Delegates at the Sixth Conference on Climate Change and Development in Africa (CCDA VI), held from Oct. 18-20, 2016 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

By Friday Phiri
ADDIS ABABA, Oct 30 2016 (IPS)

The Paris Agreement on climate change is set to enter into force on Nov. 4, after it passed the required threshold of at least 55 Parties, accounting for an estimated 55 per cent of the total global greenhouse gas emissions, ratifying the agreement.

The landmark deal, reached at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention (COP21) in Paris in December 2015, aims to limit the increase in the global average temperature to ‘well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels’ and to pursue efforts to ‘limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels’ in this century."Parties cannot have bargaining power from outside." -- Natasha Banda of the ACPC’s Young African Lawyers Programme

The basis of the Agreement is the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) submitted by all parties in the lead-up to COP 21, which are essentially blueprints for how they plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Once a party ratifies the Paris Agreement, its coming into force implies that the Agreement and all its provisions – including INDC which changes to NDC – becomes legally binding to that Party.

However, while some African countries are among the 86 Parties that had ratified the Agreement by Oct. 27, an analysis by the African Climate Policy Centre (ACPC) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) has revealed that most African NDCs are vague in their adaptation and mitigation aspirations.

“There are still a number of challenges with the submissions of many developing countries, including vagueness in their mitigation ambitions and adaptation aspirations; lack of cost estimates, no indication of sources of funding and in some cases, pledges of mitigation commitments that exceed their current levels of emissions, among others,” Johnson Nkem of ACPC told IPS during the Sixth Conference on Climate Change and Development in Africa (CCDA VI), held from Oct. 18-20.

Nkem sympathises with most African countries, which he said had to outsource the development of their INDCs due to lack of capacity and resources to do so on their own. He says ACPC is ready to help countries that are yet ratify to consider revising their climate action plans and make them more realistic before they submit instruments of ratification.

James Murombedzi of the African Climate Policy Centre speaking at the Sixth Conference on Climate Change and Development in Africa (CCDA VI), held from Oct. 18-20, 2016 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

With the continent considered the most vulnerable to climate change vagaries but contributing a mere five percent to global GHG emissions, the CCDA VI was held under the theme: The Paris Agreement on climate change: What next for Africa?

The main objective of the meeting was to discuss implications of implementing the Paris Agreement, considering that the continent is already experiencing climate-induced impacts, such as frequent and prolonged droughts and floods, as well as environmental degradation that make livelihoods difficult for rural and urban communities. Increasing migration is both triggered and amplified by climate change.

In this vein, of utmost importance for Africa is to understand the implications of the Agreement with regards to means of implementation (technology transfer and finance), an issue that has never escaped the minds of the African Group of Negotiators, and this is a point that Murombedzi emphasised to stakeholders at the conference.

“There are contentious nuances of the agreement that must be unpacked in the context of Africa’s development priorities, particularly in regard to the means of implementation which were binding provisions of the Kyoto Protocol and currently only non-binding decisions in the Paris Agreement,” said James Murombedzi, Officer in Charge of the ACPC.

But with the defective NDCs, Murombedzi is of the view that “the unprecedented momentum for ratification of the Paris Agreement presents an urgent opportunity for African countries to revise their Climate Action Plans to address the noted discrepancies and strengthen their ambition levels where appropriate.”

According to Murombedzi, the move would ensure that the implementation of the Agreement supports and accelerates the continent’s sustainable and inclusive development agenda as framed by the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Apart from revision of NDCs, another key issue that emerged at the conference was the mainstreaming of climate information and services in national decision-making processes, in order to better manage the risks of climate variability and adaptation, especially among the most vulnerable communities.

UNECA believes the vulnerable groups’ access to climate information services differs from the rest of society, thus, climate information services, with pro-active targeting where possible, need to be integrated throughout climate interventions for the benefit of women, girls and the youth.

In catalyzing action for this, UNECA organised a meeting for lawmakers, on the sidelines of CCDA VI.

“This training is geared at setting the scene for lawmakers to factor climate information issues in budgetary allocation in their countries,” said Thierry Amoussougo of Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), pointing out that the meeting was looking at strategies that could be implemented by lawmakers and governments to ensure climate change policies were mainstreamed into development planning and actions in different African countries.

According to experts, climate information refers to data that is obtained from observations of climate (temperature, precipitation from weather centers) and also data from climate model output. It entails the transformation of climate-related data together with other related information into customized products such as projections, forecast, information, trends, economic analyses, counseling on best practices, development and evaluation of solutions and other services in relation to climate that are useful to society.

The challenge is that due to several factors, these services in most African countries are not well coordinated, let alone accurate.

“There is need to not only build the capacities of the required human resources but also invest in adapted climate information infrastructure and create the enabling environment for different institutions involved in climate information delivery,” said Sylvia Chalikosa, Member of Parliament for Mpika Central located in Zambia’s far Northern region of Muchinga.

Generally, in examining the implications of the Paris Agreement for Africa’s sustainable economic growth, the conference noted the need to identify viable and transformative investment opportunities, reform institutions to make them more efficient, and build capacity to access and absorb climate finance — in readiness to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the Paris agreement, to leapfrog technologies and transition to low-carbon, climate-resilient pathways.

This, according to Natasha Banda, who is part of the ACPC’s Young African Lawyers Programme, supporting the African Group of Negotiators is the only way, for there is no turning back for African countries even amidst the noted teething challenges with their NDCs.

“At this stage, signing and ratifying the Agreement is not optional for us as Africa,” said Banda, stressing that ratifying the Agreement is the starting point because the nature of international Agreements is that “parties cannot have bargaining power from outside.”

To this end, Mithika Mwenda of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) has some advice for African countries as they go to Marrakech next month, where rules and procedures for implementation of the Paris Agreement would be set.

“We in Africa, particularly, are concerned with the most important action—adaptation to climate change,” said Mwenda, emphasising that the continent should not lose focus of the most important aspect—means of implementation.

By Rajendra Kumar Pachauri
NEW DELHI, Jan 14 2016 (IPS)

The agreement reached in December, 2015 at the 21st Conference of the Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is a major step forward in dealing with the challenge of climate change. The very fact that almost every country in the world signed off on this agreement is a major achievement, credit for which must go in substantial measure to the Government of France and its leadership. However, in scientific terms, while this agreement certainly brings all the Parties together in moving ahead, in itself the commitments that have been made under the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) are quite inadequate for limiting temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century relative to pre-industrial levels.

Rajendra Kumar Pachauri

Any agreement on climate change has to take into account the scientific assessment of the impacts that the world may face and the risks that it would have to bear if adequate efforts are not made to mitigate the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Scientific assessment is also necessary on the level of mitigation that would limit risks from consequential impacts to acceptable levels. The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has come up with a clear assessment of where the world is going if it moves along business as usual. The AR5 clearly states that without additional mitigation efforts beyond those in place today, and even with adaptation, warming by the end of the 21st Century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread and irreversible impacts globally. Adaptation and mitigation are complementary strategies for reducing and managing the risks of climate change. Correspondingly, substantial emissions reductions over the next few decades can reduce climate risks in the 21st Century and beyond, increase prospects for effective adaptation, reduce the costs and challenges of mitigation in the longer term and contribute to climate-resilient pathways for sustainable development.

In the AR5, five Reasons For Concern (RFCs) aggregate climate change risks and illustrate the implications of warming and of adaptation limits for people, economies and ecosystems across sectors and regions. The five RFCs are associated with: (1) Unique and threatened systems, (2) Extreme weather events, (3) Distribution of impacts, (4) Global aggregate impacts, and (5) Large scale singular events. These RFCs grow directly in proportion to the extent of warming projected for different scenarios.

Substantial cuts in GHG emissions over the next few decades can substantially reduce risks of climate change by limiting warming in the second half of the 21st century and beyond. Cumulative emissions of CO2 largely determine global mean surface warming by the late 21st century and beyond. Limiting risks across RFCs would imply a limit for cumulative emissions of CO2. Such a limit would require that global net emissions of CO2 eventually decrease to zero and would constrain annual emissions over the next few decades. But some risks from climate damages are unavoidable, even with mitigation and adaptation. This results from the fact that there is inertia in the system whereby the increased concentration of GHGs in the earth’s atmosphere will create impacts which are now inevitable.

The Paris agreement is an extremely significant step taken by the global community, but to deal effectively with the challenge ahead, a much higher level of ambition would be required by all the countries of the world than is currently embodied in the INDCs. A review of the INDCs is due to take place only in 2018 and 2023. This may be too late, because a higher level of ambition will need to be demonstrated urgently, if the world is to reduce emissions significantly before 2030. Delaying additional mitigation to 2030 will substantially increase the challenges associated with limited warming over the 21st century to below 2 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels. And, if the global community is serious about evaluating the impacts of climate change within a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, then stringent mitigation actions will have to be taken much earlier than 2030. If early action is not taken, then a much more rapid scale up of low carbon energy over the period 2030 to 2050 would become necessary with a larger reliance on carbon dioxide removal in the long term and higher transitional and long term economic impacts.

In essence, Paris has to be seen as the beginning of a journey. If the world is to minimize the risks from the impacts of climate change adequately, then the public in each country must demand a far more ambitious set of mitigation measures than embedded in the Paris agreement. That clearly is the challenge that the world is facing, and the global community must take in hand urgently the task of informing the public on the scientific facts related to climate change as a follow up to Paris. Then only would we get adequate action for risks being limited to acceptable levels.

(End)

Excerpt:

By Hazel Henderson
MIAMI, Florida, Nov 17 2015 (IPS)

We humans are acutely aware of risks. From our earliest times, the risks we faced were from hunger, predatory animals, extreme environmental conditions and, as our numbers grew, from other human tribes.

Hazel Henderson

Today, in the 21st century, new risks dominate our political and social issues from terrorism, barbarous attacks on civilians as in Paris, nuclear meltdowns and weapons, financial crises, desertification and famines, disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas, Greenland and Antarctica, water shortages, polluted air, rising sea levels, new pandemics and drug-resistant diseases.

Yet views about these risks and priorities in addressing them are all over the map. This disparity is largely due to different views on how these new risks arose, who is to blame (since they are mostly humanly self-inflicted). This underlying debate about causes of today’s risks still hampers agreement on how to address let alone solve them or mitigate their effects.

Take the view of risk prevalent in the global financial system and its millions of traders in London, Wall Street, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Shanghai. They focus on risks to corporate earnings and profitability, interest rate risk, weak GDP growth, volatile gasoline prices, grassroots opposition, government regulation, political demands for rising wages, democratic demands to reduce inequality.

I attended a conference on “Playing for the Long-term” in New York, November, 3, 2015, hosted by the New York Times convening some 500 Wall Streeters. Their views focused on these risks, as well as those disrupting finance posed by the incursions of Silicon Valley startups threatening to bypass Wall Street: crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending, cellphone banking, social media and electronic startups based on Internet platforms. Risks from cyber attacks also focused much attention. Risks from the wider world received little attention – even those now impinging on coal and oil stocks from activists divesting from fossil fuels. I asked Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman if he agreed with Bank of England head Mark Carney that many fossil fuel reserves could never be lifted or burned without further damage to the global climate and that these assets would be devalued. Mr. Gorman allowed that climate change was a problem, but that it was “not our business.”

Climate risk was hardly raised until one of the last speakers, former US Vice President Al Gore, explained how his London-based investment firm Generation Investment Management had produced healthy financial returns on $10 billion dollars of client assets by investing beyond fossil fuels in the more efficient, knowledge-rich technologies of renewable energy companies and the growing next economy: the Solar Age. Unfortunately for the rest of us, financial players like economists see risk in terms of money – forgetting that currencies are simply units of account which track and keep score of human transactions and interactions with nature’s resources.

So it still seems a question of “What risks?” – where and how they arise. How can we come together to share responsibility for our common future on this planet, powered daily by free energy from the Sun? As the beleaguered beautiful city of Paris prepares to host the UN Climate Summit from November 30 to December 11, 2015, even the world’s scientists of the Convention on Climate Change find their assessments of climate risk challenged not only by those denying that humans caused it, but that their models under-estimated these risks.

A UNEP Emissions Gap Report assessed the 119 Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) submitted by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) October 2015, covering 88 per cent of global GHG emissions in 2012. This indicates these efforts could cut up to 11 gigatons of CO2 equivalents from projected emissions by 2030. But, this is only half of the total required if there is a chance of staying below the target of below 2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said that these INDC levels are an increase in ambition levels but not sufficient to reach this 2C target.

Several scientists warn that sea level rises are now inevitable due to long feedback processes measured by Earth-observing satellites. These risks focus on melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, reported by scientists James Hanson, Erick Riguot, Richard Alley, Andrea Dutton, John Englander and others. David Wasdell, director of the London-based Meridian Programme, critiques the official IPCC report’s Summary for Policy Makers for downplaying the risks for political and economic expediency. Wasdell’s Climate Dynamics: Facing the Harsh Realities of Now (September 2015) concludes that human greenhouse gases already emitted, moving heat through Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, have already exceeded the 2C target and notional “available carbon budget.” Wasdell’s report concludes that any notional carbon budget allowing further emissions has already collapsed and we face a carbon debt instead.

Are these new climate risks insurmountable? Most experts say that there is time, but it is fast running out.

The good news is that more decision-makers and citizens in all sectors have ended their focus on fossil fuels and now recognize that our planet has always been amply powered by the Sun’s daily shower of free photons. Atmospheric CO2 can be returned to soils, deserts can be greened and ecosystems regenerated as finance is redirected by the 2° Investing Initiative. We humans have all the technology we need to scale up the next economy of efficient renewable resource technologies, as we track in our Green Transition Scoreboard® currently showing 6.22 trillion dollars of private investments in these Solar Age companies and technologies.

Risks also offer opportunities, and stress is evolution’s tool. Breakdowns drive breakthroughs!

(End)

Excerpt:

By Gunter Nooke
BERLIN, Jul 10 2015 (IPS)

When the three-day conference on Financing for Development begins on Jul. 13 in Addis Ababa, the competitors in this year’s Tour de France will have reached the mountains. They will have already experienced a few spills and will still have many kilometres to go.

A similar situation is facing us with the many important conferences taking place in this important, watershed year for development.

Günter Nooke. Credit: Bundesregierung/Bergmann

The journey began with a successful and financially productive pledging conference organised by Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, in Berlin in January, and it is set to end in December with the conclusion in Paris of a climate agreement that is binding under international law.

In between, we had a G7 Summit at Schloss Elmau in Bavaria in June that will surely remain in our memories for a long time. For one thing, this was probably the first summit where so many guests were invited to attend for such a long time and where development issues were so prominent on the agenda.

Heads of government from Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tunisia and Iraq were joined by the heads of international organisations such as the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organisation (WTO), International Labour Organisation (ILO), Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

As announced by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Brussels back in 2014, it was a true development outreach focusing on Africa for all that security issues also played a major role.

For the first time ever the heads of state and government of the G7 countries agreed to strive for a carbon-free world by the end of the century. Merkel, Germany’s environment minister at Kyoto in 1997 and the climate chancellor of Heiligendamm in 2007, has once again succeeded in convincing others to join forces in forging ahead with regard to an important issue.“If the countries of Europe and Africa could agree that those who use up more of the permitted volume for storing CO2 in the atmosphere than others should pay more into the climate fund, then we would have taken a huge step forward. And those whose CO2 emissions are lower … should enjoy a comparatively greater benefit from this climate money"

So far what we mostly have are words. Germany is the only industrialised country to have significantly increased its Official Development Assistance (ODA) in 2015.Germany stands by the 0.7 percent target, but is unwilling to commit to a rigid timetable with fixed increments for increasing ODA.

Of course, ODA remains important but there are other sources for financing development. Above all it is about how efficiently the money is spent and whether the burden is fairly shared. That should also be the most important leitmotif for the Financing for Development conference in Addis Ababa.

It will scarcely be possible to get binding financial commitments from everyone in Addis. It would also be a great shame if developing countries were to call for more money from the industrialised countries and donors and the “accused”, having been put on the spot, were to respond by pointing the finger at the poor performances of the developing countries when it comes to governance, legal certainty, human rights and an independent judiciary.

Instead of confrontation it would be better if efforts were made in Addis, as they were in Elmau, to continue laying the ground for working together on a basis of mutual trust, with concrete topics and fields of cooperation being named.

Before the December climate conference in Paris, there will be the General Assembly week in New York with all the heads of state and government, a meeting that is especially important this year.

This will be the occasion for agreeing on new goals for sustainable development, on a new pact on the world’s future with concrete goals (Sustainable Development Goals – SDGs), with targets for both developing and industrialised countries.

The intention is that all countries should each make their own contribution. The SDGs are to be universally applicable, but with shared yet differentiated responsibilities for achieving them jointly.

The success of the Elmau summit was the outcome of a rare harmony between language and substance. The Group of Seven is not just a group formed by the world’s strongest industrialised countries. Following the exclusion of Russia, it has once more become evident how much we need a partnership of countries that really want to build a community of values.

The situation at the United Nations, where 193 nations are represented by their national governments, is different.

Surely, in this critical situation and in the interests of Germans and Europeans, it behoves us to work towards a special trust-based partnership between Africa and Europe. The only way for the countries of Europe and of Africa to develop in peace is by working together as good neighbours.

If we take this partnership a bit further in Addis and in New York, then we will also be successful in Paris and will reach a binding climate agreement. And then we will no longer be able to get away with being vague about the numbers, we will have to share out the CO₂ savings among us and, from 2020 onwards, find the 100 billion dollars for the Green Climate Fund.

If the countries of Europe and Africa could agree that those who use up more of the permitted volume for storing CO₂ in the atmosphere than others should pay more into the climate fund, then we would have taken a huge step forward. And those whose CO₂ emissions are lower than the average level or the maximum level per head according to the dictates of sustainability should enjoy a comparatively greater benefit from this climate money.

This arrangement would be good for everyone in Europe and in Africa. Germany, the strong export nation with emissions levels of about nine tonnes a head, would have to pay a lot of money and countries like Burkina Faso or Malawi would receive a lot. And a country like Nigeria would also finally have an incentive to put an end to gas flaring once and for all.

There are many mountains and cliffs to overcome before reaching Paris, not just for the participants in the Tour de France. However, it is important that we know the route. Otherwise we may find that there are only two parties sitting at the table together in Paris and talking about what they – the United States and China – consider acceptable.

Europe and Africa would be out of the running. This other way is not the route that will lead us to our goal.

