less irrigation water with which to feed them.

Thus far the countries where shrinking water resources are actually reducing grain harvests are all ones with smaller populations. But middle-sized countries such as Pakistan and Mexico are also overpumping their aquifers to feed growing populations.

Pakistan, struggling to remain self-sufficient in wheat, appears to be losing the battle. Its population of 185 million in 2010 is projected to reach 246 million by 2025, which means trying to feed 61 million more people in 15 years. But water levels in wells are already falling by a meter or more each year around the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. They are also falling under the fertile Punjab plain, which Pakistan shares with India.

A World Bank report, “Pakistan’s Water Economy: Running Dry”, sums up the situation: “The survival of a modern and growing Pakistan is threatened by water.”

In Mexico, home to 111 million people, the demand for water is outstripping supply. In the agricultural state of Guanajuato, the water table is falling by six feet or more a year. In the northwestern wheat-growing state of Sonora, farmers once pumped water from the Hermosillo aquifer at a depth of 40 feet. Today, they pump from over 400 feet. With 51 percent of all water extraction in Mexico from aquifers that are being overpumped, Mexico’s food bubble may burst soon.

If business as usual continues, the question for each country overpumping its aquifers is not whether its food bubble will burst, but when – and how the government will cope with it. For some countries, the bursting of the bubble may well be catastrophic.

And the near-simultaneous bursting of several national food bubbles could create unmanageable food shortages, posing an imminent threat to global food security and political stability.

*Adapted from “World on the Edge” by Lester R. Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. Full book available online at www.earth-policy.org/books/wote.

Heat waves clearly can destroy crop harvests. The world saw high heat decimate Russian wheat in 2010. Crop ecologists have found that each one-degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum can reduce grain harvests by 10 percent. But the indirect effects of higher temperatures on our food supply are no less serious.

Rising temperatures are already melting the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Recent studies indicate that a combination of melting ice sheets and glaciers, plus the thermal expansion of the ocean as it warms could raise sea level by up to six feet during this century.

Yet even a three-foot rise in sea level would sharply reduce the rice harvest in Asia, a region home to over half the world’s people that grows 90 percent of the world’s rice. It would inundate half the riceland in Bangladesh and submerge part of the Mekong Delta in Viet Nam. Viet Nam, second only to Thailand as a rice exporter, could lose its exportable rice surplus.

This would leave the 20 or so countries that import rice from Viet Nam looking elsewhere. Numerous other rice-growing river deltas in Asia would be submerged in varying degrees.

While the ice sheets are melting, so too are mountain glaciers. The snow and ice masses in the world’s mountain ranges and the water they store are taken for granted simply because they have been there since before agriculture began. Now we risk losing the “reservoirs in the sky” on which so many farmers and cities depend.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service reported in 2010 the 19th consecutive year of shrinking mountain glaciers. Glaciers are melting in all of the world’s major mountain ranges, including the Andes, the Rockies, the Alps, the Himalayas, and the Tibetan Plateau.

In South America, some 22 percent of Peru’s glacial endowment, which feeds the many rivers that supply water to farmers and cities in the arid coastal regions, has disappeared. Ohio State University glaciologist Lonnie Thompson reported in 2007 that the Quelccaya Glacier in southern Peru, which had been retreating by 20 feet per year in the 1960s, was retreating by 200 feet annually.

Bolivia is also fast losing the glaciers whose ice melt supplies its farmers and cities with water. Between 1975 and 2006, the area of its glaciers shrank by nearly half. Bolivia’s famed Chacaltaya Glacier, once the site of the world’s highest ski resort, disappeared in 2009.

For the 53 million people living in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, the loss of their mountain glaciers and dry-season river flow threatens food security and political stability. Not only do farmers in the region produce much of their wheat and potatoes with the river water from these disappearing glaciers, but well over half the region’s electricity supply comes from hydroelectric sources. Currently, few countries are being affected by melting mountain glaciers as much as these Andean societies.

As Peru’s glaciers shrink, the water flow from the mountains to the country’s arid coastal region, where 60 percent of the people live, will decline during the dry season. This region includes Lima, which, with nearly nine million inhabitants, is the world’s second largest desert city, after Cairo. Given the coming decline in its water supply, a U.N. study refers to Lima as “a crisis waiting to happen”.

In many of the world’s agricultural regions, snow is the leading source of irrigation and drinking water. In the southwestern United States, for instance, the Colorado River – the region’s primary source of irrigation water – depends on snowfields in the Rockies for much of its flow.

California, in addition to depending heavily on the Colorado, relies on snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountain range to supply irrigation water to the Central Valley, the country’s fruit and vegetable basket.

A preliminary analysis of rising temperature effects on three major river systems in the western United States – the Columbia, the Sacramento, and the Colorado – indicates that the winter snow pack in the mountains feeding them will be reduced dramatically and that winter rainfall and flooding will increase.

With a business-as-usual energy policy, global climate models project a 70-percent reduction in the snow pack for the western United States by mid-century. A detailed study of the Yakima River Valley, a vast fruit-growing region in Washington State, shows progressively heavier harvest losses as the snow pack shrinks, reducing irrigation water flows.

Agriculture in the Central Asian countries of Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan depends heavily on snowmelt from the Hindu Kush, Pamir, and Tien Shan Mountain ranges for irrigation water. And nearby Iran gets much of its water from the snowmelt in the 5,700-meter-high Alborz Mountains between Tehran and the Caspian Sea.

Ice melting in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau poses an even graver threat to food security at a global scale. It is the ice melt from these mountain glaciers that helps sustain the major rivers of Asia during the dry season, when irrigation needs are greatest.

In the Indus, Ganges, Yellow, and Yangtze River basins, where irrigated agriculture depends heavily on the rivers, the loss of any dry-season flow is bad news for farmers. China is the world’s leading producer of wheat. India is number two. (The United States is number three.) With rice, China and India totally dominate the world harvest. Therefore, the melting of these glaciers coupled with the depletion of aquifers present the most massive threat to food security the world has ever faced. In India, the giant Gangotri Glacier, which helps keep the Ganges River flowing during the dry season, is retreating. The Ganges River is by far the largest source of surface water irrigation in India and a source of water for the 407 million people living in the Gangetic basin.

Yao Tandong, a leading Chinese glaciologist, reports that glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau in western China are now melting at an accelerating rate. Many smaller glaciers have already disappeared. Yao believes that two-thirds of these glaciers could be gone by 2060.

If this melting of glaciers continues, Yao says it “will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe”. The Yangtze, by far the country’s largest river, helps to produce half or more of its 130-million-ton rice harvest.

Like the depletion of aquifers, the melting of glaciers can artificially inflate food production for a short period. At some point, however, as the glaciers shrink and the smaller ones disappear entirely, so does the water available for irrigation.

The melting of the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau would appear to be China’s problem. It is. But it is also everyone else’s problem. In a world where grain prices have recently climbed to record highs, any disruption of the wheat or rice harvests due to water shortages in India or China will raise their grain imports, driving up food prices for all.

In India, where just over 40 percent of all children under five years of age are underweight and undernourished, hunger will intensify and child mortality will likely climb.

For China, a country already struggling to contain food price inflation, there may well be spreading social unrest if food supplies tighten. For U.S. consumers, this melting poses a nightmare scenario. If China enters the world market for massive quantities of grain, as it has already done for soybeans over the last decade, it will necessarily come to the United States – far and away the leading grain exporter.

Ironically, the two countries that are planning to build most of the new coal-fired power plants, China and India, are precisely the ones whose food security is most massively threatened by the carbon emitted from burning coal. It is now in their interest to try and save their mountain glaciers by quickly shifting energy investment from coal-fired power plants into energy efficiency, wind farms, and solar thermal and geothermal power plants.

*Adapted from “World on the Edge” by Lester R. Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. Full book available at www.earth-policy.org/books/wote.

During the years when governments and the media were focused on preparations for the 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations, a powerful climate movement was emerging in the United States: the movement opposing the construction of new coal-fired power plants.

Environmental groups, both national and local, are opposing coal plants because they are the primary driver of climate change. Emissions from coal plants are also responsible for 13,200 U.S. deaths annually – a number that dwarfs the U.S. lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

What began as a few local ripples of resistance quickly evolved into a national tidal wave of grassroots opposition from environmental, health, farm, and community organisations. Despite a heavily funded industry campaign to promote “clean coal”, the American public is turning against coal.

In a national poll that asked which electricity source people would prefer, only three percent chose coal. The Sierra Club, which has kept a tally of proposed coal-fired power plants and their fates since 2000, reports that 152 plants in the United States have been defeated or abandoned.

An early turning point in the coal war came in June 2007, when Florida’s Public Service Commission refused to license a huge 5.7- billion-dollar, 1,960-megawatt coal plant because the utility proposing it could not prove that building the plant would be cheaper than investing in conservation, efficiency, or renewable energy.

This point, frequently made by lawyers from Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental legal group, combined with widely expressed public opposition to any more coal-fired power plants in Florida, led to the quiet withdrawal of four other coal plant proposals in the state.

Coal’s future also suffered as Wall Street, pressured by the Rainforest Action Network, turned its back on the industry. In February 2008, investment banks Morgan Stanley, Citi, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Bank of America announced that any future lending for coal- fired power would be contingent on the utilities demonstrating that the plants would be economically viable with the higher costs associated with future federal restrictions on carbon emissions.

One of the unresolved questions haunting the coal sector is what to do with the coal ash – the remnant of burning coal – that is accumulating in 194 landfills and 161 holding ponds in 47 states. This ash is not an easy material to dispose of since it is laced with arsenic, lead, mercury, and other toxic materials.

A coal ash spill in Tennessee in December 2008 released a billion gallons of toxic brew and is costing the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 1.2 billion dollars to clean up.

An August 2010 joint study by the Environmental Integrity Project, Earthjustice, and the Sierra Club reported that 39 coal ash dump sites in 21 states have contaminated local drinking water or surface water with arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals at levels that exceed federal safe drinking water standards. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had already identified 98 other water- polluting sites.

In response to these and other threats, new regulations are in the making to require better management of coal ash storage facilities to avoid contaminating local groundwater supplies. In addition, EPA is issuing more stringent regulations on coal plant emissions to reduce chronic respiratory illnesses and deaths caused by coal-fired power plant emissions.

The coal industry practice of blasting off mountaintops to get at coal seams is also under fire. In August 2010, the Rainforest Action Network announced that several leading U.S. investment banks, including Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo, had ceased lending to companies involved in mountaintop removal coal mining.

Massey Energy, a large coal mining company notorious for its violations of environmental and safety regulations and the owner of the West Virginia mine where 29 miners died in 2010, lost all funding from three of the banks.

Now that the United States has, in effect, a near de facto moratorium on the licensing of new coal-fired power plants, several environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, are starting to focus on closing existing coal plants.

