Civil society groups argue that fossil fuels should not be eligible for climate funding in any form. Credit: Bigstock

By Kitty Stapp
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 3 2015 (IPS)

After a difficult infancy, the Green Climate Fund is finally getting some legs. The big question now is what direction it will toddle off in.

Local ownership, sustainability and a firm commitment to clean energy are a few of the non-negotiable items if the Fund is to be a success, civil society groups stress."Allowing so-called climate financing for projects that are slightly less dirty than a hypothetical alternative is a sure way to game the system." -- Karen Orenstein

“The GCF board is aiming to have at least a few projects in the pipeline in time for COP21 [the high-level climate change summit in Paris in December] – to show the world that the fund is open for business and that developed countries are putting their money where their mouths are,” Karen Orenstein of Friends of the Earth told IPS. “Of course, this will be more credible once substantially more of the money pledged to the GCF is legally committed.

“It is essential that those first GCF projects set the appropriate precedent for future-financed activities. The GCF must showcase the best of what it has to offer,” she added.

“This means directly addressing the adaptation and mitigation needs of the vulnerable through environmentally-sound initiatives that promote human rights and benefit local economies, rather than Wall Street-type transactions that may theoretically have trickle-down benefit for the poor.”

The Fund is the United Nations’ premier mechanism for funding climate change-related mitigation and adaptation in developing countries.

At the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, donors agreed to mobilise 100 billion dollars a year by 2020, in an undefined mix of public and private funding, to help developing countries. The GCF is to be a cornerstone of this mobilisation, using the money to fund an even split between mitigation and adaptation projects.

Actual funding has trickled in slowly. But delivery of a pledge by the government of Japan late last month for 1.5 billion dollars carried the Fund over the required 50 percent threshold to begin allocating resources for projects and programmes in developing countries.

The Fund aims to finalise its first set of projects for approval by the GCF Board at its 11th meeting in November.

It has also identified strategic priority areas and global investment opportunities that are not adequately supported by existing climate finance mechanisms, and can be used to maximise the GCF’s impact, especially investments in efficient and resilient cities, land‐use management and resilience of small islands.

“Projects must be genuinely country-driven, which means not only government-driven but also driven by communities, civil society and local private sector. And, of course, there must be no trace of support for dirty energy,” Orenstein said.

To date, 33 governments, including eight developing countries, have pledged close to 10.2 billion dollars equivalent, with 21 of them signing a part or all of their contribution agreement. But how to maintain and accelerate that funding in the long term remains to be seen.

In a new analysis, the World Resources Institute (WRI) notes that more than five years after Copenhagen, the sources, instruments, and channels that should count toward the 100-billion-a-year goal remain ambiguous.

It suggests four possible scenarios: developed country climate finance only; developed country finance plus leveraged private sector investment; developed country finance, multilateral development bank (MDB) climate finance (weighted by developed countries’ capital share) and the combined leveraged private sector investment; and all the first three sources, plus climate-related official development assistance (ODA) as compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

In terms of which is most likely to be adopted, as governments negotiate a comprehensive new climate change agreement for the post-2020 period, Michael Westphal, a senior associate on WRI’s Sustainable Finance team, told IPS that parties have not agreed yet on even what finance sources should count.

“Our scenario analysis is focused on assessing how likely is it that each scenario could reach 100 billion dollars, given different assumptions of growth and leverage,” he explained.

“One of the main conclusions, not surprisingly, is that the more sources that are included, the more realistic is it for the 100 billion dollars to be reached – i.e., it would require lower growth rates and assumptions about how much private finance is leveraged per public dollar.”

Supplemental funding could flow from new and innovative sources, such as the redirection of fossil fuel subsidies, carbon market revenues, financial transaction taxes, export credits, and debt relief, the analysis says.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that pre-tax fossil fuel subsidies for OECD countries – long derided as irrational and destructive by environmental groups and many economists – amounted to 13.3 billion dollars in 2012.

Budgetary support and tax expenditures to fossil fuels totalled 76.4 billion dollars in 2011 for the OECD’s 34 member countries.

“On fossil fuel subsidies, the G20 has agreed to phase them out over the medium term, so we think it is likely to have progress on this front over the next five years,” Westphal told IPS.

“The IMF has written extensively about the costs of fossil fuel subsidies, so the issue is now a front burner issue for multilateral finance institutions.  As for ETS [emission trading system], governments would have to agree to divert some of the revenues from the allowances into their budgets for international climate finance.”

But even should the funding goal be reached, observers will be watching closely to see where the money goes.

Karen Orenstein has compared the push by some governments and financial institutions for “less dirty” fossil fuels to fight climate change to a doctor telling his cancer-ridden patient that “it’s fine to smoke, as long as the cigarettes are filtered.”

She notes that the list of activities that can currently be counted under the Common Principles (approved by multilateral development banks and the International Development Finance Club in March) as “climate mitigation finance” includes “energy-efficiency improvement in existing thermal power plants” and “thermal power plant retrofit to fuel switch from a more GHG-intensive fuel to a different, less GHG-intensive fuel type.”

“In the broad spectrum of fossil fuels, there is always going to be a project or fuel type that is relatively more or less dirty than another,” Orenstein says. “Allowing so-called climate financing for projects that are slightly less dirty than a hypothetical alternative is a sure way to game the system.”

Also on her watchlist? The GCF funding false solutions like so-called “climate smart” agriculture, biofuels, waste incineration, nuclear energy and big dams – many of which are included in the Common Principles.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Demonstrators protesting at the Business & Climate Summit in Paris, May 20. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, May 21 2015 (IPS)

When it comes to climate change, business as usual is simply “not an option”.

That was the view of Eldar Saetre, CEO of Norwegian multinational Statoil, as international industry leaders met in Paris for a two-day Business & Climate Summit, six months ahead of the next United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21 ) that will also be held in the French capital.

Subtitled “Working together to build a better economy”, the May 20-21 summit brought together some 2,000 representatives of some of the world’s largest retail and energy concerns, including  companies that NGOs have criticized as being among the worst environmental offenders.

At the end, business leaders proclaimed that they wanted “a global climate deal that achieves net zero emissions” and that they wanted to see this happen at COP 21.

Throughout the conference, participants stressed that businesses will have to change, not only to protect the environment, but for their own survival. “Taking climate action simply makes good business sense. However, business solutions on climate are not being scaled up fast enough,” declared the summit organizers.

They pledged to lead the “global transition to a low-carbon, climate resilient economy.”

Saetre, for example, said his company wanted to achieve “low-carbon oil and gas production” and that it had embarked on renewables in the form of offshore wind energy. But he said that fossil fuels would still be needed in the future, alongside the various forms of renewable energy.

Acknowledging the widespread scepticism about multinational companies’ commitment, business leaders said that they could not “go it alone”, and called for support from governments as well as consumers.

Mike Barry, Director of Sustainable Business at British retailer Marks & Spencer, told IPS in an interview that global commitment was important in the drive to transform industry to have more environmentally friendly practices.

“Collective action can bring about real change,” he said. “We’re here today because we believe that climate change is happening and it’s going to have a significant impact on our business in the future and our success.

“Our customers would expect us to take the lead on this, and we want governments to take this seriously as well in the run-up to COP 21 [the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to be held in Paris from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11].”

He said that Marks & Spencer and other companies in a network called the Consumer Goods Forum wanted to “stand shoulder to shoulder with government to say ‘this matters and we’re here to help’.”

But government consensus on how to address climate change has proved difficult, and even French President Francois Hollande, who opened the summit, conceded that it would require a miracle for a real agreement to be reached at COP 21.

“We must have a consensus. It’s already not easy in our own countries, so with 196 countries, a miracle is needed,” he said at the Business & Climate Summit, expressing the conviction, however, that agreement will be reached through negotiation and “responsibility”.

Hollande and other officials said the involvement of businesses was essential, and France, with its huge oil and electricity companies, evidently has a big role to play.

However, demonstrators outside the summit, held at the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), slammed big business.

“These multinationals (and the banks that finance their activities) are in fact directly at the origin of climate change,” read a statement from organisations including Les Amis de la Terre (Friends of the Earth, France) and the civil disobedience group J.E.D.I. for Climate.

Saying that it was ironic to have fossil-fuel companies represented at the summit, the groups asked: “Can one imagine for a second that the tobacco industry would be associated with policies to combat smoking aimed at ending the production of cigarettes? No, that would be the best way to ensure that the world continued to chain-smoke.”

The protesters added that if Hollande and his ministers wanted to show a real commitment to the environment, they should make it clear that “the climate is not a business”.

“The fight against climate change is not the business of fossil-fuel multinationals: they belong to our past,” the groups said in a joint release, handed out on the street.

At the summit, Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said that businesses should not be “demonised” and she called for collaboration rather than confrontation.

“We all start with a carbon footprint,” she said. “It is not a question of demonising anyone but realizing that we’re all here … This is not about confrontation. This is about collaboration. If you’re thinking about confrontation, forget it. Because we’re not going to get there.”

The summit – co-hosted by Entreprises Pour l’Environnement, an association of some 40 French and large international companies, and UN Global Compact France, a policy initiative for businesses – also addressed the vulnerability of island states in the face of climate change.

Tony de Brum, the Marshall Islands’ Minister of Foreign Affairs, said that island states in the Pacific and elsewhere had an interest in keeping pressure on carbon emitters because their populations’ survival was at stake.

