Most islands are well endowed with one or more renewable energy source – rivers, waterfalls, wind, sunshine, biomass, wave power, geothermal deposits – yet virtually all remain heavily or entirely reliant on imported fossil fuels to produce electricity and power transport.

With rising oil prices, fuel import bills now represent up to 20 percent of annual imports of 34 of the 38 small island developing states (SIDS), between 5 percent to 20 percent of their Gross Domestic Product – and even up to 15 percent of the total import bills of many of the European Union’s 286 islands.

Action advocated under ‘The Malta Communiqué On Accelerating Renewable Energy Uptake For Islands’ adopted by a 50-nation two-day conference that ended here last week will hopefully slash, in some cases eliminate, reliance on fossils and related pollution, while increasing energy security, employment as well as economic and social wellbeing.

‘The Renewables and Islands Global Summit’ in Malta was co-hosted by the 100-nation International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) based in Abu Dhabi and by the government of Malta – a 316 sq km Mediterranean island republic of 410,000 inhabitants, and EU’s smallest member state.

The meeting represents a key milestone in IRENA’s initiative on renewables and islands launched by its governing council last January, as well as a follow-up to the Rio+20 conference in June and the ‘achieving sustainable energy for all in Small Island Developing States’ ministerial meeting in Barbados in May.

The communiqué invites IRENA to establish a global renewable energy islands network (GREIN) as a platform for sharing knowledge, best practice, challenges and lessons learnt while seeking innovative solutions.

GREIN will also help assess country potential, build capacity, formulate business cases for renewables deployment involving the private sector and civil society while identifying available finance as well as new ideas for innovative financing mechanisms.

In addition, the network will develop methodologies for integrating renewables into sustainable tourism, water management, transport, and other industries and services.

IRENA’s Kenyan director-general Adnan Amin told the 120 delegates that “we have confirmed the enormous potential for renewables in small island developing states as well as for developed island countries, not to mention coastal countries with remote, energy-deprived islands of their own. Ambitious policy targets appear increasingly attainable because of great strides forward in technology and cost-effectiveness.

“We are laying the groundwork for a business council to bring investors – from major energy companies to innovative SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and also financial institutions – into the discussion,” Amin added. “Academics and NGOs can also contribute to the search for practical solutions. Developed island states can do much by sharing their experience with small-island developing states that face broadly similar challenges.”

Representatives (including 15 ministers) from 26 developing Pacific, Caribbean and African developing island nations and from coastal developing states with islands reported a wide range of renewables deployment, from detailed long-term plans and ongoing activities to reach up to 100 percent renewables, to admissions of very low deployment and no firm goals or plans yet.

West African Cape Verde, a 10-island 4,033 sq km archipelago with 491,000 inhabitants, has started working towards 100 percent, then possibly 300 percent renewables, according to José Brito, senior adviser to Cape Verde’s Prime Minister, José Maria Neves. Surplus energy remaining from meeting domestic needs (including seawater desalination) could either be stored or exported, Brito said. Cape Verde aims to become a renewables training hub for Africa.

Dominica in the East Caribbean (71,000 inhabitants, 754 sq km) could also become a net energy exporter, Crispin Grégoire, its former ambassador to the UN and now a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) official in charge of Caribbean issues told IPS.

“With 325 rivers and mountainous terrain, we have huge hydroelectric potential. Moreover, Iceland and the EU are helping assess our extensive geothermal resources. We could export surplus electricity by interconnector seabed cable to Guadelupe and Martinique, each just 60 km away. We could also attract high-tech industries to use our surplus power.”

Reporting Caribbean-wide developments, Grégoire told delegates of numerous regional renewables opportunities, where electricity prices can reach 35 cents a kilowatt hour, several times those in the U.S. or Europe.

SIDS DOCK, launched by 10 SIDS nations in 2009, has started operations to mobilise finance for sustainable energy projects and to benefit from opportunities emerging from the global carbon markets. Seven projects are under development in the Bahamas, Belize, the Dominican Republic, Grenada and Jamaica, but far more financial resources are needed.

Under the Galapagos Zero Fossil Initiative, the Galapagos 10-island archipelago off Ecuador – home to world famous tortoises – will achieve 100 percent renewables by 2020, Pedro Carvajal, counsellor to Ecuador’s ministry of energy and energy efficiency told the conference. Half will derive from jatropha oil, made from seeds grown by 240 farming families in 40 communities on the mainland; most of the rest from wind energy, and the balance from photovoltaics.

In the Pacific, Tuvalu, Tokelau and the Cook Islands are rapidly moving towards 100 percent renewables. In contrast, Vanuatu, (82 islands totalling 12,190 sq.km) 67 percent of whose 224,564 inhabitants have no access to electricity, has not really started to develop its potential, William Sanlam, multilateral desk officer at Vanuatu’s ministry of foreign affairs told IPS.

