Shanty town near Cape Town, South Africa. Credit: Chell Hill(CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Busani Bafana
LUANDA, Sep 3 2015 (IPS)

Slums are a curse and blessing in fast urbanising Africa. They have challenged Africa’s progress towards better living and working spaces but they also provide shelter for the swelling populations seeking a life in cities.

Rural Africans are pouring into towns and cities in search of jobs and other opportunities, but African cities – 25 of which are among the 100 fastest growing cities in the world – are not delivering the much needed support services, including housing, at the same rate as people are demanding them.

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) projects that nearly 1.3 billion people – more than the current population of China – will be living in cities in Africa in the next 15 years."We must encourage, identify ‎and celebrate the continent. Our schools need to train architects and city planners in no other way than to appreciate and promote African architectural culture" – Tokunbo Omisore, past president of the African Architects Association

Africa’s urbanisation rate of four percent a year is already over-stretching the capacity of its cities to provide adequate shelter, water, sanitation, energy and even food for its growing population.

Safe and resilient cities and human settlements is one of the aims of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be agreed on in New York next month. As the SDGs replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) launched in September 2000, UN-Habitat has largely succeeded in meeting the target of taking 100 million people out of slums by the time the MDGs expired in Asia, China and part of India … but not in Africa.

However, Tokunbo Omisore, past president of the African Architects Association, believes that Africa can solve its slums situation by planning and developing towns and cities that strike a balance in the provision of housing, water sanitation, energy and transport while luring investments to create jobs.

According to Omisore, the problem lies in the fact that so far settlements have been developed for people but not with people, and he asks if Africa wants the humane aspects of its cultural values and heritage reflected in its cities or has to replicate the cities of developed nations to become classified as developed.

“Slums and sprawls demand understanding the reasons and problems resulting in their existence and identifying the class of people living there,” says Omisore.

“African governments focus on the infrastructural development of developed nations without consideration for the human development of our different communities and ensuring creation of employment opportunities which is key to the sustainability of our cities. People make the cities, not the other way around.”

By redefining slums, policy-makers in Africa can work more on understanding the rural-urban links to arrive at African solutions for African problems, he argues, calling for a “campaign of marketing Africa and appreciating what is African.”

Aisa Kirabo Kacyira, Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“We must encourage, identify ‎and celebrate the continent. Our schools need to train architects and city planners in no other way than to appreciate and promote African architectural culture.”

At a time Africa is grappling with the issue of land tenure, particularly in agriculture, limited and often expensive land in urban settlements is posing the question of whether Africa should build up or build across, and there are those who argue that densification is the answer to Africa’s housing woes.

At the 2nd Africa Urban Infrastructure Investment Forum hosted by United Cities and Local Government-Africa (UCLG-A) and the government of Angola in Luanda in April,  Aisa Kirabo Kacyira, Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat argued that densification is an avenue for the transformation of Africa and its cities.

“If urbanisation should be possible and if we are going to build landed housing without going up, it simply means it will be expensive, but if we have to densify then we need to go up,” said Kacyira.

“Yes, let us stick to our identity and culture, but let us stick to principles that make economic sense. We are not going to have vibrant cities by running away from the problem and spreading and sprawling.”

Kacyira also argued that by planning, reducing desertification and recycling waste, African cities can help reduce their carbon footprint, a key issue on the post-MDG agenda.

Meanwhile, a Kenya housing project could represent a model for the future of

Housing in Africa. Muungano Wa Wanavijiji, a federation of slum dwellers, has partnered with Shack/Slum Dwellers International to provide decent shelter for people living in slums by creating a low cost three-level house called  ‘The Footprint’, which costs 1,000 dollars.

The project has built 300 houses in two settlements this year. Dwellers pay 20 percent towards the structure and are given support to access a microloan covering 80 percent of the cost.

The UCLG-A network which represents over 1,000 cities in Africa, estimates that Africa needs to mobilise investments of 80 billion dollars a year for upgrading urban infrastructure to meet the needs of urban residents.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Africa is experiencing a revolution towards cleaner energy through renewable energy but the story has hardly been told to the world, says Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Steiner, who had been advocating for renewable energy at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Lima, said Africa is on the right path toward a low carbon footprint by tapping into its plentiful renewable resources – hydro, geothermal, solar and wind.

Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

“There is a revolution going on in the continent of Africa and the world is not noticing it. You can go to Egypt, Ethiopia Kenya, Namibia, and Mozambique. I think we will see renewable energy being the answer to Africa’s energy problems in the next fifteen years,” Steiner said in an interview with IPS.

Sharing the example of the UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, Steiner told IPS that the decision was taken that “if UNEP is going to be centred with its offices in the African continent on the Equator, there can be reason why we are not using renewable energy. So we installed photovoltaic panels on our roof which we share with UN Habitat, 1200 people, and we produce 750,000 kilowatt hours of electricity every year, that is enough for the entire building to operate.”

He noted that although it will take UNEP between eight and 10 years to pay off the installation, UNEP will have over 13 years of electricity without paying monthly or annual power bills. “It is the best business proposition that a U.N. body has ever made in terms of paying for electricity for a building,” he said.

According to Steiner, the “revolution” is already happening in East Africa, especially in Kenya and Ethiopia which are both targeting renewable energy, especially geothermal energy.