Utilities are beginning to recognise that coal is not a viable long- term option. TVA announced in August 2010 that it was planning to close nine of its 59 coal-generating units. Duke Energy, another major southeastern utility, followed with an announcement that it was considering the closure of seven coal-fired units in North and South Carolina alone.

Progress Energy, also in the Carolinas, is planning to close 11 units at four sites. In Pennsylvania, Exelon Power is preparing to close four coal units at two sites. Xcel Energy, the dominant utility in Colorado, announced it was closing seven coal units. And in April 2011, TVA agreed to close another nine units as part of a legal settlement with EPA.

In an analysis of the future of coal, Wood Mackenzie, a leading energy consulting and research firm, describes these closings as a harbinger of things to come for the coal industry.

The chairman of the powerful U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Jon Wellinghoff, observed in early 2009 that the United States may no longer need any additional coal plants. Regulators, investment banks, and political leaders are now beginning to see what has been obvious for some time to climate scientists such as James Hansen: that it makes no sense to build coal-fired power plants only to have to bulldoze them in a few years.

Closing coal plants in the United States may be much easier than it appears. If the efficiency level of the other 49 states were raised to that of New York, the most energy-efficient state, the energy saved would be sufficient to close 80 percent of the country’s coal-fired power plants. The remaining plants could be shut down by turning to wind, solar, and geothermal energy.

The U.S. transition from coal to renewables is under way. Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. coal use dropped eight percent. During the same period, and despite the recession, 300 new wind farms came online, adding some 23,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity.

With the likelihood that few, if any, new coal-fired power plants will be approved in the United States, this moratorium sends a message to the world. Denmark and New Zealand have already banned new coal-fired power plants. As of late 2010, Hungary was on the verge of closing its one remaining coal plant.

Ontario Province, where 39 percent of Canadians live, plans to phase out coal entirely by 2014. Scotland announced in September 2010 that it plans to get 100 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2025, backing out coal entirely. In May 2011, that target date was pushed up to 2020.

Even China is surging ahead with renewable energy and now leads the world in new wind farm installations. These and other developments suggest that the Plan B goal of cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020 may be much more attainable than many would have thought a few years ago.

The restructuring of the energy economy will not only dramatically drop carbon emissions, helping to stabilise climate, it will also eliminate much of the air pollution that we know today. The idea of a pollution-free environment is difficult for us even to imagine, simply because none of us has ever known an energy economy that was not highly polluting.

Working in coal mines will be history. Black lung disease will eventually disappear. So too will ‘code red’ alerts warning us to avoid strenuous exercise because of dangerous levels of air pollution.

And, finally, in contrast to investments in oil fields and coal mines, where depletion and abandonment are inevitable, the new energy sources are inexhaustible. While wind turbines, solar cells, and solar thermal systems will all need repair and occasional replacement, investing in these new energy sources means investing in energy systems that can last forever.

Although some of the prospects look good for moving away from coal, timing is key. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet? If not, sea level will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice-growing river deltas of Asia will be underwater. And there will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refugees.

If we cannot mobilise to save the Greenland ice sheet, we probably cannot save civilisation as we know it.

*Adapted from ‘World on the Edge’ by Lester R. Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. Full book available at www.earth-policy.org/books/wote.

After the earth was created, soil formed slowly over geological time from the weathering of rocks. It began to support early plant life, which protected and enriched it until it became the topsoil that sustains the diversity of plants and animals we know today. Now the world’s ever-growing herds of cattle, sheep, and goats are converting vast stretches of grassland to desert.

One indicator that helps us assess grassland health is changes in the goat population relative to those of sheep and cattle. As grasslands deteriorate, grass is typically replaced by desert shrubs.

In such a degraded environment, cattle and sheep do not fare well. But goats – being particularly hardy ruminants – forage on the shrubs. Goats are especially hard on the soil because their sharp hoofs pulverise the protective crust of soil that is formed by rainfall and that naturally checks wind erosion.

Between 1970 and 2009, the world’s cattle population increased by 28 percent and the number of sheep stayed relatively static. Meanwhile, goat herds more than doubled.

Growth in goat populations is particularly dramatic in some developing countries. While cattle herds in Pakistan doubled between 1961 and 2009, and the number of sheep nearly tripled, the goat population grew more than six-fold and is now roughly equal to that of the cattle and sheep populations combined. These livestock have grazed the countryside bare of its rainfall-retaining vegetation, contributing to the massive flooding that ravaged Pakistan in the summer of 2010.

A giant dustbowl is now forming south of the Sahara in Africa’s Sahel region, thanks in part to overgrazing.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, reports losing 867,000 acres of rangeland and cropland to desertification each year. As human and livestock populations grow, herders and farmers compete for an ever-smaller amount of land for each person and animal. The goat population in particular has skyrocketed as the soil has eroded.

If Nigeria’s human population and livestock herds continue growing as they are today, the associated land degradation will eventually undermine herding and farming.

A second giant dustbowl is developing in northern and western China, western Mongolia, and central Asia. After economic reforms in 1978 shifted the responsibility for farming from large, state-organised production teams to individual farm families, China’s livestock populations spiralled upward. The number of goats continues to grow as the land is stripped of vegetation and winds help remove the soil to convert rangelands into desert.

We can contrast the situation in China with that in the United States, which has a comparable grazing capacity. While the two countries have similar numbers of cattle, the United States’ combined sheep and goat population of 9 million is minute compared with China’s 281 million.

Unfortunately, all kinds of livestock degrade soils by removing vegetation and trampling the ground.

Livestock rotation, mixed crop-livestock farming, and other sustainable agricultural practices can reduce soil erosion, raise cropland productivity, and lead to higher soil carbon content and soil moisture. In some situations, small numbers of livestock can be kept in restricted areas and forage can be brought to them, as in India’s cooperative dairy model.

But in the end, the only viable way to eliminate overgrazing on the earth’s rangelands is to balance the size of flocks and herds with nature’s capacity for re-growth.

*Lester R. Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article highlights data presented in Lester R. Brown, ‘World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse’ (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), available online at www.earth- policy.org/books/wote

More data from ‘World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse’ by Lester R. Brown is available at www.earth-policy.org and www.earth- policy.org/data_highlights/2011/highlights14

One key component of the Plan B climate stabilisation strategy is solar energy. Solar is even more ubiquitous than wind energy and can be harnessed with both solar photovoltaics (PV) and solar thermal collectors.

Solar PV – both silicon-based and thin film – converts sunlight directly into electricity. The growth in solar cell production climbed from an annual expansion of 38 percent in 2006 to an off-the-chart 89 percent in 2008, before settling back to 51 percent in 2009.

At the end of 2009, there were 23,000 megawatts of PV installations worldwide, which when operating at peak power could match the output of 23 nuclear power plants. Germany, with an installed PV power generating capacity of almost 10,000 megawatts, is far and away the world leader in installations.

On the manufacturing front, the early leaders – the United States, Japan, and Germany – have been overtaken by China, which produces more than twice as many solar cells annually as Japan. World PV production has roughly doubled every two years since 2001 and exceeded 20,000 megawatts in 2010.

Historically, photovoltaic installations were small-scale – mostly residential rooftop installations. Now that is changing as utility- scale PV projects are being launched in several countries.

The United States, for example, has under construction and development some 77 utility-scale projects, adding up to 13,200 megawatts of generating capacity. Morocco is now planning five large solar- generating projects, either photovoltaic or solar thermal or both, each ranging from 100 to 500 megawatts.

More and more countries, states, and provinces are setting solar installation goals. Italy’s solar industry group is projecting 15,000 megawatts of installed capacity by 2020. Japan is planning 28,000 megawatts by 2020. The state of California has set a goal of 3,000 megawatts by 2017.

Solar-rich Saudi Arabia recently announced that it plans to shift from oil to solar energy to power new desalination plants that supply the country’s residential water. It currently uses 1.5 million barrels of oil per day to operate some 30 desalting plants.

With installations of solar PV climbing, with costs continuing to fall, and with concerns about climate change escalating, cumulative PV installations could reach 1.5 million megawatts (1,500 gigawatts) in 2020. Although this estimate may seem overly ambitious, it could in fact be conservative, because if most of the 1.5 billion people who lack electricity today get it by 2020, it will likely be because they have installed home solar systems.

In many cases, it is cheaper to install solar cells for individual homes than it is to build a grid and a central power plant.

The second, very promising way to harness solar energy on a massive scale is a large-scale solar thermal technology, often referred to as concentrating solar power (CSP), that uses reflectors to concentrate sunlight on a liquid, producing steam to drive a turbine and generate electricity. One of the attractions of utility-scale CSP plants is that heat during the day can be stored in molten salt at temperatures above 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat can then be used to keep the turbines running for eight or more hours after sunset.

CSP first came on the scene with the construction of a 350-megawatt solar thermal power plant complex in California. Completed in 1991, it was the world’s only utility-scale solar thermal generating facility until the completion of a 64-megawatt power plant in Nevada in 2007.

Although solar thermal power has been slow to get under way, utility- scale plants are being built rapidly now, led by the United States and Spain. The United States has more than 40 solar thermal power plants operating, under construction, and under development that range from 10 to 1,200 megawatts each. Spain has 60 power plants in these same stages of development, most of which are 50 megawatts each. The American Solar Energy Society notes that solar thermal resources in the U.S. Southwest can satisfy current U.S. electricity needs nearly four times over.

In July 2009, a group of 11 leading European firms and one Algerian firm, led by Munich Re and including Deutsche Bank, Siemens, and ABB, announced that they were going to craft a strategy and funding proposal to develop solar thermal generating capacity in North Africa and the Middle East. Their proposal would meet the needs of the producer countries and supply part of Europe’s electricity via undersea cable.

This initiative, known as the Desertec Industrial Initiative, could develop 300,000 megawatts of solar thermal generating capacity – huge by any standard. Caio Koch-Weser, vice chair of Deutsche Bank, noted that “the Initiative shows in what dimensions and on what scale we must think if we are to master the challenges from climate change.”

Even before this proposal, Algeria – for decades an oil exporter – was planning to build 6,000 megawatts of solar thermal generating capacity for export to Europe via undersea cable. The Algerians note that they have enough harnessable solar energy in their vast desert to power the entire world economy. This is not a mathematical error. The German government was quick to respond to the Algerian initiative. The plan is to build a 1,900-mile high-voltage transmission line from Adrar deep in the Algerian desert to Aachen, a town on Germany’s border with the Netherlands.

At the global level, Greenpeace, the European Solar Thermal Electricity Association, and the International Energy Agency’s SolarPACES programme have outlined a plan to develop 1.5 million megawatts of solar thermal power plant capacity by 2050.

For Earth Policy Institute’s Plan B to save civilisation, we suggest a more immediate world goal of 200,000 megawatts by 2020, a goal that may well be exceeded as the economic potential becomes clearer.

The pace of solar energy development is accelerating as the installation of rooftop solar water heaters – solar thermal collectors on a smaller scale – takes off. This technology is sweeping China like wildfire, with an estimated 1.9 billion square feet of rooftop solar thermal collectors installed, enough to supply 120 million Chinese households with hot water.