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Driven by solar and wind, world investments in renewable energy leapt in 2014. Photo credit: Jürgen from Sandesneben, Germany/Licensed under CC BY 2.0

By Sean Buchanan
ROME, Mar 31 2015 (IPS)

Driven by solar and wind, world investments in renewable energy reversed a two-year dip last year, brushing aside the challenge from sharply lower oil prices and registering a 17 percent leap over the previous year to stand at 270 billion dollars.

These investments helped see an additional 103Gw of generating capacity – roughly that of all U.S. nuclear plants combined –around the world, making 2014 the best year ever for newly-installed capacity, according to the 9th annual “Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investments” report from the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) released Mar. 31.

Prepared by the Frankfurt School-UNEP Collaborating Centre and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the report says that a continuing sharp decline in technology costs – particularly in solar but also in wind – means that every dollar invested in renewable energy bought significantly more generating capacity in 2014."Climate-friendly energy technologies are now an indispensable component of the global energy mix and their importance will only increase as markets mature, technology prices continue to fall and the need to rein in carbon emissions becomes ever more urgent" – Achim Steiner, Executive Director of UNEP

In what was called “a year of eye-catching steps forward for renewable energy”, the report notes that wind, solar, biomass and waste-to-power, geothermal, small hydro and marine power contributed an estimated 9.1 percent of world electricity generation in 2014, up from 8.5 percent in 2013.

This, says the report, means that the world’s electricity systems emitted 1.3 gigatonnes of CO2 – roughly twice the emissions of the world’s airline industry – less than it would have if that 9.1 percent had been produced by the same fossil-dominated mix generating the other 90.9 percent of world power.

“Once again in 2014, renewables made up nearly half of the net power capacity added worldwide,” said Achim Steiner, Executive Director of UNEP. “These climate-friendly energy technologies are now an indispensable component of the global energy mix and their importance will only increase as markets mature, technology prices continue to fall and the need to rein in carbon emissions becomes ever more urgent.”

China saw by far the biggest renewable energy investments last year – a record 83.3 billion dollars, up 39 percent from 2013. The United States was second at 38.3 billion dollars, up seven percent on the year (although below its all-time high reached in 2011). Third came Japan at 35.7 billion dollars, 10 percent higher than in 2013 and its biggest total ever.

According to the report, a prominent feature of 2014 was the rapid expansion of renewables into new markets in developing countries, where investments jumped 36 percent to 131.3 billion dollars. China with 83.3 billion, Brazil (7.6 billion), India (7.4 billion) and South Africa (5.5 billion) were all in the top 10 investing countries, while more than one billion dollars was invested in Indonesia, Chile, Mexico, Kenya and Turkey.

Although 2014 was said to be a turnaround year for renewables after two years of shrinkage, multiple challenges remain in the form of policy uncertainty, structural issues in the electricity system and even the very nature of wind and solar generation which are dependent on breeze and sunlight.

Another challenge, says the report, is the impact of the more than 50 percent collapse in oil prices in the second half of last year.  However, according to Udo Steffens, President of the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, the price of oil is only likely to dampen investor confidence in parts of the sector, such as solar in oil-exporting countries and biofuels in most parts of the world.

“Oil and renewables do not directly compete for power investment dollars,” said Steffens. “Wind and solar sectors should be able to carry on flourishing, particularly if they continue to cut costs per MWh. Their long-term story is just more convincing.”

Of greater concern is the erosion of investor confidence caused by increasing uncertainty surrounding government support policies for renewables.

“Europe was the first mover in clean energy, but it is still in a process of restructuring those early support mechanisms,” according to Michael Liebreich, Chairman of the Advisory Board for Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “In the United Kingdom and Germany we are seeing a move away from feed-in tariffs and green certificates, towards reverse auctions and subsidy caps, aimed at capping the cost of the transition to consumers.

“Southern Europe is still almost a no-go area for investors because of retroactive policy changes, most recently those affecting solar farms in Italy. In the United States there is uncertainty over the future of the Production Tax Credit for wind, but costs are now so low that the sector is more insulated than in the past. Meanwhile the rooftop solar sector is becoming unstoppable.”

A media release announcing publication of the UNEP report said that if the positive investment trends of 2014 are to continue, “it is increasingly clear that major electricity market reforms will be needed of the sort that Germany is now attempting with its Energiewende [energy transition].”

The structural challenges to be overcome are not simple,” it added, “but are of the sort that have only arisen because of the very success of renewables and their over two trillion dollars of investment mobilised since 2004.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

Part of the area planned for extraction of CO2 in Val d’Elsa, Tuscany, Italy with a protest sign reading: EXTRACTION OF CO2 FROM THE GROUND – A NONSENSE!!! Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
LUCCA, Italy, Oct 30 2014 (IPS)

“If  they go ahead and dig those wells, all my work will be destroyed, all my life, everything,” says Franca Tognarelli, looking at the hills and vineyards around her house in Certaldo, Val d’Elsa, in the heart of Tuscany.

Now retired, Franca invested all her savings in restructuring her house in Certaldo, only to find that it sits on top of a deposit of CO2 that a private company – Lifenergy S.r.l. – is eager to extract and sell for industrial purposes, most likely in the production of sparkling beverages.

The irony is that the gas under Franca’s house is the same greenhouse gas held largely responsible for global warming.

While a growing awareness of the potential disastrous consequences of climate change is pushing nations to join efforts in curbing emissions of CO2, including considering highly disputed technologies such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), the prospect of lucrative business is enough for private companies to want to extract more of it from under the ground.While a growing awareness of the potential disastrous consequences of climate change is pushing nations to join efforts in curbing emissions of CO2 … the prospect of lucrative business is enough for private companies to want to extract more of it from under the ground

According to a scientific source who wished to remain anonymous, the CO2 obtained from the area in question would offset most of the production of renewable energy in Tuscany, ultimately cancelling its Italian leadership in the production of geothermal energy.

In a preliminary phase, the CO2 project would involve drilling two test wells to a depth of between 400 and 700 metres inside a 45 hectare area that Lifenergy has already purchased. If the testing gives positive results, the company would then proceed to expand a network of wells necessary for extracting the CO2.

“They will simply have to compensate me for the part of ground they’ll be drilling,” explains Franca, “but they will be allowed to enter my property and dig all the holes they want.”

Under Italian law, a land owner’s permission is not required to enter the land for experimental excavation purposes once such experiments have been authorised by the public authorities.

Lifenergy is not the first company to have attempted to put its hands on the CO2 reserves of Val d’Elsa, but it is the first which has managed to obtain the permits to do so, after a last attempt made in the 60s ended up with the explosion of a well.

In May, a group of concerned citizens took the issue to the Tuscany Regional Administrative Court, but the court rejected their objections to the Lifenergy plan. “The law is on our side and we are open to dialogue, but we are determined to carry forward our activities,” Massimo Piazzini, managing director of Lifenergy, told local news website GoNews.

“But we need serious and responsible institutions that are willing to discuss and find solutions to give new opportunities to the territory, while respecting mankind and the environment,” he added.

Members of the Committee for the Safeguard and Defence of Val d’Elsa blame the previous town council for not having taken concrete action against the Lifenergy plan, but the newly elected mayor of Certaldo, Giacomo Cucini, said that “after receiving the company request to start testing, the former mayor simply followed the normal procedure without expressing a political opinion on the matter.”

Nevertheless, he added, “the current town council openly opposes the extraction project on our territory, because this is a territory that lives on agriculture and tourism and we want it to remain that way.”

Apart from the ‘visual impact’ that an extraction plant would have on the characteristic landscape of Certaldo, the risks of water and air pollution are a major concern among members of the Committee for the Safeguard and Defence of Val d’Elsa.

“There are plenty of farmers here who have been working all their lives, sweating blood to keep their business going, especially with the crisis,” says Caterina Concialdi, one of the committee members. “Now they have to face a private company that might leave them empty-handed, because the risks are real and nobody is telling us who’s going to pay for the damages if something happens.”

Ubaldo Malavolta is one of those farmers. His land is part of the area for which Lifenergy has requested a drilling permit after the testing phase.

“If they get the concession, they will be able to dig holes in my garden, and it’s not like a water well,” he said, adding that the company itself has declared that there will be emissions of hydrogen sulphide.”

“It’s called H2S and it’s not just about the smell, it’s poisoning and it leads to air pollution” insists Tiziano Traini, another committee member. “They are obviously supposed to keep the level of these emissions under the threshold established by law. But this will nevertheless mean a serious worsening of environmental conditions for the people who live here.”

Despite the widespread opposition shared by local citizens and the town council, the decision on the concession lies in different hands: “We have been asked to express a technical opinion,” Cucini explains, “but in no way can the municipality allow or deny the research phase of the project.”

The Tuscany Region, the authority that is responsible for the concession, is currently in the process of evaluating the environmental impact and is expected to take a decision by the beginning of December.

“The research permit is still on, but the Regional Council has stated that there will be no more concessions for underground extractions in the area, and this is quite reassuring for us,” the mayor told IPS.

Enrico Rossi, president of the Tuscany Region, explained in a public statement that the Regional Council’s stance is an act of responsibility towards the environment.

But the citizens seem to have lost their faith in the institutions and look with concern at their future: “I’m too old to go anywhere,” says Franca, “and this house will be of no value inside a mining area.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

* Anja Krieger and Elena Roda contributed to this report.

Jänschwalde open cast lignite mine, close to Atterwasch, Germany. Credit: Christian Huschga

By Melanie Mattauch
LUSATIA, Germany, Aug 20 2014 (IPS)

Johannes Kapelle has been playing the organ in the Protestant church of Proschim since he was 14. The 78-year-old is actively involved in his community, produces his own solar power and has raised three children with his wife on their farm in Proschim, a small village of 360 inhabitants in Lusatia, Germany.

Now the church, his farm, the forest he loves dearly and his entire village is threatened with demolition to leave space for expansion of Swedish energy giant Vattenfall’s lignite (also known as brown coal) operations to feed its power plants. Nearly all of the fuel carbon (99 percent) in lignite is converted to CO₂ – a major greenhouse gas – during the combustion process.“What we’re seeing today is the result of putting economic thinking at the forefront. Our mantra is to just continue doing things as long as they generate profit. We need to counteract this trend with ethical thinking. We need to do what’s right!” – Protestant pastor Mathias Berndt

For Kapelle, this is inconceivable: “In Proschim, we’ve managed effortlessly to supply our community with clean energy by setting up a wind park and a biogas plant. Nowadays, it is just irresponsible to expand lignite mining.”

The desolate landscape the giant diggers leave behind stretches as far as the eye can see from just a few hundred metres outside Proschim.

“It’s only going to take about a quarter of a year to burn the entire coal underneath Proschim. But the land is going to be destroyed forever. You won’t even be able to enter vast areas of land anymore because it will be prone to erosion. You won’t be able to grow anything on that soil anymore either. No potatoes, no tomatoes, nothing,” says Kappelle.

Some 70 km northeast of Proschim, Protestant pastor Mathias Berndt also sees his community under threat. His church in Atterwasch has been around for 700 years and even survived the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century. Now it is supposed to make way for Vattenfall’s Jänschwalde Nord open cast lignite mine.

The 64-year-old has been Atterwasch’s pastor since 1977 and refuses to accept that his community will be destroyed: “As Christians, we have a responsibility to cultivate and protect God’s creation. That’s what it says in the Bible. We’re pretty good at cultivating but protection is lacking. That’s why I’ve been trying to stop the destruction of nature since the days of the German Democratic Republic.”

“Vattenfall’s plans to expand its mines have given this fight a new dimension,” Berndt adds. “This is now also about preventing our forced displacement.”

Berndt is currently involved in organising a huge protest on August 23 – a human chain connecting a German and Polish village threatened by coal mining in the region. He has also been pushing his church to step up its efforts to curb climate change.

As a result, his regional synod has positioned itself against new coal mines, lignite power plants and the demolition of further villages. It is also offering churches advice on energy savings and deploying renewable energy. The parsonage in Atterwasch, for example, has been equipped with solar panels.

Parsonage in Atterwasch with solar panels. Credit: Christian Huschga

Despite Germany’s ambitions for an energy transition, its so-called Energiewende, the country’s CO₂ emissions have been rising again for the past two years, for the first time since the country’s reunification. This is primarily due to Germany’s coal-fired power plants, and brown coal power stations in particular.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recently confirmed that it is still possible to limit global warming below 2° C. But there is only a limited CO₂ budget left to meet this goal and avert runaway climate change.

The IPCC estimates that investments in fossil fuels would need to fall by 30 billion dollars a year, while investments in low-carbon electricity supply would have to increase by 147 billion dollars a year.

As a result, more and more faith leaders are calling for divestment from fossil fuels. One of the most powerful advocates has been Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former South African Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, who recently called for an “anti-apartheid style boycott of the fossil fuel industry”.

Tutu’s call to action has been echoed by U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres, who has urged religious leaders to pull their investments out of fossil fuel companies.

Protestant pastor Mathias Berndt. Credit: Christian Huschga

Many churches have taken this step already. Last month, the World Council of Churches, a fellowship of over 300 churches representing some 590 million people in 150 countries, decided to phase out its holdings in fossil fuels and encouraged its members to do the same.

The Quakers in the United Kingdom, the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, the United Church of Christ in the United States, and many more regional and local churches have also joined the divestment movement.

The Church of Sweden was among the first to rid itself of oil and coal investments. It increased investments in energy-efficient and low-carbon projects instead, which also improved its portfolio’s financial performance.

Gunnela Hahn, head of ethical investments at the Church of Sweden’s central office explains: “We realised that many of our largest holdings were within the fossil industry. That catalysed the idea of more closely aligning investments with the ambitious work going on in the rest of the church on climate change. ”

Meanwhile, from the frontline, pastor Berndt calls for putting ethics first: “What we’re seeing today is the result of putting economic thinking at the forefront. Our mantra is to just continue doing things as long as they generate profit. We need to counteract this trend with ethical thinking. We need to do what’s right!”

*  Melanie Mattauch is 350.org Europe Communications Coordinator

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The Japanese government blames the shutdown of its 50 nuclear reactors as the reason why it must revise its target. Credit: Bigstock

By Stephen Leahy
WARSAW, Nov 15 2013 (IPS)

Japan announced Friday that it will renege on its carbon emissions pledge, likely ending any hope global warming can be kept to 2.0 degrees C.

The shocking announcement comes on the fifth day of the U.N. climate talks in Warsaw known as COP19, where more than 190 nations have agreed to a 2.0 C target and are trying to close the carbon emission gap to get there."It's like a slap in the face of those suffering from the impacts of climate change such as the Philippines." -- Wael Hmaidan

Japan will increase that gap three to four percent with its new 2020 reduction target, according to the Climate Action Tracker (CAT). It amounts to a three-percent increase compared to a 1990 baseline. Japan’s 2009 Copenhagen Accord pledge was a 25 percent reduction by 2020.

“Japan is taking us in the opposite direction,” Marion Vieweg of Climate Analytics, a German climate research organisation, told IPS here in Warsaw.

“Their revision shows the bottom up approach is not working if countries can simply drop their pledges at any time,” Vieweg said.

Climate scientists have long maintained that the 2020 target for industrialised countries should be to reduce emissions 25-40 percent compared to a 1990 baseline. However, even if nations meet their current climate pledges under the Copenhagen Accord, CO2 emissions in 2020 are likely to be eight to 12 billion tonnes higher than what’s needed, according to the U.N. Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report 2013.

Japan, the fifth largest emitter of CO2, is just the latest to abandon its international commitments.

While Australia hasn’t officially torn up its reduction pledge, the newly elected Tony Abbott government has gutted nearly all the emission programmes it needs to fulfill its 2020 promise of reductions between five and 25 percent compared to 2000, said Vieweg.

Canada may be the worst offender. Itrecently said its carbon emissions will be 20 percent higher than its Copenhagen pledge. More importantly, Canada’s emissions in 2020 will be 66 -107 percent greater than what’s actually required to do its share to reach 2.0 C.

“We’re getting results,” claimed Canada’s Environment Minister Leona Agglukaq.

“Australia, Canada and now Japan are having a destructive impact on the climate negotiations,” said Kimiko Hirata, Japanese Climate Action Network spokesperson. Climate Action Network (CAN) is an international network of more than 800 NGOs.

“There has been no public discussion about this lower target. We are very embarrassed by our government’s decision,” Hirata said in a press conference here.

The Japanese government blames the shutdown of its 50 nuclear reactors as the reason why it must revise its target. However, analysis by Climate Action Tracker has found that even with Japan’s current fossil fuel mix it could still reduce emissions 17-18 percent.

Climate Action Tracker produces independent reports by Climate Analytics, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Dutch-based energy institute Ecofys.

“With more energy efficiency and renewables, Japan could still make its 25-percent target,” said Vieweg.

Three separate studies by Japanese civil society organisations also show Japan could meet its 25-percent target without nuclear power. One detailed economic study shows that investments in energy efficiency and green energy would create more than two million jobs without reducing Japan’s GDP.

“Last October has been the hottest October Australia has ever experienced. Australians want action on climate,” said Heather Brewer of Climate Action Network, Australia.

More than 200 events and actions will be held in Australia on Nov. 17 to protest the Abbott government’s climate policies, she said.

On Monday at the opening of COP19, Yeb Sano, lead negotiator of the Philippines delegation, spoke emotionally about the devastation caused by Super Typhoon Haiyan. An extraordinarily powerful storm, it was the 24th typhoon to hit the country this year. Many see this as an indicator of climate change and of what is to come.

“I will now fast for the climate. I will not eat during this COP until there is a meaningful outcome in sight with concrete pledges,” Sano said in the opening plenary.

Sano has now been joined by more than 100 people here in Warsaw and more outside.

And in an unprecedented action, Sano launched a public online petition today to call on U.N. countries to take urgent and bolder action to tackle climate change. Within hours, more than 100,000 people had signed on.

“Superstorm Haiyan is a climate nightmare — carbon pollution is driving more frequent and intense storms which are devastating vulnerable communities. New realities require new politics, I urge you to stop the sad tradition of feet-dragging on commitments to cut pollution, and breaking promises on finance,” it reads in part.

Japan’s announcement “is like a slap in the face of those suffering from the impacts of climate change such as the Philippines,” said Wael Hmaidan, director of CAN International.

By Lusha Chen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 14 2013 (IPS)

In June, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia were enveloped in haze as hundreds of forest fires burned across the island of Sumatra, in the worst pollution crisis to hit Southeast Asia in more than a decade.