Angel Gurría, Secretary General of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), also highlighted the threat to vulnerable countries, saying that for them, climate change is not about protecting the environment for future generations, but “it’s about how long the water will take to overcome the land.”

Gurría said that greater reductions in carbon emissions were required than has so far been proposed by states, and he stressed that countries over time needed to “develop a pathway to net zero emissions globally” by the second half of the century.

“Governments at COP 21 need to send a clear directional signal that will drive action for decades to come,” he said. “We are on a collision course with nature, and unless we seize this opportunity, we face an increasing risk of severe, pervasive and irreversible climate impact.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

Africa’s wetland areas are experiencing immense pressure from commercial development and agriculture, settlements, excessive exploitation by local communities and improperly-planned development activities. Credit: Creative Commons CC0

By Tonderayi Mukeredzi
HARARE, Mar 12 2015 (IPS)

African wetlands are among the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the continent, covering more than 131 million hectares, according to the Senegalese-based Wetlands International Africa (WIA).

Yet, despite their importance and value, wetland areas are experiencing immense pressure across the continent. Commercial development ranks as the major threat for the draining of wetlands, including for tourism facilities and agriculture, where hundreds of thousands of hectares of wetlands have been drained.

Other threats to Africa’s wetlands are commercial agriculture, settlements, excessive exploitation by local communities and improperly-planned development activities. The prospect of immense profits from recently discovered oil, coal and gas deposits has also led to an increase in on-and offshore exploration and mining in sensitive ecological areas.Commercial development ranks as the major threat for the draining of [Africa’s] wetlands, including for tourism facilities and agriculture … Other threats are commercial agriculture, settlements, excessive exploitation by local communities and improperly-planned development activities

In Nigeria, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, for example, wetlands and estuaries coincide with fossil fuel deposits and related infrastructure developments.

In northern Kenya, port developments in Lamu are set to take place in the West Indian Ocean Rim’s most important mangrove area and fisheries breeding ground.

In KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape of South Africa, heavy mineral sands are located in important dune forest ecosystems, and gas is being prospected for in the water-scarce and ecologically unique Karoo.

In East Africa, oil discoveries have been made in the tropical Congo Basin rain forest and the Virunga National Park – a world heritage site and a wetland recognised under the Ramsar Convention.

The Okavango Delta in Botswana, one of Africa’s most important wetlands and designated as the 1,000th world heritage site by UNESCO, has been home to many threatened species and the main water source of regional wildlife in Southern Africa. Yet it is shrinking due to drier climate, increased grazing and growing pressure from tourism.

“This delta is a true oasis in the middle of the bone-dry Kalahari Sand Basin, a rare untouched wilderness that’s been preserved by decades of border and civil wars in the Angolan catchment,” said National Geographic explorer Steve Boyes in an interview. “Many people along the Okavango River live like communities did some 400 years ago – and from them I think we can learn a lot about how to be better stewards of the natural world.”

Boyes calculated the abundance of life in the delta: more than 530 bird species, thousands of plant species, 160 different mammals, 155 reptiles, scores of frogs and countless insects.

“Everywhere you look you find life. We surveyed bats and we found 17 species in three days. We started looking for praying mantises and found 90 different species,” he said.

A recent survey by the Botswana Department of Wildlife and National Parks and the environmentalist group BirdLife Botswana concluded that that the wetland’s historical zones of dense reed beds and water fig islands were largely destroyed by hydrological changes and fire. Bush fires and a high grazing pressure further reduced the natural shores of the Okavango Delta.

Studies by BirdLife Botswana also showed that the slaty egret, a vulnerable water bird living only in Southern Africa, with its main breeding grounds in the wetlands of Zambia, Mozambique and Botswana’s Okavango Delta, is now estimated to have a total population of only about 4,000 birds.

The egret, which is listed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as vulnerable, seems to be losing its main breeding sites in the Okavango.

Environmentalists hope that they can still save the wetland, and pin their hopes on a “Slaty Egret Action Plan” which will be used by the Botswana’s Department of Wildlife and National Parks, BirdLife and other environment stakeholders to guarantee the survival of the Okavango Delta as a safe haven for the birds.

In a further step to save the wetlands, the Botswana government announced this month that from now on, seekers of mobile safari licences would be prohibited from operating in the Okavango Delta because the area in now congested.

The Botswana Guides Association, which represents many of the mobile safaris, is threatening to appeal.

Another example of the devastation of major wetlands occurred in Nigeria with pollution of farmlands linked to the Shell oil company.  The Niger Delta Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration Project, an independent team of scientists from Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States, has characterised the Niger Delta as “one of the world’s most severely petroleum-impacted ecosystems.”

In 2013, a Dutch court found the Nigerian subsidiary of Shell culpable for the pollution of farmlands at Ikot Ada Udo in Akwa Ibom state in the coastal south of the country.

The Niger Delta is Africa’s largest delta, covering some 7,000 square kilometres – one-third of which is made up of wetlands. It contains the largest mangrove forest in the world.

Assisted by environmental organisation Friends of the Earth, the court ruling was a victory for the communities in the Niger Delta after years of struggle against the oil company dating back 40 years, although the clean-up still has far to go.

“Destruction of wetlands is prevalent in almost all countries in Africa because the driving factor is the same – population pressure – many mouths to feed, ignorance about the role wetlands in playing in the ecosystem, lack of policies, laws and institutional framework to protect wetlands and in cases where these exist, they are hardly enforced,” John Owino, Programme Officer for Water and Wetlands with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)  told IPS from his base in Nairobi, Kenya.

Owino said that the future of African wetlands lies in stronger political will to protect them, based on sound wetland policies and encouragement for community participation in their management, which is lacking in many African countries.

But very few African governments have specific national policies on wetlands and are influenced by policies from different sectors such as agriculture, national resources and energy.

Edited by Lisa Vives/Phil Harris   

As governments of 195 countries approved the COP20 final document in Lima in the early hours of Dec. 14, activists protested about the watered-down results of climate negotiations outside the venue where they met. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
LIMA, Dec 14 2014 (IPS)

After a 25-hour extension, delegates from 195 countries reached agreement on a “bare minimum” of measures to combat climate change, and postponed big decisions on a new treaty until the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21), to be held in a year’s time in Paris.

After 13 days of debates, COP 20, the meeting of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), failed to resolve key issues such as the monitoring of each country’s commitment to emissions reductions, recognition of loss and damage caused by climate alterations and immediate actions, representatives of observer organisations told IPS.

The agreed document was the third draft to be debated. The Lima Call for Climate Action, as it is known, stipulates that countries must propose national greenhouse gas emission reduction targets by October 2015.

It also “urges” developed countries to “provide and mobilise financial support for ambitious mitigation and adaptation actions” to countries affected by climate change, and “invites” them to pledge financial contributions alongside their emissions reduction targets. This exhortation was a weak response to the demands of countries that are most vulnerable to global warming, and it avoided complete disaster.

But observers complained that the Lima Call pays little attention to the most vulnerable populations, like farmers, coastal communities, indigenous people, women and the poorest sectors of societies.

“There were a number of trade-offs between developed and developing countries, and the rest of the text has become significantly weaker in terms of the rules for next year and how to bring climate change action and ambitions next year,” Sven Harmeling, the climate change advocacy coordinator for Care International, told IPS. “That has been most unfortunate,” he said.

The 2015 negotiations will be affected, as “they are building up more pressure on Paris. The bigger issues have been pushed forward and haven’t been addressed here,” he said.

Harmeling recognised that an agreement has been reached, although it is insufficient. “We have something, but the legal status of the text is still unclear,” he said. If there is really a “spirit of Lima” and not just a consensus due to exhaustion, it will begin to emerge in February in Geneva, at the next climate meeting, he predicted.

The countries of the South voted in favour of the text at around 01:30 on Sunday Dec. 14, but organisations like Oxfam, the Climate Action Network and Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) were very critical of the result. The Lima negotiations “have done nothing to prevent catastrophic climate change,” according to FoEI. “What countries need now is financing of climate action and what we need is urgent action now, because we need our emissions to peak before 2020 if we are to stay on a safe path.” -- Tasneem Essop

More than 3,000 delegates met Dec. 1-13 for the complex UNFCCC process, with the ultimate goal of averting global warming to levels that would endanger life on Earth.
Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who chaired the COP 20, extended the meeting in order to build bridges between industrialised countries, the largest carbon emitters, who wanted less financial pressure, and developing countries who sought less control over their own reductions.

“Although we seem to be on opposite sides, we are in fact on the same side, because there is only one planet,” said Pulgar-Vidal at the close of the COP.

The specific mandate in Lima was to prepare a draft for a new, binding climate treaty, to be consolidated during 2015 and signed in Paris. Methodological discussions and fierce debates about financing, deadlines and loss and damage prevented a more ambitious consensus.

“What countries need now is financing of climate action and what we need is urgent action now, because we need our emissions to peak before 2020 if we are to stay on a safe path,” Tasneem Essop, climate coordinator for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), told IPS.

“We need to protect the rights of climate impacted communities,” she said. The defencelessness of the most vulnerable people on the planet is what makes action a matter of urgency.

However, the Lima agreement contains few references to mechanisms for countries to use to reduce their emissions between 2015 and 2020, when the new treaty replacing the Kyoto Protocol is due to come into force.