Other developing countries such as India and Brazil may also soon see millions of households turning to this inexpensive water heating technology. Once the initial installment cost of rooftop solar water heaters is paid back, the hot water is essentially free.

In Europe, where energy costs are relatively high, rooftop solar water heaters are also spreading fast. Systems typically pay for themselves in electricity savings within 10 years. In Austria, 15 percent of all households now rely on them for hot water. As in China, in some Austrian villages nearly all homes have rooftop collectors. And some two million Germans are now living in homes where water and space are both heated by rooftop solar systems.

The U.S. rooftop solar water heating industry has historically concentrated on a niche market – selling and marketing 100 million square feet of solar water heaters for swimming pools between 1995 and 2005. The industry was poised to mass-market residential solar water and space heating systems when federal tax credits were introduced in 2006.

Led by Hawaii, California, and Florida, annual U.S. installation of these systems has more than tripled since 2005. The state of Hawaii requires that all new single-family homes have rooftop solar water heaters. California aims to install 200,000 solar water heaters by 2017, and New York State aims to have 170,000 residential solar water systems in operation by 2020.

With the cost of rooftop heating systems declining, many other countries will likely join Israel, Spain, and Portugal in mandating that all new buildings incorporate rooftop solar water heaters. Worldwide, Plan B calls for a total of 1,100 thermal gigawatts of rooftop solar water and space heating capacity by 2020.

Moving fast to harness the world’s enormous solar potential would bring a clear win for local economies and for the climate.

* Lester R. Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. Adapted from Brown’s ‘World on the Edge’. Full book available online at www.earth-policy.org/books/wote.

When it comes to population growth, the United Nations has three primary projections. The medium projection, the one most commonly used, has world population reaching 9.2 billion by 2050. The high one reaches 10.5 billion. The low projection, which assumes that the world will quickly move below replacement-level fertility, has population peaking at eight billion in 2042 and then declining.

If the goal is to eradicate poverty, hunger, and illiteracy, then we have little choice but to strive for the lower projection.

Slowing world population growth means ensuring that all women who want to plan their families have access to family planning information and services. Unfortunately, this is currently not the case for 215 million women, 59 percent of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

These women and their families represent roughly one billion of the earth’s poorest residents, for whom unintended pregnancies and unwanted births are an enormous burden.

Former U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) official J. Joseph Speidel notes that “if you ask anthropologists who live and work with poor people at the village level…they often say that women live in fear of their next pregnancy. They just do not want to get pregnant.”

The United Nations Population Fund and the Guttmacher Institute estimate that meeting the needs of these 215 million women who lack reproductive health care and effective contraception could each year prevent 53 million unwanted pregnancies, 24 million induced abortions, and 1.6 million infant deaths.

Along with the provision of additional condoms needed to prevent HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, a universal family planning and reproductive health programme would cost an additional 21 billion dollars in funding from industrial and developing countries.

Shifting to smaller families brings generous economic dividends. In Bangladesh, for example, analysts concluded that 62 dollars spent by the government to prevent an unwanted birth saved 615 dollars in expenditures on other social services. For donor countries, ensuring that men and women everywhere have access to the services they need would yield strong social returns in improved education and health care.

Slowing population growth brings with it what economists call the demographic bonus. When countries move quickly to smaller families, growth in the number of young dependents – those who need nurturing and educating – declines relative to the number of working adults.

At the individual level, removing the financial burden of large families allows more people to escape from poverty. At the national level, the demographic bonus causes savings and investment to climb, productivity to surge, and economic growth to accelerate.

Japan, which cut its population growth in half between 1951 and 1958, was one of the first countries to benefit from the demographic bonus. South Korea and Taiwan followed, and more recently China, Thailand, and Viet Nam have been helped by earlier sharp reductions in birth rates.

Although this effect lasts for only a few decades, it is usually enough to launch a country into the modern era. Indeed, except for a few oil-rich countries, no developing country has successfully modernized without slowing population growth.

Though many developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America were successful in quickly reducing their fertility within a generation or so after public health and medical gains lowered their mortality rates, many others did not follow this path and have been caught in the demographic trap – including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen.

(Large families are a greater financial burden on both parents and governments, and more impoverished people and societies tend to produce larger families. Thus they become “trapped” in a cycle of poverty and high fertility.)

Countries that do not succeed in reducing fertility early on face the compounding of three percent growth per year or 20- fold per century. Such rapid population growth can easily strain limited land and water resources. With large “youth bulges” outrunning job creation, the growing number of unemployed young men increases the risk of conflict. This also raises the odds of becoming a failing state.

Put simply, the costs to society of not filling the family planning gap may be greater than we can afford.

The good news is that governments can help couples reduce family size very quickly when they commit to doing so. My colleague Janet Larsen writes that in just one decade Iran dropped its near-record population growth rate to one of the lowest in the developing world.

When Ayatollah Khomeini assumed leadership in Iran in 1979 and launched the Islamic revolution, he immediately dismantled the well-established family planning programmes and instead advocated large families. At war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988, Khomeini wanted to increase the ranks of soldiers for Islam. His goal was an army of 20 million.

Fertility levels climbed in response to his pleas, pushing Iran’s annual population growth to a peak of 4.2 percent in the early 1980s, a level approaching the biological maximum. As this enormous growth began to burden the economy and the environment, the country’s leaders realised that overcrowding, environmental degradation, and unemployment were undermining Iran’s future.

In 1989 the government did an about-face and restored its family planning programme. In May 1993, a national family planning law was passed. The resources of several government ministries, including education, culture, and health, were mobilised to encourage smaller families.

Iran Broadcasting was given responsibility for raising awareness of population issues and of the availability of family planning services. Television was used to disseminate information on family planning throughout the country, taking advantage of the 70 percent of rural households with TV sets. Religious leaders were directly involved in what amounted to a crusade for smaller families.

Some 15,000 “health houses” or clinics were established to provide rural populations with health and family planning services. Iran introduced a full panoply of contraceptive measures, including the option of vasectomy – a first among Muslim countries. All forms of birth control, including the pill and sterilisation, were free of charge. Iran even became the only country to require couples to take a course on modern contraception before receiving a marriage license.

In addition to the direct health care interventions, Iran also launched a broad-based effort to raise female literacy, boosting it from 25 percent in 1970 to more than 70 percent in 2000. Female school enrollment increased from 60 to 90 percent. Women and girls with more schooling are likely to have fewer children, making their education a smart investment.

As a result of this initiative, family size in Iran dropped from seven children to fewer than three. From 1987 to 1994, Iran cut its population growth rate by half, an impressive achievement.

The bad news is that in July 2010 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared the country’s family planning programme ungodly and announced a new pronatalist policy. The government would pay couples to have children, depositing money in each child’s bank account until age 18. The effect of this new programme on Iran’s population growth remains to be seen.

Nevertheless, Iran’s history shows how a full-scale mobilisation of society that incorporates public outreach, access to family planning resources, and gender equality in education can accelerate the shift to smaller families.

*Lester R. Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article is adapted from Chapter 11, “Eradicating Poverty, Stabilizing Population, and Rescuing Failing States” in Lester R. Brown, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), available online at www.earth- policy.org/books/wote.

Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and across the Middle East at the start of 2011 have reminded the world just how politically fragile some countries are. But the focus of international politics has been shifting for some time now.

After a half-century of forming new states from former colonies and from the breakup of the Soviet Union, the international community is today faced with the opposite situation: the disintegration of states. As an article in Foreign Policy observes, “Failed states have made a remarkable odyssey from the periphery to the very center of global politics.”

The Failed States Index, undertaken by the Fund for Peace and published in each July/August issue of Foreign Policy, ranks 177 countries according to “their vulnerability to violent internal conflict and societal deterioration,” based on 12 social, economic, and political indicators.

In 2005, just seven countries had scores of 100 or more out of 120. (A score of 120 would mean that a society is failing totally by every measure.) By 2010, it was 15. Higher scores for countries at the top and the doubling of countries with scores of 100 or higher suggest that state failure is both spreading and deepening.

States fail when national governments lose control of part or all of their territory and can no longer ensure people’s security. Failing states often degenerate into civil war as opposing groups vie for power. In Afghanistan, for example, the local warlords or the Taliban, not the central government, control the country outside of Kabul.

One reason for government breakdowns that has become more relevant recently is the inability to provide food security – not necessarily because the government is less competent but because obtaining enough food is becoming more difficult.

Providing sufficient food has proved to be particularly challenging since the rise in food prices that began in early 2007. Although grain prices subsided again for a while, they have remained well above historical levels and, at the beginning of 2011, are fast approaching levels similar to the spring 2008 peak.

Among the top 20 countries on the 2010 Failed States list, all but a few are losing the race between food production and population growth. The populations in 15 of the top 20 failing states are growing between two and four percent a year. Many governments are suffering from demographic fatigue, unable to cope with the steady shrinkage in cropland and freshwater supply per person or to build schools fast enough for the swelling ranks of children.

In 14 of the top 20 failing states, at least 40 percent of the population is under 15, a demographic indicator that raises the likelihood of future political instability. Many are caught in the demographic trap: they have developed enough economically and socially to reduce mortality but not enough to lower fertility. As a result, large families beget poverty and poverty begets large families.

Virtually all of the top 20 countries are depleting their natural assets – forests, grasslands, soils, and aquifers – to sustain their rapidly growing populations. The three countries at the top of the list – Somalia, Chad and Sudan – are losing their topsoil to wind erosion, undermining the land’s productivity. Several countries in the top 20 are water-stressed and are overpumping their aquifers.

After a point, as rapid population growth, deteriorating environmental support systems, and poverty reinforce each other, the resulting instability makes it difficult to attract investment from abroad. Even public assistance programmes from donor countries are sometimes phased out as the security breakdown threatens the lives of aid workers.

The conditions of state failure may be a long time in the making, but the collapse itself can come quickly.

Before revolution in Tunisia helped spark unrest in Yemen in January of 2011, the country already faced several threatening trends. It is running out of both oil and water, and has the poorest population among Arab countries.

The shaky Yemeni government faces a Shiite insurgency in the north, a deepening conflict between the north and the south, and an estimated 300 Al Qaeda operatives within its borders. With its long, porous border with Saudi Arabia, Yemen could become a gateway for Al Qaeda to move into Saudi Arabia.

Failing states are rarely isolated phenomena. Conflicts can easily spread to neighbouring countries, as when the genocide in Rwanda spilled over into the DRC, where an ongoing civil conflict claimed more than five million lives between 1998 and 2007. Similarly, the killings in Sudan’s Darfur region quickly spread into Chad as victims fled across the border.

Failing states can become training grounds for international terrorist groups, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen; bases for pirates, as in Somalia; or sources of drugs, as in Afghanistan and Myanmar (Burma).