“Kenya plans to triple its electricity generation up to about 6000 megawatts in the next five years. More than 90 percent of the planned power is to come from geothermal, solar and wind power,” he said. “If you are in Africa and decide to exploit your wind, solar and geothermal resources, you will get yourself freedom from the global energy markets, and you will connect the majority of your people without waiting for thirty years until the power lines cross every corner of the country” – Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director

Kenya currently runs a geothermal power development corporation which invites tenders from private investors bid and is establishing a wind power firm likely to be the largest in Africa with a capacity of 350 megawatts of power under a public-private partnership.

In Ethiopia, expansion of the Aluto-Langano geothermal power plant will increase geothermal generation capacity from the current 7 MW to 70 MW. The expansion project is being financed by the Ethiopian government (10 million dollars), a 12 million dollar grant from the Government of Japan, and a 13 million dollar loan from the World Bank.

Renewable energy has costs but also benefits

Phillip Hauser, Vice President of GDF Suez Energy Latin America, told IPS that geothermal power is a good option for countries in Africa with that potential, but it comes with risks.

“It is very site-dependent. There can be geothermal projects that are relatively cost efficient and there are others that are relatively expensive. It is a bit like the oil and gas industry. You have to find the resource and you have to develop the resource. Sometimes you might drill and you don’t find anything – that is lost investment,” Hauser told IPS.

Steiner admitted that like any other investment, renewable energy has some limitations, including the need for upfront initial capital and the cost of technology, but he said that countries with good renewable energy policies would attract the necessary private investments.

“We are moving in a direction where Africa will not have to live in a global fuel market in which one day you have to pay 120 dollars for a barrel of crude oil, then the next day you get it at 80 dollars and before you know it, it is doubled,” he said.

“So if you are in Africa and decide to exploit your wind, solar and geothermal resources, you will get yourself freedom from the global energy markets, and you will connect the majority of your people without waiting for thirty years until the power lines cross every corner of the country,”Steiner added.

A recent assessment by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) of Africa’s renewable energy future found that solar and wind power potential existed in at least 21 countries, and biomass power potential in at least 14 countries.

The agency, which supports countries in their transition to a sustainable energy future, has yet to provide a list of countries with geothermal power potential but almost all the countries around the Great Rift Valley in south-eastern Africa – Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania among others – have already identified geothermal sites, with Kenya being the first to use a geothermal site to add power to its grid.

Adnan Amin, Director-General of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

IRENA Director-General Adnan Z. Amin told IPS that the agency’s studies shows that not only can renewable energy meet the world’s rising demand, but it can do so more cheaply, while contributing to limiting global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius – the widely-cited tipping point in the climate change debate.

He said the good news in Africa is that apart from the resources that exist, there is a growing body of knowledge across African expert institutions that would help the continent to exploit its virgin renewable energy potential.

What is needed now, he explained, is for countries in Africa to develop the economic case for those resources supported by targeted government policies to help developers and financiers get projects off the ground.

The IRENA assessment found that in 2010, African countries imported 18 billion dollars’ worth of oil – more than the entire amount they received in foreign aid – while oil subsidies in Africa cost an estimated 50 billion dollars every year.

New financing models for renewable energy

According to Amin, renewable energy technologies are now the most economical solution for off-grid and mini-grid electrification in remote areas, as well as for grid extension in some cases of centralised grid supply.

He argued that rapid technological progress, combined with falling costs, a better understanding of financial risk and a growing appreciation of wider benefits mean that renewable energy would increasingly be the solution to Africa’s energy problem.

In this context, Africa could take on new financing models that “de-risk” investments in order to lower the cost of capital, which has historically been a major barrier to investment in renewable energy, and one such model would include encouragement for green bonds.

“Green bonds are the recent innovation for renewable energy investments,” said Amin. “Last year we reached about 14 billion dollars, this year there is an estimate of about 40 billion, and next year there is an estimate of about 100 billion dollars in green finance through green bonds. Why doesn’t Africa take advantage of those?” he asked.

During the conference in Lima, activist groups have been urging an end to dependence on fossil fuel- and nuclear-powered energy systems, calling for investment and policies geared toward building clean, sustainable, community-based energy solutions.

“We urgently need to decrease our energy consumption and push for a just transition to community-controlled renewable energy if we are to avoid devastating climate change,” said Susann Scherbarth, a climate justice and energy campaigner with Friends of the Earth Europe.

Godwin Ojo, Executive Director of Friends of the Earth Nigeria, told IPS that “we urgently need a transition to clean energy in developing countries and one of the best incentives is globally funded feed-in tariffs for renewable energy.”

He said policies that support feed-in tariffs and decentralized power sources should be embraced by both the most- and the least-developed nations.

Backed by a new discussion paper on a ‘global renewable energy support programme’ from the What Next Forum, activists called for decentralised energy systems – including small-scale wind, solar, biomass mini-grids communities that are not necessarily connected to a national electricity transmission grid.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

“The big picture is that the CDM is at a crossroads. The markets have collapsed” – Hugh Sealy, CDM Executive Board Chair. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
LIMA, Dec 4 2014 (IPS)

The U.N. mechanism for supporting carbon emissions projects in developing countries – the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – is in crisis as a result of a dramatic slump in the prices being paid for carbon credits.