Dr. Nigel Sizer, Courtesy of the World Resources Institute

An analysis by the U.S.-based World Resources Institute (WRI) determined that 150,000 square kilometres burned – more than twice the size of Singapore. Worse, nearly three-quarters of the fires in the study area burned on peatland (a soil layer composed of partly decomposed organic material,  often several metres deep), which acts as a sink to absorb planet-heating carbon dioxide.

Dr. Nigel Sizer, the director of WRI’s Global Forest Initiative, spoke with IPS correspondent Lusha Chen about the obstacles they confronted in investigating the fires, and what countries in the regional Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) can do to prevent this recurring environmental catastrophe.

Q: Regarding the most recent fires across Sumatra, what efforts are being undertaken and what efforts should be taken to investigate the cause of the fire and potential culprits?

A: Achieving full accountability for the fires in Sumatra is important, but it will not be easy. Officials in Indonesia, Singapore, and elsewhere are currently investigating who started the fires and who is legally responsible. Several companies that operate palm oil and pulpwood concessions, as well as a few individuals, have already been implicated.

Still, it remains to be seen exactly who will be officially prosecuted and what the penalty will be. Knowing who is legally responsible can be determined only after careful collection of evidence and proper due process.

A major hurdle is that land ownership information in Indonesia is complex, difficult to obtain and opaque. Analysis from the World Resources Institute found that determining who is legally responsible managing the land where fires occurred is a huge challenge.

For example, although many fires were concentrated in company concession lands set aside for palm oil or pulpwood development, simply identifying which companies manage the land proves very difficult. The company concession data are inconsistent between the Ministry of Forestry, the provincial and district governments, and even more so with the self-reported data from the companies.

Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia should work together to try and unravel the complex ownership structures of the companies, and their subsidiaries, to understand who manages the land where fires may have occurred.

Q: In the report, you called on ASEAN leaders to act together to stop the pollution. Did this happen at the recent meeting in Brunei?

A: In October the heads of state from the ASEAN countries took some positive steps towards combatting the illegal and harmful fires that cause the haze. Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and Thailand agreed to adopt a joint “haze monitoring system” and share digital land-use and concession maps on a government-to-government basis. These are good steps towards transparency and accountability.

But much more progress needs to be made. The governments stopped short of making concession and land use data entirely public, which would allow for independent monitoring of fire-prone areas by civil society. The ASEAN governments can also do more to ensure that companies operating in multiple countries in the region are held to responsible for their operations in Sumatra.

Ultimately, enforcement on the ground in Indonesia remains the most important thing. The risk of further fires will remain high unless the no-burn policies as strictly enforced at a local level. This will require support from national and local governments, as well as corporate buyers and consumers who purchase commodities produced in the area.

Q: How seriously are the fires contributing to Indonesia’s GHG emissions, and what are the long-term consequences if the problem is not addressed?

A: The fires are an enormous contributor to Indonesia’s Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, and will have profound impacts on the country’s climate strategies.

Calculating the emissions from the fires is be extremely difficult, due to uncertainly in the depth and quantity peat, a soil layer of partly-decomposed organic material that can emit large amounts of gas when burned. According to estimates from Indonesia’s national office on climate change*, changes in land use (including fires) and the effects on peatland account for 79 percent of Indonesia’s total emissions. This is globally significant, as Indonesia is, by some accounts, the third largest emitter in the world.

The Indonesian government has pledged to cut emissions 26 percent (or 41 percent with international assistance) by 2020 compared to business-as-usual. It will be very difficult for them to meet this ambitious goal without addressing the issue of fires on forest and peatland.

Q: Slash-and-burn is a very traditional way to clear the land for planting. What efforts should be taken at the grassroots level?

A: We need greater awareness and political will from the leaders on the ground. Elected officials, local governments, and local communities need to take strong action to ensure that illegal burning is controlled. Local farmers should be given alternatives to burning, such as access to mechanised equipment that can make clearing and planting easier.

It is also vital that major plantation companies prohibit their local company operators and suppliers from burning land. Similarly, corporate buyers of commodities like palm oil and pulp and paper should ensure that their supply chains are not linked to companies suspected of burning.

Getting the markets to send the right message will help ensure that local farmers and company operators understand the damage that the fires cause.

Change on the ground cannot happen without them.

(*Citation: DNPI (2010) Indonesia’s Greenhouse Gas Abatement Cost Curve. Dewan Nasional Perubahan Iklim, Jakarta, Indonesia.)

Excerpt:

Climate change effects, such as extreme weather events, drive up environmental remediation costs. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 7 2013 (IPS)

If global carbon emissions continue to rise at their current rate, humanity will eventually be left with no other option than a costly, world war-like mobilisation, scientists warned this week.

“It’s blindingly obvious that our economic system is failing us,” said economist Tim Jackson, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey in the UK."Prosperity isn’t just about having more stuff. Prosperity is the art of living well on a finite planet." -- economist Tim Jackson

Climate change, pollution, damaged ecosystems, record species extinctions, and unsustainable resource use are all clear symptoms of a dysfunctional economic system, Jackson, author of the report and book “Prosperity Without Growth”, told IPS.

“It is a travesty of what economy should be. It has absolutely failed to create social well being and has hurt people and communities around the world,” he said.

Emissions need to peak and decline by 2020 to have a chance at keeping global temperature rise to less than 2.0 degrees C, according to the Emissions Gap Report 2013, involving 44 scientific groups in 17 countries and coordinated by the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

Carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels has raised the global average temperature only 0.85C so far, but even that has produced a wide range of impacts.

Despite years of negotiations, countries’ commitments to reducing emissions remain far short of what’s needed, said Merlyn van Voore, UNEP climate change coordinator.

Even if nations meet their current climate pledges under the Copenhagen Accord, CO2 emissions in 2020 are likely to be eight to 12 billion tonnes higher than what is needed to stay below 2C at a reasonable cost, the report concluded. Failure to close this “emissions gap” by 2020 will require an unprecedented global effort to crash carbon emissions.

“Waiting brings huge additional costs,” van Voore said in a press conference.

No country has offered to do anything beyond their 2009 Copenhagen commitments. Nor is anyone expecting new offers at next week’s UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP 19) in Warsaw. Very few country leaders will attend COP 19, making this a technical negotiation on the shape of new climate treaty that will only come into force in 2020.

In the six years remaining before 2020, not only do countries need to increase their reduction commitments, some countries have to actually put policies in place to meet their Copenhagen commitments. China, India, Russia and the European Union are on track, but the U.S. and Canada are not, the report found.

In recent months, however, the U.S. has introduced some new policies and plans, including emissions caps on power plants. Canada is going in the opposite direction.

A government report recently acknowledged its emissions will be at least 20 percent higher than its Copenhagen reduction target. This was considered “good progress” given the skyrocketing emissions from its rapidly expanding tar sands oil operations, the Canadian government report said.

“Canada is a wealthy country. It could easily meet its target,” said Jennifer Morgan, director of the Climate & Energy Programme at the World Resources Institute.

“It’s very important for Canada to meet its target. That sends a very important message to the world,” Morgan, lead author of the UNEP report, told IPS.

However, economics is getting in the way of action. Canada has become very rich as the biggest supplier of foreign oil to the U.S. In less than 20 years, Canada’s GDP has tripled to 1.8 trillion dollars, with ambitious plans to grow even more. Politicians in Canada, and all over the world, reject anything they believe would hurt their countries’ economic growth.

Jackson and number of ecological economists say the current self-destructive economy must be transformed into one that delivers a shared and lasting prosperity. This kind of Green Economy is far beyond business as usual with some clean technology thrown in. It is what Jackson calls a “fit-for-purpose economy” that is stable, based on equity and provides decent, satisfying livelihoods while treading lightly on the earth.

The current growth-worshiping consumption economy is “perverse” and at odds with human nature and our real needs, he said.

“Prosperity isn’t just about having more stuff,” he said. “Prosperity is the art of living well on a finite planet.”

With powerful vested interests in the current economy, making this transformation will be difficult but it is already starting to happen at the community level. Jackson and co-author Peter Victor of Canada’s York University lay all this out in a new report “Green Economy at Community Scale“.

They see the roots of a transformational Green Economy in community banks, credit unions and cooperative investment schemes that enhance local communities. The Transition Town movement, creating local currencies, community-owned energy projects, global Ecocity movement are all part a response to an economy that does not work for most people and has created an environmental crisis, said Victor in a press release.

“Using GDP as measure of success is like riding a bike while only paying attention to how fast you are pedaling,” Jackson said.  “It is wrong in so many ways.”

Nuclear energy provides around a fifth of U.S. electricity demand. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 4 2013 (IPS)

Four prominent climate and energy scientists are calling on environmentalists to rethink their longstanding opposition to nuclear energy, warning that there is no “credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power”.

The warning comes just ahead of a new round of international climate negotiations, slated to start next week in Poland, aimed at arriving at an international consensus on action to mitigate climate change beyond 2015. Yet observers are increasingly pessimistic that this process will be able to keep the planet’s average temperature rise below two degree Celsius by the end of this century, the current stated goal."Solar and wind technologies have none of those risks and their costs are quickly coming down." -- Steve Clemmer of UCS

The new call comes in the form of a letter sent over the weekend to world leaders, prominent environmentalists and green organisations. Most prominently, it was signed by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist who for decades has written of the dangers posed by climate change; today, he is perhaps the single most recognisable researcher speaking on the issue in the United States.

Also signing on to the call, addressed to “those influencing environmental policy but opposed to nuclear energy”, are two additional U.S. scientists, Ken Caldeira and Kerry Emanuel, and one from Australia, Tom Wigley. Each are associated with major research institutions.

“We appreciate your organization’s concern about global warming, and your advocacy of renewable energy. But continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change,” the four state.

“With the planet warming and carbon dioxide emissions rising faster than ever, we cannot afford to turn away from any technology that has the potential to displace a large fraction of our carbon emissions. Much has changed since the 1970s. The time has come for a fresh approach to nuclear power in the 21st century.”

Currently, nuclear energy provides around a fifth of U.S. electricity demand. Globally, that figure is slightly lower, with 30 countries hosting nuclear reactors that provided around 12 percent of worldwide electricity production, as of 2011.

As of July, around 434 reactors were operating globally, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a U.S. lobby group. In addition, 71 new plants were under construction, including two here in the United States.

In their letter, the four scientists say that while they support renewable forms of electricity production, these methods appear unable to deal with the quickly ramping-up global demands for energy. They also suggest that new nuclear plant designs are cheaper and “much safer” than older reactors, while new incineration methods can “solve the waste disposal problem”.

The letter has been embraced by the nuclear industry, which many analysts suggest has been stagnating for years over environmental and safety concerns.

“The letter puts an exclamation point on a phenomenon that has been unfolding for several years, namely the steady growth in support for nuclear energy from leading environmentalists,” Marv Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, told IPS in a statement.

“Greenhouse gas emissions would be vastly higher if nuclear energy facilities did not provide 40 percent of the electricity globally that is produced by carbon-free sources of power (63 percent in the United States) … There is ever-increasing recognition of this analysis.”

Expensive, slow, risky

In fact, the number of environmentalists who have publicly begun advocating for nuclear power in the face of climate change remains quite low, though James Hansen will now be a notable addition.

Among environmentalists, initial reactions to the letter have been adamant, if respectful, rejection.

“[We] respect these scientists, and thank them for their years of service. Unfortunately, we will have to agree to disagree with them on this one,” Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS.

“While we agree that the climate crisis is the most urgent challenge of our time, this group fails to acknowledge that wind, solar and [energy] efficiency are the faster, cheaper and safer way to fight the climate threat.”

Brune says nuclear plants are “too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky”, while noting that Germany, one of the world’s largest economies, is currently decommissioning its nuclear plants while focusing significant funding on renewable energy sources.

Indeed, green groups have been increasingly trumpeting the falling costs of renewables, with wind energy falling by around 43 percent over the past three years, and solar down by 80 percent. The economics of nuclear, on the other hand, have become even more complicated in recent years, with several U.S. plants shutting down over feasibility concerns.

Further many renewable technologies are currently ready to be put into action, compared to the decade it can take to build a new nuclear plant. A major report released last year by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a U.S. research group, found that currently available renewable technologies could provide 80 percent of U.S. demand by 2050.

And while, in their letter, Hansen and the other scientists allude to new technologies that would make the nuclear option cheaper and safer, most such methods have yet to be demonstrated.

“There certainly are proposed technologies that proponents say would address many of these concerns, but they don’t have a proven track record, and have yet to be deployed on a large scale,” Steve Clemmer, director of energy research for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“It would have been nice to know exactly what this letter is referring to, as they don’t actually back up these claims. If they’re going to convince environmental groups, they’re going to need to offer some good technical information.”

While UCS has focused for years on issues of nuclear safety and price (a recent analysis on a U.S. plant under construction can be found here), the group doesn’t reject the prospect of nuclear energy entirely.

“Because the climate issue is so large and the need to reduce emissions is so big and urgent, we certainly don’t want to take nuclear power off the table as a potential solution to climate change,” Clemmer says.

The United States alone, for instance, will likely have to reduce its emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050.

“As such, we’re definitely supportive of things like research and development of nuclear and other technologies that can reduce carbon emissions, and we want to make sure we have as many options at our disposal,” Clemmer continues.

“But where we are today is a different story. We’re not in a position to allow for large-scale deployment of nuclear power, due to concerns over security, proliferation, safety, waste disposal. Meanwhile, solar and wind technologies have none of those risks and their costs are quickly coming down.”

Because many deep-sea ecosystems are so stable, even small changes in temperature, oxygen, and pH may lower the resilience of deep-sea communities. Credit: Courtesy NOAA HURL Archives

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

Oil, gas and coal are contaminating the world’s oceans from top to bottom, threatening the lives of more than 800 million people, a new study warns Tuesday.

“It took a year to analyse and synthesise all of the studies on the impacts of climate change on ocean species,” Camilo Mora, an ecologist at University of Hawai‘i in Honolulu and lead author, told IPS."We are seeing greater changes, happening faster, and the effects are more imminent than previously anticipated." -- Alex Rogers of the University of Oxford

Mora is also lead author of ground-breaking climate study published in Nature last week.

“It was very sad to see all the responses were negative. We were hoping there might be some safe havens,” he said.

The study found that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are overheating the oceans, turning them acidic and reducing the amount of oxygen in seawater. This is happening too fast for most marine species to adapt and ocean ecosystems around the world will collapse.

By 2100, no corner of the oceans that cover 70 percent of the Earth’s surface will be untouched.

“The impacts of climate change will be felt from the ocean surface to the seafloor. It is truly scary to consider how vast these impacts will be,” said Andrew Sweetman of the International Research Institute of Stavanger, Norway, co-author of the PLOS Biology study published Oct. 15.

This ambitious study examined all the available research on how current and future carbon emissions are fundamentally altering the oceans. It then looked at how this will impact fish, corals, marine animals, plants and other organisms. Finally the 29 authors from 10 countries analysed how this will affect the 1.4 to 2.0 billion people who live near the oceans or depend on them for their food and income.

Some 500 million to 870 million of the world’s poorest people are likely to be unable to feed themselves or earn incomes from oceans too contaminated by fossil fuel emissions, the “Biotic and Human Vulnerability to Projected Changes in Ocean Biogeochemistry over the 21st Century” study concludes.

“We are making a big mess of the oceans. Climate change is having a major impact illustrating the need for urgent action to reduce emissions,” said Mora.

The researchers used models of projected climate change developed for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to build their analysis. These models are validated using measurements from past decades.

Additionally the findings of the PLOS Biology study were verified using actual observations. There were some differences but not significant enough to alter the conclusions, said Mora.

More shocking is that the oceans will be dramatically altered even with reduced growth in use of fossil fuel in coming decades and major declines starting in 2050, he said.

Only an abrupt decline in consumption of oil, gas, and coal within the next 10 years will minimise the impacts on the oceans.

This study only looked at how climate change is impacting the oceans and did not look at other impacts such as overfishing, chemical and nutrient pollution or plastic trash.

However, the 2013 update to the Ocean Health Index also released Tuesday did look at all current impacts on oceans. It ranked the current overall health of the oceans as a 65 out of possible 100. The index was launched in 2012 and is annual international collaboration to assess health of oceans based on 10 measures such as biodiversity, coastal livelihoods and protection, food provision.

The oceans’ ability to provide food only scored 33 out of 100, showing that food security is already at risk. It also means fish and other foods from the oceans are being harvested far faster than nature can replace them, the index reports.

China, Taiwan, Russia, India and Japan had the worst scores indicating that their regional wild-caught fisheries are nearly depleted.

“The Ocean Health Index measures how well we are sustainably producing seafood,” said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Centre for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Fish are a vital source of protein for many but the index shows food security is at risk in some parts of the world, said Rosenberg in a release.

In regions subject to damaging storms and cyclones, the health of their coastal zones including mangroves, salt marshes, seagrass beds and coral reefs are a poor 57 out of 100, the index found. Tropical cyclones cause an estimated 26 billion dollars a year in lost property.

“Coastal habitats mitigate the damage that storms cause…. We must try to restore naturally protective coastal habitats,” Elizabeth Selig, director of Marine Science at Conservation International, said in a statement.

The Index “reveals the areas that must be improved in order to provide our children and their children a healthy thriving ocean,” said well-known oceanographer Sylvia Earle who is explorer-in-residence at National Geographic.

“This must be done as if it’s a matter of life and death – because it is,” Earle said in a statement.

Yet another independent assessment of ocean health reached a similar conclusion.

The world’s oceans are changing faster than previously thought with potentially dire consequences for both human and marine life, said the State of the Oceans report released last week by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Climate change combined with other impacts like chemical pollution and overfishing have put the oceans into a downward spiral.

“We are seeing greater change, happening faster, and the effects are more imminent than previously anticipated,” Alex Rogers of the University of Oxford and IPSO’s scientific director told IPS.

“What these latest reports make absolutely clear is that deferring action will increase costs in the future and lead to even greater, perhaps irreversible, losses,” said Dan Laffoley of the IUCN in a release.

Rich benthic fauna and associated reef fish, Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, which is expected to be one of the first places in the world to see prolonged, record-breaking heatwaves. Credit: Courtesy of Keoki Stender, Marinelifephotography.com

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Oct 10 2013 (IPS)

A climate plague affecting every living thing will likely start in 2020 in southern Indonesia, scientists warned Wednesday in the journal Nature. A few years later the plague will have spread throughout the world’s tropical regions.

