Small-scale farmer, Zimbabwean Ruth Chikweya, struggles with her maize crop. Both rich and poor nations struggle from issues of food insecurity. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
DOHA, Dec 4 2012 (IPS)

Qatar may be one of the richest countries in the world, but it has something in common with its African counterparts – food insecurity.

This Middle-Eastern oil-producing nation imports 90 percent of its food because it is a dryland country.

“Food is very expensive here,” an immigrant Ghanaian taxi driver who opted to remain anonymous told IPS.

“Here, a litre of petrol is cheaper than water,” said the driver who spent the last week transporting the delegates at the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP 18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to their venue.

While Qatar’s issues of food insecurity stem from its terrain, African countries are struggling with food insecurity because of poverty and erratic weather patterns that have dramatically reduced agricultural production over the years, Emmanuel Seck, programme manager at the Dakar-based Environment and Development Action in the Third World, told IPS.

As African countries struggle to make use of their vast land resources to improve food production because of climate change, Qatar, like other Gulf States and emerging economies such as China, is leasing and buying land in Africa, said Seck. According to a 2012 report by the Oakland Institute, investors in the United States and Europe are the leaders in foreign land acquisition.

But developing countries such as Swaziland are already aligning their policies towards producing and supplying food for Qatar, and the two monarchies have established diplomatic relations.

“We have vast virgin land in our country and we can use it to produce food for Qatar to drive our economy,” head of Swaziland’s COP 18 technical mission, Mbuso Dlamini, told IPS.

Swaziland, however, is not producing enough staple food for its citizens, importing most of it from neighbouring South Africa. Swaziland’s largest foreign exchange earner is sugar.

According to the latest report from Worldwatch Institute, of the 70.2 million hectares of land leased or bought all over the world in the last decade, 34.3 percent is in Africa. Qatar and other Gulf States have acquired a combined 6.4 million hectares of land in developing countries.

Bruce Campbell, programme director at the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centres (CGIAR) Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), said that a balance needed to be struck in order to ensure that poor communities that are dependent on subsistence farming are not kicked off their land to make way for agricultural developments by foreign governments and multinational companies.

“Countries need to put in place mechanisms that will ensure that the leasing of land does not disenfranchise communities,” Campbell told IPS.

He said that leasing land might not necessarily be a bad idea as some people are moving away from subsistence farming to finding jobs. Campbell said that the guidelines on the Responsible Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of Food Security spearheaded by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation would help countries strike that balance.

Tanzanian researcher from the University of Dar es Salaam Emma Limenga warned African governments against leasing out land for long periods. Normally, land lease agreements last for 99 years, which Limenga said could jeopardise the food security of future generations.

“Remember, future generations are not responsible for the decisions that we make now,” Limenga said in an interview with IPS. “A 10- to 20-year lease agreement is reasonable.”

She said that leasing land and justifying the practice by saying that it would create jobs was neither right nor wrong. She pointed out that while poor communities may have access to land, they might not be able to buy food because of unemployment.

“Some communities are not even cultivating the land because of the erratic weather patterns … Access to jobs helps people to be able to buy food,” said Limenga.

Burger Patrice, the executive director of the NGO Centre d’Actions et de Realisations Internationales, told IPS that Africa’s poverty should not be an excuse for “land grabbing”.

Patrice explained that the rehabilitation of dryland was the solution to land grabbing and food insecurity.

“Drylands are a result of climate variations over many years,” he said. “It is cheaper to rehabilitate the land through the use of fertiliser and ecological agriculture than to let it continue to deteriorate.”

“It is in the interest of countries like Qatar to start producing their own food because at some point they will run out of oil and will not afford the high costs of importing this basic need,” said Patrice.

He said that although land has experienced the greatest impact of climate change, the negotiations in the Qatari capital of Doha have overlooked that aspect. And he maintained that the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification was a poor cousin in the U.N. system because land was not given the prominence it deserved.

To most people, holes in the ozone layer or the melting of polar ice caps can sound like distant catastrophes. “But let’s talk about concrete examples,” says an Indonesian director whose documentary film captures the lives of local farmers affected by a dramatically changing environment.