Fortunately, state failure is not always a one-way street. South Africa, which could have erupted into a race war a generation ago, is now a functioning democracy. Liberia and Colombia, both of which once had high Failed State Index scores, have each made a remarkable turnaround.

Nevertheless, as the number of failing states grows, dealing with various international crises becomes more difficult. Situations that may be manageable in a healthy world order, such as maintaining monetary stability or controlling an infectious disease outbreak, become difficult and sometimes impossible in a world with many disintegrating states. Even maintaining international flows of raw materials could become a challenge. At some point, spreading political instability could disrupt global economic progress.

One of the leading challenges facing the international community is how to prevent that slide into chaos. Continuing with business as usual with international assistance programmes is not working.

Reversing the process of state failure is an even more challenging, demanding process than the rebuilding of war- torn states after World War II, and it requires a level of interagency cooperation that no donor country has yet achieved. Since state failure is, by its nature, systemic, a systemic response is called for – one that is responsive to the many interrelated sources of failure.

Within the U.S. government, efforts to deal with weak and failing states are fragmented. What is needed now is a new cabinet-level agency – a Department of Global Security (DGS) – that would fashion a coherent policy toward each weak state.

This recommendation, initially set forth in a report of the Commission on Weak States and U.S. National Security, recognises that threats to security now come less from military power and more from the social and environmental trends that undermine states.

The new agency would incorporate AID (now part of the State Department) and all the various foreign assistance programs that are currently in other government departments, thereby assuming responsibility for U.S. development assistance across the board. It would be funded by shifting fiscal resources from the Department of Defence, in effect becoming part of a new security budget.

It would focus on the central sources of state failure by helping to stabilise population, restore environmental support systems, eradicate poverty, and strengthen the rule of law through bolstering police forces, court systems, and, where needed, the military.

The DGS would make such issues as debt relief and market access an integral part of U.S. policy. It would also provide a forum to coordinate domestic and foreign policy, ensuring that domestic policies do not weaken the economies of low-income countries or raise the price of food to unaffordable levels for the poor.

These investments are in a sense a humanitarian response to the plight of the world’s poorest countries. But in the economically and politically integrated world of the twenty- first century, they are also an investment in our future.

*Lester R. Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article is excerpted from Chapter 7, “Mounting Stresses, Failing States,” and Chapter 11, “Eradicating Poverty, Stabilizing Population, and Rescuing Failing States” in Lester R. Brown, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), available online at www.earth-policy.org/books/wote.

The heat in the upper six miles of the earth’s crust contains 50,000 times as much energy as found in all the world’s oil and gas reserves combined. Despite this abundance, only 10,700 megawatts of geothermal electricity generating capacity have been harnessed worldwide.

Partly because of the dominance of the oil, gas, and coal industries, which have been providing cheap fuel by omitting the costs of climate change and air pollution from fuel prices, relatively little has been invested in developing the earth’s geothermal heat resources. Over the last decade, geothermal energy has been growing at scarcely 3 percent a year.

Roughly half the world’s existing generating capacity is in the United States and the Philippines. Indonesia, Mexico, Italy, and Japan account for most of the remainder. Altogether some 24 countries now convert geothermal energy into electricity. El Salvador, Iceland, and the Philippines respectively get 26, 25, and 18 percent of their electricity from geothermal power plants.

The potential of geothermal energy to provide electricity, to heat homes, and to supply process heat for industry is vast. Among the countries rich in geothermal energy are those bordering the Pacific in the so-called Ring of Fire, including Chile, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, the United States, Canada, Russia, China, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia. Other geothermally rich countries include those along the Great Rift Valley of Africa, such as Kenya and Ethiopia, and those around the Eastern Mediterranean.

Beyond geothermal electrical generation, an estimated 100,000 thermal megawatts of geothermal energy are used directly – without conversion into electricity – to heat homes and greenhouses and as process heat in industry. This includes, for example, the energy used in hot baths in Japan and to heat homes in Iceland and greenhouses in Russia.

An interdisciplinary team of 13 scientists and engineers assembled by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2006 assessed U.S. geothermal electrical generating potential. Drawing on the latest technologies, including those used by oil and gas companies in drilling and in enhanced oil recovery, the team estimated that enhanced geothermal systems could be used to massively develop geothermal energy. This technology involves drilling down to the hot rock layer, fracturing the rock and pumping water into the cracked rock, then extracting the superheated water to drive a steam turbine. The MIT team notes that with this technology the U.S. has enough geothermal energy to meet its energy needs 2,000 times over.

Though it is still costly, this technology can be used almost anywhere to convert geothermal heat into electricity. Australia is currently the leader in developing pilot plants using this technology, followed by Germany and France. To fully realise this potential for the U.S., the MIT team estimated that the government would need to invest 1 billion dollars in geothermal research and development in the years immediately ahead, roughly the cost of one coal-fired power plant.

Even before this exciting new technology is widely deployed, investors are moving ahead with existing technologies. For many years, U.S. geothermal energy was confined largely to the Geysers project north of San Francisco, easily the world’s largest geothermal generating complex, with 850 megawatts of generating capacity.

Now the U.S., which has more than 3,000 megawatts of geothermal generation, is experiencing a geothermal renaissance. Some 152 power plants under development in 13 states are expected to nearly triple U.S. geothermal generating capacity. With California, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah leading the way, and with many new companies in the field, the stage is set for massive U.S. geothermal development.

Indonesia, richly endowed with geothermal energy, stole the spotlight in 2008 when it announced a plan to develop 6,900 megawatts of geothermal generating capacity. The Philippines is also planning a number of new projects.

Among the Great Rift countries in Africa – including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti – Kenya is the early leader. It now has over 100 megawatts of geothermal generating capacity and is planning 1,200 more megawatts by 2015. This would nearly double its current electrical generating capacity of 1,300 megawatts from all sources.

Japan, which has a total of 535 megawatts of generating capacity, was an early leader in this field. Now, following nearly two decades of inactivity, this geothermally rich country – long known for its thousands of hot baths – is again beginning to build geothermal power plants.

In Europe, Germany has 5 small geothermal power plants in operation and some 150 plants in the pipeline. Werner Bussmann, head of the German Geothermal Association, says, “Geothermal sources could supply Germany’s electricity needs 600 times over.”

Beyond geothermal power plants, geothermal (ground source) heat pumps are now being widely used for both heating and cooling. These take advantage of the remarkable stability of the earth’s temperature near the surface and then use that as a source of heat in the winter when the air temperature is low and a source of cooling in the summer when the temperature is high. The great attraction of this technology is that it can provide both heating and cooling and do so with 25-50 percent less electricity than would be needed with conventional systems.

In Germany, for example, there are now 178,000 geothermal heat pumps operating in residential or commercial buildings. This base is growing steadily, as at least 25,000 new pumps are installed each year.

In the direct use of geothermal heat, Iceland and France are among the leaders.

Iceland’s use of geothermal energy to heat almost 90 percent of its homes has largely eliminated coal for this purpose. Geothermal energy accounts for more than one third of Iceland’s total energy use.

Following the two oil price hikes in the 1970s, some 70 geothermal heating facilities were constructed in France, providing both heat and hot water for an estimated 200,000 residences. Other countries that have extensive geothermally based district-heating systems include China, Japan, and Turkey.

Geothermal heat is ideal for greenhouses in northern countries. Russia, Hungary, Iceland, and the U.S. are among the many countries that use it to produce fresh vegetables in the winter. With rising oil prices boosting fresh produce transport costs, this practice will likely become far more common in the years ahead.

Among the 22 countries using geothermal energy for aquaculture are China, Israel, and the U.S. In California, for example, 15 fish farms annually produce some 10 million pounds of tilapia, striped bass, and catfish using warm water from underground.

Hot underground water is widely used for both bathing and swimming. Japan has 2,800 spas, 5,500 public bathhouses, and 15,600 hotels and inns that use geothermal hot water. Iceland uses geothermal energy to heat 135 public swimming pools, most of them year-round open-air pools. Hungary heats 1,200 swimming pools with geothermal energy.

If the four most populous countries located on the Pacific Ring of Fire – the U.S., Japan, China, and Indonesia – were to seriously invest in developing their geothermal resources, they could easily make this a leading world energy source.

With a conservatively estimated potential in the U.S. and Japan alone of 240,000 megawatts of generation, it is easy to envisage a world with thousands of geothermal power plants generating some 200,000 megawatts of electricity by 2020.

For direct use of geothermal heat, the 2020 Plan B goal is 500,000 thermal megawatts. All together, the geothermal potential is enormous.

*Lester R. Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article is adapted from Chapter 5, “Stabilizing Climate: Shifting to Renewable Energy,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4

The bicycle has many attractions as a form of personal transportation. It alleviates congestion, lowers air pollution, reduces obesity, increases physical fitness, does not emit climate-disrupting carbon dioxide, and is priced within the reach of the billions of people who cannot afford a car.

Bicycles increase mobility while reducing congestion and the area of land paved over. Six bicycles can typically fit into the road space used by one car. For parking, the advantage is even greater, with 20 bicycles occupying the space required to park a car.

Few methods of reducing carbon emissions are as effective as substituting a bicycle for a car on short trips. A bicycle is a marvel of engineering efficiency, one where an investment in 22 pounds of metal and rubber boosts the efficiency of individual mobility by a factor of three.

The bicycle is not only a flexible means of transportation; it is ideal in restoring a balance between caloric intake and expenditure. Regular exercise of the sort provided by cycling to work reduces cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and arthritis, and it strengthens the immune system.

World bicycle production, averaging 94 million per year from 1990 to 2002, climbed to 130 million in 2007, far outstripping automobile production of 70 million. Bicycle sales in some markets are surging as governments devise a myriad of incentives to encourage bicycle use. For example, in 2009 the Italian government began a hefty incentive programme to encourage the purchase of bicycles or electric bikes in order to improve urban air quality and reduce the number of cars on the road. The direct payments will cover up to 30 percent of the cost of the bicycle.

China, with 430 million bikes, has the world’s largest fleet, but ownership rates are higher in Europe. The Netherlands has more than one bike per person, while Denmark and Germany have just under one bike per person.

China dramatically demonstrated the capacity of the bicycle to provide mobility for low-income populations. In 1976, this country produced six million bicycles. After the reforms in 1978 that led to an open market economy and rapidly rising incomes, bicycle production started climbing, reaching nearly 90 million in 2007.

The surge to 430 million bicycle owners in China has provided the greatest increase in mobility in history. Bicycles took over rural roads and city streets. Although China’s rapidly multiplying passenger cars and the urban congestion they cause get a lot of attention, it is bicycles that provide personal mobility for hundreds of millions of Chinese.

Among the industrial-country leaders in designing bicycle- friendly transport systems are the Netherlands, where 27 percent of all trips are by bike, Denmark with 18 percent, and Germany, 10 percent. By contrast, the United States and Britain are each at 1 percent.