These actions need to start immediately, said Essop, as later measures may be ineffective. “What governments seem to be thinking is that they can do everything in the future, post 2020, when the science is clear that we have to peak before that,” she told IPS.

Unless action is taken, year by year extreme climate, drought and low agricultural yields will be harder on those communities, which bear the least responsibility for climate change. Essop believes that governments are waiting for the negotiations in Paris, when there were urgent decisions to be taken in Lima.

Among the loose ends that will need to be tied in the French capital between Nov. 30 and Dec. 11, 2015, are the balance to be struck between mitigation and adaptation in the new global climate treaty, and how it will be financed.

“If we hadn’t come to the decision we have taken (the Lima Call for Climate Action), thing would be more difficult in Paris, but as we know there are still many things to be decided bewteen here and December 2015, in orden to resolve pending issues,” Laurent Fabius, the French Foreign Minister, said in the closing plenary session.

The goal of the agreement is for global temperature to increase no more than two degrees Celsius by 2100, in order to preserve planetary stability. Reduction of fossil fuel use is essential to achieve this.

Mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage are the pillars of the new treaty. The last two issues are vital for countries and populations disproportionately impacted by climate change, but faded from the agenda in Lima.

“It’s disastrous and it doesn’t meet our expectations at all. We wanted to see a template clearly emerging from Lima, leading to a much more ambitious deal,” said Harjeet Singh, manager for climate change and resilience for the international organisation ActionAid.

“What we are seeing here is a continuous pushback from developed countries on anything related to adaptation or loss and damage,” he told IPS.

These are thorny issues because they require financial commitments from rich countries. The Green Climate Fund, set up to counter climate change in developing countries, has only received 10.2 billion dollars by this month, only one-tenth of the amount promised by industrialised nations.

The Lima Call for Climate Action did determine the format for Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC), for each country to present its emissions reduction targets.

However, the final agreement eliminated mechanisms for analysing the appropriateness and adequacy of the targets that were contained in earlier drafts.

Negotiators feel that the sum of the national contributions will succeed in halting global warming, but observers are concerned that the lack of regulation will prevent adequate monitoring of whether emissions reductions on the planet are sufficient.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

The as-yet unfinished exhibit area which forms part of the temporary installations that the host country has built in Lima to hold the COP 20, which runs Dec. 1-12. Credit: COP20 Peru

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 17 2014 (IPS)

This December, 195 nations plus the European Union will meet in Lima for two weeks for the crucial U.N. Conference of the Parties on Climate Change, known as COP 20. The hope in Lima is to produce the first complete draft of a new global climate agreement.
However, this is like writing a book with 195 authors. After five years of negotiations, there is only an outline of the agreement and a couple of ‘chapters’ in rough draft.

The deadline is looming: the new climate agreement to keep climate change to less than two degrees C is to be signed in Paris in December 2015.

“A tremendous amount of work has to be done in Lima,” said Erika Rosenthal, an attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law organisation and advisor to the chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).Climate science is clear that global CO2 emissions must begin to decline before 2020 – otherwise, preventing a 2C temperature rise will be extremely costly and challenging.

“Time is short after Lima and Paris cannot fail,” said Rosenthal. “Paris is the key political moment when the world can decisively move to reap all the benefits of a clean, carbon-free economy.”

Success in Lima will depend in part on Peru’s Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal. As official president of COP 20, Pulgar-Vidal’s determination and energy will be crucial, most observers believe.

Climate change is a major issue in Peru, since Lima and many other parts of the country are dependent on freshwater from the Andes glaciers. Studies show they have lost 30 to 50 percent of their ice in 30 years and many will soon be gone.

Pulgar-Vidal has said he expects Lima to deliver a draft agreement, although it may not include all the chapters. The full draft with all the chapters needs to be completed by May 2015 to have time for final negotiations.

The future climate agreement, which could easily be book-length, will have three main sections or pillars: mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage. The mitigation or emissions reduction pillar is divided into pre-2020 emission reductions and post-2020 sections.

Peru’s environment minister, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, during one of the many events held to promote the COP 20. As chairman of the conference, his negotiating ability and energy will be crucial to the progress made towards a new draft climate agreement. Credit: COP20 Peru

Both remain contentious, in terms of how much each country should reduce and by when.

Climate science is clear that global CO2 emissions must begin to decline before 2020 – otherwise, preventing a 2C temperature rise will be extremely costly and challenging.

However, emissions in 2014 are expected to be the highest ever at 40 billion tonnes, compared to 32 billion in 2010. This year is also expected to be the warmest on record.

In 2009, at COP 15 in Copenhagen, Denmark, developed countries agreed to make pre-2020 emission reductions under the Copenhagen Accord. However, those commitments fall far short of what’s needed and no country has since increased their “ambition”, as it is called.

Some – like Japan, Australia and Canada – have even backed away from their commitments.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon held a special summit with 125 heads of state on Sep. 24 in hopes countries’ would use the event to announce greater reductions. Instead, developed countries like the U.S. made general promises to do more while hundreds of thousands of people around the world marched to demand their leaders to take action.

The ambition deadlock was evident at the U.N. Bonn Climate Conference in October with developing nations pushing their developed counterparts for greater pre-2020 cuts.

However, the country bloc known as the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) proposed a supplementary approach to reducing emissions that involves countries sharing their knowledge, technology and policy mechanisms.

Practical, useful and necessary, this may become a formal part of a new agreement, Rosenthal hopes.

“There were very good discussions around renewable energy and policies to reduce emissions in Bonn,” agrees Enrique Maurtua Konstantinidis, international policy advisor at CAN-Latin America, a network of NGOs.

“Developed countries need to make new reduction pledges in Lima,” Konstantinidis told TA.

This includes pledges for post-2020 cuts. Europe’s target of at least 40 percent cuts by 2030 is not large enough. Emerging countries like China, Brazil, India and others must also make major cuts since the long-term goal should be a global phase-out of fossil fuel use by 2050 to keep temperatures below 1.5C, he said.

This lower target is what many African and small island countries say is necessary for their long-term survival.

The mitigation pillar still needs agreement on how to measure and verify each country’s emission reductions. It will also need a mechanism to prevent countries from failing to meet their targets, Konstantinidis said.

Ironically, the most advanced mitigation chapter, REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), is the most controversial outside of the COP process.

REDD is intended to provide compensation to countries for not exploiting their forests. Companies and countries failing to reduce emissions would pay this compensation.

The Peruvian government wants this finalised in Lima but many civil society and indigenous groups oppose it. Large protest marches against REDD and the idea of putting a price on nature are very likely in Lima, Konstantinidis said.
“Political actors appear totally disconnected from real solutions to tackle global warming,” said Nnimmo Bassey of the No Redd in Africa Network and former head of Friends of the Earth International.

REDD is a “financial conspiracy between rich nations and corporations” happy to trade cash for doing little to reduce their carbon emissions, Bassey said in an interview.

The only way to stop this “false solution” is for a broad alliance of social movements who take to the streets of Lima, he said.

The adaptation pillar is mainly about finance and technology transfer to help poorer countries adapt to the impacts of climate change. A special Green Climate Fund was set up this year to channel money but is not yet operational.

At COP 15, rich countries said they would provide funding that would reach 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 in exchange for lower emissions reductions. Contributions in 2013 were only 110 million dollars.

Promises made by Germany and Sweden in 2014 amount to nearly two billion dollars, however, payments will be made over a number of years. It is also not clear how much will be new money rather than previously allocated foreign assistance funding.

“Countries need to make new financial commitments in Lima. This includes emerging economies like China and Brazil,” said Konstantinidis.

Loss and damage is the third pillar. It was only agreed to in the dying hours of COP 19 last year in Warsaw, Poland. This pillar is intended to help poor countries cope with current and future economic and non-economic losses resulting from the impacts of climate change.

This pillar is the least developed and will not be completed until after the Paris deadline.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Some 60 major U.S. food retailers have already pledged not to sell GE salmon. Credit: Kevin Galens/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Oct 29 2014 (IPS)

Officials in Panama have fined the local facility of a U.S. biotechnology company for a series of permitting and regulatory failures around a pioneering attempt to create genetically modified salmon.

The experiments are being carried out by researchers for AquaBounty Technologies, which currently has an application with the U.S. government to sell genetically modified (GM) salmon filets in this country. If regulators approve that application, AquaBounty’s salmon would be the first genetically modified meat sold for human consumption anywhere in the world."There are about 35 other genetically modified species in the development pipelines in other companies." -- Dana Perls of Friends of the Earth

Further, companies in the United States and around the globe are said to be actively watching U.S. regulators’ response to AquaBounty’s application as a critical indication of whether to proceed with other GM meat projects.

“AquaBounty is really out front on this – the current case will set an important precedent,” Dana Perls, a food and technology campaigner at Friends of the Earth, a watchdog group, told IPS.

“From what we know, there are about 35 other genetically modified species in the development pipelines in other companies. So depending on what happens in this case, we’ll likely either see a flow of other permits or this will demonstrate that there isn’t room on the market for GM meat or seafood.”

AquaBounty’s application with the U.S. government would involve getting filets of the new GM salmon from the company’s breeding facility in Panama and into the U.S. market. Advocates are now pointing to the Panamanian authorities’ findings of regulations violations as an indication that the U.S. regulatory process is proceeding too quickly in considering the salmon application.