“I found in Indonesian villages that poverty and access to education are directly connected to nature because the traditional farming methods are affected by changes in the climate,” Shalahuddin Siregar, whose documentary Negeri di Bawah Kabut (The Land Beneath the Fog) has won several international awards, told IPS.

The film follows the lives of two families of Indonesian farmers in Genikan village on the slopes of Mount Merbabu in Central Java, who no longer know when to plant which crops because the seasons are not regular any more due to climate change.

“Most of the children in Indonesia’s countryside cannot continue to attend school  because parents don’t earn enough from farming to pay for school expenses, since the weather has become unpredictable and crops fail,” said Siregar, who spent three years shooting  the film.

The farmers, he says, have to supplement incomes by migrating to the cities to work as construction workers during months when they cannot farm.

With representatives from 194 countries, including environment, energy and foreign affairs ministers as well as heads of states meeting in Qatar for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP18/CMP8) from Nov. 26 to Dec. 7 to discuss future agreements to deal with climate changes their decisions would affect vulnerable communities in Indonesia and elsewhere.

“The most vulnerable people in Indonesia are small farmers, fishermen, indigenous people, forest-dependent people, women and children,” Martin Baker, communications coordinator of Greenpeace in Indonesia told IPS.

He added that deforestation, extreme weather, floods, landslides, air degradation, water quality and coastal abrasion makes those lives more difficult.

Greenpeace and other environmental groups believe that despite the environmental impacts of climate change from activities such as deforestation, the Indonesian government continues to strongly support big companies extracting the country’s natural resources for huge profits.

Indonesia loses about a million hectares of forests a year, despite a two-year moratorium that limits deforestation, following a pledge of a billion dollars from Norway.

“The government is not serious enough about working on their mitigation programmes. What we saw on the ground, the deforestation is still happening. The biggest source of emission, its root causes and its impact is not well addressed,” said Baker.

According to Elfian Effendi, executive director of the Indonesian NGO Greenomics, the government is doing only as much as it thinks it can afford to, without forgoing the economic benefits of exploiting natural resources.

“Due to unclear support and commitment from the developed countries, the Indonesian government works just based on the ‘scale’ that is affordable for Indonesia, not more,” he told IPS.

With most developed countries too busy fighting economic downturns, developing countries are raising the question of who is going to pay for climate change solutions, and they are particularly concerned about the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, which binds industrialised countries to reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s special envoy on climate change, Rachmat Witoelar, was quoted as saying that his country will try to convince developed nations to adopt a treaty on climate change and join a trust fund for mitigation efforts.

“Indonesia hopes that developed countries would show leadership in saving the earth from destruction due to climate change, the effects of which are getting stronger every year,” said Witoelar, quoted by the local news agency Antara.

Yudhoyono has pledged to cut his country’s emissions by 26 percent by 2020, or 41 percent over the same period if the international community steps in to help.

When it comes to mitigating the effects of climate change Indonesia is globally important because it contains about half the world’s tropical peatlands and nearly a quarter of the world’s mangroves, which keep the highest carbon stocks of any forest type. How these are preserved or depleted has consequences far beyond Indonesia’s borders, scientists say.

Hence, Indonesia is considered both a victim and a perpetrator of climate change: On one hand the archipelago of more than 17,000 islands is extremely vulnerable to climate change, and on the other hand it is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States.

“As an archipelago, Indonesia could be called a vulnerable state. Most people who live in and near the forest may get severe impacts from deforestation and forest degradation…while those who live on the shoreline may get impacts from the rise of sea levels and from floods,” Wandojo Siswanto, an Indonesian expert on forestry and climate change told IPS.

For vulnerable communities such as those portrayed in Sinegar’s film, there are no immediate solutions.

Eleven-year-old Arifin, the film’s main character, contemplates whether he will be able to continue studying after finishing elementary school as his parents grapple with harvests that have gone wrong because the rains are no longer regular, and cannot afford the school fees, uniform and shoes.

“Arifin’s father felt guilty that he could not afford further studies for his son. He had already failed to send his two older sons to school,” said Siregar, adding that in the end the boy had to go to a cheaper Islamic boarding school in another town with financial help from a neighbour.