The CDM, which deals in Certified Emission Reductions (CERs), is faced with possible collapse because demand in recent years from the principal buyers – countries tasked with emission reduction obligations under the Kyoto Protocol – has dropped, because emission reduction targets have not risen significantly and because economic growth has slowed. “The mechanism [Clean Development Mechanism] has so far led to the registration of 7,800 projects and programmes across 107 developing countries with hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, resulting in 1.5 billion fewer tonnes of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere” – Hugh Sealy, CDM Executive Board Chair

The CDM Executive Board and its members at the ongoing (Dec. 1-12) U.N. Climate Change Conference in Lima, Peru, have been trying to convince negotiators there to renew their commitment to the mechanism, which has existed for the last ten years. Hugh Sealy, Chair of the CDM, answered questions from IPS on what has gone wrong and what needs to be done.

Q:  Can you give us the big picture of the Clean Development Mechanism today?

A:  The big picture is that the CDM is at a crossroads. The markets have collapsed. The price of CERs has fallen to about 0.30 a dollar compared with over 30 dollars five years ago.

Q:  What has been achieved so far?

A:  The mechanism has so far led to the registration of 7,800 projects and programmes across 107 developing countries with hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, resulting in 1.5 billion fewer tonnes of greenhouse  gases entering the atmosphere.

Q:  Where was the problem for the CDM?

A:  The beginning of the trouble for the CDM – and this is my personal feeling – was the European Union’s 2009 directive [to strictly limit the permissibility of international credits and ban them altogether from 2020] which came into effect on Jan. 1, 2013. You have a situation where you have one buyer – the European Union. Japan has decided to create its own system, the JCR, Australia has gone its own way, Canada has gone its own way, and the United States has never bothered either. So if you have system where the European Union as our major buyer is going to exclude all other units, then the market is not going to take a lot of them. And that is when the prices begin to drop.

Q:  So you think you should have had a regulated market for CERs?

A:  A market for CERs, which are not like any other commodity, should have had a floor. While others had a floor for theirs, we never had a floor on ours.  Yet now the World Bank is saying that we should create some sort of market reserve fund that can suck all this excess credit. They say about three billion dollars may be required to suck up this excess. And I don’t see it as a problem of excess CERs. I see it as lack of demand for CERs. I mean, look at all the CERs that we have generated. We have 1.5 gigatonnes of emission reductions. The emissions gap is 10 gigatonnes per year. So to me, the essential and radical demand remains for a market system.

Q:  The CDM Executive board has been fronting voluntary cancelling as a possible option for creating demand for CERS. What is the idea behind that?

A:  The idea is that anyone. Even you as the media, me as an individual, a company, a government can purchase and cancel CERs immediately. But we have no idea what demand we will have for voluntary cancellation. So I cannot tell you that as a result of voluntary cancellation we will see an immediate upsurge in the price of CERs. But we as a board think this is the right thing to do. To make CERs available to anyone who wants to reduce their carbon footprint.

The other thing that we are looking at is what services we provide. And we believe we have a very robust Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) system for determining actual emission reductions.

And what we see is that a number of financial institutions like the World Bank, the Global Environmental Facility and the Green Climate Fund are allocating quite a bit of their portfolios to what they call performance-based finance or result-based finance. And we are in dialogue with these institutions asking them to use the CDM, use the MRV that we provide, to ensure that the CERs that you put your loans out for are actually achieved.

Q:  That may not take off and possibly is not sustainable. What would be the lasting solution?

A:  We need a clear decision here in Lima, and Paris [in 2015] in particular, as to what the role of an international offset mechanism will be in a new climate regime. We need parties, particularly the developed countries, to raise their level of ambition and to create more demand for CERs. And outside that, we are searching for non-traditional markets through voluntary cancellation.

Q:  What are the implications of this development for least developing countries and least developed small island states?

A:  If I was a developer, and I’m from one of those countries, I would hold on to my CERs. I would not seek to enter a purchase agreement at this time. Not at thirty cents. I’m an optimist. I believe the price of CERs must go up.

There is a fundamental arithmetic that I’m working with and that is that the emissions gap is about ten gigatonnes per year and is only getting wider at this point.  So if countries decide that markets will be vital component of the Paris agreement, then I cannot see how the price of CERs can remain at thirty cents. It can only go up. It is absolutely frustrating for small island states like Jamaica that already have registered CER projects. It is extremely frustrating for countries in Africa.

Q:  If the CDM was to collapse today, what would we lose?

A:  We would lose ten years of experience, ten years of learning by doing. Those who think that they can abandon the CDM and create a new market mechanism in the interim are not facing reality.

It took a very long time to create the CDM and to get it to the stage we are at now.  So my answer to your question is that we will lose quite a lot. I cannot give you a monetary number or a dollar value of what we will all lose in investment. There are over 4,500 organisations in the world that deal with the CDM.

Q:  What can be done by countries at the negotiations going on here in Peru if, in the past, such negotiations have produced a pioneering model like CDM that has to some extent worked as you seem to indicate?

A: They can increase their demand for CERs before 2020, recognise the value that the CDM can add to emerging emissions trading systems, and recognise the mechanism’s obvious value to the international response to climate change after the new agreement takes force in 2020.

This is one of the most effective instruments governments have created under the U.N. Climate Change Convention. It drives and encourages emission reductions, climate finance, technology transfer, capacity-building, sustainable development, and adaptation – everything that countries themselves are asking for from the new Paris agreement.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Venezuelan oil refinery in action. Credit: Courtesy of PDVSA

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Nov 14 2012 (IPS)

Venezuela is studying the use of nanotechnology as a means of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases caused by the oil industry.

