Credit: IPS

By Rabiya Jaffery
AMMAN, Jordan, Dec 21 2020 (IPS)

Anas Shaikh is a Pakistani farmer on a mission to bring solutions to the many difficulties small and medium-scale farmer’s face in making a sustainable living.

One of the main challenges he observed has been the difficulties for farmers to sell their produce at the right time to avoid post-harvest waste and at prices that were not exploitative due to the large number of middlemen and corporations that are now involved in the agricultural supply chain.

“The agriculture community everywhere but especially in developing countries is loaded with so many difficulties, despite the crucial role farmer’s play in the economy and food security of their countries,” says George Stacey, an analyst working with Norvergence, an environmental advocacy NGO.

“There are a lot of problems contributing to this but one of the biggest is that farmers are exploited and not paid what they deserve for their produce.” Just across the border, in India, tens of thousands of farmers are currently protesting against three new agricultural laws that aim to deregulate Indian agriculture.

Even though the laws say farmers will still have price assurances, but the language is vague, and farmers are nervous about losing government support and having to sell directly to large companies. Farmers are particularly worried that they will not be able to sell their produce and go into debt.

Already, across the region, the increasing number of intermediaries, such as wholesalers and processors – as supply chains become more monopsonistic and monopolistic due to the growing influence and presence of large global companies in markets – continue to lower the returns earned by small scale farmers.

In addition the lack of road and rail connectivity and limited accessible storage or warehouse infrastructures in Pakistan and India also further increase the need to rely on middlemen.

“Lower returns continue to exploit farmers and push many further into poverty,” says Stacey. “This also impacts the quality of produce that is grown as farmers are no longer able to access many resources such as good quality of pesticides.”

Shaikh is now on a mission to use technology to find solutions to the biggest challenges small local farmers face.

He has recently founded Peepu, an easy-to-use mobile application that cuts down on the several middlemen and the time that it takes to sell agricultural products by facilitating direct transactions between farmers and traders.

Shaikh points out that the app’s simplistic interface has been designed to ensure accessibility, keeping into consideration that the target users may not all be tech-savvy.

“I have worked in the field as a small farmer and I know farmers. This is why the app has been deliberately designed in a fashion that the farmers will find it easy to use,” says Shaikh.

Peepu was launched earlier this year on Google Play in March, and is being used by more than 700 Pakistani farmers and aims to expand further in the coming months.

“Farmers are able to sell their products at the earliest possible time and at a competitive price,” says Shaikh.

“What we are trying to do is use the technology to shift the power of negotiations back to small farmers and also allow them the possibility to conduct business with anyone, regardless, without the limitations imposed by geographical proximity.”

Currently, agriculture is one of South Asia’s biggest employers. Nearly 70 percent of the region’s population is employed in agriculture and the majority of people in the region live in rural communities.

And technology, such as Peepu, can drastically help answer many of the difficulties farmers face that also have long-term social and economic impacts.

For instance, a shorter chain of intermediaries can also potentially diminish the post-harvest losses generated due to the degradation in the quality and quantity of the crop products through the stages of the supply chain from harvest to consumer use.

“Farmers directly selling to traders in a way that isn’t exploitative and without the many middlemen involved, also provides a pragmatic solution to the utilization of unavoidable post-harvest food waste which isn’t just beneficial to farmers but also important in reducing food waste and, thus, improving food security,” says Shaikh.

Several reports, such as by The World Bank, warns that ensuring food security in South Asia, as its population continues to exponentially expand, will be one of the main challenges for the region to address in the coming years.

The region is currently home to more than 1.8 billion people — with the majority living in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh — and has been the fastest-growing region for half a decade. The population of the region is expected to further increase by 40 percent by 2050, according to the UN.

And many experts agree that addressing food insecurity is going to be amongst the top policy agendas to ensure stability in what is the most populous and amongst the poorest regions of the world.

“Food availability and accessibility can be increased by increasing production, improving distribution, and reducing the losses. And the reduction of post-harvest food losses is a critical component of ensuring future global food security,” says Hina Kamal, PhD research scholar at Future Food Beacon Program, University of Nottingham.

Kamal is working with sustainable food companies to research approaches to recycling and reutilizing food waste into functional products.

“Reduction and recycling of food waste is the only possible holistic approach towards achieving sustainability for future foods”

Studies have also established the importance of policies that address securing food availability that considers the context and impacts of climate change on agriculture.

A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, states that while climate change and rising temperatures will affect food production across Asia differently, the most food insecure populations are likely to be in South Asia.

Kamal points out that the urgency of tackling food insecurity issues can led governments of developing countries to launch short term and fast tracked initiatives, without proper co-ordination resulting in slower progress and economic inefficiencies.

“This can be reversed if there is better activation of opportunities and co-ordination amongst research institutes, research and development centers, universities and private and public enterprises and ministries,” she adds. “It is innovation that, after all. increases the scope and number of emerging technological process, logistics, marketing and operating costs.”

Peepu is currently involved with the National Incubation Center (NIC) in Karachi, Pakistan’s economic center, and is seeking funding from external investors.

“While technology can be and exploitative force, it also offers a potential for small farmers to get some of their power back and have more control over how and to who they sell their crops,” says Stacey.

“It doesn’t solve the many problems small farmers experience but it can be a tool to navigate through the challenges until better policies come along that protect them.”

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A child from the Za’atari Refugee Camp in Jordan raised a flag to represent Goal 6, Safe Water and Sanitation. Credit: UNICEF Jordan/badran

By Rabiya Jaffery
AMMAN, Jordan, Oct 1 2020 (IPS)

Jordan is one of the driest countries in the world, raking the fifth most water-stressed nation in an analysis by the World Resources Institute.

The middle eastern country gets 60% of its water from aquifers that lie in a dozen groundwater basins. And 10 of them are currently being pumped at a deficit.

“Not all aquifers are renewable and the ones that are storing rainwater that is released by springs,” says George Stacey, an analyst working with Norvergence, an environmental advocacy NGO. “No aquifer holds an endless amount of water and Jordan is extracting more water each year is getting replenished by rain.”

Three-quarters of Jordan is desert and desert steppe and is one of the countries that receive the least amount of annual precipitation.

“Climate change has made Jordan drier and the coming decades will see temperatures rising further and rain becoming more unpredictable,” adds Stacey. “Water scarcity is only going to get much worse in the coming years.”

And while rising temperatures and reducing rainfall reduce the available water supply, Jordan’s demand for water is increasing due to a rise in the country’s population as it continues to take in refugees from nearby countries.

Jordan became a state in 1946 and has since absorbed millions of refugees – mainly from Palestine, Iraq, and Syria as well as a number of Yemenis, Sudanese, and Somalis. There are currently 750, 000 refugees registered in Jordan but government figures estimate that the total number, including unregistered migrants, exceeds a million and excludes those who have gained citizenship.

“Water scarcity in Jordan will affect both refugees and Jordanians,” says Lilly Carlisle, from United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) – Jordan. “The increase in population and resulting increase in water demand have caused enormous pressure on the limited water resources and created a chronic poor water supply and demand imbalance.”

Although some government players have stated that the large influx of refugees in the country is worsening water scarcity in the country and opinions in many amongst the public and the media have implied that refugees threaten Jordan’s water security, experts disagree.

“The vast majority of refugees in Jordan come from Syria and from the Southern Governorate of Dar’a. With similar cultures and availability of water to where they now live in Northern Jordan, refugees are well aware of the need for water conservation,” says Carlisle.

“Added to this, over the past ten years of the Syrian conflict and refugee crisis, UNHCR and partners have enacted various campaigns to promote water conservation.”

In Zaatari Camp, for example, UNHCR has been running hydroponics projects since 2017 to educate refugees about water consumption within agriculture and establish new practices among refugees working in the agricultural sector to reduce water usage.

Roughly 45% of the water used in Jordan goes to agriculture and one of the key points on Jordan’s 2008–22 National Water Strategy has been efforts to stop over-pumping groundwater through reducing the amount of water that is given for free to farmers as well as water theft.

Water theft has been a regular problem in the country and, in 2013, the Ministry of Water and Irrigation launched a dedicated campaign to crack down on water violations. Between 2013 and 2017, over 30,000 violations on water mains and resources had been prevented and millions of cubic meters of stolen water have been retrieved.

Carlisle stated that the UNHCR is jointly tackling with the Jordanian Government and partners to “ensure that all people who live in Jordan, refugees and Jordanians alike, continue to have access and are aware of steps they have to take towards water conservation”.

Other solutions that the government is looking into include desalinated water from the Red Sea, which makes up 27 kilometers of coastline in Jordan, but the process requires a high amount of energy and the country lacks the necessary oil and gas deposits.

The country has, however, been in the talks with Israel for a joint mega-project, the Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance Project, that would bring desalinated water from the Red Sea to Jordan and dump the brine into the Dead Sea through a canal to stabilize the shrinking lake.

The agreement for the joint project was first signed by Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority, in 2013 but the work has been stalled several times. When completed, the Red-to-Dead canal would contribute roughly 10% of the country’s water needs.

However, environmentalists are concerned about the damage to coral reefs and other species in the Red Sea and Dead Sea if the project is completed.

“Water scarcity results in food shortage, internal migration, and can create conflicts between groups,” says Stacey. “These conflicts can also pore out to nearby countries – this is why ensuring water security in Jordan a matter of regional security.”

In 2017, a report by the Atlantic Council highlighted how water scarcity had been an indirect factor that lead to increasing tensions in, both, Yemen and Syria.

“The regional and international community needs to come together to work on sustainable solutions to Jordan’s water crisis to maintain the relative stability it has in a region that has seen multiple conflicts in the past few decades,” says Stacey.

“The country is already facing many major economic and political challenges and if the government does not adapt and implemented an effective policy to solve the water crisis, the situation will significantly worsen.”