“The impacts GM foods will have on health and the environment have not been sufficiently assessed to approve human consumption of this salmon,” Luisa Arauz Arredondo, an attorney with the Panama Centre for Environmental Advocacy, which filed the administrative complaint against AquaBounty, told IPS.

She notes that while AquaBounty’s facilities in Panama have permission to run experiments on the salmon, the country has not approved anything further.

“The salmon would not be sold to Panamanian consumers,” she says, “since the human consumption of GM salmon has not been approved by Panama or the U.S.”

Repeat violations

The Panamanian regulatory decision, which was made public on Tuesday, actually stems from a 2012 investigation of AquaBounty’s facilities and was decided in July of this year. It found that the company had failed to secure necessary permits, particularly around its use of water and pollution of the local environment – potentially important, advocates say, given the possibility of contamination of natural systems.

The authorities noted their view that the company had “repeatedly violated” these regulations, and stated that these problems persisted into 2013. They deemed the transgressions significant enough to levy almost the maximum fine allowable against the company.

AquaBounty Technologies suggests that the concerns outlined by Panama’s government were largely administrative in nature and notes that any problems have all been dealt with already.

“It is important to emphasize that none of the issues in the Resolution questioned the containment, health of the fish, or the environmental safety of the facility,” the company said in a statement sent to IPS.

“When AquaBounty was informed of issues at our Panama facility, we immediately contacted ANAM, the Panamanian agency for the environment. We initiated a program to remedy the deficiencies and the issues were formally resolved in August of 2014.”

The company notes that its Panama facility “continues to operate with no sanctions or restrictions.”

Whether the actions on the part of Panama’s government will impact on the ongoing consideration of AquaBounty’s application by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) remains to be seen.

A spokesperson for the FDA likewise pointed out that AquaBounty’s violations were based on a 2012 inspection, but also said the agency would “consider all relevant information as part of the decision-making process.”

The spokesperson noted that the agency is in the process of completing its review of the company’s application, but declined to provide a timeline on what that decision will be made.

Shoehorning regulation

For environmentalists, public interest groups and anti-GMO advocates, the Panama findings underscore a potential weakness in the FDA’s regulatory process.

“This decision is also even further proof that FDA is dangerously out of touch with the facts on the ground, advancing AquaBounty’s application based on its promises, not reality,” George Kimbrell, a senior attorney with the Center for Food Safety, a Washington-based advocacy group, said Tuesday.

Friends of the Earth’s Perls says that the FDA’s current regulatory review of the GM salmon application is based solely on the single AquaBounty facility in Panama.

“The FDA is going forward with its review based on the premise that this facility will be in compliance with regulations, yet now we’re seeing it’s not,” she says. “It is increasingly clear that there is inadequate regulation: the FDA is trying to shoehorn this new genetically engineered animal into a completely ill-fitting regulatory process.”

Much of the concern here revolves around the potential for genetically modified hybrids to escape into the wild, potentially outcompeting wild populations or introducing new diseases. Yet the issue also runs up against the scepticism that continues to colour consumer response to genetically modified foods – and the sense that regulators are moving too quickly to approve these products.

When the FDA in 2012 asked the public to weigh in on the AquaBounty salmon application, it received some 1.8 million comments expressing overwhelming opposition. Members of the U.S. Congress have likewise expressed their concern, and legislation has been proposed that would require the labelling of genetically modified fish.

As yet, there is no legal requirement in the United States to label any genetically modified food or ingredient, though the state of Vermont could soon impose such a mandate. According to a media poll conducted last year, some 93 percent of people in the U.S. support the labelling of genetically modified foods, and three-quarters said they would not eat GM fish.

Yet perhaps the most significant indication of public sentiment on this issue has come from the retailers that have pre-emptively stated that they would not sell genetically modified fish and seafood – regardless of whether the FDA approves its sale. According to data compiled by Friends of the Earth, some 60 major U.S. food retailers have already pledged to do so, including several of the country’s largest grocery chains.

“Should GE salmon come to market, we are not considering nor do we have any plans to carry GE salmon,” Safeway, the second-largest grocer in the United States, said in a policy statement released in February. “Safeway’s [policy] calls for all of our fresh and frozen seafood to be responsibly sourced and traceable or be in a time-bound improvement process by the end of 2015.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

The United Nations’ key mechanism for funding climate change-related mitigation and adaptation in developing countries is now ready to receive funds, following a series of agreements between rich and poor economies.

The agreements covered administrative but potentially far-reaching policies that will govern the mechanism, known as the Green Climate Fund (GCF). This forward momentum comes just weeks ahead of a major “pledging session” in Berlin that is meant to finally get the GCF off the ground.“One thing that was different in this meeting was the willingness of developing countries to take a stand for certain principles.” -- Karen Orenstein of Friends of the Earth

“The fund now has the capacity to absorb and programme resources that will be made available to it to achieve a significant climate response on the ground,” Hela Cheikhrouhou, the GCF’s executive director, said Saturday following a series of board meetings in Barbados.

The GCF constitutes the international community’s central attempt to help developing countries prepare for and mitigate climate change. The undertaking thus includes an implicit acknowledgment by rich countries that the developing world, although the least responsible for climate change, will be the most significantly impacted.

At the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, donors agreed to mobilise 100 billion dollars a year by 2020, in an undefined mix of public and private funding, to help developing countries. The GCF is to be a cornerstone of this mobilisation, using the money to fund an even split between mitigation and adaptation projects.

The GCF opened a secretariat last year, in South Korea, but pledges have since come in slowly. Currently, the aim is to get together 15 billion dollars as starter capital, much of which will have to be achieved at the November pledging session.

The fund’s capitalisation did get a fillip last month, when France and Germany pledged a billion dollars each and lesser amounts were promised by Norway, South Korea and Mexico. On Wednesday, Sweden pledged another half-billion dollars, aimed at setting “an example to … other donors.”

Still, that brings the total funding for the GCF to less than three billion dollars, under a fifth of the goal for this year alone.

“The good news is that this meeting finished laying a strong foundation for the fund,” Alex Doukas, a sustainable finance associate with the World Resources Institute, a think tank here, told IPS. “It’s now nearly ready to go – but it can’t get far without ambitious pledges in November.”

Significant attention is now shifting to the United States and European Union, which have yet to announce pledges. Anti-poverty campaigners have estimated that fair pledges would be around 4.8 billion dollars for the United States and six billion dollars for the European Union.

Country ownership

The GCF now has the institutional capacity to receive the funding around which its operations will revolve, but important decisions remain regarding how the fund will disburse that money.

“There’s now more clarity on how the fund will invest, but little guidance on exactly what it will invest in,” Doukas, who attended last week’s board meeting in Barbados, says. “The board has serious homework between now and its next meeting in February to ensure that it has rules in place to prioritise high-impact climate solutions that also deliver development benefits.”

Still, some important initial headway was made in Barbados around how these projects will be defined. Indeed, development advocates express cautious optimism the new agreements will put greater control over these decisions in the hands of national governments.

For instance, projects green-lighted by the GCF will now be required to have a “no objection” confirmation from the government of the country in which the project will be based.

“If you do not have the no-objection [requirement], the funding intermediaries will be able to impose their own conditionalities, even their own programmes, on a country,” Bernarditas Muller, the GCF representative from the Philippines, said during negotiations, according to a civil society summary.

Observers say this agreement came about because developing countries banded together and pushed against demands from rich governments. (The GCF board includes 24 members, half from poor and half from rich countries.)

“One thing that was different in this meeting was the willingness of developing countries to take a stand for certain principles,” Karen Orenstein, an international policy advisor with Friends of the Earth who attended the Barbados discussions, told IPS.

“The no-objection procedure in particular is something we’ve been fighting for, for a long time. If an active no-objection is not provided within 30 days, a project is suspended – that is quite important.”

Still, Orenstein, too, worries that significant decisions have against been pushed off to future meetings of the GCF board.

“The fund still leans too heavily towards multilateral development banks and the private sector,” she says.

“It’s not that the GCF shouldn’t be appealing to the private sector, but we want to sure that the priorities are being driven by developing countries. Even though we have these new agreements, there’s still not nearly enough emphasis on having priorities be set at the country level and below.”

New development discourse

At the same time, under this weekend’s agreements developing countries will now be able to access funding directly from the GCF, rather than having to go through an intermediary. In addition, monies pledges to the fund will not be able to be “earmarked” for particular uses by the donor government.

“Traditionally, a lot of funds for climate change have been delivered through multilateral organisations. They haven’t necessarily done a bad job, but in many cases there’s a trade-off between a country’s priorities versus that of the organisation’s,” Annaka Carvalho, a senior programme officer with Oxfam America, a humanitarian and advocacy group, told IPS.

“Making sure that countries are in the driver’s seat in directing where these resources are going is really important. Ultimately, only national governments are accountable to their citizens for delivering on adaptation and investing in low-emissions development.”

Carvalho, who was also at the Barbados negotiations, says that the opportunity once the GCF gets off the ground isn’t only about reacting to climate change. She says the fund can also help to bring about a new development paradigm.

“We’ve been hoping the fund will act as a catalyst for shifting the development discourse away from the forces that have caused climate change and instead towards clean energy and resilient livelihoods,” she says.