Nanotechnology operates at the sub-microscopic scale: a nanometre is a unit of measure equal to one billionth of a metre.

“We are seeking to use nanoparticles of metallic salts, such as iron, nickel or cobalt nitrates, as catalysts in oil-related processes that produce greenhouse gas emissions,” said Sarah Briceño, a researcher at the Centre for Physics at the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC).

Catalysts are substances used to speed up chemical processes, “and our goal is to develop catalysts adapted to Venezuelan industry that will make it possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from activities such as oil refining and fuel consumption by motor vehicles by up to 50 percent,” Briceño told Tierramérica*.

Venezuela, a founding member of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), extracts close to three million barrels of oil a day and has over two billion barrels of heavy crude oil reserves.

There are six refineries in the South American country that process a total of 1.1 million barrels daily.

Meanwhile, according to OPEC figures, the country consumes 742,000 barrels of different types of fuel daily, of which 300,000 barrels correspond to the gasoline used by more than six million motor vehicles.

The Ministry of the Environment reports that Venezuela is responsible for 0.48 percent of worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases and 0.56 percent of one of these “villains”, carbon dioxide.

During the experimental phase, “we have observed with scanning electron microscopes the chemical reactions between the metallic salt nanoparticles and the surfactant agents (which influence the surface tension between substances) involved in these processes,” said Briceño.

Since the concept of nanotechnology – the manipulation of matter at the molecular and atomic level – was first introduced in 1959 by U.S. physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988), winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, it has been developed in a wide range of fields including medicine, pharmaceuticals, energy, electronics, metallurgy and environmental conservation.

“The entire periodic table (of elements) can be taken to the nano scale. We are focusing our research on how Venezuela, with its technology and infrastructure, can make this environmental contribution through its work with hydrocarbons,” explained Briceño.

“Our emphasis is on the reduction of emissions of nitrous oxide and methane, two of the most potent greenhouse gases,” she added.

The research is expected to yield results in 2013. Putting these to use in industry will be a long-term objective, given the scale of work in the laboratory: at the IVIC results are obtained in masses of particles that weigh 0.1 grams, while oil production in Venezuela in a single day equals 400,000 tons.

The relationship between energy and the environment provides fertile ground for nanotechnology, as demonstrated by the research undertaken at the U.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where nanoparticles containing iron have been mixed with oil in order to make it possible to clean up offshore oil spills with magnets.

“The energy demand will increase in coming years, and we need to be able to generate cheap, abundant energy with the lowest possible environmental impact. Fossil fuels are not an adequate alternative, but even worse is using them badly when there are incredible opportunities to make them so much more efficient,” said Javier García Martínez, director of the Nanotechnology Laboratory at the University of Alicante, Spain.

Nanotechnology “offers the opportunity to generate new materials and processes, and in the field of energy there is great potential to improve the efficiency of the photovoltaic cells that make up solar panels,” Venezuelan consultant Juan Carlos Sánchez told Tierramérica.

Sánchez is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 jointly with former U.S. vice president Al Gore (1993-2001).

“The development of processes through nanotechnology aimed at greater and more effective use of solar energy isn’t necessarily in the interests of the big oil producers, whether companies or countries,” said Sánchez.

“Any technology that reduces greenhouse gas emissions is bad for their business, since the demand for oil would decline with an increase in the use of solar energy,” he explained.

In his opinion, Venezuela should direct its efforts towards other technologies that reduce the emission of greenhouse gases associated with oil industry activity, “such as so-called sequestration of the carbon dioxide generated in the refineries, in order to sink it in the subsoil of oil wells and keep it from entering the atmosphere.”

Other OPEC members are moving forward with this type of research, including Saudi Arabia, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates, as a response to the fingers of blame pointed at the oil-producing countries as being responsible for global warming, said Sánchez.

Venezuela could use its thousands of old, abandoned oil wells for this purpose, burying carbon dioxide more than 1,000 metres underground.

Briceño, meanwhile, thinks that the results achieved through the research at the IVIC could help to promote studies for the application of nanotechnology to other environment-related areas of the Venezuelan oil industry.

One example is the use and disposal of petroleum coke, a solid waste byproduct of oil refining with a carbon content of over 90 percent. Venezuela produces 20,000 tons of petroleum coke daily during the upgrading of heavy and extra heavy crude oils to make them light enough for most refineries.

The dust from the resulting mountains of coke affects communities in eastern Venezuela who live near the crude oil upgrading facilities. Perhaps at some point in the future, the impact of this waste could be lessened through treatment with nanoparticles.
* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

Food’s carbon footprint is measured “from fertiliser to fork”: Thornton and Vermeulen. Credit: Courtesy CCAFS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 31 2012 (IPS)

Food production, including agriculture, represent 29 percent of the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming, say scientists with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

Feeding the global population today involves the release of 10,000 to 16,000 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere annually, say two reports published Wednesday Oct. 31 in Copenhagen by CGIAR’s Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

Rising global temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns will affect production of staple foods like maize, rice and wheat. The reports estimate that by 2050, climate change could cause irrigated wheat yields to fall by 13 percent in developing countries, and irrigated rice yields by 15 percent.