By Vanya Walker-Leigh
HANOI, May 7 2012 (IPS)

Vietnam is hailed as a development success story for lifting millions out of poverty and staying on track to meet all of its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. But the country’s future progress is severely threatened by the impact of global climate change.

This nation of 86 million people – stretching down the eastern seaboard of the Indochina peninsula, its mountainous inland fringed by a broad coastal plain – shares the vast Mekong river system with Laos, Thailand, Burma, China and Cambodia.

Unprecedented climate-related catastrophes in recent years have turned government and citizen attention onto the pressing need for proactive climate change policies, although the actual speed of future global warming is beyond Vietnam’s control and depends more on major industrial nations’ future greenhouse gas emission reductions agreed within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Vietnam’s National Climate Change Strategy launched this March dramatically describes the nation as “one of the most affected countries…with the Mekong River Delta being one of the three most vulnerable deltas in the world alongside the Nile and the Ganges.”

By the end of this century average temperatures could have increased by two to three degrees Celsius, the Strategy warns, with major changes in rainfall patterns threatening devastating floods and droughts, while the sea level is set to rise by between 0.75 to one metre.

The policy document adds, “About 40 percent of the Mekong River Delta, 11 percent of the Red River Delta and three percent of other regions will be submerged, with two percent of Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam’s commercial capital, home to over seven million inhabitants) under water.”

Any slump in production in the huge Mekong Delta rice bowl will have grave national and global food security implications, since Vietnam is the world’s second largest rice exporter.

The Asian Development Bank’s report, ‘Addressing Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific’, issued this March, forecasts that by 2050 some 9.5 million Vietnamese will be at risk from the impacts of sea level rise. The Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment (MONRE) is leading implementation of the national Strategy.

“Building on a previous National Target Programme for Climate Change launched in 2008, the Strategy focuses on both adaptation and mitigation, while setting guideposts for the short, medium and long term as well as ten strategic tasks,” Pham Van Tan, deputy director-general of MONRE’s International Cooperation Department told IPS.

“The three action phases (go) up to the end of this year, from 2013-2025 and 2016-2050,” he explained, “aiming at a careful balance between adaptation and mitigation – the latter to counter the expected rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions implied in Viet Nam’s ambitious industrialisation plans. We will also pursue regional approaches with our neighbouring countries.”

Strategic tasks include developing wide-ranging actions on food and water security, sea level rise, increasing forest cover and renewable energy use, emission reductions, community capacity development for adaptation and scientific and technological development. Provinces and cities are tasked with developing their own plans, merged with national goals, involving the private sector and civil society.

Extensive support over the long term from international donors is seen as critical to the Strategy’s success. However, it warns, “Since Vietnam has become a middle-income country, international support will be decreased and cooperation carried out on a win-win basis.” New types of funding will hopefully emerge “through new financial and technology transfer mechanisms from developed countries.”

The Strategy’s ninth and 10th tasks relate to international cooperation and financial resources, to be channelled through a national Green Climate Fund to be set up by MONRE at the Prime Minister’s request. An international investment conference envisions inviting foreign businesses to invest in adaptation-related infrastructure.

“A climate change donor support group (comprised of countries and multilateral institutions), set up in 2008 to interact with the government as well as coordinate our actions, is currently chaired by Germany and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP),” Juergen Hesse, director of the Natural Resources Programme at the Vietnam office of GIZ (the German development cooperation agency) told IPS.

“GIZ is cooperating with several other donors as well as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature on coastal zone protection in the Mekong Delta, which includes restoration (and) extension of mangrove belts (and) upgrading existing dykes while determining key ‘erosion hot spots’ where new ones would be most needed.”

Broadening existing climate change cooperation to support the new Strategy was discussed during two high-level visits to Vietnam last month, first by UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, followed by the European Development Commissioner Andris Piebalgs, as well as by the recently appointed Director- General of the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) José Graziano da Silva during his visit in March.

“Non-governmental organisations, both Vietnamese and foreign, have been working on climate change for some time through field projects and their Climate Change Working Group,” Vu Trung Kien, director of the Climate Change Resilience Centre, told IPS. “We talk with (the) government but don’t sit on the National Climate Change Committee and have a few entry points at provincial levels so far. Lack of capacity, lack of information at all levels is a huge problem.”

The government admits that its climate change actions can only succeed as part of a broad ‘green economy’ framework, a radical departure from the environmentally destructive growth policies followed after 1975. The related National Green Growth Strategy being drafted under the Prime Minister’s leadership will hopefully be launched in time for the upcoming United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil, known as Rio+20, from Jun. 20-22.