By mid-century no place on the planet will be unaffected, said the authors of the landmark study."Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past." -- Nature study lead author Camilo Mora

“We don’t know what the impacts will be. If someone is about to fall off a three-storey building you can’t predict their exact injuries but you know there will be injuries,” said Camilo Mora, an ecologist at University of Hawai‘i in Honolulu and lead author.

“The results shocked us. Regardless of the scenario, changes will be coming soon,” said Mora.

The “climate plague” is a shift to an entirely new climate where the lowest monthly temperatures will be hotter than those in the past 150 years. The shift is already underway due to massive emissions of heat-trapping carbon from burning oil, gas and coal.

Extreme weather will soon be beyond anything ever experienced, and old record high temperatures will be the new low temperatures, Mora told IPS. This will affect billions of people and there is no going back to way things were.

“Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past,” he said.

In less than 10 years, a country like Jamaica will look much like it always has but it will not be the same country. Jamaicans and every living thing on the island and in its coastal waters will be experiencing a new, hotter climate – hotter on average than the previous 150 years.

The story will be same around 2030 in southern Nigeria, much of West Africa, Mexico and Central America without major reductions in the use of fossil fuels, the study reports.

“Some species will adapt, some will move, some will die,” said co-author Ryan Longman also at the University of Hawai‘i.

Tropical regions will shift first because their historical temperature ranges are narrow. Climate change may only shift temperatures by 1.0 degree C but that will be too much for some plants, amphibians, animals and birds that have evolved in a very stable climate, Longman said.

Tropical corals are already in sharp decline due to a combination of warmer ocean temperatures and  higher levels of ocean acidity as oceans absorb most the carbon from burning oil, gas and coal.

The Nature study examined 150 years of historical temperature data, more than a million maps, and the combined projections of 39 climate models to create a global index of when and where a region shifts into novel climate. That is to say a local climate that is continuously outside the most extreme records the region has experienced in the past 150 years.

Canada’s climate won’t shift until 2050 under the business as usual emissions scenario the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calls RCP8.5. The further a region is from the equator, the later the shift occurs. If the world sharply reduces its use of fossil fuels (RCP4.5), then these climate shifts are delayed 10 to 30 years depending on the location, the study shows. (City by city projection here)

Tropical regions are also those with greatest numbers of unique species. Costa Rica is home to nearly 800 species, while Canada, which is nearly 200 times larger in area, has only about 70 unique or endemic species.

Species matter because the abundance and variety of plants, animals, fish, insects and other living things are humanity’s life support system, providing our air, water, food and more.

“It’s an elegant study that shows timing of when climate shifts beyond anything in the recent past,” said Simon Donner, a climate scientist at Canada’s University of British Columbia.

Donner, who wasn’t involved in the study, agrees that the new regional climates in the tropics will have big impacts on many species.

“A number of other studies show corals, birds, and amphibians in the tropics are very sensitive to temperature changes,” Donner told IPS.

The impacts on ecosystems, food production, water availability or cites and towns are not known. However, the results of the study confirm the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions to reduce those future impacts, he said.

Developed countries not only need to make larger reductions in their emissions, they need to increase their “funding of social and conservation programmes in developing countries to minimize the impacts of climate change”, the study concludes.

Amongst the biggest impacts the coming ‘climate plague’ will have is on food production, said Mora.

“In a globalised world, what happens in tropics won’t stay in the tropics,” he said.

Courtesy of the Mary Robinson Foundation

By Lusha Chen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 2 2013 (IPS)

Climate justice – the nexus between human rights and climate change – must be a pillar of the post-2015 development agenda, says former Irish president Mary Robinson.

As global temperatures rise, low-income communities suffer disproportionately from health problems, financial burdens, and social and cultural disruptions.

Founder of the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice, the former U.N. high commissioner for human rights spoke with IPS correspondent Lusha Chen about the challenges and opportunities facing developing countries, especially small island states, when it comes to their survival or extinction in coming decades.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: In 2009, when you attended the Copenhagen Climate Summit, you said you didn’t see journalists or some ministers from developed countries show urgency to deal with climate change issues. Do you think this year’s U.N. General Assembly offered any changes?

A: I am surprised that more heads of state and senior ministers of developing countries don’t actually speak about their reality: that they are suffering more and more from climate shocks.

They talk about it privately, but they somehow don’t want to project vulnerability. It’s a contrast to the heads of state of small island states that maybe are going to go under. They have no choice, so they speak out and they want climate justice.

We know the reality, and we also understand that communities that haven’t contributed [to the problem] have to benefit from the low-carbon economy that we must move to. And particularly access to affordable, renewable energy.

Q: Many developing countries are facing a conflict between economic development and paying the cost to protect the environment. What’s your take on this?

A: I recognise that there are costs, I think unfair costs if you like, on poor developing countries, and we need much more support for adaptation for climate resilience, whether it’s rural areas or in cities.

I was talking to [Liberian] President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.  She may have to move part of her population from her capital Monrovia – she hasn’t budgeted for that – because of the climate. So we need much more support for adaptation, and also for the technologies that will help poor countries to benefit from no-carbon growth.

And there are a lot of examples of south-south cooperation now, which I very much welcome:  south-south engagement in projects for access to energy, even at the local level, and I’m very keen that we promote as much as possible of that.

But we have to recognise that we are coming to a very difficult period, and if we don’t do the right thing in 2015, and have a fair, robust, equitable agreement that keeps us below two degrees Celsius [of warming], it will get much more difficult for countries that are seeing a big expansion in their populations… to cope with food security, to adapt.

So this is a very precious time, it’s a very important time, and that’s why climate justice links to a good sustainable development agenda post-2015 for all countries, which countries must take more responsibility to cut their emissions, and also a fair climate agreement.

Q: Are you still plugged into what’s going on in Ireland?

A: Yes, I would also look to Ireland to take responsibility. As a former president, I don’t engage politically in Ireland, and that’s understood. But Ireland is a good country to work on food security from, because we have a very good reputation for tackling hunger…  and I’m proud of that.

Excerpt:

The melting of Mexico’s Orizaba glacier is another consequence of global warming. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
NANTES, France, Sep 27 2013 (IPS)

Greenland will eventually truly become green as most of its massive ice sheet is destined to melt, the authoritative U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported Friday.

The IPCC’s new 36-page summary of the latest science includes a warning that there is a 20-percent chance the massive Greenland ice sheet will begin an irreversible meltdown with only 0.2 degrees C of additional warming. That amount of additional warming is now certain. However, it would take 1,000 years for all the ice to melt."Every word in the 36 pages has been debated. Some paragraphs were discussed for over an hour." -- Thomas Stocker, co-chair of IPCC Working Group I

“The new report is yet another wake-up call saying we are in deep trouble and heading for dangerous levels of climate change,” said David Cadman, president of ICLEI , the only network of sustainable cities operating worldwide and involving  1,200 local governments.

“The IPCC will be attacked by fossil fuel interests and their supporters….They will try and scare the public that taking action puts jobs and the economy at risk,” Cadman told IPS. “That’s simply not true. It’s the opposite.”

Overwhelming evidence

The IPCC’s summary of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) released in Stockholm clearly states that humans are warming the planet, confirming previous reports dating back to 1997. Since the 1950s, every decade following has been warmer than the previous one, it says.

“Temperatures between 1983 and 2012 are the warmest in the past 1,400 years [in the Northern Hemisphere],” said Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the IPCC Working Group I.

In response to media reports about a so-called “warming hiatus”, Stocker said the climate system is dynamic, with more heat likely going into oceans in recent years and slightly slowing the rate of surface temperature increases.

The science around climate change is well established. More than 100 years ago, researchers demonstrated that carbon dioxide (CO2) traps heat from the sun. Burning fossil fuels, deforestation and other human activities put additional CO2 into the atmosphere, where it remains essentially forever. That additional CO2 is trapping additional heat, as it acts like another layer of insulation.

More than 90 percent of this additional heat energy is being absorbed by the oceans, according to the AR5, officially known as the Summary for Policy Makers. This explains why temperatures at the surface are not higher than today’s global average increase of 0.8 C.

The summary highlights the fact that the decrease in Arctic sea ice over the last three decades is “unprecedented” in the last 1,450 years. This year’s summer sea ice melt was less than last year’s record, but it still was the sixth lowest ever measured. The report says the Arctic is on track to be ice-free in summer before 2050, much sooner than previous reports projected.

A cautious consensus

The AR5 is a five-year effort by hundreds of scientists from 39 countries to assess, evaluate and synthesise the findings of 9,200 peer-reviewed scientific studies published since the last review in 2007, called the AR4. The IPCC does not do any research itself and is run by 110 governments who spent the last four days approving the final wording of the summary.

“Every word in the 36-pages has been debated. Some paragraphs were discussed for over an hour,” Stocker said at a press conference in Stockholm.  “No other science report has ever undergone such critical scrutiny.”

The 2000-plus page full report of Working Group I on the physical science underlying climate change will be published Monday. That is the first of four IPCC reports to be released in the coming year.

The cautiously-worded Summary for Policy Makers details and confirms the observed impacts such as increased temperatures, precipitation changes, weather extremes and more. It also confirms these and other impacts will worsen as CO2 emissions increase. Current CO2 emissions levels are at the top of the worst-case scenario.

“Do not misunderstand the low end of the temperature and other ranges in the report,” said Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organisation.

“Those are only possible if we completely stop emitting CO2,” Jarraud said.

The AR5 summary says the Greenland ice sheet lost an average of 215 billion tonnes of ice a year between 2002 and 2011. More recent studies show the ice lost has increased substantially since that time.

According to AR5, there is a one in five chance the Greenland ice sheet will melt entirely if global temperatures climb from 0.8C to more than 1.0C as is now inevitable. One of the reasons is that temperature increases in the Arctic are nearly three times higher than global average.

The 50-50 point for an unstoppable meltdown of Greenland leading to a seven-metre sea level rise is less than 4.0C.

Despite this, the AR5 says global sea level rise is not expected to be greater than one metre this century, higher than the 2007 estimate. Other scientists, including James Hansen, former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, say the observed accelerated melting of the Arctic, Greenland, Antarctic and world’s glaciers is a sign that a multi-metre rise in sea levels is possible this century unless emissions decline.

“Climate denialists”

Even before the IPCC’s new report was made public, it was attacked and misrepresented by “climate change denialists” trying to paint its findings as radical or extreme, said Charles Greene, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University in New York State.

Greene is referring to a well-documented propaganda effort by some in the fossil fuel industry as well as extremist right-wing organisations attempting to confuse the public about the reality and urgency of global warming.

“In fact, the IPCC has a long track record of underestimating impacts” of climate change, Green said.

While global action remains gridlocked, some cities are already cutting their carbon emissions. ICLEI’s members are committed to a 20-percent reduction by 2020 and 80-percent reductions by 2050.

Most national governments are failing to lead which clearly reveals the power and influence of the fossil fuel sector, Cadman says. “Cities could do 10 times more but they simply don’t have the money.”

U.S. climate emissions have already begun to come down, currently resting at their lowest point in a decade and a half. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 27 2013 (IPS)

The United States has formally told the United Nations that it is on track to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 17-percent by the end of the decade, assuming that currently proposed regulations are implemented.

That figure would be in line with a central goal President Barack Obama laid out in a watershed climate-focused plan unveiled in June. While environmentalists have been generally supportive of that initiative, known as the Climate Action Plan, the 17-percent goal (to be reduced below 2005 levels) has struck some as too cautious.“Other nations like Mexico, China and those in the E.U. are watching closely to see whether the U.S. will make good on its promises." -- Lou Leonard of WWF

On Thursday the United States handed over two reports to the United Nations, one charting the country’s progress on cutting emissions and a second that, for the first time, forecasts estimated future improvement. The reports come a day before a U.N. panel is set to unveil its fifth major update analysis on the causes and ramifications of climate change.

“This biennial report is the first ever of its kind, and will serve as a benchmark for other countries, and will hold them accountable for action on climate change,” Heather Zichal, President Obama’s top aide on climate change, told an audience here on Wednesday.

“The world looks to the United States for leadership on climate change, and we feel we must deliver it both at home and abroad … In his speech [in June], President Obama made clear that if Congress wouldn’t take action on climate change, put our nation on the path to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020, he would.”

While the United Nations has required four-yearly reporting on countries’ existing emissions-reduction policies, the United States was reportedly central in pushing the new biennial, forward-looking reporting on what countries are planning to do to combat climate change. (The U.S. biennial report is actually still in draft form, open to public comment through late October.)

The reports find that U.S. climate emissions have already begun to come down, currently resting at their lowest point in a decade and a half. Officials now estimate a range of potential emissions cuts by 2020 – depending on how implementation of regulations proceeds, greenhouse gases could come down by 14 to 20 percent below 2005 levels.

Under the hood

To get anywhere near those levels, the administration says the country will need to impose restrictions on the carbon output of both new and current power plants. It will also need to ratchet up energy efficiency standards while tamping down on two particularly noxious gases, methane and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).

U.S. regulators have taken initial steps on several of these issues, most recently last week’s proposal to significantly limit carbon emissions from current power plants (a similar proposal for current power plants is expected next June). Yet nearly all of these regulatory measures remain highly controversial, with the business lobby and Republican lawmakers offering varying levels of pushback.

“Today’s report provides a first chance to look under the hood of the President’s Climate Action Plan,” Lou Leonard, head of climate change programmes for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), said Thursday.

“Other nations like Mexico, China and those in the E.U. are watching closely to see whether the U.S. will make good on its promises and show global leadership. As the first-of-its-kind report under new international guidelines, the assessment should set a strong example of transparency and thoroughness.”

Leonard noted that the report shows the 17 percent target is “achievable but by no means yet certain”.

Further, implementation of many of these regulations will require significant cooperation with local-level forces.

“To ensure we reach and surpass the 2020 goals, action in U.S. cities and counties is another critical piece of the puzzle, and hundreds of communities are doing their part by strengthening building codes, promoting clean energy and building smarter transportation,” said Brian Holland, director of climate programmes at ICLEI USA, a network of 450 local governments.

“Federal collaboration and support for local government action has been instrumental in achieving emissions reductions in leading cities. Much more will be necessary to stabilise global climate in the long run.”

Schizophrenic approach

Others are questioning both Obama’s goal and his route to achieving it. Currently the president’s energy approach is known broadly as “all of the above”, a catchphrase meant to suggest (particularly to conservatives) that he will not be making ideologically driven energy decisions.

Yet a rising chorus has warned that continued reliance on fossil fuels is undercutting the quick scale-up in renewable energy technologies that many feel is necessary to make real progress on cutting U.S. – and global – carbon emissions.

This is particularly true with regard to the new surfeit of cheap U.S. natural gas following the introduction of technologies allowing for a process known as hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”). While this glut has accounted for much of the United States’ dip in emissions in recent years, as gas has increasingly supplanted coal, it has also come to define U.S. energy policy for the foreseeable future.

“You can’t solve climate change with an ‘all of the above’ approach – you have to go ‘all in’ on a clean energy future. The White House continues to have a schizophrenic approach to climate policy,” Jamie Henn, communications director for 350.org, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“On the one hand, the Obama administration is taking important steps forward with investments in renewable energy and the recent power plant regulations. On the other, they’re letting fracking go unregulated, still deliberating on the Keystone XL [crude oil] pipeline, and weakening key international climate policies.”

While the United States set records last year for new wind power installations – and is setting similar records this year with solar – the federal regulatory regime overseeing incentives for renewable energy here remains notably uneven, leaving investors and utilities with little long-term confidence. Fixing this issue, many argue, would allow both for this sector to blossom and for the federal government to substantially increase its emissions-reduction goals.

“A 17-percent reduction in emissions is actually far below what we should be making,” Henn says. “If anything, the [new U.N.] report underlines the need for more immediate and ambitious action.”

Queensland declared a natural disaster Jan. 12, 2011 in Brisbane, Australia. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 24 2013 (IPS)

More than a half-dozen governments on Tuesday launched a yearlong collaborative investigation into the economic benefits of taking broad action to combat global climate action.

The nine-million-dollar initiative, dubbed the New Climate Economy project, is being spearheaded by a commission chaired by former Mexican president Felipe Calderon and is backed by the governments of Colombia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Korea, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

The research will be carried out by institutes located in most of these countries and will culminate in a report to be published in September 2014, just ahead of a major scheduled United Nations summit on climate.

In addition to an oversight panel made up of former heads of state and finance ministers, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate is co-chaired by Nicholas Stern, the British economist who published a touchstone climate change review for the U.K. government in 2006. For this reason, the project is being seen as a direct follow-up to Stern’s previous work.

“At a time when governments throughout the world are struggling to boost growth, increase access to energy, and improve food security, it is essential that the full costs and benefits of climate policies are more clearly understood,” Stern said Tuesday, as the new project was launched on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York.  “It cannot be a case of either achieving growth or tackling global warming. It must be both.”

Since the publication of his 2006 report, Stern has been credited with having had perhaps the most significant impact on the international public understanding of the economic threats posed by climate change. He will now formally review the New Climate Economy report.

“There is some sense that this new report will be Stern 2.0, but in fact the focus looks set to be somewhat different,” Michele de Nevers, a senior programme associate at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“The Stern Review really focused on the costs of climate change, trying to make the point that the costs of halting or reversing climate change was relatively small in the global context. This new review, on the other hand, wants to focus on the benefits of climate action.”

Such a focus, she notes, could turn the conventional discussion on its head. “The global conversation needs to look at not just the costs,” she says, “but also the benefits that would accrue from climate action, in terms of economics, health and environment.”

Question of implementation

In developing and developed countries alike, a primary stumbling block in international climate discussions remains the amount of money both adaptation and mitigation efforts will require. The new United Nations-overseen Green Climate Fund, for instance, is aiming to raise 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 from industrialised countries, but even the first year’s pot of money has been slow to come together.

Similar debates are happening at national and community levels throughout the world, as well, as the impacts of growing weather extremes are becoming better understood. For the moment, much of this discussion continues to revolve around the sometimes staggering estimated costs of adaptation efforts and converting energy systems to be less carbon-intensive, and around the prospect that these efforts could raise significantly business operating costs.

In part for this reason, some are cautious in welcoming the new review, wondering whether the commission’s composition will be able to offer the innovative impetus required to guide the global climate discussion.

“A fresh focus on the economic consequences of climate change is very much needed, but this looks a bit like an exercise in rounding up the usual suspects – there’s significant overlap with previous … panels asking the same questions, which produced long reports that weren’t implemented thanks to the reluctance of industrialised countries to contribute their fair share,” Oscar Reyes, an associate fellow with the Climate Policy Programme at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“With bank bailouts leading climate funds to dry up, we unfortunately now see those same industrialised countries pushing for a climate finance system that’s even more dependent on the financial sector. This won’t change unless governments start to rethink their economic policies in light of the urgent climate challenge.”