Social frustrations about the country’s economic crisis, stemming from the IMF-backed austerity adopted by the government to tackle the country’s growing debt, have increased in the past few years. In 2018, as increasing youth unemployment and price hikes, and also resulted in a series of protests.

https://www.unicef.org/jordan/stories/water-security-critical-issue-children-jordan-today-and-future-generations

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By Rabiya Jaffery
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia, Aug 10 2020 (IPS)

The Persian Gulf is one of the most strategic waterways in the world and is also one of the most polluted.

According to estimates by experts, pollution levels in the Persian Gulf are 47 times higher than the world’s average and are steadily increasing.

The 600-mile body of water that is also known as the Arabian Gulf currently has 34 oilfields with more than 800 wells. In addition, roughly 85% of the oil extracted in the Gulf countries is exported – 40% of the world export of crude oil and around 15% of the world’s total export of refined products come from the region – and more than half of all the oil is carried by ships.

It is estimated that approximately 25,000 tanker movements sail in and out of the Strait of Hormuz, the only sea passage that connects the Persian Gulf to the open sea. Accidental spilling is unavoidable and, on average, 100–160 thousand tons of oil and oil products end up in the Gulf every year.

In addition to spills from tankers, oil spills and fires that have been a consequence of military activities that have taken place in the region over the past few decades have also severely contaminated the Persian Gulf.

The world’s largest oil spill, for instance, occurred during the 1991 Gulf War and an estimated 8-11 million barrels were leaked in the Persian Gulf waters as a result.

In an attempt to prevent the UN coalition forces from landing on the beaches of Kuwait that the Iraqi military was occupying at the time, Iraqi troops released oil at the Persian Gulf.

At least eight oil tankers, a refinery, two terminals, and a tank field were dumped in the waters and for at least three months, oil continued to spill into the Gulf at a rate of up to 6,000 barrels a day.

“Some of the oil spilled deep into the sea, burrowing up to 40 cm in the sand and mudflats. It remains there to this day,” writes Nick Barber in coursework published for Stanford University in 2018. “This disaster does not just highlight the responsibilities humans have in managing oil wells, rigs, pipelines, and tankers, it demonstrates how carelessness with a non-renewable energy source and pollutant, purposeful or not, can have devastating long-term environmental impacts that cannot be undone.”

In 2017, ScanEx and the Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences began conducting the pilot project on the satellite monitoring of the state of the water of the Persian Gulf.

The results of the research confirmed the severe levels of oil pollution in the gulf waters and the damage, some of it which have been irreversible, on its marine life.

“In addition to military-led pollution, other issues such as warming waters due to climate change and the increasing saline levels due to desalination efforts by countries in the Gulf area aggressively worsening marine productivity and habitats,” says George Stacey, an analyst working with Norvergence, an environmental advocacy NGO.

Oceans are heating at a higher rate than were previously predicted and the Persian Gulf, which is already a relatively warm body of water due to its location and its shallow basin, makes it particularly vulnerable to climate change.

Scientists at the Climate Change Forum at the seventh World Government Summit in Dubai explained that rising sea temperatures could wipe out a third of the gulf’s marine species by 2090.

The findings have also been confirmed by a study conducted a the University of British Columbia (UBC), that a combination of human activities was pushing at least 35 per cent of the fauna in the Gulf waters to extinction in the next 60 years.

“The ongoing damage on the marine and coastal environment is going to impact the marine productivity which will have serious impacts on the health and commerce of the region,” adds Stacey.

Researchers at UBC state that environmental loss will particularly carry a heavy economic impact on fishing industries. Fisheries of Bahrain, with a relatively large fishing industry, and Iran, with the highest catch and fewer employment alternatives due to sanctions, are pointed out to be particularly vulnerable.

“The sea is very important to all the countries in the region and preserving it should be a priority on an individual, national, and regional levels,” says Stacey.

“A lot of the damage done in the past few decades cannot be reversed completely but it is not too late to prioritize the sustainability of the marine ecosystems of the gulf waters right now because any damages to it will trickle down to impact the communities living on its coasts and reverse years of development and advancements.”

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Credit: UN

By Rabiya Jaffery
Abu Dhabi, UAE, Oct 28 2019 (IPS)

Nearly 50 million people in west Africa rely on agriculture and livestock for their livelihood but the land available for pastoral use has been rapidly shrinking.

While a part of this is because of growing population, climate change has also been a major contributor to this, says George Stacey, an analyst working with Norvergence*, an environmental advocacy NGO.

According to the United Nations, nearly 80% of the Sahel’s farmland has been negatively impacted by temperatures rising – which they are at a rate that is 1.5 times faster than the global average.

“As droughts and floods continue to increase in frequency and duration, food production in most of the Sahel region remains highly insecure,” Stacey told IPS.

“And for a region with such a high dependence on agriculture that is also already suffering from food shortage, this has extremely far-reaching consequences.”

Many areas in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Senegal, and Chad never fully recovered from the food crisis of 2012, which was a result of a combination of droughts and regional conflicts that shocked food prices, and pushed more than 13 million people in the Sahel to malnutrition levels.

And as temperatures continue to rise, food security will continue to destabilize and farmers and herders will be forced to continue to be forced to relocate searching for land to cultivate on.

“As herders and farmers in the Sahel migrate internally to cope with degrading land and diminishing livelihoods, the threats of violence and their chances of being recruited in criminal and extremist groups established in the region continues to increase,” Dr Joseph Faye, a climate and security impact and adaptation scientist working with several think tanks in western Africa, told IPS.

Poor governance and state authority have resulted in number of jihadi groups and other extremist and criminal networks establishing themselves in many parts of western Africa and food insecurity serves as a recruiting incentive for them.

Credit: UN

John Podesta, founder and director of The Center for American Progress, writes in a brief for Brookings Blum Roundtable, that security experts are concerned about the connection between climate change and terrorism and that the “the decline of agricultural and pastoral livelihoods has been linked to the effectiveness of financial recruiting strategies by al-Qaida”.

“There are a number of extremist factions that gained foothold in different parts of western Africa and they are thriving due to the dangerous combination of poor state security and easily recruitable civilians,” says Faye.

The Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP), for example, is a splinter faction of Boko Haram that just in September 2019 abducted six aid workers in Nigeria and has already executed one. ISWAP is just one of the several extremist groups currently present in the Sahel.

And many studies carried out in recent years by NGOs, think tanks, and international bodies like the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) have shown that most recruits of these groups are, in fact, far less guided by ideologies than by financial vulnerability.

And as climate conditions continue to worsen and diminish the livelihoods of farmers and herders, it will continue to get easier for different extremists and criminal groups to manipulated and recruited them to serve as foot-soldiers.

The UN special adviser on the Sahel, Ibrahim Thiaw, has stated that the region is already amongst the regions of the world that are facing the most extreme brunt of global warming.

Poor rainfall and droughts over the past decade have resulted in at least 14 million still requiring food assistance, according to a report published in 2018. The Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel also predicts a “persistent food insecurity” for the foreseeable future.

“Poor agriculture and food insecurity spikes migration and internal displacement which, in a region that already has a network on violent groups and a history of conflicts, will only make more people more vulnerable to turning to whatever option is available for them to sustain themselves,” says Faye.

“Also, conflicts in any localized area almost always spill further which is why threats in any art are highly concerning to the security of the overall region and even beyond that of course.”

The risk of extremism and violence in any part of the Sahel is dangerous to the wider region because most countries in western Africa have porous, largely unguarded borders that are frequently crossed illegally by many – from merchants and herders to those trafficking weapons, drugs, and toxic ideologies.

“Insurgencies in one country can and often do spill across borders, as was the case when conflict spread from northern to central Mali and into north and eastern Burkina Faso and southwestern Niger,” says Faye. “This is why the destabilizing effects of climate change in any part of it should be of great concern to all those who seek security and stability in the region.”

A report by the World Economic Forum emphasizes that while military pressure is “undoubtedly required” to stop extremist groups, the Sahel can only truly counter terrorism and conflicts if foreign aid is used to directly invest in improving the livelihoods of the region’s most vulnerable people.

Reports by agencies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross point out that when funds are put to help income-generating, small-scale pastoral projects such as dairy farms and community markets, conflict and violence almost always calms down.

“So long as armed extremist groups continue to be the only reliable means of livelihood around, they will continue to find people to join them,” states Stacey. “This is why development organizations and governments must provide targeted help to the pastoral and agricultural communities in the Sahel to continue being able to sustain their work.”

The United Nations Office is one of the intergovernmental organizations working on mitigating the conflicts that arise from the loss of agricultural land.

“The United Nations Office for West Africa and the Sahel promotes the peaceful coexistence between both groups and is working with Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to capture good practice from different countries in the region that could benefit the countries most affected by farmer-herder conflicts,” Kouider Zerrouk, head of strategic communications and public Information of UNOWAS, told IPS.

ECOWAS is a West African political and economic union of fifteen countries that also serves as a peacekeeping force. Member states have also, at times, sent joint military forces to intervene at times of political instability in bloc member states.

The World Bank has also launched a number of projects, including the Regional Sahel Pastoralism Support Project, and the Pastoralism and Stability in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa but the report by World Economic Forum states that there is a need for more.

”It is equally important that public and private leaders and civil societies recognize and anticipate ways that agriculture and livestock production are likely going to change in relation to climate, and encourage investments in adaptation and new crops in advance to avoid major declines in crop yields,” states the report. “The future looks challenging, which makes it all the more important to prepare for it.”

The article was supported by Norvergence, an NGO that supports climate-related advocacy work.

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Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. Credit: Masdar

By Rabiya Jaffery
ABU DHABI, UAE, Feb 22 2019 (IPS)

According to data from the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the Arab world is one of the most urbanised areas in the world, with more than 70 per cent of the population of the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)— Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)– living in urban areas.

In 2018, about 93% of the population of the UAE lived in urban cities – and it is expected to continue rising in the coming years. Dubai, the largest city in the country, has a population of over 3 million people, one-third of UAE’s 9.3 million, and is expected to double by 2027.