The reports are “Recalibrating Food Production in the Developing World: Global Warming Will Change More Than Just the Climate” by CCAFS theme leader Philip Thornton, and “Climate Change and Food Systems” by CCAFS head of research Sonja Vermeulen. IPS spoke to the two researchers by telephone. Excerpts of the interviews follow:

Q: What is the global warning sounded by the reports launched by CCAFS?

PHILIP THORNTON: I would say that the overall message from the two studies is that climate change may have considerable impacts on agriculture in developing countries, but there are many things that can be done now to help reduce the burden on smallholders.

Action is required now at many levels, not only to adapt but also to mitigate – and there are wide overlaps of actions that can serve both adaptation and mitigation.

Q: Agriculture and the food production chain are among the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Does feeding the world produce a huge carbon footprint?

SONJA VERMEULEN: The emissions footprint of food production involves the combined emissions of all the stages of food production, from ‘fertiliser to fork’. It includes manufacture of inputs like fertilisers, then agriculture itself, but also food distribution and sales, use of food in the home, and how food waste is managed.

There are large country variations, but food production, including agriculture, contributes from 19 to 29 per cent of anthropogenic (man-made) emissions. The sector that contributes the most is the energy industry, however.

An important part of the impact of agriculture and food production on GHG emissions is of course the energy it uses: machinery on farms, refrigeration, transport over long distances. (Feeding the world represents) between 10,000 and 16,000 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent.

Q: How could climate change impact people’s lives with regard to food security, especially commodities and natural resources?

SV: It highlights the imperative of providing help to those people who need it to adapt – most of whom are in developing countries and contribute very little to the global footprint of agriculture – while at the same time doing everything we can to reduce the footprint of agriculture in the developed countries.

Ensuring food security for nine billion people (the projected global population in 2050) has to be a priority, but we have to do this in a way that reduces emissions.

Q: The reports point to the urgent need to mitigate and adapt due to the reality of climate change. What actions should countries and food companies take?

SV: There are a wide variety of options that can both help smallholders adapt to climate change as well as reduce emissions – reducing waste, restoring degraded lands, feeding livestock better diets to reduce the amount of emissions per kg of meat and milk, for example.

Q: What are the consequences of the rise in temperatures and the reduction in rainfall periods?

PT: Rising temperatures and changing rainfall amounts and patterns will inevitably change the nature of growing seasons in some places and will also change the suitability of different places for different crops. In such cases, it may be that there are different varieties that can be used that are more heat-tolerant; perhaps the areas of production can be shifted to more suitable areas (e.g. shifting potato cultivation to higher elevations where it is cooler).

Regarding pests and diseases, it is certain that the prevalence and distribution of these will change, and in some cases will become increasingly important.

Q: What are the changes we may see in our diets?

PT: Climate change impacts on agricultural production may bring about substantial changes in the relative costs of different sources of calories and proteins. In developed countries, we may want to consider ways of reducing the over-consumption of certain types of food and reducing waste, because such things can help cut emissions.

In developing countries, research and development organisations may want to start thinking about ways to help smallholders grow and utilise new crops that they currently have no or only limited experience with. The issue here is to help provide smallholders with options to diversify their diets where this is appropriate.

Q: The reports say farmers around the world, especially smallholders in developing countries, should have access to the latest technology and science. Is climate-smart agriculture possible?

PT: Smallholders have enormous experience of farming, but the pace of change means that many of them are having to operate in very unfamiliar conditions. In such cases, proven technology and good science can surely help enhance food security and livelihoods – this may involve the use of new varieties that are drought-tolerant, or helping farmers to use seasonal weather forecasts to adapt their management practices to the current season. But yes, to help them towards an intelligent and resilient agriculture.

Q: How will these global changes affect different parts of the world?

PT: Several studies show that large areas of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia and South-East Asia may be particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Q: Is it true that growing crops is about to become even more unpredictable at a global level?

PT: The climate during the rest of this century is very likely to become more variable (more droughts, more floods, more extreme events), and as a result, agricultural production may well become more variable, particularly in developing countries in rain-fed situations. This is one reason why it is so important to enhance smallholders’ resilience and ability to adapt.

Q: The CCAFS reports predict a catastrophic scenario in the near future. How can we deal with this?

PT: My take would be: it doesn’t have to be like this – if we sit and do nothing, the future does indeed look bad, particularly for those who are in fact least to blame for the emissions trajectory we are currently on. But what I take from these two publications is that there are many practical things that we can do to reduce emissions and to help smallholders adapt. We need action at all levels – local, national, regional and global.

Excerpt:

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Oct 25 2012 (IPS)

Investors and corporations have become increasingly concerned over the effects of climate change, which are being felt in vast areas of the planet and have begun to impact on the profitability of their operations.

“There are clear signs that the issue is present, and companies are facing the risk of economic losses as a consequence of climate change,” Brazilian Juliana Campos Lopes, the director for Latin America of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), told Tierramérica*.

The CDP, a not-for-profit organisation, promotes the flow of information from companies, investors and cities to transform economic activities in order to help prevent dangerous climate change.

The goal is to facilitate dialogue between institutional investors and companies for the disclosure of information on the risks and opportunities presented by climate change and data on the greenhouse gas emissions, water management strategies and supply chains of the world’s largest companies.

On behalf of major investors, the CDP sends questionnaires requesting information to the biggest publicly quoted corporations.

Today, more than 655 institutional investors use the information gathered by the CDP to make decisions. The organisation also has programmes for companies and local governments.