An excellent study by John Pucher and Ralph Buehler at Rutgers University analysed the reasons for these wide disparities among countries. They note that “extensive cycling rights-of-way in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany are complemented by ample bike parking, full integration with public transport, comprehensive traffic education and training of both cyclists and motorists.”

These countries, they point out, “make driving expensive as well as inconvenient in central cities through a host of taxes and restrictions on car ownership, use and parking…. It is the coordinated implementation of this multi-faceted, mutually reinforcing set of policies that best explains the success of these three countries in promoting cycling.” And it is the lack of these policies, they note, that explains “the marginal status of cycling in the UK and USA”.

The Netherlands, the unquestioned leader among industrial countries in encouraging bicycle use, has incorporated a vision of the role of bicycles into a Bicycle Master Plan. In addition to creating bike lanes and trails in all its cities, the system also often gives cyclists the advantage over motorists in right-of-way and at traffic lights. Some traffic signals permit cyclists to move out before cars. By 2007, Amsterdam had become the first western industrial city where the number of trips taken by bicycle exceeded those taken by car.

Within the Netherlands, a nongovernmental group called Interface for Cycling Expertise (I-ce) has been formed to share the Dutch experience in designing a modern transport system that prominently features bicycles. It is working with groups in Botswana, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Ghana, India, Kenya, Peru, South Africa, and Uganda to facilitate bicycle use.

Sales of electric bicycles, a relatively new genre of transport vehicles, also have taken off. E-bikes are similar to plug-in hybrid cars in that they are powered by two sources – in this case muscle and battery power – and can be plugged into the grid for recharging as needed.

In China, where this technology came into its own, sales climbed from 40,000 e-bikes in 1998 to 21 million in 2008. China had close to 100 million electric bicycles on the road that year, compared with 18 million cars. These e-bikes are now attracting attention in other Asian countries similarly plagued with air pollution and in the United States and Europe, where combined sales now exceed 300,000 per year.

In contrast to plug-in hybrid cars, electric bikes do not directly use any fossil fuel. If we can make the transition from coal-fired power plants to wind, solar, and geothermal power, then electrically powered bicycles can also operate fossil-fuel-free.

Above all, the key to realising the potential of the bicycle is to create bicycle-friendly transport systems. This means providing bicycle trails and designated street lanes for bicycles, designed to serve both commuters and people biking for recreation, and making bike parking facilities and showers available at workplaces. This simple bicycle is a winner in the Plan B economy.

*Lester R. Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article is excerpted from Chapter 6, “Designing Cities for People” in Brown’s ‘Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilisation’ (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4.

With water shortages constraining food production growth, the world needs an effort to raise water productivity similar to the one that nearly tripled land productivity over the last half-century.

Since it takes 1,000 tonnes of water to produce one tonne of grain, it is not surprising that 70 percent of world water use is devoted to irrigation. Thus, raising irrigation efficiency is central to raising water productivity overall.

Data on the efficiency of surface water projects – that is, dams that deliver water to farmers through a network of canals – show that crop usage of irrigation water never reaches 100 percent simply because some irrigation water evaporates, some percolates downward, and some runs off.

Water policy analysts Sandra Postel and Amy Vickers found that “surface water irrigation efficiency ranges between 25 and 40 percent in India, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand; between 40 and 45 percent in Malaysia and Morocco; and between 50 and 60 percent in Israel, Japan, and Taiwan.”

Irrigation water efficiency is affected not only by the type and condition of irrigation systems but also by soil type, temperature, and humidity. In hot arid regions, the evaporation of irrigation water is far higher than in cooler humid regions.

In a May 2004 meeting, China’s Minister of Water Resources Wang Shucheng outlined for me in some detail the plans to raise China’s irrigation efficiency from 43 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in 2010 and then to 55 percent in 2030. The steps he described included raising the price of water, providing incentives for adopting more irrigation-efficient technologies, and developing the local institutions to manage this process. Reaching these goals, he felt, would assure China’s future food security.

Raising irrigation efficiency typically means shifting from the less efficient flood or furrow systems to overhead sprinklers or drip irrigation, the gold standard of irrigation efficiency. Switching from flood or furrow to low-pressure sprinkler systems reduces water use by an estimated 30 percent, while switching to drip irrigation typically cuts water use in half.

As an alternative to furrow irrigation, a drip system also raises yields because it provides a steady supply of water with minimal losses to evaporation. Since drip systems are both labour-intensive and water-efficient, they are well suited to countries with a surplus of labour and a shortage of water.

A few small countries – Cyprus, Israel, and Jordan – rely heavily on drip irrigation. Among the big three agricultural producers, this more-efficient technology is used on one to three percent of irrigated land in India and China and on roughly four percent in the United States.

In recent years, small-scale drip-irrigation systems – literally a bucket with flexible plastic tubing to distribute the water – have been developed to irrigate small vegetable gardens with roughly 100 plants (covering 25 square metres). Somewhat larger systems using drums irrigate 125 square metres. In both cases, the containers are elevated slightly, so that gravity distributes the water.

Large-scale drip systems using plastic lines that can be moved easily are also becoming popular. These simple systems can pay for themselves in one year. By simultaneously reducing water costs and raising yields, they can dramatically raise incomes of smallholders.

Sandra Postel estimates that drip technology has the potential to profitably irrigate 10 million hectares of India’s cropland, nearly one-tenth of the total. She sees a similar potential for China, which is now also expanding its drip irrigated area to save scarce water.

In the Punjab, with its extensive double cropping of wheat and rice, fast-falling water tables led the state farmers’ commission in 2007 to recommend a delay in transplanting rice from May to late June or early July. This would reduce irrigation water use by roughly one-third, since transplanting would coincide with the arrival of the monsoon. The resulting reduction in groundwater use would help stabilise the water table, which has fallen from five metres below the surface down to 30 metres in parts of the state.

Institutional shifts – specifically, moving the responsibility for managing irrigation systems from government agencies to local water users associations – can facilitate the more efficient use of water. In many countries farmers are organising locally so they can assume this responsibility, and since they have an economic stake in good water management, they tend to do a better job than a distant government agency.

Mexico is a leader in developing water users associations. As of 2008, farmers associations managed more than 99 percent of the irrigated area held in public irrigation districts. One advantage of this shift for the government is that the cost of maintaining the irrigation system is assumed locally, reducing the drain on the treasury. This means that associations often need to charge more for irrigation water, but for farmers the production gains from managing their water supply themselves more than outweigh this additional outlay.

In Tunisia, where water users’ associations manage both irrigation and residential water, the number of associations increased from 340 in 1987 to 2,575 in 1999, covering much of the country. As of 2009, China has more than 40,000 water users associations to locally manage water resources and to maximise water use efficiency. Many other countries now have similar bodies.

Although the first groups were organised to deal with large publicly developed irrigation systems, some recent ones have been formed to manage local groundwater irrigation as well. Their goal is to stabilise the water table to avoid aquifer depletion and the economic disruption that it brings to the community.

Low water productivity is often the result of low water prices. In many countries, subsidies lead to irrationally low water prices, creating the impression that water is abundant when in fact it is scarce. As water becomes scarce, it needs to be priced accordingly.

A new mindset is needed, a new way of thinking about water use. For example, shifting to more water-efficient crops wherever possible boosts water productivity. Rice production is being phased out around Beijing because rice is such a thirsty crop. Similarly, Egypt restricts rice production in favour of wheat.

Any measures that raise crop yields on irrigated land also raise the productivity of irrigation water. For people consuming unhealthy amounts of livestock products, moving down the food chain reduces water use.

In the United States, where the annual consumption of grain as food and feed averages some 800 kilogrammes per person, a modest reduction in the consumption of meat, milk, and eggs could easily cut grain use per person by 100 kilogrammes. For 300 million Americans, such a reduction would cut grain use by 30 million tonnes and the need for irrigation water by 30 billion tonnes.

Bringing water use down to the sustainable yield of aquifers and rivers worldwide involves a wide range of measures not only in agriculture but throughout the economy. The more obvious steps, in addition to more water-efficient irrigation practices and water-efficient crops, include adopting more water-efficient industrial processes and using both more water-efficient household appliances and those that use no water at all, such as the new odourless dry- compost toilets.

Recycling urban water supplies is another obvious step in countries facing acute water shortages.

*Lester R. Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article is adapted from Chapter 9, “Feeding Eight Billion People Well” in Brown’s ‘Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilisation’ (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4.

Cars promise mobility, and in a largely rural setting they provide it. But in an urbanising world, where more than half of us live in cities, there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and the city.

After a point, as their numbers multiply, automobiles provide not mobility but immobility, as well as increased air pollution and the health problems that come with it.

Urban transport systems based on a combination of rail lines, bus lines, bicycle pathways, and pedestrian walkways offer the best of all possible worlds in providing mobility, low-cost transportation, and a healthy urban environment.

Some of the most innovative public transportation systems, those that shift huge numbers of people from cars into buses, have been developed in Curitiba, Brazil, and Bogotá, Colombia.

The success of Bogotá’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, TransMilenio, which uses special express lanes to move people quickly through the city, is being replicated not only in six other Colombian cities but in scores elsewhere too, including Mexico City, São Paulo, Hanoi, Seoul, Istanbul, and Quito. By 2012, Mexico City plans to have 10 BRT lines in place.

Beijing is one of 11 Chinese cities with BRT systems in operation. In southern China, Guangzhou officially opened its BRT in early 2010. Already carrying more than 800,000 passengers daily, this system is expected to serve one million passengers per day by the end of the year.

In addition to linking with the city’s underground Metro in three places, it will soon be paralleled throughout its entirety with a bike lane. Guangzhou will also have 5,500 bike parking spaces for those using a bike-BRT travel combination.

In Iran, Tehran launched its first BRT line in early 2008. Several more lines are in the development stage, and all will be integrated with the city’s new subway lines. Several cities in Africa are also planning BRT systems. Even industrial-country cities such as Ottawa, Toronto, New York, Minneapolis, Chicago, Las Vegas, and – much to everyone’s delight – Los Angeles have launched or are now considering BRT systems.

Some cities are reducing traffic congestion and air pollution by charging cars to enter the city, including Singapore, London, Stockholm, and Milan. In London – where until recently the average speed of an automobile was comparable to that of a horse-drawn carriage a century ago – a congestion fee was adopted in early 2003.

The initial £5 (about eight dollars at the time) charge on all motorists driving into the centre city between 7 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. immediately reduced the number of vehicles, permitting traffic to flow more freely while cutting pollution and noise.

In the first year after the new tax was introduced, the number of people using buses to travel into central London climbed by 38 percent and vehicle speeds on key thoroughfares increased by 21 percent. In July 2005, the congestion fee was raised to £8. With the revenue from the congestion fee being used to upgrade and expand public transit, Londoners are steadily shifting from cars to buses, the subway, and bicycles.

Since the congestion charge was adopted, the daily flow of cars and minicabs into central London during peak hours has dropped by 36 percent while the number of bicycles has increased by 66 percent.