As the country’s cities continue to expand and grow, the challenge of civic authorities to provide adequate living conditions, water, sanitation, public transportation, and waste management features becomes more important to address.

“One of the direct results of the increase in UAE’s population, nearly all who live in urban cities, is the huge expansion in construction, facilities, and infrastructure,” says Habiba Al Marashi Chairperson of the Emirates Environmental Group (EEG), one of the most active non-government organization (NGO) based in the UAE.

“While construction is a major contributor to UAE’s economy, it is also amongst the most resource intensive sectors. Thus, growing cities such as Dubai need to plan along sustainable lines in order to reduce their negative environmental impacts and natural resource depletion,” she adds.

EEG mounted an awareness campaign to popularize the concept of green buildings in an environment that was still unfamiliar with the imperative for sustainable development and energy transition several years ago.

And Al Marashi states that a change – an understanding of the importance of sustainability – has begun to roll out.

The UAE sits on eight percent of the world’s oil reserves, meets most of its energy demand through fossil fuels, and has had a history of having one of the largest carbon footprints in the world but it seems to now be taking active measures to change this.

In 2017, during the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, the country announces its intentions to transition to at least 44% renewable energy by 2050.

“Our aim is to balance our economic needs with our environmental goals,” Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE prime minister and ruler of Dubai, said on Twitter to accompany the announcement. “The plan aims to increase usage efficiency by 40 percent and increase clean-energy contributions to 50 percent.”

Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. Credit: Masdar

This includes making sustainable development one of the key goals of its ‘Vision 2021’, including a focus on ‘green’ urban development.

“Cities are at the heart of any country’s development and define the direction of its growth and innovation and this is especially relevant in the Arab world where nearly all people are urbanized,” explains Al Marashi. “And the the future of urbanism is in sustainable cities and UAE wants to be a pioneer.”

Masdar City in Abu Dhabi is one of UAE’s most ambitious sustainable urban development projects that was built to be amongst the world’s “most sustainable developments” and “serve as a green-print for the sustainable development of cities through the application of real-world solutions in water, energy efficiency and the reduction of waste.”

The residential and retail development that is housing thousands was developed by Masdar, a renewable energy company based in Abu Dhabi, to be one of the region’s first entirely sustainable, mixed-use, low-carbon development that relies on solar and other renewable energy sources.

It is also home to Masdar Institute, the Gulf’s first research institution dedicated to advanced energy and sustainable technologies that, to date, has secured 14 US patents.

One of Masdar’s projects, in cooperation with Bee’ah, is spearheading waste-to-energy production in Sharjah that is currently generating enough power to supply to 28,000 residential complexed. Due to the facility, the rate of diversion of waste from landfills has gone up from 20% in 2009 to 70% in 2016.

The project’s goal is to eventually reduce the Sharjah’s landfill contribution to zero.

And on-site in Abu Dhabi, Masdar has developed a residential eco-villa, which aims to consume 35 percent less water and 72 per cent less power than a typical villa of the same size.

The prototype is being monitored for its energy, water, and waste management performances and the data will then be used to refine the eco-villa to support the eventual commercialization of the building concept.

Abu Dhabi also has a mandatory sustainable development framework for all its buildings. Developed by the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council (UPC), Estidama, Arabic for “sustainability’, was introduced in 2009 and was amongst the first sustainability initiatives in the region.

The framework establishes a clear vision for sustainability as the foundation of any new development occurring in UAE’s capital.

Estidima imposes sustainability requirements in the planning process and imposes a green building code with the classifies development projects under a ‘pearl’ rating system. All public buildings must have a minimum two pearl rating and all other new buildings must meet a minimum one pearl rating criteria.

“Right now, the focus of Estidama is on new developments, however, there are talks – and we are hoping – that it will be expand to include already existing buildings be retrofitted to meet the new standards,” says Al Marashi.

Dubai’s municipality also introduced its ‘Green Buildings Specifications’ in 2011 which were immediately mandatory for all new government buildings and then, in 2014, became a prerequisite on all new building developments.

“In practice this means goals of reducing energy and water consumption, the use of environment-friendly materials, renewable energy characteristics, alternative energy sources and increased efficiency,” says Al Marashi.

UN Biodiversity Conference in progress in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. The conference ends November 29. Credit: International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)

By Rabiya Jaffery
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 28 2018 (IPS)

Biodiversity conservationists have revealed that at least 10 more percent of land than what is currently being used to grow green crops will be required to successfully replace fossil fuels with alternatives derived from natural sources such as biofuel.

Speaking to government ministers and other high level representatives at the ongoing Biodiversity Conference in Egypt, Anne Larigauderie, executive secretary of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), said that the increase in the need for land for energy-related uses could undermine natural habitats across the world.

Deforestation and forest degradation are one of the biggest threats to forests worldwide and, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), in the last 60 years, over half of the tropical forests worldwide have been destroyed.

Currently, one of the biggest drivers of deforestation is the meat industry with over 2.71 million hectares of tropical forests destroyed to pasture for beef cattle every year. To put it into perspective, this is more than half of tropical deforestation in South America, and more than five times as much as any other commodity in the region. Other significant drivers also include wood products, soybeans, and palm oil.

“Degradation and loss of forests threatens the survival of many species, and reduces the ability of forests to provide essential services,” states Larigauderie. “And an increase in the need for more land could have devastating impacts that undermine the essential diversity of species on Earth.”

Established by 130 member governments in 2012, IPBES is an independent intergovernmental body that provides objective scientific assessments regarding the planet’s biodiversity to global policymakers – similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that was established 30 years ago.

During a panel discussion, Larigauderie said IPCC’s latest report gives a sense of “extreme urgency” on “tradeoffs and synergies between climate, biodiversity and land degradation.”

While it is uncertain just how much land is currently being used for biofuel crops, several researches estimate it lies between 15 and 30 million hectares. Meanwhile, IPCC predicts an increase of up to 744 million hectares in the land area needed to grow biofuel crops to slow down global warming.

“Where would this huge amount of new land come from?” asked Larigauderie. “Is there currently such a large amount of ‘marginal land’ available or would this compete with biodiversity?”

‘Marginal land’ refers to areas of land that have little to no agricultural potential because of poor soil or other undesirable characteristics.

Scientific studies on the better use of marginal lands have been going on for nearly two decades and studies show that marginal lands represent significant untapped resources to grow plants specifically used for biofuel production.

But some scientists also argue that there is not enough marginal land left to grow enough biofuels to significantly replace fossil fuels.

Larigauderie pointed out that the important issue of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities which drives up global warming needs to be addressed but relying on biofuels as a replacement for fossil fuels will almost certainly result in an increase in the demand for land which will have negative consequences on biodiversity – and consequently, carbon dioxide emissions.

Land ecosystems today soak up about a third of annual carbon dioxide emissions, with the world’s oceans accounting for about another quarter annually.

“Reforestation and safeguarding plant and animal species is far better at protecting the climate than most biofuel crops,” she stated. ““All methods that produce healthier ecosystems should be promoted as a way to combat climate change.”

IPBES intends to publish a primer detailing elements of its Global Assessment of Biodiversity in May 2019.

By Rabiya Jaffery
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 27 2018 (IPS)

Leaders of Amazon’s indigenous groups are calling for a new global agreement to protect and restore at least half of the world’s natural habitats.

The Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin (or COICA), an activist group, has prepared a proposal that will be presented to the secretariat, government bodies, and NGOs during the ongoing 14th Conference of the Parties (COP-14) UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Egypt.

COICA was founded in 1984 in Lima, Peru, and coordinates nine national Amazonian indigenous organizations in promoting and developing mechanism to defend the self-determination of Indigenous peoples and coordinate the actions of its members on an international level.

COICA’s proposal invites more input and involvement of indigenous communities in conservation efforts and policy-making that addresses biodiversity loss, as the parties negotiate on defining the terms of the post 2020 global framework on biodiversity that is to be adopted in Beijing, China in two years.

The proposal resulted from a COICA summit held last August with indigenous leaders from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guyana, Guyana, Peru, Surinam, and Venezuela.

“Nearly 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity is found on the lands of tribal peoples and that the majority of the most biodiverse places on Earth are tribal peoples’ territories,” said Juan Carlos Jintiach, a representative of COICA, currently in Egypt.

“Tribal people have been contributing and sustainably using the resources on their lands for thousands of years and it’s not possible to create policies that will be effective without their input.”

In the declaration, the indigenous delegations invite States and other entities to include ancestral knowledge in policies that address conservation, and is planning to start bilateral negotiations with different actors in an effort to create a fair ambitious agreement for 2020.

“COICA wants to work with other players behind a common goal to protect and restore half of the planet before 2050.

COICA is also pushing for a dialogue with the governments of the Amazon region to include the joint vision of the indigenous confederations through an “alliance and commitment to protect the region, its biodiversity, its cultures, and sacredness” to protect the rainforest and its “biological corridor”.

An agreement to protect a “biological corridor” that possesses over 135 million hectares of areas and is distributed between Colombia, Venezuela, and Bolivia is being promoted among the three countries.

The corridor will cover zones from the Amazon, the Andes Cordillera, and the Atlantic Ocean and is one of the regions of major biodiversity in the world and indigenous groups believe that their input and perspectives are important for the effectiveness of the agreement.

“65% of the world’s lands are indigenous territories but only 10% are legalized. Guaranteeing indigenous territorial rights is an inexpensive and effective of reducing carbon emissions and increasing natural areas,” stated Tuntiak Katan, Vice President of COICA.

In 2015, former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos welcomed Brazil’s input in the ongoing talks on the Amazon-Andres-Atlantic (AAA) agreement which, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s former president, considered analyzing in a statement during the Summit of the Americas talks in Panama.

Indigenous communities are also expressing deep concerns about statements on environmental policies and indigenous issues made by Brazil’s President-Elect, Jair Bolsonaro, during his campaigns.