Still, mounting research is making it increasingly difficult for lawmakers to ignore the prospect that climate inaction could ultimately be more expensive than policy overhauls.

New research from China, for instance, suggests that a small carbon tax would have a substantive impact on greenhouse gas emissions even as it cuts down on the air pollution that has substantially driven up health costs in that country.

Likewise, the official U.S. government auditor this year added climate change to the list of issues that pose the greatest financial risk to the government and country – and warned that Washington is markedly unprepared to deal with the scope of the problem.

The Government Accountability Office reported that disaster declarations in the United States increased to a record 98 in 2011, compared with 65 in 2004, requiring a total 80 billion dollars during that period. Further, this figure was nearly equalled by the single request, late last year, for more than 60 billion dollars in response to Superstorm Sandy, the hurricane that ravaged much of the country’s northeast.

“The launching of this new commission is extremely timely, in part because this country and other countries have finally started coming to terms with the increase in extreme weather events,” Nathaniel Keohane, vice-president of international climate at the Environmental Defence Fund, told IPS after attending the commission’s formal launch.

“That makes this kind of deep dive into the positive stories around the economies of climate change very timely. We need to move away from the old debate about what this will cost to recognise not only the price of inaction but also the opportunities that climate action will have for economies, jobs and innovation.”

Environmentalists and policy advocates say they will now be looking forward to the commission’s recommendations, as well as the potential impact the initiative’s report could have on the global negotiations to agree on a new international agreement on climate action, due the following year.

“One would hope that the report could put new energy and momentum into those talks,” CGD’s de Nevers says. “The process towards 2015 is for governments to identify their country-specific goals, but understanding that there are other economic, health and environmental benefits in play could put momentum toward being a bit more ambitious.”

A contentious global agreement on how to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the global airline industry will be at the top of the agenda over the next two weeks at an international summit, potentially solidifying details that have yet to emerge after more than a decade and a half of talks.

A C-141 Starlifter leaves a contrail over Antarctica. Credit: public domain

While civil society and the aviation industry have often been far apart in their views on the optimal strength and framework for the new regulations, prominent voices on both sides are now urging governments to set a clear timetable at talks that began Tuesday in Montreal.

Some say the negotiations, under the 191-member International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), a U.N. body, will offer a last, best opportunity to cut back on the sector’s globally significant greenhouse emissions while offering a fillip to broader multilateral efforts at combating climate change. Others are warning that failure to reach an agreement at the summit, which runs through Oct. 4, could result in an international trade war.

“The need for immediate reductions has never been greater, and ICAO delegates have a great chance to seek rapid emissions reductions,” Brad Schallert, programme officer for climate change at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS from sidelines of the talks. “Yet currently, both NGOs and the industry are hoping for stronger language than what is currently in the draft agreement.”

The draft in question, which was unveiled in early September, came out of a 10-month process convened to try to move along the broader negotiations.

In the aftermath of the passage of the Kyoto Protocol, a decade and a half ago, the United Nations mandated ICAO to evolve a mechanism by which to cut down the aviation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions. Since that time, the talks have progressed slowly when they’ve progressed at all.

In January 2012, however, the European Union put in place a far-reaching agreement to require both inbound and outbound airplanes to purchase “carbon credits” to offset their emissions. That led to virulent pushback from certain countries – led by the United States but including developing countries warning that their nascent but booming airline industries shouldn’t be forced to pay for decades’ of high pollution levels coming from developed countries.

The response temporarily halted the European Union’s scheme, though failure to come to an agreement at the current ICAO could lead it to reinstate the plan. Several officials have recently warned that doing so could lead to a trade war.

Vague timeframe

Given both the type of fuel it burns and the altitude at which its planes operate, in addition to its massive growth in recent decades, the airline industry is one of the single largest contributors of greenhouse gases. Analysts suggest that if it were a country, the industry would be the seventh-largest global polluter.

Currently those emissions contribute between 2 and 3 percent of total greenhouse gases. Yet there is broad agreement that these levels are set to increase dramatically in coming years.

In an attempt to prod the talks along and to deal with the sudden existence of the E.U. regional scheme, in November a high-level committee was tasked with formulating a compromise agreement. This committee included strong representation from the countries sceptical of the E.U. plan.

Yet to the frustration of both environmentalists and many within the airline industry, the draft states only that it “decides to develop” a global market-based mechanism to limit aviation emissions.

“The view is that it’s problematic that the agreement says it will develop, not that it will adopt, a global mechanism – the idea that there will simply be a recommendation isn’t good enough for either the NGOs or the industry,” Schallert says.

“Both the airlines and the manufacturers work on 30- to 40-year timescales, so they need signals that give them certainty. For both groups, the benefits of global measures are that they result in fewer market distortions.”

Further, a relatively speeded-up timetable is important for the industry, which is labouring under its own self-imposed schedule for cleaning up the sector.

In a landmark resolution in 2010, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) – representing 84 percent of all air traffic – agreed to be “carbon neutral” by 2020. This included a decision to impose an annual fuel-efficiency improvement of 1.5 percent until 2020 and a 50 percent reduction in emissions (under 2005 levels) by 2050.

At an annual meeting in June, IATA members reiterated these goals while also calling on governments to agree to the creation of a single global mechanism to limit aviation-related emissions.

“The ICAO Assembly is a real opportunity to demonstrate progress on tackling aviation CO2 emissions,” Paul Steele, executive director of the industry-wide Air Transport Action Group (ATAG), said last week, speaking on behalf of the industry.

“Governments now need to play their part by agreeing a package of actions, including a global market-based measure, to help reduce emissions even further … and show climate change leadership.”

E.U. motivator

Regardless of what exact timeframe is decided upon in Montreal – in the event that any agreement is arrived at – another and more controversial issue remains: what, if anything, to do until a global mechanism goes into effect. It is here that the European Union’s scheme remains both a motivator and an obstacle for ICAO negotiators.

“We are supportive of provisions in the draft resolution that will go before the ICAO Assembly for ICAO to do the work on [a global market-based] scheme,” Nancy Young, vice-president of environmental affairs for Airlines For America, a U.S.-based association, told IPS.

“In the meantime, we oppose the application of country-based or regional market-based measures to international aviation without the consent of the country of an airline’s registry.”

Yet under new language in the ICAO draft agreement, states would indeed be able to institute emissions regulations on flights to or from other countries “prior to the implementation of a global … scheme”. In a turnaround, however, the E.U. permits would cover emissions only within E.U. airspace, rather than applying to the entire flight as initially required.

Initial reports suggest that the European negotiators are amendable to such a change, though any new language would need approval from the European Parliament.

“If that is the case, then we have reason for optimism that we’re moving away from the path toward confrontation,” Steve Brown, chief operating officer at the National Business Aviation Association, told IPS in a statement, “and instead may be headed toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change.”

Power plants are the single largest sources of carbon pollution in the United States. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 20 2013 (IPS)

Regulators here have taken the first major step of President Barack Obama’s second term to scale back U.S. carbon emissions, proposing first-ever rules to dramatically reduce allowable greenhouse gas pollution for future power plants.

Both supporters and opponents of the new proposal, announced Friday by the Environmental Regulation Agency (EPA), say the regulations would make it far more difficult to build new coal-fired power plants in the United States. That has led to sharp criticism from business lobbyists and coal interests, who warn that the EPA is requiring the use of unfeasible technologies that will drive up energy costs and hurt jobs creation."Setting ambitious standards for existing power plants would be the single most important thing the administration can do on climate change." -- Rachel Cleetus of UCS

Under the new guidelines, future coal-fired power plants would need to cut their carbon dioxide emissions roughly in half, while standards for natural gas-fired plants would be similarly tightened. The eagerly anticipated regulations, a version of which was first floated last year, constitute the first major regulatory response to a landmark climate-focused speech President Obama gave in June.

At the time, the president warned that he would direct federal agencies to begin responding to climate change through regulatory and executive actions if the U.S. Congress were to remain unable to respond through legislative means.

“These proposed standards are the first uniform national limits on carbon pollution from new power plants,” the EPA’s head, Gina McCarthy, told reporters here Friday morning.

“Power plants are the single largest sources of carbon pollution. New power plants can minimise their carbon emissions by taking advantage of modern technologies. These technologies offer them a clear path forward, today and in the long term.”

The EPA will now open the proposal to public comments for two months. If the rule is then finalised – and it will almost certainly be subject to legal attack – officials hope to implement it by last next year.

In that case, the emissions rule would be among the first in the world.

“As far as I understand, using mandated emissions limits is unique” on a global level, Kyle Ash, a senior legislative representative for Greenpeace, an advocacy group, told IPS. “The E.U. countries are approaching the problem with a carbon trading system, China is now doing the same, and Australia has a carbon tax, at least for now.”

In the United States, power plants make up roughly a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. During his first term, President Obama oversaw major new regulations on the second-largest sector in this regard, automobiles and transport.

Yet while the EPA has in the past limited the amount of lead, mercury and arsenic that U.S. power plants can emit, the new rules would be the first to regulate carbon pollution.

“These standards are significant, and clearly show the EPA means business on carbon emissions,” Rachel Cleetus, an economist with the Climate and Energy Programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a research and advocacy group, told IPS.

“Yet while this is an important step forward, it’s not all the way there, and we’re looking forward eagerly to the next stage – dealing with current power plants. Setting ambitious standards for existing power plants would be the single most important thing the administration can do on climate change in the absence of action from Congress.”

Feasible technology

The new EPA proposal received immediate and widespread praise from environment groups, many lawmakers and even some large companies, even as it was pilloried by others.

“The new standards will reinforce what forward-looking companies already know: that climate change poses real financial risks and opportunities and that the future of the electric power sector depends on investing in cleaner technologies and more efficient resources – investments that create jobs and economic benefits,” 22 major U.S. companies, including the international consumer-goods company Unilever, wrote to President Obama on Friday.

Yet the rules are facing stiff opposition from many industry groups and most Republican lawmakers. Earlier this week the Senate Republican leadership offered a legislative proposal that would have barred the EPA from regulating power plant pollution levels, though this was rebuffed by Democrats.

“It is clear that the EPA is continuing to move forward with a strategy that will write off our huge, secure, affordable coal resources by essentially outlawing the construction of new coal plants,” Bruce Josten, a vice-president with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business lobby group, said Friday.

“The EPA … [has] released yet another major regulation that will hamper economic growth and job creation, and could lead to higher energy costs for American families and businesses.”

For power companies, a key complaint is that bringing coal-fired emissions down to mandated levels would require the use of new technologies collectively known as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Critics point out that CCS, which is not yet being commercially used, has only been proven effective at federally funded test sites.

Yet researchers who have studied the EPA proposals and the current CCS market say such criticism is overblown.

“The EPA rulemaking documents, which are over 400 pages long, provide quite a detailed description of the state of CCS technology, and demonstrate that both private- and public-sector power companies feel sufficiently comfortable with this technology that they are already installing it on new plants,” Dave Hawkins, director of climate programmes at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based legal advocacy group, told reporters Friday.

“The industry is like a broken record on what it takes for the EPA to use technologies to set emissions limits. This goes back over 40 years … and in every instance when the government moved forward and set sensible standards, the industry demonstrated it could comply.”

Indeed, in the context of the recent rise in availability of cheap natural gas – which can result in far lower greenhouse gas emissions – coal advocates have focused on the prospect of “clean coal”. Two power plants using CCS technology are currently being built, while three others are being planned.

“This is a pretty weird reason for the industry to claim to be upset – no one actually expects new coal plants to be proposed,” Greenpeace’s Ash says. “What will actually have an impact will be the next rule, the carbon pollution standards for existing power plants – most likely, that’s what the industry is now trying to head off.”

On Friday, the EPA’s McCarthy announced that the proposal for limiting pollution from existing power plants will be offered by June of next year.

Relatively cleaner-burning natural gas continues to be seen as an important “bridge” fuel for the foreseeable future. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 13 2013 (IPS)

A debate is heating up here over the extent to which U.S. government-facilitated private-sector development investments should be required to take into account how those ventures impact on climate change.

The discussions focus on a small and relatively little-known federal agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the government office in charge of mobilising private capital in pursuit of international development priorities. While OPIC generally receives high marks, in recent years some groups have been particularly impressed by the agency’s focus on investments in small-scale, de-centralised renewable energy projects."The world has completely changed, and we already have cheap, nimble, profitable micro-grids specifically serving poor populations." -- Justin Guay of the Sierra Club

“Outside of USAID” – the government’s main foreign aid arm – “OPIC is investing pretty much the only U.S. [government] money specifically for off-grid clean energy that directly supports clean energy access for the poor,” Justin Guay, a Washington representative for the Sierra Club, a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS.

“Any energy investment today by most agencies is about ‘energy access’, but this is disingenuous because that energy goes into the grid and the vast majority is then consumed by the rich and by large companies. Without associated infrastructure to rural areas or to make energy affordable for the poor, most of these investments are just increasing the general supply.”

OPIC’s mandate is set to run out soon, and Congress is currently tasked with figuring out the details of its re-authorisation. The Sierra Club and some other groups are warning that new legislation could undermine the agency’s unique coupling of climate-related and anti-poverty aims.

Capping the cap

Since its establishment in the early 1970s, OPIC has mobilised and insured some 400 billion dollars in investments in more than 4,000 projects in 150 countries. The agency says its renewable portfolio today stands at around one billion dollars.

Last week, OPIC and 14 other development institutions agreed for the first time to “substantially scale up” their green investments in developing countries, with the aim of collecting 100 billion dollars a year for the effort by 2020.

“The challenges of transitioning to a green economy are far outweighed by benefits of job creation, innovation and poverty alleviation,” Elizabeth Littlefield, OPIC’s president, said following the meeting.

In addition to Littlefield’s reported personal commitment to these issues, OPIC’s focus on investment in green energy was motivated by a 2009 court decision that forced the agency to pay attention to the carbon emissions of its investments. The result was a binding policy to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of its projects by 30 percent by 2018 and by 50 percent by 2023.

It is this emissions “cap” that is now the focus of debate in the U.S. Congress. While some are demanding that the regulation be maintained or even extended to other agencies, others are urging that it be tweaked or done away with entirely.

Some among this latter group represent oil-and-gas interests with a clear business stake in weakening the emissions cap. Yet a more nuanced view is also being offered by development scholars and advocacy groups worried about an imbalance between long-term international aims and immediate human development issues.

“There’s broad recognition that to really have a transformative impact and to reach billions of people there’s going to need to be a mix of renewables and non-renewables, but for some countries natural gas is a more viable model to provide access to citizens and unleash private business activity,” Ben Leo, a senior fellow at the Centre for Global Development, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“My sincere hope is that a compromise can be found amongst environmental and development groups. One could imagine, for instance, a very limited exception to the OPIC greenhouse gas cap for a small subset of countries – those that are very poor and very low emitters of carbon dioxide. Niger, for instance, has basically zero emissions.”

Access vs resilience

Much of the impetus for the current discussion around the greenhouse gas cap is centred on energy access in Africa. In part this is due to President Barack Obama’s new Power Africa initiative, proposed during his trip to the continent in June, which aims to double energy access in sub-Saharan countries through a mix of public and private investment.

As part of the proposal, OPIC would commit around 1.5 billion dollars in energy project funding and insurance, which recent experience would suggest would be largely earmarked for renewable and decentralised projects.

As part of a related bill currently pending in the House of Representatives, however, Congress would require that OPIC issue new guidance that could weaken the emissions cap. Similar talks are now taking place in the Senate. (OPIC was unable to offer comment on these legislative proposals by deadline.)

“We’re concerned that there are some folks who think we need to loosen the cap in order to make room for natural gas and fossil fuels, because those energy sources are cheap,” Janet Redman, director of the Climate Policy Programme at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“But the role of development finance institutions is to take into account both pieces of the formula – we can’t look at energy decisions without looking at their impacts. Similarly, it’s worth examining who would really benefit from lifting this cap – local communities or the companies that would be investing in massive natural gas infrastructure?”

Multilateral funders have increasingly run up against the tension between energy access and climate concerns. The past year has seen increasing movement away from certain very dirty forms of energy – both the World Bank and the United States, for instance, largely banned the overseas funding of new coal-fired power plants.

Nonetheless, relatively cleaner-burning natural gas continues to be seen as an important “bridge” fuel for the foreseeable future, in part because U.S. supplies have made it both plentiful and cheap.

Those now advocating for OPIC’s greenhouse gas cap note that other foreign aid funders – including within the U.S. government – will continue to focus on non-renewable energy investments. But they also view the resilience of green, decentralised energy production to be an important anti-poverty goal in and of itself.

“To a great extent our stance is not really based on climate concerns – this is just the right tool for the job,” Sierra Club’s Guay says.

“The debate is centred on an outmoded debate on clean energy, that it’s expensive. But the world has completely changed, and we already have cheap, nimble, profitable micro-grids specifically serving poor populations. It would be a tragedy if this debate gets focused through a prism that’s decades old.”

By Anna Shen
SAN FRANCISCO, California, Sep 11 2013 (IPS)

Newly arrived from London, Robert Swan is facing a promise he made to famed marine researcher and conservationist Jacques Cousteau decades ago.

Robert Swan in Antarctica. Courtesy of the explorer.

Cousteau asked him to preserve the Antarctic, as the “last great wilderness on earth”, from likely drilling and mining that could begin in 2041, which is the year the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty will be up for review and possible amendment.  If the treaty is altered, one of the most pristine parts of the world would likely be forever changed.

Swan plans to draw attention to this issue through what he calls his “last great exploration”. At age 60, he plans to walk once more to the South Pole, and to do so surviving on renewable energy only.

Swan is no stranger to a tough challenge. In the 1980s he was the first person to walk the North and South Poles. Swan has dedicated his life to drawing attention to climate change, and now he hopes to raise even more awareness through his latest expedition.

His first stop was at the American Renewable Energy Day conference in Colorado, where he addressed renewable energy leaders such as Ted Turner and T. Boone Pickens. Now he is on to the United Nations, where he will speak at TEDx UN Plaza on Sep. 16.

Below are excerpts from his conversation with Anna Shen.

Q. Can you tell me what Jacques Cousteau asked you to do, and about your upcoming expedition?

A.  Jacques Cousteau asked me to preserve Antarctica. His 50-year mission was to preserve a place, and then use renewable energy to save it. And to save it is to think about making it not worthwhile for companies to go to Antarctica to explore it.