In January 2008, Milan adopted a ‘pollution charge’ of 14 dollars on vehicles entering its historic centre in daytime hours during the week. Other cities now considering similar measures include San Francisco, Turin, Genoa, Kiev, Dublin, and Auckland.

Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, who was elected in 2001, inherited some of Europe’s worst traffic congestion and air pollution. He decided traffic would have to be cut 40 percent by 2020. The first step was to invest in better transit in outlying regions to ensure that everyone in the greater Paris area had access to high-quality public transit. The next step was to create express lanes on main thoroughfares for buses and bicycles, thus reducing the number of lanes for cars.

A third innovative initiative in Paris was the establishment of a city bicycle rental programme that has 20,600 bikes available at 1,450 docking stations throughout the city. Access to the bikes is by credit card, with a choice of daily, weekly, or annual rates ranging from just over a dollar per day to 40 dollars per year. If the bike is used for fewer than 30 minutes, the ride is free. The bicycles are proving to be immensely popular – with more than 63 million trips taken as of late 2009.

At this point Mayor Delanoë is working hard to realise his goal of cutting car traffic by 40 percent and carbon emissions by a similar amount by 2020. The popularity of this bike sharing programme has led to its extension into 30 of the city’s suburbs and has inspired cities such as London to also introduce bike sharing.

The United States, which has lagged far behind Europe in developing diversified urban transport systems, is being swept by a ‘complete streets’ movement, an effort to ensure that streets are friendly to pedestrians and bicycles as well as to cars. Many communities lack sidewalks and bike lanes, making it difficult for pedestrians and cyclists to get around safely, particularly where streets are heavily traveled.

This cars-only model is being challenged by the National Complete Streets Coalition, a powerful assemblage of citizen groups, including the Natural Resources Defence Council, AARP, and numerous local and national cycling organisations.

Among the issues spurring the complete streets movement are the obesity epidemic, rising gasoline prices, the urgent need to cut carbon emissions, air pollution, and mobility constraints on aging baby boomers. The elderly who live in urban areas without sidewalks and who no longer drive are effectively imprisoned in their own homes.

The National Complete Streets Coalition reports that as of April 2010, complete streets policies are in place in 20 states, including California and Illinois, and in 71 cities. One reason states have become interested in passing such legislation is that integrating bike paths and sidewalks into a project from the beginning is much less costly than adding them later.

Closely related to this approach is a movement that encourages and facilitates walking to school. Beginning in the United Kingdom in 1994, it has now spread to some 40 countries, including the United States.

Forty years ago, more than 40 percent of all U.S. children walked or biked to school, but now the figure is under 15 percent. Today 60 percent are driven or drive to school. Not only does this contribute to childhood obesity, but the American Academy of Pediatrics reports fatalities and injuries are much higher among children going to school in cars than among those who walk or ride in school buses. Among the potential benefits of the Walk to School movement is a reduction in obesity and early onset diabetes.

Countries with well-developed urban transit systems and a mature bicycle infrastructure are much better positioned to withstand the stresses of a downturn in world oil production than those that depend heavily on cars. With a full array of walking and biking options, the number of trips by car can easily be cut by 10-20 percent.

As the new century advances, the world is reconsidering the urban role of automobiles in one of the most fundamental shifts in transportation thinking in a century. The challenge is to redesign communities so that public transportation is the centerpiece of urban transport and streets are pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly.

*Lester R. Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article originally appeared at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/book_bytes/2010/pb4ch06_ss3.

The past two years have witnessed the emergence of a powerful movement opposing the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States.

Initially led by environmental groups, both national and local, it has since been joined by prominent national political leaders and many state governors.

The principal reason for opposing coal plants is that they are changing the earth’s climate. There is also the effect of mercury emissions on health and the 23,600 U.S. deaths each year from power plant air pollution.

Over the last few years the coal industry has suffered one setback after another. The Sierra Club, which has kept a tally of proposed coal-fired power plants and their fates since 2000, reports that 123 plants have been defeated, with another 51 facing opposition in the courts.

Of the 231 plants being tracked, only 25 currently have a chance at gaining the permits necessary to begin construction and eventually come online. Building a coal plant may soon be impossible.

What began as a few local ripples of resistance to coal-fired power quickly evolved into a national tidal wave of grassroots opposition from environmental, health, farm, and community organisations. Despite a heavily funded ad campaign to promote so-called clean coal (one reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s earlier efforts to convince people that cigarettes were not unhealthy), the U.S. public is turning against coal.

One of the first major industry setbacks came in early 2007 when a coalition headed by the Environmental Defence Fund took on Texas-based utility TXU’s plans for 11 new coal-fired power plants. A quick drop in the utility’s stock price caused by the media storm prompted a 45-billion-dollar buyout offer from two private equity firms.

However, only after negotiating a ceasefire with EDF and the Natural Resources Defence Council and reducing the number of proposed plants from 11 to three, thus preserving the value of the company, did the firms proceed with the purchase. It was a major win for the environmental community, which mustered the public support necessary to stop eight plants outright and impose stricter regulations on the remaining three.

Meanwhile, the energy focus in Texas has shifted to its vast wind resources, pushing it ahead of California in wind-generated electricity.

In May 2007, Florida’s Public Service Commission refused to license a huge 5.7-billion-dollar, 1,960-megawatt coal plant because the utility could not prove that building the plant would be cheaper than investing in conservation, efficiency, and renewable energy sources. This point, made by Earthjustice, a non-profit environmental legal group, combined with strong public opposition to any more coal-fired power plants in Florida, led to the quiet withdrawal of four other coal plant proposals in the state.

Coal’s future is also suffering as Wall Street turns its back on the industry.

In July 2007, Citigroup downgraded coal company stocks across the board and recommended that its clients switch to other energy stocks.

In January 2008, Merrill Lynch also downgraded coal stocks. In early February 2008, investment banks Morgan Stanley, Citi, and J.P. Morgan Chase announced that any future lending for coal-fired power would be contingent on the utilities demonstrating that the plants would be economically viable with the higher costs associated with future federal restrictions on carbon emissions.

Later that month, Bank of America announced it would follow suit.

In August 2007, coal took a heavy political hit when U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who had been opposing three coal-fired power plants in his own state, announced that he was now against building coal-fired power plants anywhere in the world.

Former Vice President Al Gore has also voiced strong opposition to building any coal-fired power plants. So too have many state governors, including those in California, Florida, Michigan, Washington, and Wisconsin.

In her 2009 State of the State address, Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan argued that the state should not be importing coal from Montana and Wyoming but instead should be investing in technologies to improve energy efficiency and to tap the renewable resources within Michigan, including wind and solar. This, she said, would create thousands of jobs in the state, helping offset those lost in the automobile industry.

One of the unresolved burdens haunting the coal sector, in addition to the emissions of CO2, is what to do with the coal ash – the remnant of burning coal – that is accumulating in 194 landfills and 161 holding ponds in 47 states. This ash is not an easy material to dispose of since it is laced with arsenic, lead, mercury, and many other toxic materials.

The industry’s dirty secret came into full public view just before Christmas 2008 when the containment wall of a coal ash pond in eastern Tennessee collapsed, releasing a billion gallons of toxic brew. Unfortunately, the industry does not have a plan for safely disposing of the 130 million tonnes of ash produced each year, enough to fill one million railroad cars.

The dangers are such that the Department of Homeland Security tried to put 44 of the most vulnerable storage facilities on a classified list lest they fall into the hands of terrorists. The spill of toxic coal ash in Tennessee drove another nail into the lid of the coal industry coffin.

In April 2009, the chairman of the powerful U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Jon Wellinghoff, observed that the United States may no longer need any additional coal or nuclear power plants. Regulators, investment banks, and political leaders are now beginning to see what has been obvious for some time to climate scientists such as NASA’s James Hansen, who says that it makes no sense to build coal-fired power plants when we will have to bulldoze them in a few years.

In April 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is both authorised and obligated to regulate CO2 emissions under the Clean Air Act.

This watershed decision prompted the Environmental Appeals Board of the EPA in November 2008 to conclude that a regional EPA office must address CO2 emissions before issuing air pollution permits for a new coal-fired power plant. This not only put the brakes on the plant in question but also set a precedent, stalling permits for all other proposed U.S. coal plants.

Acting on the same Supreme Court decision, in December 2009 the EPA issued a final endangerment finding confirming that CO2 emissions threaten human health and welfare and must be regulated, jeopardising new coal plants everywhere.

The bottom line is that the United States now has, in effect, a de facto moratorium on the building of new coal-fired power plants. This has led the Sierra Club, the national leader on this issue, to expand its campaign to reduce carbon emissions to include the closing of existing plants.

Given the huge potential for reducing electricity use in the United States by switching to more efficient lighting and appliances, for example, this may be much easier than it appears.

If the efficiency level of the other 49 states were raised to that of New York, the most energy-efficient state, the energy saved would be sufficient to close 80 percent of the country’s coal-fired power plants. The few remaining plants could be shut down by turning to renewable energy – wind farms, solar thermal power plants, solar cell rooftop arrays, and geothermal power and heat.

The handwriting is on the wall. With the likelihood that few, if any, new coal-fired power plants will be approved in the United States, this de facto moratorium will send a message to the world. Denmark and New Zealand have already banned new coal-fired power plants. Other countries are likely to join this effort to cut carbon emissions.

Even China, which was building one new coal plant a week, is surging ahead with harnessing renewable energy development and will soon overtake the United States in wind electric generation.

These and other developments suggest that the Plan B goal of cutting net carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020 may be much more attainable than many would have thought.

*Lester R. Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. “Plan B 4.0: Mobilising to Save Civilisation” can be downloaded for free at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4.

Our early twenty-first century civilisation is being squeezed between advancing deserts and rising seas.

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Measured by the biologically productive land area that can support human habitation, the earth is shrinking. Mounting population densities, once generated solely by population growth, are now also fueled by the relentless advance of deserts and may soon be affected by the projected rise in sea level. As overpumping depletes aquifers, millions more are forced to relocate in search of water.

Desert expansion in sub-Saharan Africa, principally in the Sahelian countries, is displacing millions of people – forcing them to either move southward or migrate to North Africa. A 2006 U.N. conference on desertification in Tunisia projected that by 2020 up to 60 million people could migrate from sub- Saharan Africa to North Africa and Europe. This flow of migrants has been under way for many years.

In mid-October 2003, Italian authorities discovered a boat bound for Italy carrying refugees from Africa. After being adrift for more than two weeks and having run out of fuel, food, and water, many of the passengers had died. At first the dead were tossed overboard. But after a point, the remaining survivors lacked the strength to hoist the bodies over the side. The dead and the living shared the boat, resembling what a rescuer described as “a scene from Dante’s Inferno”.

The refugees were believed to be Somalis who had embarked from Libya, but the survivors would not reveal their country of origin, lest they be sent home. We do not know whether they were political, economic, or environmental refugees. Failed states like Somalia produce all three. We do know that Somalia is an ecological disaster, with overpopulation, overgrazing, and the resulting desertification destroying its pastoral economy.