Bolsonaro will not assume office until January, but he has supported a weakening of protections for the Amazon. As a result, less land will controlled by indigenous and forest communities and more will be open to agribusiness, miners, loggers and construction companies.

“His views are worrying, but the new government will also face a challenge in reversing policies that are already in line because they will lose their position as an international leader on environmental issues,” says Oscar Soria, senior campaigner, of Avaaz– a global web movement to bring people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere.

“We wish to remind Bolsonaro that Brazil has national and international obligations to guarantee territorial rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities and to respect their free, prior, and informed consent,” he adds.

“We hope the new government will respect international obligations and we will continue to stand by NGOs and Indigenous Peoples who are fighting to save the world – the world cannot protect biodiversity without Brazil but Brazil cannot destroy biodiversity alone.”

Credit: Global Forest Coalition

By Rabiya Jaffery
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 21 2018 (IPS)

A discussion held earlier this week at the ongoing Convention of Biodiversity’s (CBD) Conference of Parties in Egypt highlighted that grants to curb deforestation in the Amazon are not enough if they are accompanied with investments that increase the loss of biodiversity.

“Parties are talking about ‘investing in biodiversity’, but we need to talk about divesting from biodiversity destruction,” stated Isis Alvarez of the Global Forest Coalition (GFC), a worldwide coalition of NGOs and Indigenous peoples’ organizations from 60 different countries striving for rights-based, socially just forest conservation policies.

“Meat and soy are the top two contributors to deforestation, we must eliminate financial and other support for these sectors.”

Incentives to produce and export meat and soy in major producer countries like Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina — or the “United Soy Republic” according to GFC — are a leading cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss, according to a briefing document prepared by GFC for the discussion at the ongoing Convention.

Originally launched in 1992 as part of the Rio Earth Summit, the Convention on Biological Diversity is a global agreement among 196 nations that represents the growing global commitment to sustainable development.

In the next two years it aims to define a post 2020 global framework on biodiversity to be adopted in Beijing in 2020 — much as the Paris Agreement did in 2015 for climate change.

UNCBD’s Aichi Targets that were set out in 2010 to be phased out in the next 10 years, states that incentives, including subsidies, that are harmful to biodiversity, need to be eliminated, phased out, or reformed in order to minimize or avoid negative impacts, while positive incentives are developed to support alternatives.

GFC highlights that, while grants are being provided in efforts to “conserve biodiversity” of the Amazon, the livestock and feedstock industry (mainly soy) are continuing to receive significant incentives, including subsidies and tax cuts.

Isis Alveraz, along with multiple other sources and scientific reports, state that at the current rate of deforestation, the world’s rainforests could diminish and virtually vanish within the next 100 years

“The biggest driver of deforestation is agriculture. Farmers cut forests to provide more room for planting crops or grazing livestock,” says Alvarez, a Colombian biologist and member of the GFC.

“Plant-based agriculture used to feed animals bred for food drives up the amount of resources consumed by crops. Intensive livestock production requires large quantities of harvested feed which, in turn, requires substantial areas of land while grazing animals such as cattle place additional stress on the state of Earth’s forests — especially the Amazon.”

GFC states that the Paraguayan Chaco region is being deforested at the rate of 1,000 hectares per day due to cattle ranching and soy monocultures, the highest rate of deforestation in the world while meat and soy companies here are receiving multiple tax incentives.

Brazil, for example, continues to be one of the countries with the highest deforestation rates on the planet. Between 2005 and 2015, the Brazilian government invested $3.18 billion in the livestock industry – 90% of which went to just three corporations.

In 2017, $48 billion went to agribusiness companies in the form of cheap credit while only $115.6 million was allocated to combatting deforestation and forest degradation.

Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon has also jumped by almost 50% during the three month electoral season that brought Jair Bolsonaro to power, according to preliminary official figures.

Between August and October, nearly 1, 674 square km (an area more than double the size of New York City) of forest was converted to pasture— making the deforestation rate go up to 273%. To put it in perspective, the rate stood at 114% during the same period last year.

And while experts observe that deforestation usually increases in Brazil’s electoral years amid promises from local politicians they tp open up protected land or make environmental legislation more flexible, far-right candidate and now president-elect Bolsonaro has added a powerful permissive voice to agribusiness, land-grabbers, illegal gold miners and loggers.

Aside from deforestation, reports show that the livestock industry is also causing significant negative impacts on local communities, animal welfare, and the environment.

“Much of the land for livestock in Paraguay was acquired via land grabbing, while wages paid by ranching operations are a third of the national minimum wage,” says Miguel Lovera of GFC’s Paraguay hub.

The discussion at the Convention proposed that alternatives to support biodiversity conservation the paper proposed a rapid reduction in meat and dairy consumption and incentives for small-scale, localized, and ecologically sound food production as well as community conservation initiatives.

Vegan Society in the United Arab Emirates

By Rabiya Jaffery
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates,, Oct 19 2018 (IPS)

The Middle East, due to its geographical location, is particularly prone to the impacts of climate change.

Longer droughts, more frequent and intense heatwaves, and higher temperatures in the summer are expected to to become increasingly prevalent throughout the Middle East – from Sana’a to Jeddah to Dubai to Tehran.

Yet, the lack of awareness towards the issue, especially on individual levels remains prevalent for the most part.

The United Arab Emirates, however, is now working on incorporating climate change adaptation and mitigation in its national agenda and has also made it part of its vision to increase environmental awareness amongst its public.

In 2016, the UAE renamed it’s Ministry of Environment and Water to the Ministry of Climate Change and the Environment, thus officially bringing the management of climate change within the scope of the ministry and includes organizing “awareness campaigns in order to promote the environmental behavior of individuals” to its sustainability agenda.

A 2017 study by the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) revealed that more than 40 per cent of the UAE’s population lack knowledge about climate change, global warming, and how human behavior contributes to environmental harm”.

Fatima Al Ghamdi, is a UAE-based climate activist, who has recently launched an advocacy group that aims to bring a shift towards a more plant-based diet in the Middle East by working on the grassroots levels.

She launched a campaign to encourage plant-based diets in the UAE in early 2017 and is planning to expand her network to the rest of the region next year.

“There is very little conversation here about how tackling meat and dairy consumption is extremely important to curb global warming levels,” said says. “A lot is being done, on awareness and policy-making levels, about deforestation and transport, but there is a huge gap on the livestock sector – not just in the UAE and the Middle East, but globally.”

Her campaign and advocacy work includes raising awareness in schools and universities about the benefits of reducing meat from daily diets, the impact of the meat industry on the climate, and what individuals can do to eat in more sustainable ways.

“I think there is a reluctance by climate change advocates and policy makers to intrude into people’s lives to the levels where they start telling them what to eat and in what quantities,” she says.

“But there can be comprehensive policies and business approaches that make dietary changes towards more plant-based diets possible and attractive for a large number of people and it’s something essential if we really want to reduce emission levels.”

Curbing the world’s huge and increasing appetite for meat is essential to avoid devastating climate change, according to one of the most comprehensive studies on the topic published in October 2018 by the journal, Nature.

In addition, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global livestock industry contributes close to one fifth of greenhouse gas emissions – even more than the combined emissions of all cars, planes, trains, and ships.

“If the top 20 meat and fairy companies in the world were a country, collectively they would be the world’s seventh largest greenhouse gas emitter,” says Daniel F Kenneth, a professor of public health nutrient, based in UAE’s capital, Abu Dhabi.

He adds that it is cattle and meat industry that has the most long-reaching impact on the environment – more than one-third of the world’s methane, which is 20 times as damaging as carbon dioxide in terms of global warming, is said to be produced by cattle, including those used for milk.

This is why most environmentalists consider industrial cattle farming a triple threat to Earth’s atmosphere, as animals produce huge amounts of the greenhouse gas methane, coupled with the loss of carbon-absorbing forests that are accommodated into grazing areas, and the immense amounts of water needed to sustain the livestock.

“Cattle ranching and soya production to feed cattle often take place on deforested land, and this deforestation is thought to be one of the most significant way in which meat production contributes to global warming,” says Kenneth. “And the massive amounts of feed and soya needed to feed cattle is far from a sustainable way to use up the world’s scarce cereal grains.”

According to Kenneth, producing 1 kg of beef is estimated to require close to 14,000 litres of water and 7 to 10 kg of feed. In comparison, it takes approximately 1000 litres of water and just 2 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of chicken.

The UAE, despite being considered a “food secure” nation, relies predominantly on food imports, with up to 80% of its food imported from other countries.

“We don’t have much of our own cattle industry but that doesn’t take the burden off us,” says Al Ghamdi. “And large amounts of carbon dioxide are generated by the transportation involved in meat production – it makes more economical and environmental sense to shift to a duet culture where we rely most on foods we have the easiest access to.”

The report published by Nature calls for a “global shift” towards more plant-based diets, slashing food waste, improving farming practices with the aid of technology, better education, industry reform and improved efficiency as ways towards tackling the problem.

“In the Middle East, we used to have diets that focused on rice with lentils and chickpeas. That’s the way we’ve eaten for ages, with just small amounts of meat,” says Al Ghamdi.

“This trend to have extremely meat-focused meals is a new and Western concept but there is nothing in meat that makes it essential – there are other foods, such as legumes and beans, that provide the same protein and iron.”

Nature’s report emphasized that, coupled with a sharp projected rise in global population and global incomes (that would enable more people to eat meat-rich diets) by mid-century, the industry’s already vast impact on the environment could increase by as much as 90 percent, unless an active effort is made to reduce it.

African refugees await news of their work and residency visa applicatiosn in Lavinsky Park near the Tel Aviv, Israel. Credit: Zack Baddorf/ZUMA Press / IPS

By Rabiya Jaffery
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia, Sep 21 2018 (IPS)

Marjani F, 44, spent 8 years in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital working as domestic help. “My husband was killed by the military after being accused of organizing a protest. I have four children and there was no way I could pay the bills staying there,” she says.