“A core part of the fund is supposed to realise sustainable development, but there’s always this line between climate and development. In fact, disconnecting these two issues is impossible.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Smog over Cairo. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria reaffirmed their commitment Sep. 17 “to support international cities’ efforts to lead in the global fight against climate change”. Credit: Wikipedia

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Sep 17 2014 (IPS)

If former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg had used the Vélib’ – Paris’ public bicycle sharing system – to arrive at the headquarters of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development here Wednesday, he might have sent a stronger message about the need for cities to be “empowered to take the lead in combating climate change”.

Yet, despite arriving by car, Bloomberg, the United Nations Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, spoke persuasively about how efficient environmental policies at local level can lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

A key step is to make populations more aware of the issues by sending the right message, so that voters can make informed decisions, Bloomberg said during an open “discussion” with OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría.

For example, if people saw an image of a baby on television with “two or three cigarettes dangling out of his or her mouth” and understood that as a symbol of the polluted air that they were breathing in their city, or the air that their children would breathe, the message would hit home, said Bloomberg, the founder and principal owner of the international media company that bears his name.If people saw an image of a baby on television with ‘two or three cigarettes dangling out of his or her mouth’ and understood that as a symbol of the polluted air that they were breathing in their city, or the air that their children would breathe, the message would hit home – Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York

“People will understand the issue, they will understand how it affects them … and what they can do about it,” he said, adding that such understanding will affect their political choices.

At the meeting, Bloomberg and Gurría “reaffirmed their commitment to support international cities’ efforts to lead in the global fight against climate change” and urged governments to adopt policies to achieve this.

Their pledge ties in with the former mayor’s current role: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed Bloomberg as a special envoy in January to assist him in “consultations with mayors and related key stakeholders in order to raise political will and mobilise action among cities as part of his long-term strategy to advance efforts on climate change”.

This assistance includes “bringing concrete solutions” to the 2014 Climate Summit that the UN Secretary-General will host in New York on Sep. 23.

However, many non-governmental organisations regard this Summit as a gathering where world leaders will once again be “fiddling with flimsy pledges instead of committing to binding carbon reductions”, according to environmental group Friends of the Earth.

“A parade of leaders trying to make themselves look good does not bring us any closer to the real action we need to address the climate crisis. This one-day Summit will not deliver any substantial action in the fight against climate change,” said Dipti Bhatnagar, climate justice and energy coordinator for Friends of the Earth International (FoEI).

“World leaders are falling far short of delivering what we need to truly tackle climate change in a just way. Their flimsy non-binding pledges in New York will do little to improve their track record. What we urgently need are equitable and binding carbon reductions, not flimsy voluntary ones,” she said in a statement.

Friends of the Earth will join with thousands of protesters on Sep. 21 to march in New York, Paris, London and several other cities around the world to “demand climate justice, standing with climate and dirty energy-affected communities worldwide”, the group said.

Some of the cities where the demonstrations will occur have already taken steps to reduce emissions and improve the quality of life for residents, as Bloomberg pointed out in Paris. But political awareness needs to be heightened so that special interest groups are not the ones imposing directions, the former mayor said.

Over three consecutive terms as mayor of New York, where he reportedly spent 268 million dollars of his own money on election campaigns, Bloomberg set up schemes to make New York “greener”, including recycling food waste and aiming at converting organic waste to biogas.

For Bloomberg and Gurría, cities are a” crucial part of efforts to slow climate change” because urban areas produce more than two-thirds of the world’s carbon emissions. The share of the global population living in cities is also set to increase to 70 percent, or 6.4 billion people, by 2050 from the current roughly 50 percent, says the OECD.

“Cities have the potential to make a great difference in the global effort to confront climate change: they account for more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and two-thirds of the world’s energy use today,” according to Bloomberg and Gurría.

“Mayors have, within their authorities, many ways to reduce emissions, change the way energy is consumed, and prepare for the impacts of climate change,” they added.

Both men called on world leaders gathering at the UN Climate Summit to “look for ways to help their cities accelerate their progress and empower them to do even more.”

“We are all aware of the immense scale of the global challenge presented by climate change,” Gurría said. “It is no longer simply an environmental issue. It is an economic and a social issue. It is vital to our quality of life and to the life of our fragile earth. Action is becoming ever-more urgent.”

The OECD and Bloomberg Philanthropies also issued a “Policy Perspectives” document Wednesday that recommends measures for enabling cities to fight global warming. The recommendations include actively involving the private sector because “green” policies cannot be separated from economic growth, according to Gurría.

He said that various sectors needed to work together to “enable real progress in reaching international climate goals and a meaningful, global agreement next year in Paris,” where the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference will take place.

Friends of the Earth and many other NGOs remain unconvinced, however, of the commitment by wealthy nations such as those that are members of the OECD. The group said that the positions of developed countries’ leaders “are increasingly driven by the narrow economic and financial interests of wealthy elites, the fossil fuel industry and multinational corporations.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The global drawdown in the use of leaded fuel has resulted in benefits of some 2.5 trillion dollars a year. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Apr 22 2014 (IPS)

Consumer advocates, public health workers and environmental groups here are calling on the federal government to take a formal step towards regulating the use of lead in aviation gasoline, despite a failure to do so for nearly two decades.

The United States is one of the few countries that continue to allow the use of lead in aviation gasoline, known as “avgas” and used in more than 150,000 small planes and helicopters at around 20,000 U.S. airports. Avgas is now the country’s largest source of lead in air emissions, with significant, universally acknowledged ramifications for the natural environment and, particularly, for human health."The EPA has the evidence it needs, the science is clear, so we really feel that there’s no need to wait any longer.” -- Kathy Attar

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the lead regulator on such issues, ordered the removal of lead from the gasoline used in motor vehicles a decade and a half ago. Yet despite what proponents of new regulations say are clear scientific findings and a straightforward conversion process, the EPA has yet to weigh in on the matter.

“We already know there’s no safe threshold for lead exposure, and we also know that lead is toxic and a possible carcinogen even at low levels, leading to brain damage and learning disabilities,” Kathy Attar, toxics programme manager with Physicians for Social Responsibility, a consumer protection group, told IPS.

“These effects are particularly dangerous for children. The EPA has the evidence it needs, the science is clear, so we really feel that there’s no need to wait any longer.”

Few other countries continue to use leaded avgas, though Algeria, Iraq and Yemen did still do so as of late last year. The United States is not only the world’s most prominent laggard in this regard, but also by far avgas’s largest user.

Smaller aircraft tend to fly much lower to the ground than jet airliners, and hence their emissions can have a much more pronounced, immediate effect on human health (jet fuel is already lead-free). Further, lead stays in the environment for a long time, leading to a  “legacy lead” already left over from decades’ of use of leaded gasoline and paint.

Meanwhile, the global drawdown in the use of leaded fuel has resulted in benefits of some 2.5 trillion dollars a year, according to United Nations estimates from 2011. That study found that the economic benefits of this phase-out, primarily in terms of public health, outweighed the costs by 10 times.

New evidence

Physicians for Social Responsibility is one of three advocacy groups now calling on the EPA to make what is known as an endangerment finding over the lead in aviation gas. This initial step would recognise that avgas lead causes pollution and that this pollution poses a threat to human health.

Such a finding would constitute a necessary first step towards eventually creating a new regulation on the issue. Yet some say that past EPA determinations on these issues already satisfies the requirements for a formal endangerment determination.

“The only showing required for a finding of endangerment is that lead emissions from aircraft engines fuelled by leaded aviation gasoline cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” the new petition, filed with the EPA on Monday, states.

“In this case, both prongs of that test have been met … There is no need for further study. EPA has all of the evidence it needs to make an endangerment finding.”

The EPA was unable to comment for this story by deadline.

Another green group, Friends of the Earth U.S., has pushed this line with the EPA in the past, and been turned down. Indeed, the current petition is actually a request for reconsideration of a similar petition filed with the regulator in 2006, while two years ago a court refused to force the agency to take further action.

In 2010, the EPA did take initial steps to start drafting a rule, but that didn’t include the endangerment finding and the agency has since stated that it needs to undertake more analysis. In mid-2012 it responded to the original Friends of the Earth petition, however, and has said it could decide on future action by the end of 2015.

It didn’t commit to that date, however. And advocates say new evidence has emerged that wasn’t taken into account during the legal proceedings and past agency decisions.

“We’ve seen the EPA issue the results of a lead-monitoring study at 17 airports, including findings of lead levels higher than federal standards,” Marcie Keever, legal director at Friends of the Earth, which took part in Monday’s petition, told IPS.

“In addition, in 2011 a study from Duke University reported on the severe negative impacts of lead from aircraft, finding elevated levels of lead in the blood of those living within 500 meters of airports.”

The EPA’s powers have become intensely politicised in recent years, due both to the agency’s positioning as the prime regulator on greenhouse gas emissions and the perception that its rules often increase companies’ operating costs.

Keever acknowledges that the agency needs to be careful about its rationale for action, but also suggests that the issues surrounding leaded avgas are relatively straightforward.

“Because of the pressures the EPA faces whenever it moves forward with regulation, they want to be very thorough,” she says. “But we think this issue is much easier than, for instance, greenhouse gases – the science is extremely clear.”

Alternatives available

In the past, members of Congress have pushed the EPA to go slow on the avgas issue. Particularly vocal have been lawmakers from the large northern state of Alaska, where small aircraft are especially important for reaching otherwise inaccessible communities.