Companies risk economic losses as a result of climate change, stressed Lopes. Credit: Courtesy IBC

Q: Why is it important for investors and companies to adopt environmental standards?

A: Because climate change now has a direct impact on business. We have the recent case of the Japanese automotive companies that suffered major losses due to the floods that affected their supply chains in Thailand.

This is the view from the perspective of risk, but it is also possible to transform that risk into opportunities. For many companies that adopt standards to report climate-related information, such as their carbon footprint, it is a way of gaining access to new markets and a competitive advantage.

Many markets restrict the entry of products that do not report their carbon footprint, so it is a way of fulfilling the obligations established by certain regions, such as Europe or the United States, which now demand these requirements.

Q: What is the pace of adoption of these standards in Latin America?

A: In terms of regulation, we do not have many initiatives. But within certain countries there are commitments for greenhouse gas reductions, although the debate is still not conclusive. Nevertheless, there is a clear trend towards more restrictive regulations, as well as indications that environmental costs will begin to be incorporated in the prices of products and services.

This is a more general scenario that will end up establishing a way of doing business. Companies in Latin America that are already beginning to report their climate data have the benefit of prior preparation for this scenario, whether in terms of regulation or market access.

The CDP questionnaire is an action plan that guides the management of emissions, which generates profits by reducing energy costs and losses. All of this investment is eventually paid back.

Q: How long does this payback take?

A: Initiatives to reduce emissions, mainly through greater energy efficiency, pay for themselves within three years. We need to dispel the myth that the payback for these investments takes place in the long term. These are some of the benefits that companies are already reporting.

Q: What environment standards do you promote?

A: The CDP recommends the most widely accepted methodologies, like the ISO 14000 family of standards. Most companies have operations in more than one country, so the benefit of international standards is that they are compatible and accepted in different regions.

To provide a comparative view, which is something else we advocate, we also promote the creation of indicators to measure the quality of management internally and offer these indicators to investors, who use them in the analysis of the make-up of investment portfolios.

Q: Where are companies’ emissions concentrated?

A: Between 50 and 80 percent are found in the supply chain. Therefore, all of this effort to measure and report emissions could be compromised if this chain is not considered as well.

Q: Has the climate awareness of investors and companies increased in recent times?

A: Yes, particularly as the problem has become more critical. There are clear signs that the issue is present, and companies are facing the risk of economic losses as a consequence of climate change.

We could take the example of the droughts in the United States, which led to a spike in grain prices on international markets. All of this is bringing about a change in paradigm. Now we need to discuss not only mitigation but also adaptation.

Latin America is, after Africa, the region that will suffer the most from climate change, despite that fact that it does not contribute the most to causing it.

One characteristic of the region is that, for example, the majority of businesses in the agricultural area are geared to export to markets with stricter criteria. That is why this scenario leads to changing the vision of regional business owners and investors.

Q: What should the role of the state be?

A: It is very important at both the national and local level. The private sector is becoming increasingly active in the construction of these parameters, but it is precisely the lack of a consensus among national governments at the global level that is leading us to a very fragmented approach and the emergence of different parameters.

There are many initiatives for measuring and reporting emissions, but the absence of a regulatory framework leads to a fragmented vision that is even beginning to cause some confusion.

A new factor is the more active role of local governments. It is cities that feel the greatest impacts of climate change and must confront the reality of adaptation on a daily basis.

There is considerable space for cooperation with the private sector, because both mitigation and adaptation require financing, which could result in major opportunities for public-private initiatives.

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

Excerpt:

Tomson Chikowero was ashamed of his job. He did not want anyone finding out what he did to earn a living, so he used to wake up early every morning and leave his home in Hatfield, a residential suburb in Zimbabwe’s capital city Harare, under the cover of darkness.

And he would return only after sunset when no one could see him carrying the bags of plastic bottles that he collected from people’s trash that day.

Tomson Chikowero carrying the bags of plastic bottles that he collected from people’s trash for recycling. People like him have become Zimbabwe’s unlikely climate change ambassadors. Credit: Stanley Kwenda/IPS

For the middle-class Chikowero, who was formerly employed as a builder but lost his job in 2010, collecting plastic and cardboard boxes from people’s trash to resell was embarrassing at first. But now he has become one of a handful of unlikely climate change ambassadors here.

Climate change has already had an impact on the country, with the Meteorological Service Department confirming that rainfall here has declined, while temperatures have risen in the past few years. It will, according to a study released on Mar. 21 titled Strengthening national capacity for climate change programme in Zimbabwe, place the country’s food security and economic growth at risk.

However, trash has a role to play in climate change mitigation in this southern African nation. A 2010 publication by the United Nations Environment Programme titled Waste and Climate Change said: “after waste prevention, recycling has been shown to result in the highest climate benefit compared to other waste management approaches. This appears to be the case … also in developing countries.”

Barnabas Mawire, the country director for Environment Africa, an environmental NGO, agreed that recycling is important for Zimbabwe.

“Recycling helps climate change (mitigation) a great deal…If industries recycle plastic bottles and scrap materials they will not use the same amount of energy they would use if they were making plastic or metal from scratch. If they recycle, they would use less raw materials and energy and that has been proven to reduce the carbon footprint,” he told IPS.

The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) factsheet on recycling stated that “recycling plastics uses only roughly 10 percent of the energy it takes to make a pound of plastic from virgin materials.”