For nearly a decade, she lived and worked as an undocumented domestic worker employed by a Saudi family until she was deported in 2017.

“The rules on keeping workers who don’t have their papers are getting stricter and the family I worked for were scared they would have to pay heavy fines,” she explains. “They knew someone who had to pay penalty for keeping undocumented help and I guess they got scared – but didn’t want to pay for my sponsorship either so they sent me back.”

Marjani is now living in Bahir Dar, a city in Ethiopia, and describes her life back home as “hopeless”.

“My children aren’t even close to me anymore – I was just someone who would send them money and speak on the phone every now and then for so long,” she says. “And most of my family has been killed in political protests or are in military camps now – it is all futile.”

Marjani was one of the reportedly 5 million undocumented migrants living in Saudi Arabia – a country with an official population of 33 million.

“For the most part – the authorities had turned a blind eye to them,” says Abdullah Harith, a migrant lawyer working in the Gulf countries. “Every few years there would be a couple of crackdowns and some people would be deported back – but overall for decades, the millions of undocumented migrants – some who have been living in the country for generations at this point – were just overlooked.”

But this leniency have changed radically recently as the Kingdom is now actively seeking to deport them as part of its new economic reforms agenda.

A campaign called “Nation Without Violators” was launched in 2017 that was to “progress to deport foreign workers illegally staying in violation of residence, labor, and border regulations of the Kingdom”.

“A 90-day amnesty began in March 2017 that allowed undocumented migrants to finalize their status and leave the country without any penalties,” says Harith.

The amnesty was extended twice and, according to official statistics, at least 800 violators per day were voluntarily deported during the 9 month period.

By the end of the amnesty period, reportedly 45,000 Ethiopians – including Marjani – had registered with the Saudi government and voluntarily returned home.

The remaining estimated 500,000 Ethiopians in Saudi Arabia are continuing to live in fear as security authorities are actively continuing to deport undocumented migrants in the country. Violations can result in deportation, a prison sentence, and fines ranging between SR15,000 ($4,000) and SR100,000 ($26,700).

“There are concerns over the humanitarian impacts of returning hundreds of thousands of people back to endemic poverty and potential harm,” says Ayda Gebre , an aid worker for RATSON – Women, Youth and Children Development Programme, a community development NGO based in Ethiopia. RATSON has been working on assisting Ethiopian migrants settle back in the country.

While the role Ethiopian migrants play in helping the country’s economy is significant – in 2015, Ethiopians abroad sent back nearly $4 billion to the country coping with crippling poverty. And while many Ethiopians in Saudi Arabia come for economic reasons, a significant number arrived after fleeing serious abuses at the hands of their government.

During crackdowns on undocumented migrants in 2013 in Saudi Arabia, over 160,000 Ethiopians were returned. Most of the Ethiopians interviewed by Human Rights Watch who were part of the 2013 Saudi expulsions were detained within a week of their return to Ethiopia.

“Most of them were tortured in detention and had, in fact, originally left because of Ethiopian government human rights violations,” says Gebre.

Ethiopia has long been criticized for its human rights violations including its harsh prison conditions, brutality of security forces, lack of freedom of speech, and forced displacement.
“In many other countries, Ethiopians just might be able to claim asylum and potentially be entitled to international protection,” says Gebre.

“But Saudi Arabia has no refugee law and is not a party to the United Nations Refugee Convention, which means that, should expulsions be carried out, many thousands of Ethiopians could be forcibly returned home to face the persecution they fled.”

By Rabiya Jaffery
KARACHI, Pakistan, Mar 26 2018 (IPS)

As shifting weather patterns and extreme climates become the norm, access to climate funds are deemed essential for developing countries, such as Pakistan, that are facing the brunt of climate change.

Based on the ADB Climate Change profile of Pakistan, a number of mitigation and adaptation measures have been taken by the government using domestic resources.

But Pakistan is still awaiting international funding required to intensify its efforts using capacity building and technology for its National Adaptation Plan, says Fatima Fasih, Program Manager for Sustainable Development at the Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business (CERB).

According to UNFCCC, climate finance is critical in addressing climate change because large-scale investments are required to adapt to changing climates, reducing emissions, and shifting to a more sustainable future.

Pakistan’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDCs) submitted to the 2015 Paris Agreement, aims to reduce up to 20% of its 2030 projected GHG emissions — using international grants for adaptation and mitigation of approximately $40 billion.

The Paris Agreement commits countries to pledge not to just keep global warming “well below two degrees Celsius”, but also to “pursue efforts” to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C by 2018.

Several researches including one carried out by Daniel Mitchell and others at Oxford University states that while the difference between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees will be marginal in annual average temperature, it would have a significant impact on reducing the probability of destructive weather events like floods, droughts, and heat waves.

“It is very important for temperatures to remain below 1.5 degrees because natural extreme weather events are going to become the norm – especially in Pakistan and other mid-latitude countries,” says Sidra Adil, an environmental engineer and GIS analyst .

Over the past 50 years, the annual mean temperature in Pakistan has already increased by roughly 0.5 degrees.

The government expects to get international grants worth $7 billion to $14 billion every year to be able to adapt to climate change and the senate passed a policy in 2017 that called upon the creation of Pakistan Climate Change Authority to manage the proposed fund.

But not only has little has come out of it, so far, and there is no concrete indication that the Global Climate Fund will be providing the required financial resources.

“There is little or no knowledge of any such funding from the GCF (Global Climate Fund) to help in the mitigation and adaptation against climate change,” says Fasih.

According to some statistics, between 1997 and 2016, Pakistan suffered from 141 extreme weather events and lost an average of 523.1 lives per year due to climate change effects.

The super-flood in 2010 killed 1,600 people, affecting an area of 38,600 square kilometers and caused a financial loss of more than $10 billion and the heatwave in Karachi in 2015 lead to the death of more than 1,200 people.

And as average global temperatures rise, impacts across the country will vary widely from glacial melting in the North to increase in sea levels at coastal areas.

Many of these will be unpredictable and possibly volatile — “such as increase in number of extreme events, such as droughts and hurricanes,” explains Fasih.

But some of the repercussions can be predicted.

“The impacts of rising temperatures are huge as increase in glacial melt will increase in flooding around the flood banks of River Indus over the next few decades,” says Fasih.

Based on ADB’s Climate Change profile of Pakistan, the sea level is expected to rise by an additional 60 centimetres by end of the century. The melting glaciers will also lead to more freshwater converting to seawater and worsen water scarcity.

“Even a rise of 1.5 isn’t desirable but that extra 0.5 degrees will make the situation a lot more dire,” says Adil. “We don’t have enough water storage options and are well on the way to becoming a water scarce nation.”

For a country where more than 50 per cent of the population is directly or otherwise dependent on agricultural activities, the impacts of this would be detrimental.

“The [difference of] 0.5 degrees increase in temperatures means a lot for people that depend largely on the weather cycles for their business and farms – which is majority of our business sector and rural areas,” Fasih says.

The loss of freshwater supply will also lead to production of hydropower at dams, such as Mangla & Tarbela.

“Considering how big the issue of energy is to us Pakistanis, this impact will surely hit across the country,” adds Fasih.

Adil states that while no rise in temperatures is ideal – that 0.5 degree difference is trivial.

“It won’t be as bad or as intense as 2C of course,” she says. “1.5 degrees gives us the room for a trade-off to work on climate strategies.”

According to a report by Yale University, should global emissions continue to rise beyond 2020, or even remain level, the temperature goals set in Paris become almost unattainable.

“It is very important to transition to renewable energies but our emissions aren’t that high – the main problem right now is that we are on the receiving end of high emissions from other countries,” says Adil.

The Federal Minister for Climate Change Zahid Hamid pointed out at the 2016 United Nations Climate Change Conference that– despite ranking amongst the top 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change– Pakistan emits less than 1% of total annual global greenhouse gases.

“Climate influences us as a whole – it is not a region concept. It is a global concept,” Adil adds.

This is an almost unanimous international agreement -that climate change is a global phenomenon and none of the countries alone can deal with the issue.

And the technology-driven transition to 100% renewable energy globally is well under way, a trend that made the 2015 Paris climate agreement possible -and there are already signs that this is paying off.

Just in the past three years, global emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels have levelled after rising for decades as major polluters and other nations are starting to boost renewable energy sources.

According to Mission 2020, the installed capacity of renewable energy set a new record of 161 gigawatts in 2017; in 2015, investment levels reached $286 billion worldwide, more than 6 times that in 2004.

And over half of that investment, $156 billion, was for projects in developing and emerging economies.

“This is a sign that policies and investments in climate mitigation are starting to pay off,” says Andrew Higham, CEO of Mission2020, in a report. “But there is still a long way to go to decarbonize the world economy.”

For Pakistan, this transition to renewable energy could take at least a decade, if not more but experts states that implementation of natural climate solutions on a smaller scale is as important a step today.

“We can’t even provide electricity to 60% of our population through coal – that we have an abundance of,” says Adil. “So it is impossible for us to transition to renewable energy right away. Policies have to change and this will take 10-15 years for the very least.”

But for that to take place, the government needs to allocate the right resources, hire trained individuals, lose short-sightedness for projects that bring quick profits at the expense of sustainability, and create awareness about the triviality of the issue.

“Despite having a Ministry of Climate Change, there is very little that it has done thus far, since most of its powers and budget has been slashed by the current elected government,” says Fasih.

But that is not speaking for the entire country- the private sector may be moving in a different direction.

Fasih, who works on the private sector’s track record on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Pakistan says that a lot of efforts being made by the private sector – both by big business, as well as entrepreneurs to combat climate change in Pakistan.

Textile and agriculture based companies, for instance, that comply to standards abroad are now actively pursuing environmental stewardship, via waste reduction, ethical consumption, water conservation and reduction in emissions.

Many NGOs, such as Climate50, founded by Adil, are also working on building expert networks to work on awareness and implementation of natural climate change solutions.