“While we understand and share your desire to remove lead from avgas … we also need to ensure the EPA does not ban lead used in avgas until we have a safe, viable, readily available, and cost-efficient alternative,” 27 U.S. senators wrote to the EPA in 2011.

Now that situation could be changing. In December, Shell became the first major oil company to unveil a “lead-free alternative” avgas, and last year the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration formally noted that such alternatives exist.

Further, the economic burdens involved in such a transition could be relatively low. Currently, unleaded gasoline used in automobiles is actually cheaper than leaded avgas.

And while some new infrastructure would be required at airports, most aircraft would require no updating whatsoever. According to Friends of the Earth, some 75 percent of the current U.S. fleet could start using unleaded fuel with no retrofitting whatsoever.

Nuclear energy accounts for about a fifth of U.S. electricity, although the last construction cycle for U.S. nuclear power plants ended abruptly in 1979. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Feb 20 2014 (IPS)

The U.S. government has announced that it will be offering substantial loan guarantees for two new nuclear reactors, giving a major boost to what would be the first such projects to go forward in the United States in more than three decades.

The move was immediately hailed by the nuclear industry, which has faced mounting concerns in recent years over the economic feasibility of nuclear power in today’s energy landscape. Yet public interest groups and environmentalists offered quick criticism, warning that U.S. regulators have failed to learn lessons from recent nuclear disasters and that the projects are too risky for taxpayer funding."This is a technology that continues to be beset with safety issues and produces toxic wastes that we still don’t have a solution for." -- Allison Fisher

Ahead of a Thursday trip to the southeastern state of Georgia, where the two plants are to be built, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz noted that the loan guarantees, worth 6.5 billion dollars, are specifically meant to rejuvenate the U.S. nuclear industry.

“The construction of new nuclear power facilities like this one … is not only a major milestone in the [Obama] administration’s commitment to jumpstart the U.S. nuclear power industry,” Moniz told reporters here, “it is also an important part of our all-of-the-above approach to American energy as we move toward a low-carbon energy future.”

The administration provisionally approved the loans four years ago, and these were expected to be finalised in 2012 (a loan for a third project remains under negotiation). Around that time, however, the high-profile and politically contentious failure of a solar energy start-up company, another recipient of federal government backing, failed, causing officials to pull back temporarily.

Private capital, meanwhile, remained largely uninterested in funding the projects, in part due to the ongoing recovery from the 2008 recession and in part due to continued reverberations from the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. Indeed, the Energy Department is now touting a new reactor design to be used for the two projects, which in part is distinguished by having an automatic shutoff system in case of emergency.

Yet green groups say significant safety concerns remain.

“We have particular concerns about this current design – we were part of a challenge to that design after the Fukushima disaster, and the United States hasn’t yet incorporated lessons learned from that experience,” Katherine Fuchs, a nuclear subsidies campaigner at Friends of the Earth US (FOE), an advocacy group here, told IPS.

“Just last week we had an earthquake in Georgia and [nearby] South Carolina, underlining continued risks that we need to make sure are taken into account. It’s significant that these are the first two plants being built in decades – there are lots of good reasons for this, particularly economics and safety concerns.”

Prohibitive expense

Although nuclear energy continues to produce about a fifth of U.S. electricity, the last construction cycle for U.S. nuclear power plants ended abruptly in 1979.

In March of that year, a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania partially melted down, the result of a confluence of poor design, technical malfunction and user error. Although the resulting release of radioactive material was never officially held responsible for any public health problems, the incident led to broad changes in regulation and oversight of nuclear power plants.

While U.S. nuclear plants have come online since then – the most recent was in the mid-1990s, for a project that began during the 1970s – the focus of both federal authorities and the private sector has largely moved on. Particularly in the context of new “fracking” technologies that allow engineers to access previously hard-to-reach natural gas deposits, the heavy capital investment required to build a new nuclear reactor – estimated by some at around nine billion dollars – has increasingly come to be seen as prohibitive.

Over the past year alone, four nuclear power plants have closed down in the United States over financial feasibility concerns, and FOE’s Fuchs points to several plans for new plants that have been shelved. Meanwhile, Wall Street investors have reportedly refused to get involved in the Georgia projects, making the federal government’s backing all the more critical if these proposals were to go forward.

Such a situation leads many critics to suggest that any nuclear project today would be too risky for the use of federal funds.

“The construction of the two new reactors … are 21 months behind schedule and 1.6 billion dollars over budget,” Allison Fisher, outreach director for the energy programme at Public Citizen, a watchdog group here, said Wednesday.

“This not only calls into question the decision to underwrite this risky project with taxpayer dollars, but … this is a technology that continues to be beset with safety issues and produces toxic wastes that we still don’t have a solution for – hardly a technology the government should be promoting and propping up with taxpayer funds.”

Clean and green?

Reaction from the nuclear industry, meanwhile, has underlined the importance of the Energy Department’s backing. On Thursday, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a trade association, dubbed the new agreement “historic”.

“The agreement demonstrates the Obama administration’s recognition of the key role nuclear energy must play in a successful clean energy policy,” Marvin Fertel, the NEI’s president, said in a statement sent to IPS. “The loan guarantee program … will act as a catalyst in hastening the construction of low- and non-emitting sources of electricity, such as nuclear power plants.”

As Fertel notes, the new loan guarantees are coming from a pot of money created by the U.S. Congress in 2005 to support new and “innovative” energy technologies. In announcing the new deal, the Energy Department, too, has been keen to conflate nuclear power and clean energy.

The new reactors “will produce enough clean electricity to power more than 1.5 million homes,” Peter W. Davidson, a senior Energy Department official, wrote in a blog post Thursday. “At the same time, this project will help fight climate change by keeping about 10 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution out of our atmosphere. That’s like taking 2 million cars off the road.”

The debate over nuclear energy’s impact on global warming has heated up somewhat in the environmental community in recent years. Yet for many green groups, such conflation is misleading.

“Nuclear power is not clean energy,” FOE’s Fuchs says. “There is no way to deal with the waste, and we don’t yet have safe designs or adequate regulation. It’s entirely wrong to lump nuclear energy in with green energy, and it’s unbelievable that the administration would tout such a thing.”

A water truck in Port Louis, Mauritius. Credit: Nasseem Ackbarally/IPS

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

As government representatives gather Tuesday in Indonesia for what could be final negotiations towards a global trade agreement under the World Trade Organisation (WTO), environmentalists and social justice campaigners are urging them to specify that water resources cannot be treated as commodities.

Critics of the privatisation and “financialisation” of natural resources are pointing to mounting interest by multinational investors in viewing common water resources as tradable, a change that development advocates worry could impact particularly on poor and marginalised communities. While international agreements enshrined a universal right to water (and sanitation) in 2010, international trade agreements have yet to follow suit – a gap that some say is becoming increasingly dangerous.“These entities have made bets that water will eventually be distributed and sold much like petroleum is today." -- William Waren

“Our concern is that the financialisation and privatisation of water is already very much a long-term goal of major multinational companies and investors,” William Waren, a trade policy analyst with Friends of the Earth U.S., a watchdog group, told IPS.

“These entities have made bets that water will eventually be distributed and sold much like petroleum is today. They know that global warming will make water resources increasingly scarce, so they want to get ahold of these resources and eventually sell it at their asking price.”

Of those who have made such bets so far, Waren mentions Suez Environment, the French water giant, as well as T Boone Pickens, the U.S. oil tycoon-turned-alternative energy magnate. Regardless of where these investors are based, however, their focus is international.

Just ahead of the start of the WTO ministerial talks, taking place Tuesday through Friday in Bali, Friends of the Earth International offered a series of case studies on the experiences of a dozen countries around the financialisation of common water resources. The report argues that a confluence of international financial institutions and corporations are “paving the way” for this process.

Yet these forces are being offered crucial aid by international trade agreements, both the vagaries of current accords and the more explicit strategies in those still under negotiation, particularly spearheaded by the United States.

These “key drivers of the deregulation and liberalization processes that have opened the water and sanitation sectors to corporate profiting-making, and as key building-blocks to the architecture of impunity that protects it,” the report states.

“Standing out amongst them are the new and increasingly less transparent and non-democratic modalities of transoceanic partnerships led by the United States … and the World Trade Organization’s agenda on environmental services.”

Old public commons

Key in this discussion is an international trade agreement signed more than a half-century ago. The predecessor to today’s WTO, created in 1995, was an accord known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

Today, GATT provisions continue to coordinate policy for the trade in physical goods. Yet Waren says neither GATT nor the WTO has ever clearly defined what constitutes a “good” or whether it includes water.

“The traditional view in international law is that water belongs to the public commons, so back in 1948 there was no consideration of what the big corporations are contemplating today – the complete control of the system from well to tap,” he says.

“So, we need to make sure there’s language in new trade agreements offering specific assurances that water is regarded as part of the public commons that is not a good or product.”

Likewise, the WTO’s discussion on trade in services remains under negotiation, largely made up of countries offering their own commitments. Yet thus far no country has made substantive commitments regarding domestic water supplies, while advocates worry that a suite of GATT commitments could substantially increase corporate control over common water resources.

Meanwhile, this week’s discussions in Bali are being seen as a last chance for the WTO to come to a multilateral agreement, as negotiations have dragged on under the current round of talks for a decade. Amidst mounting frustration, much of the momentum has instead shifted to state-to-state trade treaties and investment agreements.