“It was hard for the parents to send the son away from home, but they had no choice,” added Siregar. (END)

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, told IPS that a renewed commitment period was urgently needed in order to safeguard important emissions reductions and accounting roles that have existed under the Kyoto Protocol. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
DOHA, Nov 27 2012 (IPS)

African negotiators attending the United Nations climate change talks in Doha, Qatar say they are determined to ensure that developed countries do not let the Kyoto Protocol die as its commitment period comes to an end.

The protocol’s first commitment period will expire on Dec.31, 2012 unless negotiators at the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) can give it a new lease of life under a second commitment period to begin in January 2013.

“We are not about to watch on as some of the developed countries plot to bury the Kyoto Protocol in Doha,” Chebet Maikut, a Ugandan delegate, told IPS. The current protocol commits industrialised nations and the European Community to reduce their emissions of four greenhouse gases.

The African Group of Negotiators and the Alliance of Small Island States are pushing for the renewal of the agreement, as it is the only international treaty of its kind.

Peter Odhengo, the coordinator of Greening Kenya Initiative, told IPS: “Some of the developed countries that have been buying time (to implement emissions reductions) want to use the upcoming deadline as an opportunity to end Kyoto and we are saying ‘No’.”

According to Odhengo, Canada, Russia, and Japan are not willing to sign a second commitment period partly because they want emerging economies like China and India to commit to bigger emissions reductions.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, told IPS that a renewed commitment period was urgently needed in order to safeguard important emissions reductions and accounting roles that have existed under the Kyoto Protocol.

“The Kyoto Protocol is the only existing and binding agreement under which developed countries commit to cutting greenhouse gases. It underwrites international political trust that developed nations remain responsible to lead emission cuts,” she said.

Figueres said that the Doha deliverables had been prepared during the year and she hoped that no new issues would come up.

According to Figueres, deliverables include the second commitment period for Kyoto as well as an array of institutional arrangements and the convention to support developing countries.

Meanwhile, according to Odhengo, African countries are eager to save the United Nation’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which provides for emission reduction projects that would cease to exist if the Kyoto Protocol is not extended beyond December.

However, Peter Storey, the coordinator of the United States-based Climate Technology Initiative’s Private Financing Advisory Network, told IPS that it was meaningless for Africa to push for this. He said Africa had less than two percent of all CDM projects registered globally and the remaining projects were mostly in China, India and Brazil.

Conor Barry, the head of stakeholder development mechanisms at the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told IPS that CDM projects were rapidly increasing in Africa.

He said that the focus had changed from large-scale projects that could easily be found in India, China and Brazil to small-scale projects in Africa and least-developed countries (LDCs) in other regions.

“We have learnt a lot from CDM during the first commitment period and we think the situation will be much better for Africa if parties at Doha agree to the second (Kyoto) commitment period,” said Barry.

He said the secretariat was expanding its small-scale projects, including those involving the use of improved cooking stoves and solar lamps, across various geographical areas.

According to Barry, in April the secretariat introduced a loan scheme aimed at stimulating the registration of CDM projects in under-represented countries.

The loans are given to projects that have a high probability of registration, an expected generation of 7,500 Certified Emissions Reductions or CERs per year in LDCs and 15,000 CERs per year in non-LDCs.

John Christensen, head of the U.N. Environment Programme’s Risoe Centre, told IPS that such initiatives could increase Africa’s share of CDM projects.

He said that the European Union Emission Trading Scheme, which is the main purchaser of CERs, would only accept carbon credits from projects in LDCs from 2013.

A family walks along the beach in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region, in northeastern Nicaragua. Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
DOHA, Nov 26 2012 (IPS)

The upcoming United Nations climate talks may have a renewed sense of urgency with a new World Bank report warning that the planet is on a dangerous path to four degrees Celsius of global warming by 2100.

“Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4ºC Warmer World Must be Avoided”, released on Nov. 19, was prepared for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics.

But the 18th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 18) that begins Nov. 26 in Doha, Qatar has become extremely complex.

There is agreement amongst the 194 nations that are parties to the Convention on the need to set a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, to keep the increase in global temperatures below two degrees, to avoid catastrophic climate change.