But Fasih adds that it is necessary at present is to engage local communities (both urban and rural) to understand climate change, mitigate against it, and adapt natural solutions to climate using citizen and civic movements.

“Unless the government does not prioritize increasing awareness amongst the citizens, very little difference can be made by projects that require billions of dollars in funding,” adds Fasih.

With more and more people living outside their country of origin, it is becoming increasingly clear that stronger legal parameters — within and between nations — are required to protect the most vulnerable of migrants from denial of access to fundamental rights.

Credit: International Labour Organization

“Domestic migrant workers comprise a significant part of the regional workforce in informal employment and are among the most vulnerable groups of workers.”

The Middle East’s Gulf region has an estimated 2.4 million migrant domestic workers, traditionally recruited from Asia – mostly from the Philippines, Indonesia and India.

All foreign workers in the Gulf fall under the kafala (a visa-sponsorship) system which does not allow them to leave or change employers without their initial employer’s consent. If they do, they can be arrested and punished for “absconding” with fines, detention, and deportation.

Most Gulf countries have begun pushing some sort of reforms when it comes to labor laws for migrant workers in recent year.

Last year, the Federal National Council of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) adopted a bill on domestic workers that for the first time guarantees a weekly day of rest, 30 days of paid annual leave, paid and unpaid sick leave, and 12-hours of rest a day, among other rights.

Qatar’s cabinet also recently adopted a bill on domestic workers which guarantees a weekly rest day, 30-days of paid leave, 10-hour working days, and an end-of-service payment.

“While a significant advance, these draft laws still fall short of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Domestic Workers Convention, as they provide fewer protections than those accorded other workers under national labour laws,” according to a statement by Human Rights Watch.

Oman’s domestic worker regulations, for example, are weak, with no penalties for employer breaches, and it is the last country in the Gulf region not to provide labor rights in law, the statement adds.

“While some of the Gulf countries have been making reforms in their labor laws, the very essence of this system [of kafala] is very harsh and exploitative because the sponsor basically has absolute power over their employees,” says Mohammed.

“Domestic workers, particularly, are often forced to work in isolation and harsh conditions and are vulnerable to sexual and other forms of abuse.”

Just earlier this month, the Philippines barred nationals from seeking domestic positions in Kuwait after a Filipina maid was found dead in a freezer in her employer’s home, which officials in Manila state was merely one of many similarly unacceptable incidents in the Gulf state.

A new agreement is currently being worked on between Kuwait and Filipino authorities which seems to reassure greater protection and a stronger regulatory framework for migrant workers. But, according to media reports, there is a possibility the Philippines may only lift the ban on skilled workers.

This isn’t the first time a country has taken preemptive measures to protect low-skilled nationals working or seeking work in the Gulf.

Many Asian countries now also verify contracts to check employers agree to a minimum salary and working conditions before allowing domestic workers to go abroad. India and Sri Lanka also require sponsors to provide security deposits that are returned once the worker has safely returned home.

But several reports, including one by Human Rights Watch, show that ever since Asian countries began tightening regulations to protect domestic workers, recruiters have been expanding their demand for cheap domestic labor into East Africa— especially in nations where poverty and high unemployment make the offer of work in the Middle East hard to refuse.

“People think they are going to have a lot of money and become rich. But they don’t know that they are going to hell,” Fatima (not her real name), a former Tanzanian domestic worker in Oman, told IPS.

When Fatima left Tanzania to work as a nanny and maid in Oman in 2014, she thought she had landed a dream job that would allow her to support her family back home. Instead, she spent two years virtually imprisoned in her employer’s house, being exploited and mistreated.

She was expected to do all household chores, take care of four children, including a newborn baby, be up any time of the night to tend to the baby, and then start her day at 4 a.m. to prepare the family’s breakfast and get the children ready for school.

She was allowed two meals of leftovers a day. Communication with her family was restricted to 10 minutes every two months.

Patricia Lawson, a researcher from the Tanzanian Domestic Workers Coalition, and NGO that works on protecting domestic worker rights, recently surveyed 50 Tanzanian domestic workers based in either Oman or Kuwait.

She was told by 43 of them that their employers confiscated their passports, forced them to work seven days a week, and almost half said their employers had, at one point or another, forcibly confined them to their homes or residential compounds.

“Most women said their employers made escape even more difficult by limiting their communication for weeks and prevented them from seeking help from the outside world,” Lawson told IPS. “And at least half had absolutely no privacy and were forced to sleep on the floors of living rooms.”

The women, who described sexual harassment and assault, said that male family members groped them, exposed themselves, and entered their rooms late at night. And several described attempted rape.

“The men get violent or threaten to throw us out when we refuse their advances,” says Aisha, another former Tanzanian domestic worker who worked in the UAE for a year and then in Oman for two years. “Or they would lie to their wives and say that I tried to seduce them.”

According to Lawson, women also mentioned they could not communicate with their female employers due to language barriers or fear of dismissal.

“If they did complain, female employers would not believe them, place the burden on them to avoid the harassment, or simply fire them,” says Lawson.

Many women said when they asked to leave, their employers or agents demanded repayment of recruitment costs – often far more than they had earned.

A Human Rights Watch report from 2017 mentions a Tanzanian domestic worker who went to file a complaint with the Oman police in 2016 after a male member of the family she was working for sexually assaulted her.

The police told her that her employer had pressed charges against her for running away. She was asked to pay a fine or spend three months in jail. Oman does not criminalize non-penetrative sexual assault or harassment, as in her case.

A former official at the Tanzanian embassy in Oman told IPS that none of the rape cases reported to the police by domestic workers they assisted had moved forward, either because the women refused to undergo forensic tests or the police, after questioning the women, did not believe they had been raped.

In the Gulf region, when authorities do not believe the claim, reporting a rape can be considered a confession of consensual sexual relations, prompting charges of zina (sexual relations outside of marriage) against the rape victim.

Compounding the lack of justice, due to the stigma, migrant domestic workers rarely reported sexual violence and suffered in silence.

Lawson says her NGO teaches women the telltale signs of exploitation and tracks women overseas, calling embassies if they are in trouble. Given the lack of safety mechanisms or the political will for change, she says it is better “not to tell women not to go, but to teach them to travel safely.”

According to a Human Rights Watch Report from 2016, Tanzania has expanded some protections for overseas migrant domestic workers since 2011, but there are still many gaps in Tanzania’s recruitment and migration policies which place workers at heightened risk from the outset and provide little opportunity for redress.

Tanzania requires workers to process their applications to migrate through the country’s labor ministries, but many workers migrate outside of this channel.

The authorities require women to migrate through a recruitment agency but have not set out minimum standards for how agencies assist workers in cases of abuse, or for inspections and penalties in case of violations.

“I’m pushing for investigations. I haven’t come across one case that was investigated,” Mickness Mahera, a Tanzanian politician who has been helping to rescue women trapped in the Middle East, told IPS.

Mahera is calling on the government to enter into labour agreements with Gulf nations to protect its domestic workers abroad.

The impact of climate change. Credit: UN Photo/WFP/Amjad Jamal

By Rabiya Jaffery
KARACHI, Pakistan, Feb 2 2018 (IPS)

Historically a small fishing village, Karachi has now turned into Pakistan’s biggest commerce and industrial center that generates about half of the country’s tax revenue.

The city also accounts for at least 42 per cent of its total gross domestic product (GDP), houses its stock exchange, central bank, and the headquarters of most banks, along with major foreign multinational corporations.

The former capital has an ethnically and religiously diverse population that exceeds 17 million, and according to a 2015 report by Express Tribune, a million people from other cities and rural areas migrate there every three years due to its high employment opportunities.

According to World Wildlife Federation (WWF-Pakistan), an increasing proportion of these migrants include those that have been displaced due to an increase in catastrophic floods caused by melting glaciers or those that have been impacted by the rising droughts in the warmer regions.

German Watch, a German think-tank in its recent Global Climate Risk Index 2016 report listed Pakistan number five in the list of top 10 countries most affected by climate change.

Karachi, Pakistan’s main portal city is also far from immune to the impacts of global rising temperatures.

In fact, urban cities – such as Karachi – are usually more susceptible to heat waves due to a phenomena knows as the “heat island effect” which causes temperatures to be 5-8 °C higher than the countryside.

“Deforestation, miles of asphalt roads and vertical building structures increase heat absorption and limit air circulation,” says Zainub AlRustamani, a sustainable urban planning consultant and architect.

“The vehicular and industrial emissions as well as the increased energy consumption of an unchecked growing population in poorly planned yet densely populated settlements also factor in.”

In 2015, the severe heat wave that struck Southern Pakistan had temperatures as high as 49 °C and in Karachi alone claimed the lives of almost 1,200 people, according to local newspapers – a first in the country’s recent history.
Karachi is also close to the Indus River Delta, where the Indus flows into the Arabian Sea.

Due to rising sea levels, the delta is now almost at-level with the Arabian Sea.

“This threatens the stability of the ecosystem because it leads to land erosion and increases the salinity of creeks flowing from the Indus,” says Dr Amir Inam of Pakistan’s Institute of Oceanography.

Sea intrusion increases temporary and permanent flooding to large land areas, which limits fresh water supplies and food security, he adds. This also creates an inhospitable environment for aquatic creatures and mangrove trees that depend on fresh water.

In fact, the area of Pakistan that is covered by mangrove forests has decreased from 400,000 hectares in 1945 to 70,000 hectares, according to a report by Climate Change News, due partly to the rising sea levels and partly to land grabbing. Some 205 acres had been razed to make way for several coal-fired power plants.

The repercussions of the upset in the balance of the ecosystem are vast. According to the World Wildlife Federation (WWF), these mangrove trees play a critical role in buffering the coastline from erosion caused by waves and storms.

“Mangrove trees cannot stop cyclones and tsunamis. But they do act as the first line of defense against these natural calamities, minimizing their damage,” adds Dr. Inam.