The real story here is about the last great exploration. I walked to both poles and saw all these things about climate change before the world began to wake up to them. The last great exploration is to survive on earth.

We need to look at how we are going to power our planet. If we don’t there will be no world to explore. We are undertaking an expedition in two years time that is a really big challenge, and we will survive in Antarctica on renewable energy, which nobody has done before. We are willing to go back and put renewable energy to the ultimate test. We will not survive on earth unless we start relying on clean energy.  Decisions today are threatening the future of life on earth.

This is a story that begins with walking to the poles to experience the issues -walking across ice caps that are melting, having our faces burnt off due to a hole in the ozone 25 years ago. What was our response to that? We could join Greenpeace and become activists and they do an excellent job. But what could we do that was different?

We could work with industry and business because everyone makes choices about how to spend money.  But let’s inspire people too, especially youth, with social media and our Facebook page.

Q. How does your mission on creating awareness on renewable energy relate to developing countries?

A. When I walked the poles 22 years ago, the whole issue of energy was not in the front of people’s minds. People were not engaged in thinking about energy. Also, energy use in China and India was not ramped up.

I am working in India on renewable energy projects; if we don’t get India and China using clean renewable energy with one billion people [each], we will have a problem. However, I have been dealing for 15 years with countries like India and China, which are far more important to get right than the USA; there are more people in Bombay than in California – there are 30 million people in one city in India.

Q. Thinking about renewable energy is great in theory, but who are the leaders in producing this technology?

A. The U.S. is the most advanced in this area and has the most money. It is brilliant at technology. If somebody has a good idea in America, there is a good chance to make it happen.

Steve Jobs started in a garage in Berkeley. If you have a fantastic idea, you can get it going, and get the financial support to make the technology happen. That is because people are willing to invest; banks and infrastructure support it to make it happen.

Somebody in China or India may have a great idea but then there is not the financial backing to make it happen. They can’t finance it; that is why America has its advantage, and these big people realise that there is money to be made, and a market.

Q. What is missing in the international debate on renewable energy?

A. Science is telling us that we should be doing certain things, but people are not responding to it globally because people are not listening. People are stuck. There are lots of nations out there that are developing and they want what we want, what we have in the West. The international community needs to be much clearer on directions forward. The USA can help the international community by showing better leadership.

A nation like India produces 1.0 to 1.5 tonnes of carbon per person, but in the U.S. the number is 22 tonnes. The people of India say, “How can we make changes when they produce 22 and we produce one? Why can’t we do what we are doing?” The U.S. needs to show personal leadership, that we are making changes, or else the rest of the world won’t take it seriously. Europe also needs to show leadership.

Excerpt:

An international coalition has agreed to begin working towards domestic regulation aimed at reducing the use of HFCs, compounds commonly used as refrigerants but referred to as “super greenhouse gases” for their particularly negative impact on global warming.

Environmental groups are lauding the decision, one of a suite of agreements struck Monday at a summit in Oslo by the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants (CCAC), which includes 34 developed and developing countries and 38 organisations.“This is a critical step in building confidence ahead of the big climate treaty negotiations in 2015." -- Durwood Zaelke of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development

The CCAC was created by former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton in early 2012 and today has expanded to include multilateral institutions such as the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank and the World Health Organisation.

“We will continue to promote climate-friendly alternatives and make efforts to reduce emissions of HFCs,” the CCAC communiqué, released Monday, pledges.

“CCAC Partner countries will adopt domestic approaches to encourage climate-friendly HFC alternative technologies and work toward a phasedown in the production and consumption of HFCs under the Montreal Protocol. We will work with international standards organisations to revise their standards to include climate-friendly HFC alternatives.”

Indeed, analysts suggest the agreement could be particularly meaningful because the country representatives agreed to work towards the reduction under the framework of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. That 1987 agreement, one of the most ratified of all U.N. treaties, is widely seen as one of the most successful of global environment accords.

“Agreeing to phase down HFCs under the Montreal Protocol is the single biggest, fastest and most effective action we can take against climate change in the next several years,” Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, a Washington-based think tank, said Monday.

“Phasing down HFCs can avoid the equivalent of up to 100 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2050, and up to 0.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.”

Zaelke says the Montreal Protocol is the single biggest climate mitigation tool available to the world over the next few years, as a new international climate treaty remains under debate.

“The Montreal Protocol helped the world reduce the use of hundreds of similar chemicals over the past 25 years, and it knows how to do its job,” he told IPS from the sidelines of the CCAC discussions in Oslo.

“This is also a critical step in building confidence ahead of the big climate treaty negotiations in 2015. If they don’t build some interim momentum and success, there’s no way those talks will be successful.”

Gigatonne gap

The CCAC focuses on four pollutants with short atmospheric lives – HFCs, methane, so-called black carbon and what’s known as tropospheric ozone, a main constituent of smog. The group’s founding aim was to try to reduce some of these short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) ahead of when next international climate treaty is to come into being, in 2020.

“The idea here is the recognition that between now and 2020 there’s going to be an eight-to-10-gigatonne gap between the amount of emissions reductions pledged by countries and what scientists say is necessary to keep the world’s temperature rise below two degrees Celsius,” Mark Roberts, an international policy advisor with the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a watchdog group, told IPS from Oslo.

“So addressing these shorter-lived substances could offer more time for the rest of the world to work on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. In particular, as analysts have started talking about the best course of action between now and 2020 to get rid of that ‘gigatonne gap’, HFCs have risen to top of pile.”

Representatives will now be tasked with going home and figuring out regulatory or legislative fixes to various SLCP issues, including their level of HFC use. No targets have been set under the new agreement, but the overarching plan currently is to reduce HFC use by 80 percent, allowing the remainder to be used for military and certain other purposes.

While the CCAC has no specific oversight mechanisms, analysts expect countries to openly trumpet any new regulatory approaches, starting at the next meeting of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in November in Warsaw.

Also on Monday the World Bank unveiled new plans to incorporate analysis of countries’ SLCP use into its development activities. A new report found that the Washington-based institution spent some 18 billion dollars on SLCP-related funding over the past half-decade, while the bank will announce a specific goal on the issue by next year.

International drumbeat

The CCAC agreement is the latest in a strengthening international response to phase out HFCs, the use of which has increased significantly in recent years. And with HFCs a key component in air conditioning, their use is expected to see a massive boost on the back of rising middle classes in emerging economies.

According to the CCAC, global HFC use increased by around 8 percent between 2004 and 2008. But without international action, these emissions are projected to “accelerate rapidly” – by some 20 times in coming decades, according to the U.S. government.

HFCs were initially introduced during the 1990s to replace other compounds, known as CFCs and HCFCs, known to be particularly damaging to the ozone layer. While the Montreal Protocol was able to massively reduce the use of these other compounds, scientists in recent years began to realise that HFCs, though not damaging to the ozone layer, were extremely potent greenhouse gases.

Some forms are thousands of times more detrimental than carbon dioxide.

“Current predictions are that if nothing is done on HFCs, by 2050 they would be up to around 20 percent of carbon dioxide emissions – basically offsetting all commitments that countries have made to reduce carbon dioxide,” EIA’s Roberts says. “On the other hand, if we can cut off this use now, we can save 100 gigatonnes by 2050.”

More than 110 countries have now offered some form of support for HFC reductions, perhaps most notably the bilateral agreement struck in June between the United States and China, two of the largest HFC producers and users. In addition, recent statements by both the Group of 8 (G8) rich nations and the Group of 20 (G20), as well as the Arctic Council, have likewise backed HFC draw-downs.

At least two proposals, including one authored by the United States, Canada and Mexico, are now pending to officially amend the Montreal Protocol to cover a reduction in HFC use and production. Those motions are slated to be formally discussed by members in October.

Advocates say the official social cost of carbon (SCC) has a significant impact on the cost-benefit rationale for strengthened carbon-related regulation. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Aug 17 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced it is accepting a petition from a conservative advocacy group critical of a recent substantial increase to official calculations of the so-called “social cost of carbon”.

Since 2010, Washington officials have estimated that the damages resulting from the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere could be quantified at around 22 dollars per tonne, representing the net impact of both pollution and climate change on human health and safety, agriculture, the environment, energy costs, etc.“The irony of their complaints is that the current figures for the social cost of carbon are likely far too low." -- Jamie Henn of 350.org

But following on a little-publicised inter-agency review, in June the government began to use a new figure, 36 dollars per pound, an increase of some 60 percent.

According to government officials, that’s in line with similar figures being used by some European countries. Advocates say the official social cost of carbon (SCC) has a significant impact on the cost-benefit rationale for strengthened carbon-related regulation.

“The social cost of carbon is a powerful metric to help make the risks of climate change more tangible – it’s the difference between saying, ‘cigarettes are probably unhealthy for you’ and ‘cigarettes cause cancer’,” Jamie Henn, communications director for 350.org, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“As people start to make the direct link between carbon emissions and the problems in their communities, from high asthma rates to extreme weather, they’re going to start to demand more action.”

SCC figures can also be used to put a specific “social harm” price tag on the emissions of particular companies or facilities. Henn notes that the oil giant ExxonMobil, for instance, estimates that it put out around 125 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent last year – potentially costing society some 4.5 billion dollars a year, according to the new SCC number.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama has promised wide-ranging regulatory action during his second term in office to counter the ongoing lack of climate-related legislation coming from the U.S. Congress. That prospect has led to a significant ramping up in lobbying efforts in recent months by the oil-and-gas sector and powerful U.S. business interests.

A quiet revision

At the heart of the pushback against the SCC revision is the fact that, unusually, the change was made with almost no publicity. Instead, President Obama’s administration simply integrated the new number into an obscure report on new energy efficiency requirements for microwave ovens – requirements that were to go into effect on Friday.

Since June, however, critics of government action on carbon pollution and climate change have seized on the issue, attempting to force the administration to backtrack on the new rule. On Friday, the Energy Department accepted a petition filed by the Landmark Legal Foundation, a conservative legal advocacy group based, accusing the government of a lack of transparency in the process.

The Department of Energy’s “unannounced, dramatically increased, and improperly altered [SCC] valuation presented for the first time in this microwave oven regulation will certainly become the standard by which all other agencies will place a purportedly beneficial economic value on new carbon regulations,” the foundation states.

“Landmark objects to the Department’s … decision to utilize an ‘Interagency Update’ to justify increasing the ‘social cost’ of carbon dioxide without any opportunity for public comment.”

On Friday, the Department of Energy publicly announced that it would be opening Landmark’s petition to public comment for 30 days (the announcement also includes a copy of the petition). Neither the department nor Landmark responded to IPS’s request for comment.

“It’s no wonder that the fossil fuel industry and their allies are so worried about the calculations,” 350.org’s Henn says.

“The irony of their complaints is that the current figures for the social cost of carbon are likely far too low. Scientists are making it increasingly clear that we’re approaching dangerous climate tipping points, beyond which the damage to our planet and society are incalculable. In the end, it’s hard to put a price tag on a liveable planet.”

Indeed, some scientists have suggested far higher ranges for SCC figures, from 55 to as high as 900 dollars a ton. The U.S. government itself estimates that the official SCC figure will rise to more than 70 dollars a ton by 2050.

War on SCC

The new SCC figures have also caught the attention of lawmakers, bolstered by support from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business lobby group.

In mid-July, an Obama administration official was summoned to testify before a Congressional oversight committee on the issue. When lawmakers complained about the lack of legislative or public input, the official, Howard Shelanski, noted that the inter-agency revisions were based on three publicly created, peer-reviewed computer models.

“It is important to note that the only changes made in May 2013 to the SCC estimates reflect the refinements made to the underlying models,” Shelanski stated in testimony. “In other words, all of the changes to the social cost of carbon values were the result of updates to … models that were made by the model developers themselves.”

He also stated that the SCC has been referenced in all energy efficiency rulemaking in recent years, and hence has been open to public input since at least 2010. Indeed, the government has been trying to evaluate the financial impact of pollution for far longer, with little partisan pushback.

“We’ve actually been on the books using cost-benefit analysis, evaluating the costs of pollution, for a very long time – the [1963] Clean Air Act requires us to do that, but this analysis has become more robust since that time,” Elizabeth Perera, a senior Washington representative for the Sierra Club, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“And let’s remember, this is a very market-based approach, a very bipartisan approach to dealing with pollution.”

Republican lawmakers were dissatisfied with Shelanski’s rebuttal, however. In early August, the House of Representatives voted to disallow another key regulatory agency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), from using any SCC value in its energy regulations without specific Congressional approval.

The bill has little chance of becoming law, but represents only one piece of a broader push by the right against SCC implementation. Some lawmakers worry that a currently pending EPA regulation could result in a significant scaling back of the use of coal in the United States.

“The EPA’s policies have real-world consequences,” the SCC amendment’s sponsor, Representative Tim Murphy, said following its passage. “We’ve already seen what the ‘social cost’ of the War on Coal is today – the cost is jobs.”

Regional temperature increases predicted by 2100. Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Synthesis Report 2004

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Aug 15 2013 (IPS)

Two reports released Wednesday reveal the dangerous gap between science and politics. New climate research shows that extreme events such as the severe heat wave in the U.S. last year will double in 2020, increase 400 percent by 2040, and then get far worse without significant carbon reductions.

Meanwhile, an analysis shows Canada cannot meet its weak 2020 carbon emissions reduction target even as it plans to triple the size of its massive tar sands operations in coming decades.

Canada’s has no credible carbon reduction plan and has done virtually nothing on climate since Stephen Harper’s government came to power in 2006, said activists.

“It will be very difficult for the Canadian government to achieve its own emissions reduction target for 2020 even without tar sands expansion,” Danny Harvey, a climate scientist at the University of Toronto, said at a press conference Wednesday.

Canada, the United States and other countries pledged to reduce their total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 17 percent compared to 2005 levels by the year 2020 under what is known as the Copenhagen Accord. Scientists say that target is too weak and will result in global temperatures rising by at least 3.5C, a very dangerous level of climate change.

Those high temperatures will likely produce heat extremes that kill people, animals and crops, and blanket 85 percent of the planet’s land area in summer by 2100, German and Spanish scientists reported late Wednesday.

“That’s what our calculations show for a scenario of unabated climate change,” said co-author Dim Coumou of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Shockingly, it is already too late to prevent a doubling of heat waves by 2020 and four-fold increase by 2040, concludes the study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The reason for this is that burning enormous amounts of fossil fuels over the past 50 years has added 40 percent more heat-trapping CO2 gas to the atmosphere. Even if all human sources of CO2 emissions ended today, temperatures will continue to rise from the present 0.8C of additional warming to as much as 1.1. to 1.5C due to a time lag in the climate system, scientists say.

And those temperatures would not decline for a very long time.

That is why all countries agreed to cut CO2 emissions at the 2009 U.N. climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen.

Canada matched the U.S. pledge to reduce emissions 17 percent but then did little to reduce its emissions and instead dramatically expanded the world’s biggest energy project, the Alberta tar sands.

Each year, the tar sands burn nearly 40 billion cubic metres of natural gas, roughly two-thirds of what India uses annually. This gas is mainly used to heat water so the tarry bitumen can be boiled out of the ground and converted into heavy crude oil.

In 2011, 370 million cubic metres of freshwater was used. This is more than the city of Toronto’s 2.8 million people use. Oil companies pay nothing for the water even though the water becomes too toxic to be returned to rivers or to aquifers.

Most analyses show that oil from the tar sands is the most polluting and has the highest CO2 footprint compared to other sources of oil. Those CO2 emissions are increasing as bitumen becomes harder to extract and are expected to double by 2020.

“Canadian politicians are simply not telling the truth. You can’t keep expanding the tar sands and meet the reduction target,” said Mark Jaccard, an energy economist at Simon Frasier University and a Harper government appointee to the now-shuttered National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

There are no federal regulations on oil and gas emissions in Canada. Instead of acting, the Harper government launched a 16-million-dollar public relations campaign in the U.S. and Canada promoting the economic benefits of “responsible resource development” of the tar sands – a move mocked by activists as “greenwashing”.

Deep cuts in emissions after 2020 will be needed to avoid most of the world suffering under devastating heat waves before the end of the century, the Potsdam Institute’s research shows. Those reductions “will be impossible to achieve if we lock in 40 years of increased tar sands emissions by building more pipelines” like the Keystone XL, said the University of Toronto’s Danny Harvey in a press conference here in Toronto Wednesday.

The U.S. is on target to make its meet its Copenhagen reduction pledge. However, Canada’s abysmal environmental record has come to the attention of the Barack Obama administration. President Obama recently said that he would only approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline if it “does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution”. The long-delayed Keystone XL would bring 800,000 barrels of tar sands bitumen (heavy oil) to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Keystone XL will increase Canada’s emissions by allowing the tar sands to expand in size, said Gillian McEachern of Environmental Defence Canada. And there is no technology nor any policies that will allow Canada to reduce those emissions before 2020, McEachern said.

Other proposed pipelines that are needed to support tar sands expansion have met strong opposition in Canada and it is far from certain if they will be completed, said Jaccard.

“We are now at a point where the only acceptable alternative is for the U.S. government to reject Keystone XL,” he said.

Yard clippings and agricultural waste smolder into char in Foundation of Sustainable Technology's (FoST) biochar maker. Biochar helps fertilise soil and improves its ability to retain water. Credit: Rob Goodier/E4C/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 26 2013 (IPS)

Even as policymakers around the world wrestle with how to cut future emissions of global greenhouse gases, some scientists and environmentalists are increasingly turning their attention to the carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere, trying to discern ways that this level can be efficiently and safely brought down.

Amidst a burgeoning crop of innovative, even outlandish ideas is one that looks back to an ancient agricultural technique known as biochar. This is a fertilisation practice that involves making charcoal out of a previous year’s crops and mixing that into the soil to nourish the subsequent year’s fields – in the process secreting that plant’s carbon away from the atmosphere.“People in developing countries are often constrained by poor soils, those that are acidic or poor in nutrients, and that’s where the addition of biochar tends to show the largest increase in growth rates.” -- Thayer Tomlinson of the International Biochar Initiative

In May, a U.S. science station announced that, for the first time, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide had surpassed 400 parts per million (ppm). Climate scientists have been warning for years that levels beyond 350 ppm would bring about a “tipping point” of accelerating polar ice melt, rising global temperatures and extreme weather.