Two of the largest ever contemplated are currently under negotiation, both led by Washington: the 12-member Trans Pacific Partnership and another free trade area between the United States and the European Union. If the two were to come to fruition, they would cover the vast majority of the world’s economy.

Yet these so-called U.S. models also come with stringent pro-business requirements and quasi-judicial enforcement mechanisms that put investors on the same level as sovereign states.

“There is a clear and present danger in these investment agreements, and water policy is an almost constant issue,” Waren says.

“Part of the problem is that much of investment case law has an explicit right to export. So countries acting to deal with a dwindling water supply, especially in the Global South, may not realise they’re giving the right to investors both to make investments and to export.”

And despite the United Nations’ 2010 agreement on the universal right to access to water, the international tribunals that adjudicate disputes under investment agreements typically don’t recognise international humanitarian law. For critics, such a system underlines the importance of the WTO explicitly engaging with the issue of water as a tradable good.

A third more expensive

It is somewhat ironic that the push towards increased multilateral financialisation of water could be coming from the United States, where the experience surrounding the privatisation of public water utilities has been notably negative.

The country’s largest private water company, American Water, was formerly owned by a German company. But that owner pulled out in large part due to public resistance towards both private and foreign ownership of water resources.

“There has clearly been resistance to private ownership,” Mary Grant, a researcher with Food & Water Watch (FWW), an advocacy group, told IPS. “Communities have made clear that they want local ownership of their systems in order to control both quality of service and the rates charged.”

FWW surveys have found that investor-owned utilities in dozens of U.S. states have typically charged a third more than those owned by the public, a lack of efficiency corroborated by other investigations. Profit-driven systems also experience problems in deciding where to extend service, with companies at times proving reluctant to do so in low-income areas or very small communities.

“The U.S. experience shows that water privatisation has been a failure,” Grant says. “It hasn’t resulted in better services even while it has led to higher rates and, often, worse service. Local, public provision is the most responsible way to ensure that everyone has access to safe and affordable water.”

A Woolworths gourmet pork sausage tray. Biodegradable and compostable, it has been accepted by the Australiasian Bioplastics Association. Credit: Doug Beckers/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 21 2013 (IPS)

Eight major multinational consumer products companies have come together to investigate whether it is possible to produce a sustainable form of “bioplastic”, made from plants rather than petroleum products.

As announced Wednesday, members of the new Bioplastic Feedstock Alliance (BFA) include Coca-Cola, Nestle, Nike, Ford and others, as well as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Washington-based conservation group. Organisers say the WWF will aim to bring scientific perspectives to the alliance on the thorny issues that have plagued the production of both bioplastics and biofuels."If we think about the amount of plastic that will be needed in the future, scaling up the monocrop industrial system will require an incomprehensible amount of land." -- Dana Perls

“As we follow the dialogue on biofuels, we can already understand the debate that will be on the emergence of the bioplastics industry, and a lot of these brands are now wondering how they can do this right from the beginning and avoid unintended consequences,” Erin Simon, manager of the WWF’s packaging and material science programme, told IPS.

“Working with WWF could be valuable in saying, ‘Here’s the science behind some of these questions and here’s how we’ll avoid negative impacts on the environment and society at large. As a conservation organisation concerned with prioritising the ecosystems producing these raw materials, it’s important to have these companies asking for guidance on food security, land-use issues and the broader use of chemicals.”

Simon describes the alliance as “technology neutral”, meaning that it will not actually function to pool corporate resources on research and development of bioplastics. However, five of the companies involved – Coke, Ford, Heinz, Nike and Procter & Gamble – are already doing so through a separate grouping, called the Plant PET Technology Collaborative (PTC).

Unveiled in June 2012, the PTC aims to collaboratively develop a common type of plastic (known as PET) made entirely from plant materials. The initiative has piggybacked on a material already in commercial use by Coca-Cola and others that is made of 30 percent plant material, from sugarcane.

Unilever and Danone, two other members of the new BFA, are already using some plastics made from 100 percent plant material, coming from a variety of sources. Still, today only around one percent of plastics being produced are made with plant materials.

Comprehensive responsibility

Interest in alternatives to the ubiquitous petroleum-based plastic that characterises modern consumerism has increased substantially in recent years, driven both by consumers and the manufacturers that supply them. Even while issues of environmental sustainability have become increasingly common considerations, concerns continue to mount about how today’s industries will evolve in a post-“peak oil” world.

“Companies understand they need to be creating solutions today for the future because they won’t have these resources forever. But while plastics made from petroleum products are extremely efficient and pretty low-cost, feedstock production is not benign,” Simon says.

“The feedstocks being used today are sugarcane, corn, etc, and there’s a lot of pressure to move away from these first-generation sources because they’re considered food competitive. So the question is: Are they food competitive? And if they are, what next-generation feedstock could provide for more sustainable raw material sourcing?”

One of the companies involved in the new BFA, the U.S.-based consumer goods conglomerate Procter & Gamble, has a long-term plan to work towards using 100 percent renewable or recycled materials in its products and packaging. It says bioplastics represent an important opportunity in this regard.

Still, the company acknowledges that obstacles continue to stand in the way of this goal.

“We clearly recognise that as we evaluate potential feedstocks for bioplastics, we will need to ensure they are being sourced responsibly and sustainably,” Jack McAneny, a global sustainability officer with the company, told IPS. “BFA represents a fantastic opportunity to work with like-minded companies, WWF and other stakeholders to evaluate potential bioplastic feedstocks and help ensure responsible and sustainable sourcing practices.”

Others are concerned over whether this sourcing can ever be done responsibly. Some environmentalists worry that the nascent bioplastics industry – indeed, the broader synthetic biology sector – is so poorly regulated right now that answering questions related to sustainability is going to come down to self-oversight by the industry itself.

“While it’s very encouraging that these companies want to find sustainable solutions to these problems, it’s really important that the questions this new alliance looks at are comprehensive, addressing ecological, economic and social impacts in the short and long term,” Dana Perls, a campaigner for the food and technology programme at Friends of the Earth U.S., a watchdog group, told IPS.

“Do we have enough land to produce the feedstock required to feed growing demand for plastic? If we think about the amount of plastic that will be needed in the future, scaling up the monocrop industrial system will require an incomprehensible amount of land. We need to have a very good understanding of the economic impact that this could have on entire economies across the Global South.”

Perls also notes that the discussion over bioplastics is just one component of the broader debate over synthetic biology, the implications of which are still being explored by scientists.

“Currently there is no government regulation anywhere in the world looking at the biotechnology issue broadly – the companies are leagues ahead of the governments in the U.S. and internationally,” she says.

“That means it’s the companies producing the products, those that are most financially invested, that are doing the testing. In our opinion, this industry can’t be self-regulated. We need a strict, thorough regulatory framework before any of these companies are allowed to say that a new bioplastic is a sustainable product that can be put out on the market.”

The ecosystem and indigenous people of Yasuní Park are in danger, environmentalists warn. Credit: Iniciativa Yasuní-ITT

By Ángela Meléndez
QUITO, Aug 24 2013 (IPS)

The Ecuadorean government’s decision to allow oil drilling in the Yasuní National Park, one of the most biodiverse areas of the planet, has caused alarm among environmentalists and indigenous people, who are calling for a referendum on the issue.

President Rafael Correa ordered the shelving of the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, a plan to leave oil reserves underground in the Amazon rainforest park in return for international compensation.

He complained that only 13.3 million dollars were contributed by companies, individuals and countries to a trust fund administered by the United Nations since 2007, towards a final goal of 3.6 billion dollars.

The decision announced Aug. 15 gives the state-run oil company Petroamazonas the green light to commence exploration in up to one percent of the area of the park, according to the decree that ended the Yasuní-ITT Initiative.

Opponents warn of the effects on the fauna, flora, and native peoples in voluntary isolation – the Tagaeri and the Taromenane – if drilling goes ahead in Ecuador’s largest protected area, covering 982,000 hectares.

On Thursday Aug. 22, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE), the Confederation of Peoples of Kichwa Nationality (ECUARUNARI), the Confederation of University Students, and environmental organisations like Acción Ecológica presented a proposal for a referendum to the Constitutional Court.

They will need to collect 584,000 signatures – five percent of all registered voters in this country of 15 million people – in support of the petition.

In the proposed referendum, voters would be asked: “Do you agree that the Ecuadorean government should keep the crude in the ITT, known as block 43, underground indefinitely?”

President Correa urged people to collect signatures, and said he was sure that his own proposal to extract crude from Yasuní, for the purpose of boosting public expenditure, would win in a referendum.

The government says an area of less than one-thousandth of Yasuní park, situated in the north of the country, will be affected.

It also claims the isolated native communities will not be impacted, since the fields to be exploited (Ishpingo, Tambococha and Tiputini – the ITT) are far from the area declared the “untouchable zone”, where they live.

José Lema, the president of the association of geological engineers of Ecuador, told IPS that it is possible that oil could be extracted as the government proposes.

He cited the work Petroamazonas is doing in the Pañacocha field, located in another nature reserve in the north of the country, which has received international recognition for environmental best practices.

“Petroamazonas is carrying out similar work there, and it has had only temporary impacts while building the oil pipeline,” he said.