With the mangroves gone, the Karachi coastline has become more prone to natural disasters such as cyclones and tsunamis.

While no major tsunami has struck Karachi since 1945, a drill stimulating a major earthquake in the Indian Ocean conducted by United Nations warned that the tsunami waves could reach Karachi in just one and a half hours and “wipe out the entire city”.

So far, no tangible evacuation plan exists to prepare the city’s residents in case of an emergency.

An additional strain to Karachi’s stability is the Port Qasim Power Project, part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor program, currently in development along the coastline of the Arabian Sea.

Though created to alleviate Pakistan’s energy crisis, the project has wreaked havoc on the lives of people in close proximity to it, and damaged one of Pakistan’s most critical ecosystems that many living along the coastal belt replied on, to farm and fish.

These changes have already displaced as many as 80 percent of the five million Pakistanis who once lived along the banks of the Delta.

Policy making on climate change have so far lagged in the country and the first major bill to “fast-track measures needed to implement actions on the ground” was passed just last year.

Measures had been passed earlier address climate change, but most have been little implemented, critics charge.

“The Pakistani government must prioritize its response to climate change in order to mitigate environmental threats and prevent future calamities,” says Sarfaraz Khan, an environmental activist based in Pakistan.

And much like the government, the Pakistani public finds it difficult to prioritize climate change when the average citizen is deprived of life’s most basic necessities and the immediate and clear hazards to livelihood trump long-term, still somewhat largely invisible threats.

However, this perception is changing as global warming starts to impact everyday life.

In 2007-2008, a Gallup poll found that only 34 percent of Pakistanis were aware of climate change, and only 24 percent considered it a serious threat but by 2015, Pakistan had joined a list by Pew Research Center of the top 19 countries where the majority of the population now considers climate change a top global threat.

“For decades, Pakistan has struggled to manage urgent crises, ranging from infrastructure woes to terrorism,” adds Khan. “There is no downplaying the severity of those threats but, at the same time, it is vital to acknowledge that another potentially devastating danger lurks in the shadows.”

Karachi was named among the least safe cities of the world in a 2017 report of 60 cities published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

Only five cities across the globe were placed above Karachi in the category of deaths from natural disasters.
Annually, more than four people among one million lost their life in Karachi due to natural disasters.

If actions are not taken to combat the impact of climate change, environmental factors will continue to worsen the political and economic instability in Pakistan and one of their biggest threats, in the long term, is the stabilization of Karachi, the country’s economic backbone.

Carbon Projects Waiting to Exhale. Credit : IPS

By Rabiya Jaffery
ABU DHABI, Nov 20 2017 (IPS)

The world’s nations got together in Bonn, Germany, for the 23rd annual Conference of the Parties (COP) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where nearly 200 countries and some 23, 000 delegates met to discuss and influence the negotiations over the rulebook of the Paris Agreement.

The agreement, reached at the COP21 in Paris, brought 195 countries together to adopt the first-ever legally binding global agreement to deal with climate changes through mitigations and financial policies starting in the year 2020.

This is why, COP23, the climate negotiations held in Bonn and which concluded November 18, proved to be extremely technical – the Paris agreement was essentially what a constitution is to a new regime and now, it was time to pass the laws.

And where there is law-making, there are lobbyists.

Both nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and industry representatives lobbied at COP but not for the same things – businesses have become ever more involved in the UN climate process and this has led to some uncomfortable interactions between the two groups.

A recently published report by Corporate Accountability International (CAI) found that energy industries are, in fact, some of the most powerful lobbyists at climate talks such as COP.

“Big Polluters like oil, gas, coal, and agricultural transnational corporations (TNCs) are not only the largest emitters; their climate denial, lobbying, and policy interference make these industries one of the primary obstacles to sound climate policy at the local, national, and international levels,” states the CAI report, Polluting Paris.

For almost as long as the UNFCCC has existed, the same industries whose profits depend on the burning of oil, coal, and gas have been permitted to bankroll the UN climate talks, it elaborated.

This has long been a contentious issue because it allows some of the corporations to write checks to bolster the COP Presidency’s budget, provide services such as cars for delegates, or even build the negotiating halls where world leaders gather to address climate change.

For instance, during COP17 in Durban, corporations were given a choice by the South African government to fund entertaining jazz concerts, fancy gala dinners, or a lounge.

The British-South African mining giant, Anglo American, sponsored a number of keynote events, including the official opening ceremony and also co-hosted a cocktail rception hand in hand with the South African government, during which its chief executive warned that an energy future without coal is not an option.

The football-stadium-turned-conference-center where the talks took place during COP19 in Warsaw was covered in corporate logos, including PGE and LOTOS, both majority state-owned coal and oil companies. Not only did the Polish government co-organize the “International Coal and Climate Summit” alongside the industry-funded World Coal Association, they also used their official COP19 website to push for oil drilling in the Arctic (which LOTOS is involved in).

Poland will also host COP24 in 2018, when the guidelines and procedures for implementation of the Paris Agreement will be agreed upon.

However, after years of pressure from advocates and civil society, a call for a conflict of interest policy that ensures that participants with interests at odds with the objectives of the UNFCCC to not be invited to participate was finally culminated at the climate change conference held ahead of this year’s COP in Bonn in May.

Yet when, Fiji, the first small-island developing country to preside over these climate talks, understandably so established a trust fund to raise US 26 million to help to finance this COP23 and was actively requesting financial support, numerous fossil fuel based corporations and developed countries wrote cheques.

These include Fiji Airways, which then also sported the COP23 logo on one of its planes as well as Australia, Japan, the EU and even the US that has infamously decided to pull out of the Paris agreement and had reneged on its financial contributions to the UNFCCC or the Green Climate Fund, which aims to help countries like Fiji respond to climate change.

“The dirtiest polluters have long used their sponsorship of climate talks as part of a PR strategy to pretend they are part of the solution,” says Pascoe Sabido, Corporate Europe Observatory. “By sponsoring these talks, a Big Polluter can prop itself up as a legitimate actor, which in turn makes politicians more receptive to its deceptive lobbying”

This, he adds, swings the door open even wider for Big Polluters to expand their influence over climate policy.

Exxon Mobil, BP, and Chevron, for example, have all previously pledged their support for the Paris accord and even released statements to show their disagreement with Trump’s decision to default from the agreement.

But the fossil fuel industry has, in fact, known for decades that its products and practices were a danger to the planet – only 25 fossil fuel producers are responsible for over half of global emissions, according to a Carbon Majors Report.

But the industry giants have secured a seat at the head of the international climate policymaking table, elaborates the CAI report.

Since corporations are able to effectively buy their way into high-level events attended by world climate leaders, sponsorship itself often directly provides them with the lobbying prospects they need to undermine climate policy.

At UNFCCC, these fossil fuel TNCs then exploit the climate crisis by hijacking the talks, stifling ambition, pushing false solutions, and blocking the financing (and therefore withholding the availability) of real solutions, according to the report.

During COP23, for example, during a roundtable discussion on non-market approaches to implement the Paris Agreement, the Ukrainian delegation rolled out a proposal for the creation of a new permanent subsidiary body that would be called ‘Committee for Future’. This committee would place energy companies directly between the international climate negotiations and their national implementation.

The Ukrainian presenter of the proposal stated that “the Committee for the Future functions in between the global UNFCCC and national [climate plans and] allows direct participation of the corporates. US energy majors and other non-state actors will be brought to the UN table.”

In the lead-up to COP23, the US Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, had struck an $80 million dollar deal to ship 700,000 tons of thermal coal to Ukraine by the end of the year.

In fact, the Trump administration in the US is, perhaps, the most relevant example of how this industry –puppet-show plays out.

“Who can doubt, for example, that the failure of the United States to secure domestic climate legislation, or ratify the Kyoto Protocol or the Paris Agreement, is largely the result of industry interference?” asks the CAI report.

And it is not just the US, many of these UNFCCC-accredited organizations publicly declare support for the Paris Agreement and climate policy more broadly but an in-depth look at who constitute their board of directors and where their money goes shows otherwise.

For example, the Business Council of Australia (BCA) member base is made up of 127 CEOs from Australia’s largest and wealthiest corporations and BusinessEurope’s membership and leadership also includes many polluting corporations yet both have aggressively obstructed climate policy initiatives for years.

This in no way, undermines the role of the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement – according to Corporate Accountability, without UNFCC, these Global North governments are left free to do what they want while the rest of the world, especially Global South countries, low-income communities, people of colour, women, and children continue to pay the price.

World governments are again slated to take up the issue of conflicts of interest at the climate talks in May 2018.

“Fossil fuels must be left in the ground and Big Polluters must be delinked from the climate talks. To do this, we must end the corporate capture of the UNFCCC,” says Nnimmo Bassey, from Health of Mother Earth Foundation.

The only way Parties to the UNFCCC, it seems, can develop and implement real solutions to climate change is if those working on behalf of Big Oil, Coal, Gas and other Big Polluters aren’t allowed to weaken the guidelines world governments are currently developing for implementation of the Paris Agreement,

A vegetable vendor in Bangalore using a solar lamp to light her stall. Credit: SELCO/IPS

By Rabiya Jaffery
ABU DHABI, Aug 31 2017 (IPS)

Since weather affects everyone, the idea that women are more susceptible to the effects of climate change may strike some as puzzling.

However, according to a United Nations report, State of the World Population, women—particularly those in poor countries—will be affected differently than men.

An Environmental Justice Foundation report revealed that by 2050 the number of people fleeing the impacts of climate change could reach 150 million. And, according to the Women’s Environmental Network, 80 per cent of these climate refugees will be women and children.

This is primarily because women make up the majority of the world’s poor, tend to have lower incomes, and are more likely to be economically dependent than men – all of which greatly limits their ability to cope with difficult climate conditions.

In addition, while extreme weather and disappearing water resources affect entire communities, women in rural areas represent 45-80 per cent of the agricultural workforce and are more likely to feel the brunt.