“We need a paradigm shift in our approach to climate, to really change how we look at what a solution means – most of the discussion is not only focused on the energy sector but on ongoing emissions,” Mark Hertsgaard, a writer who has focused on climate issues for the past two decades, told a Washington audience Thursday.

“Ongoing emissions, current and future, are adding about two ppm of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere per year, but what’s driving the problem is the 400 ppm already in the atmosphere. While all of the discussion is currently about that two ppm, we also have to get serious about the 400 ppm – how to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”

Hertsgaard points to a recent United Nations report that found the decade prior to 2010 experienced a historically unprecedented number of “extreme weather events”. Even if all new emissions were suddenly halted, he notes, scientists suggest that global temperatures would continue to rise for at least another three decades.

Yet according to a growing number of soil researchers, climate scientists and others, biochar could offer an opportunity to reduce those pre-existing global levels of carbon dioxide.

Through photosynthesis, all plants naturally take carbon dioxide out of the air as an integral part of their own life cycle. Under normal circumstances that carbon would then be re-released into the atmosphere when the plant dies and decomposes, but the idea behind biochar is to consolidate that carbon in a solid form that can be placed beneath the ground – and hence out of the atmosphere, at least for a certain period.

The central part of the process is to burn the plant – perhaps crops after they have died, perhaps trees that have died from an infestation, or perhaps something planted specifically for the purpose – in a low-oxygen fire, and convert it to charcoal. The resulting “biochar” can then be used as a high-potency fertiliser, offering benefits for both the farmer and the broader fight against climate change.

According to estimates done by Johannes Lehmann, a Cornell University agricultural science researcher, the world would be able to fully offset its annual greenhouse gas emissions if biochar were to be added to around 10 percent of existing agricultural fields.

That’s the idea, anyway. Thus far, even for those who view the science as relatively solid, the potential to significantly scale up biochar use internationally remains far off.

“Many questions remain, but the key here is that we need to broaden our gaze to make agriculture central to the discussion on climate change,” Hertsgaard says. “In theory, biochar could be a means of turning back the clock on climate. Certainly agriculture could be a crucial part of the solution to dialling back the problem.”

Soil benefits

Thus far, funding and policy support for biochar have been uneven, although there is clear government interest in the United States and the European Union.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has perhaps shown the greatest institutional interest to date, financing a regular series of small grants for continued research into biochar, particularly at universities. Yet while attempts have been made in the U.S. Congress to secure funding in major agricultural legislation, these have not yet been successful.

Internationally, the United Nations, World Bank and USAID, the United States’ foreign policy arm, have likewise fostered and studied a series of projects, but observers suggest that most donors are still adopting a wait-and-see approach. There are currently several dozen small-scale and pilot projects going forward in developing countries, however, most notably in India.

Indeed, while the international climate discussion offers a tantalising if still remote potential for biochar, the food security needs of developing countries today constitute the most tangible opportunity for this approach. A host of simple, low-cost designs are now available for creating biochar, most of which are fashioned out of simple 55-gallon drums.

“People in developing countries are often constrained by poor soils, those that are acidic or poor in nutrients, and that’s where the addition of biochar tends to show the largest increase in growth rates,” Thayer Tomlinson, communications director for the International Biochar Initiative (the IBI, which has a wealth of domestic and international data here), a U.S.-based advocacy group, told IPS.

“Part of the importance here is that communities can use agricultural residue, rather than firewood or cordwood, and convert that into useful products. These significant soil benefits can be provided without cutting down forests, without depending as heavily on commercial fertilisers, and simply using products that could otherwise be discarded.”

The IBI has been around since 2007, and Tomlinson says during that time interest in biochar has built noticeably, from industry, entrepreneurs, development experts and others.

“Watching the bibliographic references to biochar, there have been huge increases on a year-to-year basis,” she says. “This issue tends to span several interest groups – agriculture, energy, climate change – so it’s been difficult to find a true agency ‘home’, but there is clearly building commercial interest.”

Meanwhile, the industry is working to standardise the burgeoning sector’s products. Last year, the IBI came out with initial standards for defining biochar, and two months ago it unveiled a new certification programme for North American producers.

In April, the group submitted a “carbon offset” protocol to U.S. regulators, aimed at quantifying how much carbon is in biochar and the emissions that its use would counterbalance. That submission is currently open to public comment.

Washington and Beijing are stepping up research into new “carbon capture” technologies at coal-fired power plants. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 11 2013 (IPS)

The United States and China have agreed on a suite of potentially far-reaching initiatives aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the world’s two largest economies and largest polluters.

Environmental groups are applauding initial reports of the agreements, arrived at during high-level talks here on Wednesday and Thursday. Further, there is also a sense that the discussions indicated a warming of relations between the two powers that could constitute the basis for an important new cooperative relationship at international negotiations on climate change."Bilateral efforts between these two countries are essential – and this collaboration can inject additional vigour in tackling climate change around the world." -- Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute

“I thought it was one of the best sessions for climate change I’ve ever sat in,” a senior official in President Barack Obama’s administration, speaking on background, told reporters Thursday. “Not only were they high-level officials on both sides, but I thought that there was candid discussion, interesting discussion, and most importantly, proposals for cooperation moving forward.”

As unveiled Wednesday and further refined Thursday, the two countries have agreed to jointly focus on five broad areas. These include cutting down on emissions from heavy transport, strengthening energy efficiency, and improving the collection of greenhouse gas-related data.

Washington and Beijing will also step up research into new “carbon capture” technologies at coal-fired power plants, and collaborate on building new “smart” electrical grids that are both more efficient and can more easily incorporate renewable energy sources and distributed generation.

The talks also advanced modalities behind a landmark agreement struck between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping in June to reduce the amount of HFCs, “super-greenhouse gases” used in refrigeration and air conditioning, the two countries use and produce.

“They’re clearly addressing some of the largest sectors in terms of greenhouse gas emissions – buildings, transportation and power, which together constitute the majority of emissions for both countries,” Alden Meyer, director of the Washington office of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a watchdog group, told IPS.

“For the moment, however, it’s hard to gauge the actual impact on emissions without knowing more of the details. The most fundamental question is whether these initiatives will merely help the two countries meet already-stated emissions-reductions goals between now and 2020. That would still be good, of course, but it wouldn’t be adding additional ambition to the global effort.”

Current U.S. policy revolves around a 17 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels by 2020. For China, the central goal is to cut its economy’s “carbon intensity” by 40 to 45 percent, also by the end of the decade.

Yet Meyer notes that “everyone agrees” that both countries need to do far more if there is to be any chance of keeping the global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the current international goal that climate scientists warn constitutes a dangerous cut-off point.

The talks are also being seen as a key success on the part of the new U.S. secretary of state, John Kerry, long known for his climate advocacy. Kerry was integral in setting up a new U.S.-China working group on climate, and reports suggest the secretary of state has been actively engaging in this way in nearly every country he visits.

“This is no longer a side issue – Kerry has made climate into a centrepiece of political discussions, elevating it to the top tier of the geopolitical agenda, up there with security and economic issues,” Meyer notes. “That’s also being helped by the recent push by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the International Energy Agency to warn that this is a major threat to development and the world economy alike.”

Patching the disconnect

Climate change was not the only issue under discussion during the two-day U.S.-China summit, known as the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED). But the talks did showcase the initial results of the bilateral working group on climate, set up in April, the final report of which can be found here.

“One of the great features this year is the special sessions on climate change and energy security, so we envision smaller sessions with a very focused agenda,” an Obama administration official told reporters in a briefing Monday.

“We want to demonstrate to the world that the two largest economies in the world can cooperate in this century to help tackle these environmental challenges … We’re hoping that at the end, we can cite some concrete examples of our cooperation through reduced emissions.”

Nor are the five initiatives outlined this week planned to be the end of the new U.S.-China cooperation. The working group on climate is reportedly working unusually intensively, a schedule that is expected to continue.

By October, the group is expected to agree on the implementation details for the first five initiatives. Thereafter, the Obama administration has suggested that climate issues will remain on the annual S&ED agenda, which will include annual review of implementation of previous initiatives and the assumption that new ones will be launched.

The results from this week’s discussions could now be used as a springboard to jolt ongoing international negotiations in the lead-up to a Paris summit, in 2015, where world leaders will be required to fashion a new global deal on climate change.

“There is renewed momentum between the U.S. and China on climate change. Bilateral efforts between these two countries are essential – and this collaboration can inject additional vigour in tackling climate change around the world,” Jennifer Morgan, director of the Climate and Energy Program at the World Resources Institute, a Washington think tank, said in a statement.

“These actions can help build trust and enhance cooperation between these two major countries. The benefits of joint action are clear. Now, we need them to follow up with actions that will drive down global emissions and take advantage of economic opportunities in a low-carbon future.”

UCS’s Meyer notes that the disconnect between the United States and China on the way forward on climate action has been a key obstacle in the international talks over the past several years.

“To the extent that they’re now cooperating on the ground, hopefully that will spill over into a more useful partnership in the negotiations for a post-2020 deal,” he says.

“In Paris in 2015 we’ll need broad engagement and cooperation among leaders of major countries, which is what we didn’t have going into the Copenhagen summit [in 2009]. To have this new relationship at the leadership level more than two years out from the Paris talks is a good thing – this level of engagement among leaders will be essential.”

Children in Georgetown, Guyana learn about solar energy during an exhibition. Credit: CREDP

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Jul 8 2013 (IPS)

When James Husbands, a 24-year-old Barbadian businessman, began weighing the possibility of manufacturing solar water heaters, there was already a prototype on the island that had been designed and installed by an Anglican priest living there in the early 1970s.

A market study on the viability of producing solar water heaters had been done by a local NGO. This study, coupled with the Barbados government’s imposition of import duties on the solar water heaters sold by an Australian company to the island, convinced James that the time was right to enter the field."Governments cannot promote what they do not understand and utilities do not promote what they are not supplying themselves." -- CREDP's Thomas Scheutzlich

Husbands, now managing director of Solar Dynamics, told the IPS that government support in the late 1970s was crucial to the success of his venture in the early days. Barbados currently has the fifth highest penetration worldwide of solar water heaters per thousand households.

Arnaldo Vieira de Carvalho, a specialist in the Energy Division of the Infrastructure and Environment Sector of the Inter-American Development Bank, told IPS that Latin America and the Caribbean use renewable energy (RE) in much greater proportion than any other region, although much of that is hydropower and biofuels. The use of wind and solar remain quite small.

IDB and its partners have sponsored a competition since 2009 for RE and Energy Efficiency projects in the Caribbean, the winners of which receive up to 100,000 dollars in financing and technical support. Eight winners were selected last year. The competition, IDEAS, has among its criteria that winners’ projects should benefit the poor, gender equity, and indigenous communities.

An added incentive to accelerate the slow pace of RE development, even though the region is not a major source of fossil fuel emissions, is the spate of devastating natural disasters over the past decade.

Ulric Trotz, deputy director and science adviser of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC), told IPS in an e-mail, “Extreme weather events (often associated with climate change) have caused significant damage to the region. For example, Hurricane Ivan in Grenada wiped out approximately 200 percent of her GDP in 2004. Similarly, a one in 100-year flood in Guyana in 2005 wiped out more than 60 percent of that country’s GDP in that year, moving it from a positive growth position to a negative real growth.”

Consequently, Caribbean governments have begun taking a more proactive approach to promoting the development of renewable energy, establishing an Energy Unit at the Caricom regional headquarters which works in conjunction with the CCCCC.

Trotz said promoting renewable energy is important, because “by diverting costs away from the importation of fossil fuels, [Caribbean] countries will have additional resources from the savings to put towards building resilience to the impacts of Climate Change and Climate Vulnerability.

“It is not just the conversion to renewable energy but energy efficiency” that the region is focusing on, he said.

He added that “pooling RE projects across the region might have a catalytic effect of encouraging investment as this may significantly lower transaction costs and make investment more attractive.”

The Caribbean, apart from Trinidad and Tobago, which is an oil producer, currently spends billions on the importation of fossil fuels every year. In May, while on a visit to Trinidad, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden made the point that energy costs in the region need to be lowered and the use of renewable energy increased.

“There’s probably no group of nations better situated to take advantage of renewable energy possibilities than here in the Caribbean. And we know that many Caribbean nations pay three times more for energy than we do in the United States of America…[We] are working together on this, looking to invest in connected regional grids to create economies of scale and renewable energy – economies of scale that are driven by renewable energy,” he said.

The region has also sought the assistance of European Union partners, and launched the Caribbean Renewable Energy Development Programme with the major objective of strengthening the ability of Caribbean countries to mobilise investors to make the shift from conventional energy investment to renewable energy investment.

According to Thomas Scheutzlich, principal advisor of the Caribbean Renewable Energy Program (CREDP) since 2003, lack of an enabling legal policy framework and lack of well-defined bankable project proposals have been major barriers to the development of RE projects in the Caribbean region.

Scheutzlich has overall responsibility for implementation of the CREDP programme on behalf of the German consultancy company Projekt-Consult GmbH, which is charged by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) with the implementation of CREDP. Germany is responsible for 80 percent of CREDP’s funding.

One problem is that many banks in the region are unsure of the economic soundness of RE ventures and are unable to judge the risks inherent in such new technology, Scheutzlich said. The lack of government guarantees also makes traditional banks reluctant to back such ventures.

However, regional and international banks such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the European Investment Bank, and the Caribbean Development Bank “are all looking for bankable energy projects and offer financing,” he said.

Scheutzlich added that, “There is still a widespread and general lack of understanding of the potential of indigenous energy sources and energy efficiency throughout the society. Subsequently, governments cannot promote what they do not understand and utilities do not promote what they are not supplying themselves.”

Utility companies in the region generally have universal monopoly over the generation, transmission, distribution, and sale of electricity. “This is their traditional business model and they will only divert from that model if it is economically attractive” for them to do so, he said.

But despite the slow pace in the Caribbean, during the last few years the energy landscape has been “positively changing with the change processes accelerating and gaining a certain dynamism, and this is exactly what CREDP wants to trigger.”

Extreme heat, flooding and water and food shortages will rock South Asia and Africa by 2030 and render large sections of cities inhabitable, if the world continues to burn huge amounts of coal, oil and gas, the World Bank is warning.

“Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts and the Case for Resilience“, a new report commissioned by the World Bank and released Wednesday, analysed the expected effects on South Asia and Africa if global temperatures increase by two and four degrees Celsius.

The report showed that a global temperature rise of two degrees Celsius will have a wide range of dangerous effects, including a loss of 40 to 80 percent of cropland in Africa and rising sea levels that will destroy significant parts of many coastal cities in South Asia.

“If the world warms by two degrees Celsius – warming which may be reached in 20 to 30 years – that will cause widespread food shortages, unprecedented heat waves, and more intense cyclones,” said World Bank President Jim Yong Kim.

He pointed out that such change could “greatly harm the lives and the hopes of individuals and families who have had little hand in raising the earth’s temperature”.

The burning of carbon-based fuels has increased the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere by 40 percent. CO2 and water vapour in the atmosphere are crucial in retaining some of the sun’s heat energy; without them, the earth’s atmosphere would be more like the moon’s: 100 degrees Celsius in the daytime and -150 degrees at night.

Adding 40 percent more CO2, however, has increased the amount of heat energy the Earth absorbs, with more than 93 percent of it warming the oceans.

Bleak findings

One of the shocking findings in the new study is the enormous impact a two-degree rise will have on the urban poor, said Rachel Kyte, the vice president for sustainable development at the World Bank.

Urbanisation is increasing rapidly, especially in the developing world, with many more people living in slums and informal settlements, Kyte told IPS from London.

The report painted a bleak picture for many cities.

As climate change disrupts rainfall patterns and generates more extreme weather in the coming decades, leading to poor crop yields, rural populations will flood cities. Escalating numbers of urban poor will suffer, with temperatures magnified by the “heat island effect” of the constructed urban environments.

Safe drinking water will also be harder to find, especially after floods, contributing to greater water-borne diseases such as cholera and diarrhoea.

Coastal regions like Bangladesh and India’s two largest coastal cities, Kolkata and Mumbai, will face extreme river floods, more intense tropical cyclones, rising sea levels and very high temperatures.

“Huge numbers of urban poor will be exposed in many coastal cities,” Kyte said.

Meanwhile, a sea level rise of 30 centimetres, possible by 2040, will result in massive flooding in cities and inundate low-lying cropland with saltwater, which is corrosive to crops. Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, a global rice producer, is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise, and a 30-centimetre rise there could result in the loss of about 11 percent of crop production, the report found.

“We face a huge challenge over the next 20 years to…redesign our cities to protect them from climate change,” Kyte predicted, even as cities already face a huge infrastructure investment gap.

One trillion dollars a year needed to be invested every year by 2020 by some estimates, Kyte said, adding that “to build climate resilience into cities will take another 300 to 500 million dollars a year”.

A lack of water will be a problem in other regions. The projected loss of snowmelt from the Himalayas will reduce the flow of water into the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra river basins, which altogether threaten to leave hundreds of millions of people without enough water, food or access to reliable energy, the report said.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, by the decades of 2030 or 2040, drought mixed with destructive flooding will contribute to farmers’ losing 40 to 80 percent of cropland used for growing maize, millet and sorghum.

And while carbon emissions have already increased oceans’ acidity by 30 percent, by 2040, oceans will be too acidic for many coral reefs to survive. The death of coral reefs results in major loss of fish habitats as well as protection against storms.

“That will have significant consequences for ocean fish catches, which are already in decline today,” said Bill Hare of Climate Analytics and who was the lead author of the study.

Policy recommendations

The report is a science-based guide for the World Bank and governments for what these regions will face over the next 20 to 30 years, said Hare.

“Much of this can be avoided, and it will cost far less with urgent action to reduce carbon emissions,” Hare told IPS.

In a speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama called climate change the “global threat of our time” and promised the United States would do far more to reduce emissions. A detailed announcement is expected next week.

Last week, the United States and China agreed to reduce phase out HFCs, a greenhouse gas used in air conditioners. China has also created a series of carbon trading regions to cut emissions.

“These are small positive signs that need to pickup momentum,” Hare said.

Civil society organisations warn that if agriculture becomes part of a carbon market, it will spur more land grabbing in Africa. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jun 12 2013 (IPS)

U.N. climate talks have largely stalled with the suspension of one of three negotiating tracks at a key mid-year session in Bonn, Germany.