Perhaps the largest flow of Somali migrants is into Yemen, another failing state. In 2008, an estimated 50,000 migrants and asylum seekers reached Yemen, 70 percent more than in 2007. And during the first three months of 2009 the migrant flow was up 30 percent over the same period in 2008. These numbers simply add to the already unsustainable pressures on Yemen’s land and water resources, hastening its decline.

On Apr. 30, 2006, a man fishing off the coast of Barbados discovered a 20- foot boat adrift with the bodies of 11 young men on board, bodies that were “virtually mummified” by the sun and salty ocean spray.

As the end drew near, one passenger left a note tucked between two bodies: “I would like to send my family in Basada [Senegal] a sum of money. Please excuse me and goodbye.” The author of the note was apparently one of a group of 52 who had left Senegal on Christmas Eve aboard a boat destined for the Canary Islands, a jumping off point for Europe.

They must have drifted for some 2,000 miles, ending their trip in the Caribbean. This boat was not unique. During the first weekend of September 2006, police intercepted boats from Mauritania with a record total of nearly 1,200 people on board.

For those living in Central American countries, including Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, Mexico is often the gateway to the United States. In 2008, Mexican immigration authorities reported some 39,000 detentions and 89,000 deportations. In the city of Tapachula on the Guatemala-Mexico border, young men in search of jobs wait along the tracks for a slow-moving freight train passing through the city en route to the north. Some make it onto the train. Others do not.

The Jesús el Buen Pastor refuge is home to 25 amputees who lost their grip and fell under a train while trying to board. For these young men, says Olga Sánchez Martínez, the director of the refuge, this is the “end of their American dream”. A local priest, Flor María Rigoni, calls the migrants attempting to board the trains “the kamikazes of poverty”.

Today, bodies washing ashore in Italy, Spain, and Turkey are a daily occurrence, the result of desperate acts by desperate people.

And each day Mexicans risk their lives in the Arizona desert trying to reach jobs in the United States. On average, some 100,000 or more Mexicans leave rural areas every year, abandoning plots of land too small or too eroded to make a living.

They either head for Mexican cities or try to cross illegally into the United States. Many of those who try to cross the Arizona desert perish in its punishing heat. Since 2001, some 200 bodies have been found along the Arizona border each year.

With the vast majority of the 2.4 billion people to be added to the world by 2050 coming in countries where water tables are already falling, water refugees are likely to become commonplace. They will be most common in arid and semiarid regions where populations are outgrowing the water supply and sinking into hydrological poverty.

Villages in northwestern India are being abandoned as aquifers are depleted and people can no longer find water. Millions of villagers in northern and western China and in parts of Mexico may have to move because of a lack of water.

Advancing deserts are squeezing expanding populations into an ever smaller geographic area. Whereas the U.S. Dust Bowl displaced three million people, the advancing desert in China’s Dust Bowl provinces could displace tens of millions.

Africa, too, is facing this problem. The Sahara Desert is pushing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria northward toward the Mediterranean. In a desperate effort to deal with drought and desertification, Morocco is geographically restructuring its agriculture, replacing grain with less thirsty orchards and vineyards.

In Iran, villages abandoned because of spreading deserts or a lack of water already number in the thousands. In the vicinity of Damavand, a small town within an hour’s drive of Tehran, 88 villages have been abandoned. And as the desert takes over in Nigeria, farmers and herders are forced to move, squeezed into a shrinking area of productive land. Desertification refugees typically end up in cities, many in squatter settlements. Others migrate abroad.

In Latin America, deserts are expanding and forcing people to move in both Brazil and Mexico. In Brazil, some 66 million hectares of land are affected, much of it concentrated in the country’s northeast. In Mexico, with a much larger share of arid and semiarid land, the degradation of cropland now extends over 59 million hectares.

While desert expansion and water shortages are now displacing millions of people, rising seas promise to displace far greater numbers in the future, given the concentration of the world’s population in low-lying coastal cities and rice-growing river deltas. The numbers could eventually reach the hundreds of millions, offering yet another powerful reason for stabilising both climate and population.

In the end, the issue with rising seas is whether governments are strong enough to withstand the political and economic stress of relocating large numbers of people while suffering heavy coastal losses of housing and industrial facilities.

During this century we must deal with the effects of trends – rapid population growth, advancing deserts, and rising seas – that we set in motion during the last century. Our choice is a simple one: reverse these trends or risk being overwhelmed by them.

*Lester R. Brown is the founder of the Earth Policy Institute. This article is adapted from Chapter 2, “Population Pressure: Land and Water,” of Brown’s “Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization” (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php? /books/pb4.

By Lester R. Brown
WASHINGTON, Sep 29 2009 (IPS)

In early 2008, Saudi Arabia announced that, after being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, the non-replenishable aquifer it had been pumping for irrigation was largely depleted.

In response, officials said they would reduce their wheat harvest by one-eighth each year until production would cease entirely in 2016. The Saudis would then import virtually all the grain consumed by their Canada-sized population of nearly 30 million people.

The Saudis are unique in being so wholly dependent on irrigation. But other, far larger, grain producers such as India and China are facing irrigation water losses and could face grain production declines.

Emerging Trends Threaten Food Security

Fifteen percent of India’s grain harvest is produced by overpumping its groundwater. In human terms, 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced from wells that will be going dry. The comparable number for China is 130 million. Among the many other countries facing harvest reductions from groundwater depletion are Pakistan, Iran, and Yemen.

The tripling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices between mid-2006 and mid-2008 signaled our growing vulnerability to food shortages. It took the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression to lower grain prices.

Past decades have witnessed world grain price surges, but they were event-driven – a drought in the former Soviet Union, a monsoon failure in India, or a crop-withering heat wave in the U.S. Corn Belt. This most recent price surge was trend-driven, the result of our failure to reverse the environmental trends that are undermining world food production.

These trends include – in addition to falling water tables – eroding soils and rising temperatures from increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Rising temperatures bring crop-shrinking heat waves, melting ice sheets, rising sea level, and shrinking mountain glaciers.

With both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting at an accelerating pace, sea level could rise by up to six feet during this century. Such a rise would inundate much of the Mekong Delta, which produces half of the rice in Viet Nam, the world’s second-ranking rice exporter. Even a three-foot rise in sea level would cover half the riceland in Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people. And these are only two of Asia’s many rice-growing river deltas.

The world’s mountain glaciers have shrunk for 18 consecutive years. Many smaller glaciers have disappeared. Nowhere is the melting more alarming than in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau where the ice melt from glaciers sustains not only the dry-season flow of the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers but also the irrigation systems that depend on them. Without these glaciers, many Asian rivers would cease to flow during the dry season.

The wheat and rice harvests of China and India would be directly affected. China is the world’s leading wheat producer. India is second. (The United States is third.) With rice, China and India totally dominate the world harvest. The projected melting of these glaciers poses the most massive threat to food security the world has ever faced.

The Harbinger of Civilisation’s Demise?

The number of hungry people, which was declining for several decades, bottomed out in the mid-1990s at 825 million. In 2009 it jumped to over one billion. With world food prices projected to continue rising, so too will the number of hungry people.

We know from studying earlier civilisations such as the Sumerians, Mayans, and many others, that more often than not it was food shortages that led to their demise. It now appears that food may be the weak link in our early twenty-first century civilisation as well.

Will we follow in the footsteps of the Sumerians and the Mayans or can we change course – and do it before time runs out? Can we move onto an economic path that is environmentally sustainable? We think we can. That is what Plan B 4.0 is about.

Mobilising to Save Civilisation

Plan B aims to stabilise climate, stabilise population, eradicate poverty, and restore the economy’s natural support systems. It prescribes a worldwide cut in net carbon emissions of 80 percent by 2020, thus keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations from exceeding 400 parts per million.

Cutting carbon emissions will require both a worldwide revolution in energy efficiency and a shift from oil, coal, and gas to wind, solar, and geothermal energy.

The shift to renewable sources of energy is moving at a pace and on a scale we could not imagine even two years ago.

Consider the state of Texas. The enormous number of wind projects under development, on top of the 9,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity in operation and under construction, will bring Texas to over 50,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity (think 50 coal-fired power plants) when all these wind farms are completed. This will more than satisfy the needs of the state’s 24 million residents.

Nationwide, new wind generating capacity in 2008 totaled 8,400 megawatts while new coal plants totaled only 1,400 megawatts. The annual growth in solar generating capacity will also soon overtake that of coal. The energy transition is under way.

The United States has led the world in each of the last four years in new wind generating capacity, having overtaken Germany in 2005. But this lead will be short-lived. China is working on six wind farm mega-complexes with generating capacities that range from 10,000 to 30,000 megawatts, for a total of 105,000 megawatts. This is in addition to the hundreds of smaller wind farms built or planned.

Wind is not the only option. In July 2009, a consortium of European corporations led by Munich Re, and including Deutsche Bank, Siemens, and ABB plus an Algerian firm, announced a proposal to tap the massive solar thermal generating capacity in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.

Solar thermal power plants in North Africa could economically supply half of Europe’s electricity. The Algerians note that they have enough harnessable solar energy in their desert to power the world economy. (No, this is not an error.)

The soaring investment in wind, solar, and geothermal energy is being driven by the exciting realisation that these renewables can last as long as the earth itself. In contrast to investing in new oil fields where well yields begin to decline in a matter of decades, or in coal mines where the seams run out, these new energy sources can last forever.

At a Tipping Point

We are in a race between political tipping points and natural tipping points. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid the resulting rise in sea level? Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau? Can we stabilise population by lowering fertility before nature takes over and halts population growth by raising mortality?

Yes. But it will take something close to a wartime mobilisation, one similar to that of the United States in 1942 as it restructured its industrial economy in a matter of months. We used to talk about saving the planet, but it is civilisation itself that is now at risk.

Saving civilisation is not a spectator sport. Each of us must push for rapid change. And we must be armed with a plan outlining the changes needed.

*Lester R. Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. “Plan B 4.0: Mobilising to Save Civilisation” can be downloaded for free at http://www.earth-policy.org/.

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Protecting the earth’s nearly 4 billion hectares of remaining forests and replanting those already lost are both essential for restoring the earth’s health, an important foundation for the new economy.

Reducing rainfall runoff and the associated flooding and soil erosion, recycling rainfall inland, and restoring aquifer recharge depend on simultaneously reducing pressure on forests and on reforestation.

There is a vast unrealised potential in all countries to lessen the demands that are shrinking the earth’s forest cover. In industrial nations the greatest opportunity lies in reducing the quantity of wood used to make paper, and in developing countries it depends on reducing fuel wood use.

The rates of paper recycling in the top 10 paper-producing countries range widely, from China and Finland on the low end, recycling 33 and 38 percent of the paper they use, to South Korea and Germany on the high end, at 77 and 66 percent. The United States, the world’s largest paper consumer, is far behind South Korea, but it has raised the share of paper recycled from roughly one fourth in the early 1980s to 50 percent in 2005.