Droughts and erratic rainfall forces women to work harder and, often, younger girls are seen dropping out of schools to help their mothers, states the report. “This cycle of deprivation, poverty and inequality undermines the social capital needed to deal with climate change effectively.”

This means that not only are women more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, they also have fewer opportunities to make decisions on how to deal with it – men have greater access to the money and education necessary to participate in climate-change decisions, policymaking, and local planning.

However, despite being often underrepresented in drafting policy and strategies to tackle the causes and impacts of climate change, many women from rural areas around the world are now actively taking the responsibility to protect the environment, their families, and livelihoods.

“A few years ago, climate change was considered gender-neutral,” says Naoko Ishii, chief executive of the nonprofit Global Environment Facility, which works on climate issues. “But when we did a gender analysis, gender neutral actually mean gender-ignorant.”

In growing recognition of the connection between women’s rights and climate change, Greenpeace has been working on multiple solar energy projects that assist women at community levels to implement simple, effective, and affordable sustainable solutions in rural areas in developing countries.

“We believe women are the most affected by climate change and, when empowered, can be positive agents of change in the path towards a sustainable world powered by 100 per cent renewable energy,” says Ghalia Fayad, the Arab World programme leader for Greenpeace Mediterranean.

The NGO has supported adapting solar systems to replace the more costly previously used diesel generators that also suffered from chronic electricity shortages in several primarily women-run cooperates that are now diversifying the production of the likes of argon, almond, and eggs in the country.

“The benefits of solar energy meant they increased their business’s productivity, allowing them to think about expanding further and setting up new food production outlets,” said Fayad. “Most importantly for these women, steady productivity now means increased family time, and that has no price.”

Greenpeace is also currently running solar cooking training sessions that showcase the potential of solar energy as an alternative to coal, wood, and butane gas to women in rural Morocco.

“The women who are the voice of this campaign ask for the Moroccan government to act on the legislative and institutional framework that would then enable the spread of renewable energy on decentralized level,” adds Fayad.

Earlier this year, the NGO also collaborated with Deir Kanoun Ras el Ain, a 23 women strong cooperative in South Lebanon that produces artisan food to launch a crowdfunding project to install solar power to heat water and power machines.

“I can feel that everything is about to change for us,” says Daad Ismail, President of the women’s cooperative. “Electricity shortages have hurt our productivity, our working hours and our personal lives. We know that solar energy will not only help us to cut bills, generate more income and improve our lives, but it will also broaden our horizons with new opportunities.”

The cooperative now has 12 solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, with a total peak production capacity of 3 kilowatts.

Coupled with energy efficiency measures including LED lights, thermal insulation and a solar water heating system, the annual electricity bill could be cut by two thirds and reliance on their diesel generator reduced to a minimum.
“Women generally are often most connected to their communities and family, which gives them a unique potential to contribute to create real and lasting change,” says Fayad.

Their perspectives are essential to ensuring local people have a say in the changes affecting their lives, she adds.

By Rabiya Jaffery
ABU DHABI, Aug 29 2017 (IPS)

Rising temperatures due to global warming may ground up to a third of airplanes worldwide in the decades to come, according to a recently published analysis by Columbia University.

During the hottest parts of the day, 10 to 30 per cent of fully loaded planes may have to shed a portion of their weight in order to take off safely, states the study.

Published in the journal Climatic Change, the study shows that more frequent heat waves will make it harder for aircraft to take off safely because warming air lessens the ability of airplane wings to generate lift.

Here is what happens – when temperatures rise, the air warms and the air spreads out and its density declines, making the air very thin. Wings of aircraft generate less lift as they race across a runway when the air is thin, explains Ethan Coffel, lead author of the study.

“Depending on the aircraft model, runway length, and other factors, at some point a packed plane may be unable to take off safely if the temperature gets too high,” he added.

The research estimates that if the global emission rate continues to grow, fuel capacities and payload weights for some aircraft will have to be reduced by as much as 4 per cent on the hottest days at many major airports worldwide.

Averaged over all land and ocean surfaces, temperatures have warmed up roughly 0.74ºC over the last century with more than half of this warming—about 0.4°C — occurring since 1979, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This may already have started to affect aviation – American Airlines, for example, had to cancel more than 40 flights out of Arizona and Las Vegas when daytime highs of nearly 120°C made it too hot for smaller regional jets to take off amid a heat wave this summer in June.

American Airlines, for example, had to cancel more than 40 flights out of Arizona and Las Vegas when daytime highs of nearly 120°C made it too hot for smaller regional jets to take off amid a heat wave this summer in June.
A handful of studies warn that warming climate may increase dangerous turbulence along major air routes, and head winds that could lengthen travel times while rising sea levels are already threatening to swamp some major airports.

“This points to unexplored risks of changing climate on aviation,” said coauthor Radley Horton, a climatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Most narratives so far have solely focused on how aviation impacts global warming (aircraft comprise about 2 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions) and not how rising temperatures will impact it.

“As the world gets more connected and aviation grows, there may be substantial potential for cascading effects – economic and otherwise,” he added.

And worldwide, average temperatures are expected to go up as much as another 3°C by 2100.

Consequently, heat waves will probably become more prevalent, with annual maximum daily temperatures at airports worldwide projected to go up 4-8°C by 2080, leading to more costly delays in take offs or cancellations, says the study.

The study projects the affect on a wide range of jets as well as some of the busiest airports in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, China and South Asia.

Airports likely to be most affected according to the researchers’ appraisal of 19 major airports include New York’s LaGuardia, due to short runways, and Dubai International Airport in the United Arab Emirates, because of scorching heat.

“Our results suggest that weight restriction may impose a non-trivial cost on airline and impact aviation operations around the world,” said lead author Ethan Coffel, a Columbia University PhD. student.

The non-trivial costs include the major logistical and economic costs of delays and cancellations that can spread from one air hub to another. These costs of delays or cancellations could also disrupt other sectors of the economy as they trickle down.

“Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar that have all invested heavily in aviation have worse problems. Their runways are long but their temperatures are already very high,” says C B Ramkumar, a writer, speaker, and consultant on applied sustainability, in response to the report.

Projections also found that the least affected airports include New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, London’s Heathrow and Paris’ Charles de Gaulle.

“While some effects could be mitigated with new engine or body designs, or expanded runways, all these modifications would come at a cost, in an industry that is already struggling with wafer thin margins,” added Ramkumar.

The report concluded that the sooner climate can be incorporated into mid- and long-range plans, the more effective adaptation efforts can be.

ends

Much of the world is moving away from oil for its electricity generation, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), which says that globally the fossil fuel has dropped from a 25 percent share to 3.6 percent over the last four decades.

Credit: WAM

And, as the Gulf States take steps to expand their use of clean energy, an ambitious plan by the United Arab Emirates to boost its use of renewable electricity from less than 1 percent to 50 percent by 2050 could be a game-changer for the region, experts say.

Dropping oil prices and growing concerns about climate change have exposed the downsides of relying on oil. As the Gulf’s demand for power continues to rise, the UAE is leading the way in shifting to greener energy resources including multiple major investments in solar projects in order to reduce energy consumption and preserve natural resources.

In Abu Dhabi, for example, construction began earlier this year for an 11.1.1GW plant, its largest solar photovoltaic (PV) power plant yet, which is to produce enough electricity to power about 200,000 houses.

According to a press release, the plant, being constructed by Japan’s Marubeni and China’s JinkoSolar, is to be connected to the grid between the last quarter of next year and March 2019.

“This project must be associated with the creation of advanced research centre to drive the economic and technological journey, placing the UAE on the world map of knowledge-based economies,” tweeted Sheikh Hazza bin Zayed, the vice chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, about the launch of the construction.

This project falls in line with the UAE Energy Plan 2050, which aims to increase clean energy use by 50 per cent and improve energy efficiency by 40 per cent, resulting in savings worth Dh700 bn.

Dubai’s Electricity and Water Authority, DEWA, has also launched a number of major projects on renewable energy, to drive the sustainable development of the Emirate.

This includes the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, the largest single-site solar park in the world and the first of its kind to be implemented according to the Independent Power Produce (IPP) model, with a total investment of AED 50 billion, and a planned capacity of 1,000 MW by 2020 and 5,000 MW by 2030.

According to Energy Digital, the park will eventually save approximately 6.5 million tons per annum in emissions.

Hazza bin Zayed also wrote that UAE’s interest in producing renewable energy is leading to a decline in the global cost of energy tenders in solar power and wind energy, , especially in Europe and other parts of the Middle East.

DEWA has already broken two world records with the project – first, by obtaining the lowest price globally for the park’s second phase, at USD 5.6 cents per kilowatt hour (kW/h) last year and another, earlier this year, with the lowest recorded bid being USD 2.99 cents per kW/h for the 800MW third phase of the park.

DEWA’s has also launched the Shams Dubai initiative, the largest distributed solar rooftop project in the Middle East, which has commissioned DP world into installing 88,000 rooftop solar panels in some of its houses and building complexes. Any surplus energy will be exported back into DEWA’s grid.
“This supports our efforts to achieve the Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050, launched, to transform Dubai into a global hub for clean energy and green economy,” writes Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD and CEO of DEWA about the initiative, in a column for a local publication.

He added that DEWA’s strategy is in line with Dubai’s target of generating 5,000MW of solar power by 2030, comprising 25 percent of its total power output.

Dubai has also taken up a number of other initiatives and projects including a 1.5MW system deployed at the Jebel Ali Power Station and the Dubai solar schools program, which targets around 50MW over three years of systems installed in schools across the emirate. The Dubai based Al Nabooda Automobiles has also signed a solar lease for the development of 6.7MW of solar power to their new DIC facility and Aramex has a new 3MW system on their logistics facility.

Al Tayer added that due to UAE’s positioning on the solar belt makes solar energy the most common source of clean energy in the UAE and the country now realizes the importance of harnessing it.