Meanwhile, civil society organisations claim the controversial issue of “carbon farming” has been pushed back onto the agenda after African nations objected to the use of their lands to absorb carbon emissions."There is a profound danger to agriculture here, with real potential for more land grabbing and expansion of monocultures in order to harvest credits." -- Helena Paul of EcoNexus

At the Bonn Climate Change Conference this week, Russia insisted on new procedural rules. That blocked all activity in one track of negotiations called the “Subsidiary Body for Implementation” (SBI). The SBI is a technical body that was supposed to discuss finance to help developing countries cope with climate change, as well as proposals for “loss and damage” to compensate countries for damages.

The SBI talks were suspended Wednesday.

“This development is unfortunate,” said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Figueres also said the two-week Bonn conference, which ends Friday, had made considerable progress in the two other tracks. A complex new global climate treaty is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2015 with the goal of keeping global warming to less than two degrees C.

“Governments need to look up from their legal and procedural tricks and focus on the planetary emergency that is hitting Africa first and hardest,” said Mithika Mwenda of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), an African-wide climate movement with over 300 organisations in 45 countries.

And where there is “progress” at the climate talks it is in the wrong direction, according to civil society.

“We’ve seen many governments in Bonn call for a review of the current failed carbon markets to see what went wrong, why they haven’t actually reduced emissions and why they haven’t raised finance on a significant scale,” said Kate Dooley, a consultant on market mechanisms to the Third World Network.

“If we don’t learn these lessons we’ll be doomed to repeat these environmentally and financially risky schemes, at the cost of real action to reduce emissions,” Dooley said in a statement.

In Bonn, two key African negotiators appear to be pushing the World Bank agenda rather than their national interests, civil society organisations claim. Those negotiators are also working for organisations receiving World Bank funding.

One appears to want African nations’ mitigation actions to be based on agriculture, they said.

The World Bank and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation and other organisations favour what they call “climate smart” agriculture. This is defined as forms of farming that are sustainable, increase productivity and with a focus on soaking up carbon from the atmosphere.

African environment ministers from 54 nations recently stated they were not obligated to use their lands to mitigate carbon emissions since Africa is not responsible for climate change. They also instructed African negotiators at the Bonn climate talks to focus on helping African agriculture adapt to a changing climate.

“Are these people serving two masters?” asked Mariam Mayet of the Africa Centre for Biosafety, which works to protect farmers’ rights and biodiversity across the continent.

“What is the World Bank’s level of influence over these individuals, and is there a risk that this is impacting on their actions and the outcome here?” Mayet told IPS.

In December 2011, more than 100 African and international civil society organisations sent a joint letter to African ministers asking for “no soil carbon markets in Africa”.

Globally, agriculture is a major source of global warming gases like carbon and methane – directly accounting for 15 percent to 30 percent of global emissions. Changes in agricultural practices such as reducing or eliminating plowing and fertiliser use can greatly reduce emissions.

Agriculture can also be used to absorb or trap carbon in the soil. When a plant grows, it takes CO2 out the atmosphere and releases oxygen. The more of a crop – maize, soy or vegetable – that remains after harvest, the more carbon is returned to the soil.

Civil society organisations warn that if agriculture becomes part of a carbon market, it will spur more land grabbing in Africa, with woodlands being used mainly for carbon sequestration instead of food production.

“There is a profound danger to agriculture here, with real potential for more land grabbing and expansion of monocultures in order to harvest credits,” Helena Paul of EcoNexus, an environmental NGO, previously told IPS.

Soils are extraordinarily variable and different climatic regimes affect how they function, said Ólafur Arnalds, a soil scientist at the Agricultural University of Iceland. While soils are a key part of the planet’s carbon cycle, we don’t know enough about soil carbon, Arnalds told IPS at a recent Soil Carbon Sequestration conference in Iceland.

That complexity does not suit carbon markets well and drives up costs of accounting and verification. However, Arnalds does believe that soils and agriculture have an important role in climate change and farmers should be compensated for their efforts.

The emissions data suggests that the globe could warm well more than the two degrees Celsius that climate scientists have set as an acceptable level by the end of this century. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jun 11 2013 (IPS)

Greenhouse gas emissions worldwide rose by 1.4 percent last year, setting a new record, according to data released Monday.

The findings, from the International Energy Agency (IEA), come just weeks after scientists in Hawaii recorded carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere higher than 400 parts per million, another modern record.“The most important takeaway here is that this two-degree ‘pathway’ is still within our reach.” -- Kelly Mitchell of Greenpeace

The data suggests that the globe could warm well more than the two degrees Celsius that climate scientists have set as an acceptable level by the end of this century, a target towards which international negotiations are currently working.

“Climate change has quite frankly slipped to the back burner of policy priorities. But the problem is not going away – quite the opposite,” Maria van der Hoeven, the IEA’s executive director, said Monday at the launch of a special report on the issue.

“The path we are currently on is more likely to result in a temperature increase of between 3.6 and 5.3 degrees C, but … much more can be done to tackle energy-sector emissions without jeopardising economic growth, an important concern for many governments.”

While such estimates have been published previously, the warnings and a set of detailed recommendations are particularly significant coming from the IEA. The Paris-based organisation was set up in the early 1970s to coordinate global oil supply, and continues to advise primarily the world’s richest countries.

“It’s one thing for an environmental group to be saying this, but the IEA is a very respected authority on energy markets and policy, with lots of analytical capacity,” Nathaniel Keohane, the vice-president for international climate at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), an advocacy group here, told IPS.

“This is an organisation founded to respond to the oil shock of the 1970s, yet they’re saying that a ‘climate shock’ is what we now have to watch for, in terms of threat to long-term economic prosperity. This report helps point us in a direction of where we need to go in the near term to try to get back on track.”

Indeed, Keohane says the new report can in part be seen as a “hopeful” document, in that the four policy recommendations its lays out would allow international climate negotiators to realistically continue working towards limiting global temperature rise to just 2 degree C.

“The most important takeaway here is that this 2 degree ‘pathway’ is still within our reach,” Kelly Mitchell, a campaigner with Greenpeace, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“Further, the IEA makes the point to clarify a host of no-cost measures towards that pathway. With countries around the world already experiencing the impacts of climate change, that leaves very few reasons left why governments should be delaying action on climate change.”

The IEA recommendations would use only currently available technologies and could be implemented at no net cost, it says. These include a new focus on energy efficiency, continuing to limit the growth of the coal industry, reducing the amount of methane leakage during oil extraction, and speeding up the phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies.

Nearly half of these savings would come from energy efficiency alone. Fully implementing the recommendations would reduce emissions by around eight percent by 2020, the organisation estimates.

“This does not take us all the way where we need to go,” EDF’s Keohane cautions. “But this is a package of policies that would help create the opportunity to turn towards ‘climate safety’.”

Back on track

The overall rise of 1.4 percent in carbon dioxide emissions masks some potentially positive news. The United States, for instance, reduced its 2012 emissions to levels last seen during the 1990s, largely on the back of strong new use of domestically sourced natural gas, while Europe also saw a decline.

At 3.8 percent, China too saw its emissions grow more slowly than anytime in the past decade, as Beijing has begun pouring funding into renewables. Yet China also posted the largest contribution to the new global emissions increase.

Indeed, developing countries made up some 60 percent of those emissions, up from 45 percent a little over a decade ago. Due to the large growth in energy demand from these countries, IEA analysts point out that developing countries “stand to gain the most from investing early in low-carbon and more efficient infrastructure”.

Climate negotiators are currently meeting in Bonn, Germany. Yet progress in the talks has been stymied in particular by disagreements between developed and developing countries over how to allot responsibility for emissions cuts.

The IEA is now warning that governments across the globe, though particularly in major emitting countries, will need to put in place these policy reforms by 2020. That’s already an extremely tight deadline, but actually the IEA says “intensive action” is required well before that date.

“Delaying stronger climate action to 2020 would come at a cost,” the report states. “1.5 trillion dollars in low-carbon investments are avoided before 2020, but 5 trillion dollars in additional investments would be required thereafter to get back on track.”

One potential strength of the IEA’s recommendations is that they could easily be implemented in parallel to the international climate negotiations. While political will is necessary to see through some of the recommendations – particularly phasing out coal use and fossil fuel subsidies – others wouldn’t require much political involvement.

“The headline agreements from the international talks will take place starting in 2020, but these are four practical, pragmatic policies that could be put in place leading up to that point,” EDF’s Keohane says.

“This means the United States has to take the lead, and will also require action from China, the E.U., India, Brazil. But each of these recommendations could be implemented regardless of what happens in Bonn and later talks, and each will be critical to getting us across the finish line.”

Also on Monday, researchers released a first-ever ranking of 100 entities in the United States, historically the largest greenhouse gas emitter, by their level of greenhouse gas emissions. At the top of the list are three power companies, which researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts say constitute five percent of all U.S. annual emissions.

At number four on the list is the U.S. government, based on 2011 data.

Mexico is particularly vulnerable to increasingly frequent extreme weather events, which make climate change mitigation and adaptation measures essential to preserving its spectacular natural landscapes, like Pico de Orizaba, Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jun 8 2013 (IPS)

The Climate Change Fund set up in November in Mexico faces enormous challenges such as the enforcement of anti-corruption standards, which make it unlikely that concrete actions will begin this year, according to civil society organisations.

The fund, which will allocate resources to mitigate and adapt to climate change, was created under the General Climate Change Law of June 2012, with an initial budget of only 78,000 dollars, assigned mainly for administrative expenses.

The initiative was adopted in accordance with the global strategy that emerged at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 16) held in December 2010 in the southeastern Mexican city of Cancún.

“We know that recipient countries face significant corruption challenges,” and that is a concern because “the Mexican fund may be a model” for other countries that need assistance, Lisa Elges, the head of the Climate Governance Integrity Programme for Transparency International (TI), told IPS.

“A corruption risk assessment is needed, as well as people’s participation and involvement in monitoring the process,” she said.

TI, the global anti-corruption watchdog, is planning to publish in July or August a report on climate finance mapping and assessments which will analyse funds received by nine countries, including Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Panama.

The TI experts found failures of accountability, of dispute settlement mechanisms and of coordination with national funds. In addition there were conflicts of interest between actors involved, such as companies, and a lack of monitoring for projects from initial design to completion.

Mexico’s Climate Change Fund is meant to attract and channel public, private, national and international resources for actions against the effects of climate change, with a priority on adaptation.

Mexico is particularly vulnerable to increasingly frequent and extreme weather events, such as severe drought, intense rains and frosts, for which measures of mitigation and adaptation are essential.

Since 2006, this country of 118 million people has received more than seven billion dollars in loans or donations from the private sector, multilateral bodies and other countries for environmental policies, in response to the government’s call for resources to overcome the challenges, according to the Mexican Centre for Environmental Law (CEMDA).

Among the ongoing projects is the restoration of wetlands in the Gulf of Mexico, financed by the World Bank, and the design of a model for monitoring, verifying and reporting in the forestry sector, an initiative that is due to be launched in 2015, with aid from Norway.

Carlos Tornel, a public policy analyst at CEMDA, told IPS that the climate fund “must have clear rules, accountability and transparency, and should not be the only financing mechanism.”

A report on the flow of resources to Mexico’s climate fund from the public coffers, international institutions and the private sector will be published this month by CEMDA.

In the view of the government of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto, it is preferable to have a well-defined structure and guidelines in place first, before beginning to finance projects.

“We want to design something that really works well. We have to make it transparent, make it functional, and reduce costs,” Luis Muñozcano, the assistant director general for climate change projects in the environment ministry, told IPS.

Draft guidelines for the climate change fund stipulate the definition of the responsibilities of those involved, procedures for receiving and disbursing funds, a mechanism for accessing information, and transparency in accounting for the resources, among other aspects.

By 2020 a system of financial incentives and subsidies should be in place for adaptation and mitigation measures.

The Mexican fund can also channel cash to energy efficiency, renewable energy, biomass use and clean transportation projects.

Every year Mexico emits some 748 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the main greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, according to the most recent measurements collected in 2010 and officially released last December.

The General Climate Change Law establishes a plan to reduce emissions by 30 percent by 2020 and by 50 percent by 2050, with reference to 2000 levels.

Mexico’s Fifth National Communication delivered in 2012 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change predicts that achieving the planned emissions reduction by 2020 will require 138 billion dollars of investment.

“We want a standardised approach. The issue is to see if money was efficiently used. Moreover, in practical terms, the complaints schemes are not operational at the national level,” said Elges, referring to the global Green Climate Fund created at COP 16 and originally promised starter capital of 30 billion dollars.

At the Cancún meeting it was agreed that industrialised nations should contribute 100 billion dollars a year to that fund from 2020 onwards. The Green Climate Fund is devoted to assisting poor countries to adapt to climate change impacts and to develop low-carbon economies. The World Bank is to administer the resources for the first three years according to the standards of the Convention.

The Green Fund is governed by a council of 24 delegates, with equal numbers from developed and developing nations, who are responsible for use and oversight of the resources.

After South Korea was elected as the headquarters of the Green Climate Fund last year, TI received a complaint from one of the other candidate countries accusing South Korea of buying votes with irregular payments. But the Asian country denied the allegations and the case did not proceed further.

However, Elges saw this as a warning sign of the dark shadows that can haunt these kinds of funds.

The other candidates to host the central office of the Green Climate Fund were Germany, Mexico, Namibia, Poland and Switzerland.

“It remains to be seen who is going to allocate the budget. So far, the finance ministry is the only body responsible,” said Tornel.

Forest in Sierra de Manantlán biosphere reserve in western Mexico.Credit: Comisión Nacional de Áreas Protegidas

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 25 2013 (IPS)

Issues related to the ownership of forest carbon and to prior consultation mechanisms threaten to derail plans for the Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation of Forests (REDD+) in some countries of Latin America, according to experts.

The problems are hindering the design of Mexico’s plan in the framework of the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD). In Panama, they have prompted the country’s indigenous peoples to withdraw from the programme.

“The previous government let slip the opportunity of concluding the process for fear of social activism, especially on the part of indigenous people and campesino communities,” Gustavo Sánchez, head of the Mexican Network of Campesino Forestry Organisations (Red MOCAF), told IPS.

The administration of Enrique Peña Nieto, whose six-year term began in December, has not said “whether or not it will adopt the current draft” of the national plan, he said.

“When it comes to the plan, Mexico is the second most advanced country in the Mesoamerican region (southern Mexico and Central America), because Costa Rica is already engaged in consultations, after reaching an agreement between native peoples and the government,” Sánchez said.

REDD+ is a climate change mitigation action plan that currently finances national programmes in 16 countries of the developing South in a quest to combat deforestation, reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and promote access by participating countries to technical and financial support.

The initiative was launched in 2008 by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) and the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), with the goal of promoting conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.

In Latin America the participating countries are Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama and Paraguay, while associate members that have not so far received financing are Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Peru. A total of 46 countries in the developing South are participating.

Mexico’s forested area covers 65 million hectares in the territories of some 2,300 communities, of which 600 manage forestry enterprises, according to the Mexican Civil Council for Sustainable Forestry (CCMSS).

This country of nearly 117 million people emits 748 million tonnes a year of CO2, one of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. Close to 16 percent arises from livestock farming, deforestation and other soil uses.

The authorities estimate that 150,000 hectares of forest are lost every year, but environmental organisations put deforestation at over 500,000 hectares a year.

In February, Panamanian indigenous groups withdrew from the pilot programme in their country, saying that the process was disrespecting their right to free, prior and informed consent and their collective right to traditional lands, as well as violating the 2007 U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

“The state has marginalised us. The first thing the programme must guarantee is safeguards for indigenous people. Continuing in the programme makes no sense,” said Héctor Huertas of the National Union of Indigenous Lawyers of Panama (UNAIPA), which represents the National Coordinating Body of Indigenous Peoples in Panama (COONAPIP).

Huertas told IPS that COONAPIP, a confederation of the seven native peoples in this Central American country, will be bringing a lawsuit in an administrative court against the Panamanian National Environmental Authority in a bid to halt REDD+.

Panama, a country of 3.5 million people, is home to some 417,000 indigenous people, according to the 2010 census, living on 16,634 square kilometres, equivalent to 29 percent of the national territory. Indigenous lands are regarded under the constitution as collectively-owned property that cannot be sold.

The crisis of the plan in Panama has fed suspicion in dozens of NGOs and academic institutes around the world that REDD+ does not represent a viable solution for environmental problems.

But it may serve as a lesson for the countries involved in designing the REDD+ programmes.

The study “Legal analysis of cross-cutting issues for REDD+ implementation: Lessons learned from Mexico, Viet Nam and Zambia”, says that “Mexico’s laws do not specify who owns carbon, but we can presume that forest owners and rights holders will be the direct beneficiaries.

“The clarification of land tenure rights is a crucial component of forest-based approaches to combating climate change and defining related carbon rights,” says the study, published May 2 by UN-REDD.

Another report, “Putting the Pieces Together for Good Governance of REDD+: An Analysis of 32 REDD+ Country Readiness Proposals”, published in March, concludes that few countries involved in the initiative “consider specific design options or challenges related to REDD+ benefit sharing, conflict resolution, or revenue management systems.”

However, the report makes the positive point that “most include plans to address these issues as readiness activities move forward.”

The publication, by Lauren Goers Williams of the U.S.-based World Resources Institute, says: “Relatively few readiness proposals identify specific next steps to address land tenure challenges or establish mechanisms to coordinate with local institutions during REDD+ planning and implementation.”

Although six REDD+ pilot projects, known as early actions, are under way in Mexico, it is unlikely that the national strategy will be completed this year.

“It is worrying to see the progress made with the early actions, because there is no national core concept, which should have come first,” Sánchez complained. ”Less importance is being given to tenure and rights, and more to measuring, reporting and verifying carbon. More progress is being made on the technical side, but there is no criterion for sustainability.”

NGOs involved in the process will ask the National Forestry Commission for clarity with respect to negotiation of the national strategy, for the settling of critical issues.

In the case of Panama, Huertas said that indigenous people “were demanding that indigenous experts be included on the programme, and that consultations be channelled through COONAPIP. Now we want a suspension of REDD+ based on the precautionary principle, because fundamental rights are being violated.”

The precautionary principle states that when potential adverse effects are not fully understood, the activities in question should not proceed.

The withdrawal of the native communities is being discussed at the 12th session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, being held in New York May 20-31.

UN-REDD is currently carrying out an external evaluation of the Panama national programme.

The UN-REDD study says: “To ensure the successful and equitable distribution of REDD+ benefits, legislation on REDD+ should incorporate clear and harmonised legal procedures and rules, allowing for open participation among actors at subnational and national levels.”