If every country recycled as much of its paper as South Korea does, the amount of wood pulp used to produce paper worldwide would drop by one third.

The use of paper, perhaps more than any other single product, reflects the throwaway mentality that evolved during the last century. There is an enormous possibility for reducing paper use simply by replacing facial tissues, paper napkins, disposable diapers, and paper shopping bags with reusable cloth alternatives.

The largest single demand on trees – the need for fuel – accounts for just over half of all wood removed from forests. Some international aid agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), are sponsoring fuelwood efficiency projects.

One of USAID’s more promising projects is the distribution of 780,000 highly efficient wood cook stoves in Kenya that not only use far less wood than a traditional stove but also pollute less. Kenya is also the site of a solar cooker project sponsored by Solar Cookers International. These inexpensive cookers, made from cardboard and aluminum foil and costing 10 dollars each, cook slowly, much like a crockpot.

Requiring less than two hours of sunshine to cook a complete meal, they can greatly reduce firewood use at little cost. They can also be used to pasteurise water, thus saving lives. Over the longer term, developing alternative energy sources is the key to reducing forest pressure in developing countries.

Despite the high value to society of intact forests, only about 290 million hectares of global forest area are legally protected from logging. Forests protected by national decree are often safeguarded not so much to preserve the long-term wood supply capacity as to ensure that they continue to provide invaluable services such as flood control. Countries that provide legal protection for forests often do so after they have suffered the consequences of extensive deforestation, such as in China and the Philippines.

Although nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) have worked for years to protect forests from clearcutting, sustainable forestry is now seen as another way to protect forests. If only mature trees are felled, and on a selective basis, a forest and its productivity can be maintained in perpetuity.

In 1997, the World Bank joined forces with the World Wide Fund for Nature to form the Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use. By 2005 they had helped designate 55 million hectares of new forest protected areas and certify 22 million hectares of forest. In mid-2005, the Alliance announced a goal of reducing global net deforestation to zero by 2020.

There are several additional forest product certification programmes that inform environmentally conscious consumers about the sustainable management of the forest where wood products originate. The most rigorous international programme, certified by a group of NGOs, is the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Some 88 million hectares of forests in 76 countries are certified by FSC-accredited bodies as responsibly managed.

Forest plantations can reduce pressures on the earth’s remaining forests as long as they do not replace old-growth forest. As of 2005, the world had 205 million hectares in forest plantations, an area equal to nearly one third of the 700 million hectares planted in grain. Tree plantations produce mostly wood for paper mills or for wood reconstitution mills. Increasingly, reconstituted wood is substituting for natural wood as the world lumber and construction industries adapt to a shrinking supply of large logs from natural forests.

Production of roundwood (logs) on plantations is estimated at 432 million cubic meters per year, accounting for 12 percent of world wood production. This means that the lion’s share, some 88 percent of the world timber harvest, comes from natural forest stands. Projections of future growth show that plantations can sometimes be profitably established on already deforested, often degraded, land, but they can also come at the expense of existing forests. There is competition with agriculture as well, since land that is suitable for crops is also good for growing trees. Water scarcity is yet another constraint, as fast-growing plantations require abundant moisture.

Nonetheless, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that as plantation area expands and yields rise, the harvest could more than double during the next three decades. It is entirely conceivable that plantations could one day satisfy most of the world’s demand for industrial wood, thus helping to protect the world’s remaining forests.

South Korea is in many ways a reforestation model for the rest of the world. When the Korean War ended, half a century ago, the mountainous country was largely deforested. Beginning around 1960, under the dedicated leadership of President Park Chung Hee, the South Korean government launched a national reforestation effort. Relying on the formation of village cooperatives, hundreds of thousands of people were mobilized to dig trenches and to create terraces for supporting trees on barren mountains. Today forests cover 65 percent of the country, an area of roughly 6 million hectares.

In Niger, farmers faced with severe drought and desertification in the 1980s began leaving some emerging acacia tree seedlings in their fields as they prepared the land for crops. As these trees matured they slowed wind speeds, thus reducing soil erosion.

The acacia, a legume, fixes nitrogen, enriching the soil and helping to raise crop yields. During the dry season the leaves and pods provide fodder for livestock. The trees also supply firewood. This approach of leaving 20 to 150 seedlings per hectare to mature on some 3 million hectares has revitalised farming communities in Niger.

Shifting subsidies from building logging roads to planting trees would help protect forest cover worldwide. The World Bank has the administrative capacity to lead an international programme that would emulate South Korea’s success in blanketing mountains and hills with trees. In addition, FAO and the bilateral aid agencies can work with individual farmers in national agroforestry programmes to integrate trees wherever possible into agricultural operations.

Reducing wood use by developing more efficient wood stoves and alternative cooking fuels, systematically recycling paper, and banning the use of throwaway paper products all lighten pressure on the earth’s forests. But a global reforestation effort cannot succeed unless it is accompanied by the stabilisation of population. With such an integrated plan, coordinated country by country, the earth’s forests can be restored.

*Lester Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article is adapted from Chapter 8, “Restoring the Earth”, of Brown’s “Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization” (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), available for free downloading and purchase at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm. A slideshow summary of Plan B 3.0 is available at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/presentation.htm.

Some 43 countries around the world now have populations that are either essentially stable or declining slowly.

In countries with the lowest fertility rates, including Japan, Russia, Germany, and Italy, populations will likely decline somewhat over the next half-century.

A larger group of countries has reduced fertility to the replacement level or just below. They are headed for population stability after large numbers of young people move through their reproductive years. Included in this group are China and the United States.

A third group of countries is projected to more than double their populations by 2050, including Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda.

United Nations projections show world population growth under three different assumptions about fertility levels. The medium projection, the one most commonly used, has world population reaching 9.2 billion by 2050. The high one reaches 10.8 billion. The low projection, which assumes that the world will quickly move below replacement-level fertility to 1.6 children per couple, has population peaking at just under 8 billion in 2041 and then declining.

If the goal is to eradicate poverty, hunger, and illiteracy, and lessen pressures on already strained natural resources, we have little choice but to strive for the lower projection.

Slowing world population growth means that all women who want to plan their families should have access to the family planning services they need. Unfortunately, at present 201 million couples cannot obtain the services they need.

Former U.S. Agency for International Development official J. Joseph Speidel notes that “if you ask anthropologists who live and work with poor people at the village level…they often say that women live in fear of their next pregnancy. They just do not want to get pregnant.”

Filling the family planning gap may be the most urgent item on the global agenda. The benefits are enormous and the costs are minimal.

The good news is that countries that want to help couples reduce family size can do so quickly. In just one decade Iran dropped its near-record population growth rate to one of the lowest in the developing world.

When Ayatollah Khomeini assumed leadership in Iran in 1979, he immediately dismantled the well-established family planning programmes and instead advocated large families. In response to his pleas, fertility levels climbed, pushing Iran’s annual population growth to a peak of 4.2 percent in the early 1980s, a level approaching the biological maximum.

As this enormous growth began to burden the economy and the environment, the country’s leaders realised that overcrowding, environmental degradation, and unemployment were undermining Iran’s future.

In 1989, the government did an about-face and restored its family planning programme. In May 1993, a national family planning law was passed. The resources of several government ministries, including education, culture, and health, were mobilised to encourage smaller families.

Iran Broadcasting was given responsibility for raising awareness of population issues and of the availability of family planning services. Some 15,000 “health houses” or clinics were established to provide rural populations with health and family planning services.

Religious leaders were directly involved in what amounted to a crusade for smaller families. Iran introduced a full panoply of contraceptive measures, including the option of male sterilization – a first among Muslim countries. All forms of birth control, including contraceptives such as the pill and sterilisation, were free of charge. In fact, Iran became a pioneer – the only country to require couples to take a class on modern contraception before receiving a marriage license.

In addition to the direct health care interventions, a broad-based effort was launched to raise female literacy, boosting it from 25 percent in 1970 to more than 70 percent in 2000. Female school enrollment increased from 60 to 90 percent.

Television was used to disseminate information on family planning throughout the country, taking advantage of the 70 percent of rural households with TV sets. As a result of this initiative, family size in Iran dropped from seven children to fewer than three.

From 1987 to 1994, Iran cut its population growth rate by half. Its population growth rate of 1.3 percent in 2006 is only slightly higher than that in the United States.

While the attention of researchers has focused on the role of formal education in reducing fertility, soap operas on radio and television can even more quickly change people’s attitudes about reproductive health, gender equity, family size, and environmental protection. A well-written soap opera can have a profound short-term effect on population growth. It costs relatively little and can proceed even while formal educational systems are being expanded.

The power of this approach was pioneered by Miguel Sabido, a vice president of Televisa, Mexico’s national television network, with a series of soap opera segments on illiteracy. The day after one of his soap opera characters visited a literacy office wanting to learn how to read and write, a quarter-million people showed up at these offices in Mexico City.

Eventually 840,000 Mexicans enrolled in literacy courses after watching the series. Sabido dealt with contraception in another soap opera, and within a decade this drama series helped reduce Mexico’s birth rate by 34 percent.

Other groups quickly picked up this approach. The U.S.-based Population Media Centre has initiated projects in some 15 countries and is planning launches in several others. Their radio dramas in Ethiopia, for example, address issues of health and gender equity, such as HIV/AIDS, family planning, and the education of girls. A survey two years after the broadcasts began in 2002 found that 63 percent of new clients seeking reproductive health care at Ethiopia’s 48 service centers reported listening to one of the dramas. Demand for contraceptives increased 157 percent.

The costs of providing reproductive health and family planning services are small compared with their benefits. Expanding these services to reach all women in the developing countries would take close to 17 billion dollars in additional funding from both industrial and developing countries.

Shifting to smaller families brings generous economic dividends. For Bangladesh, analysts concluded that 62 dollars spent by the government to prevent an unwanted birth saved 615 dollars in expenditures on other social services. Investing in reproductive health and family planning services leaves more fiscal resources per child for education and health care, thus accelerating the escape from poverty.

Helping countries that want to slow their population growth to do so quickly brings with it what economists call the demographic bonus. When countries move quickly to smaller families, growth in the number of young dependents – those who need nurturing and educating – declines relative to the number of working adults. In this situation, productivity surges, savings and investment climb, and economic growth accelerates.

This effect lasts for only a few decades, but it is usually enough to launch a country into the modern era. Indeed, except for a few oil-rich countries, no developing country has successfully modernised without slowing population growth.

The United Nations estimates that meeting the needs of the 201 million women who do not have access to effective contraception could each year prevent 52 million unwanted pregnancies, 22 million induced abortions, and 1.4 million infant deaths. Put simply, the costs to society of not filling the family planning gap may be greater than we can afford.

*Lester Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute. This essay is adapted from Brown’s book, “Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization” (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008).