While there are no estimates on how much Zimbabwe would save in greenhouse gas emissions, recycling in the United Kingdom currently saves more than 18 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, the annual emissions of 177,879 passenger vehicles.

But many Zimbabweans are not aware of climate change or mitigation efforts. This southern African country has no climate change policy, though it is in the process of formulating one with the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

So when Chikowero first started collecting trash he, along with the hundreds of others who sort through people’s trash to collect plastic and cardboard boxes for resale, merely did it to earn a living in a country with an unemployment rate of 70 percent. A kilogramme of plastic can be sold for between seven and 10 dollars.

While there are no official figures on how many people earn a living from this, the sight of people collecting trash from Harare’s suburbs is a common one. Plastic buyers at the Mbare Musika market in Harare told IPS that they deal with over 200 garbage collectors every day.

The market is the biggest in the city, and has an organised area for buyers of recyclable material. In addition, Mukundi Plastics, a packaging and recycling company in Harare’s industrial area, said that they receive deliveries from about 100 people a day.

Recycling is important to the country. According to the Environmental Management Authority, a government body set up to protect environmental services and goods, Zimbabwe is running out of landfill sites.

In addition, the Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa 2011 said that Zimbabwean households generate solid waste amounting to 2.7 kg per day, of which only 47 percent is biodegradable. Authorities often resort to burning trash as a way of disposing it, a practice considered harmful to the environment.

Recycling is a great way to combat this.

Chikowero first learnt about climate change and how recycling can reduce carbon emissions when a buyer mentioned it to him and other trash collectors as a way of encouraging them to continue their work.

“We were just doing this for the money when we started, and I wondered why people are interested in buying plastic bottles and cardboard boxes, until we were told what happens once the plastic is bought from us,” Chikowero said. It is recycled by both local and international companies for the manufacture of soft drink bottles and cereal boxes.

He also did not realise that by encouraging domestic workers in the homes he collected trash from to separate paper from plastic, he was helping Zimbabwe with climate change mitigation.

According to the study Strengthening national capacity for climate change programme in Zimbabwe, commissioned by the government and U.N. agencies, the nation lacks the capacity to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

“I asked them to separate plastic bottles from the waste that they put in their rubbish bins. At first they were hostile to the idea, but with time when they became familiar with me and understood why I was asking them to do so, it became easy,” said Chikowero.

The more people embraced the idea, the easier his job became. And he is now able to collect larger amounts of plastic in less time, thereby earning more money.

Currently he collects plastic from 50 blocks of residential flats in Harare’s city centre and the outlying areas of Eastlea.

The caretakers of these flats are also fast becoming part of his sphere of influence. “They help me a lot and that makes my job easy,” said Chikowero as he pointed to a notice by the caretaker encouraging residents to separate their paper and plastic from the rest of their waste on a wall at the St. Tropez Flats in Eastlea.

Here, housemaids Idah Ndadziyira and Tatenda Munjoma told IPS that three other plastic collectors passed through the building on a regular basis, and that they, like Chikowero, taught them about climate change and the importance of recycling.

“I did not know what it was about. In fact I thought it could only happen in other countries and not in Zimbabwe until the plastic collectors educated me about it… I am now sharing the information with other people,” Ndadziyira told IPS.

Chikowero has now gotten every third house in the Eastlea suburb to recycle their plastic, and other households are steadily catching up.

“It’s now a way of life. That’s why this movement is growing,” said Chikowero.

Even the country’s National Climate Change Committee coordinator, Dr. Toddy Ngara, acknowledged the efforts of trash collectors like Chikowero.

“Their work is commendable, they have helped a lot in cleaning our cities and are now helping to clean the environment with their contribution to the recycling industry,” Ngara told IPS.

The government’s climate adaptation committee has promised to consult and use them as ambassadors in developing a national climate change strategy.

The director of environment at the Ministry of Environment, Irvin Kunene, said at a climate change policy meeting in Harare in early May that “all stakeholders including trash collectors will be consulted in crafting the country’s national climate change policy.”

And it has made Chikowero proud of his job.

“Now, I am no longer ashamed,” he told IPS.

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

One of the world’s largest “paper factories” – a dubious title traditionally conferred on the United Nations –  is on the verge of running out of business.

The world body, which now calls itself “Paper Smart”, has drastically cut down its paper output. Virtually every single document is now being transmitted electronically – a decision taken by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

The United Nations says it is putting sustainable development into practice at the Rio+20 summit, which runs Jun. 20-22, through its Paper Smart initiative to minimise both paper use and the conference’s overall carbon footprint by encouraging the use of digital documents.

Despite the United Nations’ “Paper Smart” initiative, the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development appears more paper and less smart here. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

“There will be extremely limited print-on demand (sic) services when needed,” it warned.

In a bygone era, hundreds and thousands of press releases and voluminous U.N. reports came uninterruptedly from the paper mill in the Secretariat in New York. And at the end of the day, the reports ended up in a garbage dump – or, more recently, in a recycling bin.

No longer, says a U.N. official. “We produce paper only on demand,” said Magnus Olafsson, director  of the U.N. Meetings and Publishing Division at the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management.

In an interview with IPS, he pointed out that the 132-member Group of 77 developing countries, the largest single coalition at the United Nations, requested only six printed pages of a 40-page document during the negotiations at Rio+20.