That target is easy enough to understand, but exactly how this can be achieved has been the subject of intense and complex negotiations for many years, said Jennifer Morgan, director of the Climate and Energy Program of the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based NGO.

Last year at COP 17 in Durban it took extra days of negotiations for countries to finally agree to launch a new round of negotiations to create a legally binding international agreement.

That agreement will require carbon emission reductions for all nations by 2015 to meet the two-degree target. It is intended to be ratified and enter into force by 2020.

“No one knows what this new agreement will look like,” Morgan told Tierramérica in a press conference. “Are countries going to show up in Doha with the will to create a solid work plan?”

2015 is only three years off. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires some industrialized countries to reduce their emissions, was negotiated in less than three years. However, it took another eight years to be ratified by enough countries to enter into force, and some key nations like the United States backed out of the Protocol.

One of the major issues in Doha will be “ambition”, said Morgan. Ambition refers to how big the emission cuts that nations are prepared to agree to will be.

Climate science clearly shows that to stay below two degrees of warming, global greenhouse gas emissions must begin to decline by 2020.

To do this, industrialized nations must trim their emissions output by 25 to 40 percent below their 1990 emission levels.

The United States has pledged to make a three percent reduction compared to 1990 levels. The United Kingdom is aiming for a 34 percent reduction and has already reached 18 percent.

“We hope the U.S. will bring a new strategy, including greater ambition, to Doha,” said Morgan.

Most countries’ current reduction pledges are nowhere near what is needed, said Bill Hare, director of Climate Analytics, a non-profit climate science advisory group based in Berlin.

Countries have to find ways to trim another 9 to 11 billion tons of CO2 by 2020 or forget two degrees Celsius, Hare told Tierramérica.

This “emissions gap” between the reductions pledged and those needed to keep the climate under control is growing larger, based on new data to be released this week by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Hare’s group.

“The gap keeps getting bigger… making it ever more difficult and costly to stay below two degrees,” said Hare.

Deforestation is the second largest source of climate-heating carbon emissions after fossil fuels.

To provide a financial incentive for developing countries to reduce deforestation, a controversial programme called REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is also being negotiated at COP 18.

Forests are far more valuable than places to store carbon, according to the first comprehensive scientific assessment of REDD+ and potential impacts on biodiversity and local peoples’ livelihoods.

Conserving biodiversity and sustaining livelihoods are essential if REDD+ is going to work, says the new study, “Understanding Relationships Between Biodiversity, Carbon, Forests and People: The Key to Achieving REDD+ Objectives. A Global Assessment Report”.

Coordinated by the world’s largest network of forest scientists, the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO), the report will be formally presented during the meeting in Doha.

“The world’s rapidly dwindling forests are not just carbon warehouses,” John Parrotta, report co-author and scientist with the United States Forest Service, told Tierramérica. “Forests provide a wide range of environmental goods and services that people need.”

Those goods and services include cleaning water, preventing flooding, and providing food and habitat for humans and many other creatures like bees that perform valuable services like pollination.

Deforestation currently gobbles up an area the size of Greece (13 million hectares) every year, and is driven mostly by conversion to agriculture and by the wood products industries. REDD+ is an attempt to reverse this by creating a financial value for the carbon stored in forests.

Trees take heat-trapping carbon out of the atmosphere as they grow and store it for as long as the trees live. Instead of cutting down trees and selling the wood, the carbon trapped in the living trees can be sold as “carbon credits” on an open market.

A steel, cement, or coal-fired power company in the United States or a European country can then buy those credits instead of reducing its carbon emissions. The current price is around 10 dollars per ton, but this fluctuates.

Like any market, the carbon market demands verification of how much carbon is in a forest and how much carbon will remain there over 40, 60 or 80 years. This is both very technical and very expensive to do.

Purchasers of carbon credits also want contractual agreements with forest owners to guarantee the carbon stays in the forest, which may prevent local people from using the forest to grow food, fix a roof or even hunt for generations.

While REDD+ could protect forests and be an annual revenue source for local people, doing it right is very complex and there is much work left to do, said Parrotta. “It is hard to see how there will be much progress at Doha.”

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

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