As the climate change strategy tellingly warns, “public awareness on climate change remains limited and one-sided: too much attention towards the adverse impacts…and too little to changing production and consumption behaviours towards…low-carbon, green growth.”

Tashi Jamtsho. Credit: Vanya Walker-Leigh/IPS.

By Vanya Walker-Leigh
THIMPU, Bhutan, Nov 18 2011 (IPS)

Prime ministers of Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh and India gather here on Saturday (Nov. 19) for the ‘Climate Summit for a Living Himalayas’, aiming to adopt an ambitious ten-year roadmap for regional adaptation strategies.

The first three nations also participated in the 28-nation Climate Vulnerable Forum in Dhaka, Bangladesh last Monday.

While the UN climate change negotiations launched in 1995 and resuming for their 17th annual session in Durban in South Africa on Nov. 28 have so far failed to generate sufficient action to slow global climate change, the four East Himalayan nations are already beginning to feel its destructive impacts. The summit aims to enable them to face related problems jointly.

“The summit is the culmination of over two years’ work by senior officials from the four participating nations,” Dr. Tashi Jamtsho, the young Bhutanese civil servant who is executive secretary of the Bhutan Climate Summit Secretariat told IPS in an interview at his office here.

“The summit has three main goals,” he explained. “They are to adopt a roadmap for adapting to climate change, to highlight the issues we are facing internationally, and to create partnerships, networks and relationships to share information, experience and skills. Summit partners are the government of Denmark, the World Wildlife Fund, the MacArthur Foundation and ICIMOD – the Nepal-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development.

“We have approached the climate change challenge holistically, focusing on four interrelated key topics – food security, protection of freshwater systems, energy security (including development of renewable sources) and the protection and sustainable use of biodiversity. Technical meetings have been held on each topic with the four nations submitting national reports on each sector. This work underpins the Regional Framework of Action and related budget formally adopted by senior officials from our four nations who met here on Oct. 23.”

The documents are being reviewed by a meeting of ministers Nov. 18, then transmitted for formal endorsement by the prime ministers’ summit the following day.

A slew of scientific studies including the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) show that over the past two decades the Himalayan region’s rainfall and weather patterns have become increasingly erratic, putting biodiversity, wildlife, soils, water resources and thus food production and rural livelihoods under growing strain.

The southern and eastern flanks of the massive mountain range are the ‘watertower’ for over 1.3 billion Indians, Nepalis, Bangladeshis and Bhutanese. Rising temperatures have set off an accelerating process which is shrinking the huge glaciers. If continued, ever growing quantities of ‘melt water’ could set off catastrophic Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs), as thousands of mountain lakes start to burst their banks. Further ahead looms the dreadful prospect of permanent drought – as the local climate dries out.

The Regional Framework of Action however will need to be converted into actual policies and measures, but civil servants are still negotiating on implementation mechanisms to follow up the summit decisions, including whether, and if so, where to locate a permanent secretariat. Agreement at the summit is not certain, Tashi admits. “In that case there should be a provision in the summit declaration for further consultations.”

Although civil society will not be admitted to the high-level meetings, a six-day parallel event Nov. 14-19 features exhibitions and seminars by regional environmental NGOs as well as a youth rally organised by ICIMOD.

Dago Tschering, research officer at Bhutan’s only environmental NGO, the Royal Society for the Protection of Nature, told IPS that “NGOs from the four countries have made important contributions to developing each country studies and positions on the four summit topics. We have also worked collaboratively on this through our membership of Climate Action Network South Asia – the regional node of the 700 strong global network of NGOs campaigning on climate change since 1990. We expect our roles to be enhanced by the summit outcome.”

While heads of several leading UN agencies as well as European Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard have declined the invitation to attend the summit, high-level representation of major donor countries is still hoped for. Donor support is seen as a critically essential input to fulfilling the roadmap’s many goals – though the weak decisions on climate change finance emerging from the G20 summit in Cannes on Nov. 3-4 are hardly encouraging.

Nor is the information emerging at the Dhaka Forum about donor aid being ‘recycled’ as climate finance, instead of additional allocations being made, in accordance with agreements on a three-year, 30 billion dollar ‘fast start financing’ commitment made at the 2009 UN climate change conference in Copenhagen. In his speech to the forum UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged that “governments must find ways — now — to mobilise resources up to the 100 billion dollars per annum pledged. An empty shell is not sufficient.”

He was referring to the decision taken at last year’s UN climate change conference in Cancun, Mexico, to set up a Green Climate Fund whose resources would reach 100 billion dollars a year by 2020. The Fund’s functioning and financing will be discussed at the Durban conference.

The Durban conference will be informed of the Himalayan summit results, says Tashi. “We plan to showcase the outcome at a high-level event,” he told IPS, and then adding with true civil service caution, “if the outcome is really successful.”