“If we succeed”, he said, it will be the wave of the future. “The reaction from member states has been very
positive,” he added.

When the Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) began negotiations early this year, the original document, called the zero draft, was 6,000 pages long. The final outcome document will be 49 pages – all in electronic format.

The Rio+20 summit, also known as the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, is the first major U.N. conference that has gone digital.

The United Nations, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption in the context of the global environment, is apparently practising in its own backyard what it preaches to the outside world.

During the PrepCom meetings in New York, delegates were encouraged to carry their mobile devices, including tablets, to avail themselves of the Paper Smart Portal, available at http://papersmart.un.org.

Perhaps the ultimate compliment came from Joseph Torsella, U.S. Ambassador for U.N. management and reform, who told delegates in New York recently: “We have evidence and experience on our side: we know reform can succeed at the U.N. because we can see where it already ha.s.

“We see the unsung heroes in the U.N.’s Department of General Assembly and Conference Services Management who’ve been pushing toward a paper-smart U.N. So far, they have reduced UN printing by 65 percent in just two years, saving each year a pile of a paper 49 times as tall as the (39-storeyed) Secretariat building, and a pile of money too.”

The 1,400-member U.N. delegation attending Rio+20 will generate an estimated 3,600 tonnes of carbon emissions, largely from air travel. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 2 2012 (IPS)

As the international community readies for a global mega-conference on sustainable development in Brazil mid-June, the United Nations is determined to practice what it preaches to the outside world: improve resource efficiency and drastically reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions.

With over 50,000-60,000 participants worldwide scheduled to arrive in Rio de Janeiro, the U.N. staff delegation to the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+20, has been minimised to approximately 1,400 – primarily for economic and environmental reasons.

But even so, the 1,400 participants, according to U.N. statistics, will generate an estimated 3,600 tonnes of carbon emissions, largely from air travel.

And so the president of the 193-member General Assembly, Ambassador Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser of Qatar, has offered his strong support for a Carbon Emissions Offsetting Initiative (CEOI).

The aim: to offset the carbon footprint from U.N. staff travelling to Brazil and participating in Rio+20 summit.

A carbon footprint has been defined as the total amount of greenhouse gases produced to support human activities, and is traditionally expressed in equivalent tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2).

The CEOI, the brainchild of the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation in the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), is aimed at a “climate neutral U.N. participation at Rio+20”.

“I look forward to a resounding success of this U.N. system-wide Carbon Emissions Offsetting Initiative at Rio+20,” Ambassador Al-Nasser said.

In a letter to Yiping Zhou, head of the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation, Dr. Mutlaq Al-Qahtani, ambassador and chef de cabinet, said “the President of the General Assembly commends your team’s creativity and your leadership in responding to our collective commitment to ‘walking the talk’ on climate change”.

The CEOI also has the blessings of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and Under-Secretary-General Sha Zukang, head of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs and secretary-general of Rio+20.

Both officials will join Ambassador Al-Nasser during the launch of the initiative on Jun. 21 as part of a side event at Rio+20 in Brazil.

The Special Unit has been mandated to facilitate the initiative by building partnerships and leveraging the services of its flagship exchange platform: South-South Global Assets and Technology Exchange (SS-GATE) to offset the estimated 3,600 tonnes of CO2 emissions from the U.N.’s participation in Rio+20.

According to the Special Unit, SS-GATE will offset the emissions with Gold Standard Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs) generated from Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects with a priority for projects in the 48 Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

The CDM allows emissions-reduction projects in developing countries to earn CER credits, each equivalent to one tonne of CO2.

CERs can be traded and sold, and used by industrial countries to meet a part of their targets under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

The Special Unit says that with more than 3,600 registered projects in 72 developing countries, the CDM has proven to be a powerful mechanism to deliver finance for emissions-reduction projects and contribute to sustainable development.

To date, about 1,270 projects in 45 countries have issued a total of more than 780 million CERs.

The Special Unit also points out that SS-GATE has recently offset over 3,500 tonnes CO2 emissions from two major U.N. events: the U.N. Pavilion at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, China and the 2011 Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa.

The Special Unit’s key partners include the the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) and its Rio+20 Secretariat, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNCCC) and the UNDP’s Environment and Energy Group and its Bureau for Development Policy.

Meanwhile, in a report released in April, the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) points out that over 50 percent of the U.N.’s greenhouse gas emissions are from air travel (4.2 tonnes per capita) making this the biggest challenge for the organisation in reducing its overall emissions.

In its third annual report titled “Moving Towards a Climate Neutral U.N.,” the report details a wide range of actions taken across the U.N. system to improve resource efficiency and cut the organisation’s emissions.

“These include encouraging train journeys over air travel, providing bicycles for staff members, installing efficient lighting systems in U.N. offices or using e-conferencing instead of traveling to meetings,” it says.

According to the report, the U.N.’s 2010 emissions for 54 entities in hundreds of locations (and over 200,000 employees) show that the U.N.’s total greenhouse gas emissions were 1.8 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

“This is the same amount of carbon sequestered annually by 383,795 acres of pine or fir forests, an area the size of the Faroe Islands.”

In the foreword to the report, Ban said “the United Nations system is strongly committed to leading by example and ensuring that our operations are continuously monitored and improved – not just in terms of what we deliver, but also how we deliver.”

“We are also looking to this year’s U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development – Rio+20 – to generate ideas that will energize sustainability efforts worldwide,” he added.