The expert believes the first thing to be done is to carry out a new assessment of the area in order to redesign the drilling plan.

“There may be changes, because the methodology that was first used (in 1993) was a two-dimensional seismic survey…that determined reserves of 920 million barrels of crude,” he said.

“But once more detailed information is available, there will be a more precise volume assessment, which will no doubt be greater than the original estimate,” he said.

In Lema´s view, the main task will be to adapt the oil rigs that are already in the park, and to bring in equipment for the installation. Then the wells will have to be drilled and the oil pipeline built.

“Every project creates disturbances; the aim is to reduce them as much as possible by using the best technology,” he said.

Wilson Pástor, a former minister of non-renewable resources in the left-leaning administration of Correa, who took office in 2007, says the concerns are unfounded because oil is already being extracted in the park.

“Block 31, which was explored by (Brazilian oil company) Petrobras and now belongs to Petroamazonas, is located within the park,” he said.

He also noted that the Pañacocha field produces 18,000 barrels per day, but the crude is not processed in any way within the protected area.

“The same approach will be used with ITT, since there are already seven oil rigs in the area,” and cluster wells will be drilled. “Previously, one well per platform would be drilled, but now 25 wells are drilled from each rig, occupying less space,” he said.

In Pástor’s view, the most polluting activity is the treatment and separation of water, gas and oil, which mean “in practice setting up a refinery, and the refinery will not be built in the ITT…so the entire intervention will only affect 190 hectares.”

He added that electricity will not be generated in the field and the oil pipeline will not affect the park, as it will be buried in a trench three metres wide filled with biodegradable material.

Evidently, the drilling plans already existed

The former minister also said that oil exploitation would have an additional benefit for the park. “Today, the Yasuní lacks strong institutions to control access to the park, but if Petroamazonas begins work here there will be resources to protect it,” he said.

According to government forecasts, the Tiputini field will produce its first barrels of crude in two years’ time, Tambococha 12 months later, and Ishpingo a year after that.

But civil society organisations are not convinced by the arguments put forward by Correa and his government.

María Paula Romo, of the left-wing party Ruptura 25, who is a former member of the constituent assembly that rewrote the constitution, argues that the government is violating article 57 of the constitution, which bans extraction activities in the territories of isolated peoples.

The article says: “The territories of the peoples living in voluntary isolation are an irreducible and untouchable ancestral possession and all forms of extractive activities shall be forbidden there. The state shall adopt measures to guarantee their lives, enforce respect for self-determination and their intention to remain in isolation, and ensure observance of their rights.”

It adds that “the violation of these rights shall constitute a crime of ethnocide, which shall be classified as such by law.”

Romo told IPS, “Before talking about specifications for wells, the first step is to ask how entry into forbidden territory can be justified in the light of the constitution.”

The justice minister, Lenín Lara, said there are no isolated communities in the oilfields where drilling is planned.

But environmental experts and academics refute this claim.

“The Taromenane are hemmed in on every side. And even if the work is done with the best technology, pressure is going to be put on these peoples,” said journalist and filmmaker Carlos Andrés Vera.

With reporting by Carey L. Biron in Washington, D.C.

Recently deforested peat land intended for oil palm plantations in Borneo, Indonesia. Credit: glennhurowitz/CC-BY-2.0

By Baradan Kuppusamy
KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 22 2013 (IPS)

With a propensity to devour everything in their path and spiral quickly out of control, leaving behind swathes of scorched earth, forest fires are considered a hazard in most parts of the world. In Indonesia, however, fires are the preferred method for clearing large areas of land for massive plantations of commercial crops.

In the first half of 2013, research studies have already recorded 8,343 forest fires, a higher number than has been recorded in preceding years.

While some blazes occurred naturally, igniting in the country’s vast rainforests that are transformed in the dry summer months into an expanse of kindling, experts say that many fires were created by plantation companies and, to a lesser extent, by local communities, to clear millions of hectares of jungle land needed for oil palm plantations.

According to the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), oil palm plantations “covered 7.8 million hectares in Indonesia” in 2011, and produced roughly 23.5 million tonnes of crude palm oil that year.

The cheapest and easiest way to clear enough land to yield these huge quantities of oil is to set fire to acre upon acre of rainforest and let the wind and the flames do the work, including reducing the acidity of peat soil.

This soggy, organic matter is anathema to palm trees, which explains why about two-thirds of forest fires in Indonesia occur on peat lands.

Unfortunately, peat soil becomes extremely toxic at high temperatures, emitting greenhouse gases and creating haze and smog. Peat fires can burn on for weeks, even months, endangering wildlife and human communities far from the site of the actual fire.

For years, palm oil-producing companies in Indonesia and Malaysia, which together account for 85 percent of the world’s palm oil production every year, have come under fire from activists and scientists who say the ‘forest fire method’ poses serious environmental and health risks for the entire region.

While most of these fires originate in Sumatra, changes in wind direction mean that smoke travels to nearby countries.

Last month, for instance, the international community pilloried Indonesia for fires that choked parts of neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia.

The haze that enveloped the latter was so bad that the government in Kuala Lumpur declared a state of emergency in parts of the country where air pollution index readings reached a critical 750 on Jun. 23, well above the “hazardous” level of 300.

Malaysian citizens were advised to stay indoors, while Singaporean authorities cancelled outdoor summer activities as panicked residents emptied stores of their supply of protective masks.

The average air pollution index rating in both Malaysia and Singapore now hovers at over 100, a dramatic increase from the preceding decade, which “could contribute to climate change and is seriously detrimental to the health of people in the region,” Gurmit Singh, a renowned Malaysian environmentalist, told IPS.

Blame has been bandied about, with governments, corporations and even local communities named as culprits, but public censure has failed to prompt concrete action.

Environment ministers representing five members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) flew to Malaysia’s capital last week in search of a lasting solution to what has become a predictable, annual crisis, but the talks concluded on Jul. 17 with no firm agreement on the table.

All that officials from Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand approved was a plan for Indonesia to refer ASEAN’s 2002 Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution to its parliament by 2014 – hardly a promising solution, since the accord appeared before Indonesia’s legislature in 2009 but was not mentioned once during the entire session.

The outcome of the high-level meeting comes as no surprise to T. Jayabalan, a public health consultant and adviser to Friends of the Earth-Malaysia.

“For almost 20 years these governments have adopted a lackadaisical attitude towards resolving the problem (of forest fires),” he told IPS.

“No concrete measures have been taken because any measure imposed will impact the profits of palm oil companies,” he added.

A quick look at the stakes involved in palm oil production support Jayabalan’s claim: according to CIFOR, crude palm oil brought in 12.4 billion dollars in foreign exchange in 2008, while the government bagged another billion dollars in export taxes alone that same year.

The sector employs some 3.2 million people every year – no mean feat in a country where 30 million people live below the poverty line.

Earlier this year, the Indonesian Palm Oil Producers Association unveiled an ambitious plan to grow the sector by 5.4 percent by the year 2020, adding another four million hectares to existing plantations around the country.

With such zealous plans in the pipeline, a solution is urgently needed, “rather than more talk and postponement of key decisions,” Jayabalan stressed.

He and other experts believe the first step must entail recognising the role palm oil companies play in creating fires.

Data published last month by the Washington-based World Research Institute (WRI) shows that the number of fires per hectare is “three to four times higher within…oil palm concession boundaries than outside of them.”

The research also suggests that there are significant discrepancies between maps issued by the ministry of forestry and those being used by oil palm companies.

According to WRI, “Company ‘Business Land Use Rights’ licence boundaries (in Indonesian, Hak Guna Usaha or HGU)…are generally nested within, and are smaller than, the concession boundaries the government is using. This is creating confusion about responsibility for fires found on land thought to be within concessions but outside areas the companies fully control and are directly developing.”

With more fires expected in the months between August and October, environmentalists are urging governments to “come to terms with the haze and its root causes because people in the region suffer from the pollutants,” Singh said. Various studies have shown that haze pollution leads to an increase in the number of people suffering from upper respiratory tract infections, asthma and rhinitis.

Countries in the region are also being called upon to cooperate in the development and implementation of prevention mechanisms, monitoring and early warning systems, information-sharing networks and other channels for providing mutual assistance.

But these steps have currently been stalled by Indonesia’s refusal to ratify the ASEAN Haze Pollution Agreement.

Residents of Port of Spain make their way down flooded streets. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jul 21 2013 (IPS)

The Green Climate Fund (GCF), created under the auspices of the United Nations to finance the huge investments demanded by climate change, was opened up to participation by civil society and private sector representatives as observers in March.

But non-governmental organisations are pressing for more active participation now that the GCF is moving into the crucial phase of designing policies and distributing resources, especially with regard to the controversial Private Sector Facility.

“Now they are discussing what type of observers and executors can be in the Fund. This opens up the possibility of having financial institutions involved as executors, and they are studying the criteria for qualification and safeguards,” Colombian attorney Astrid Puentes, co-director of the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA), told Tierramérica. In this process, “we are being ignored,” she stated.

As one of the observer organisations from the region, AIDA monitors the sessions of the GCF Board, which is based in South Korea.

The creation of the GCF was agreed at the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, held in late 2011 in Cancún, Mexico. The industrialised countries pledged to deliver 30 billion dollars in new and additional financing by 2012, with priority placed on resources for climate change adaptation in the poorest and most vulnerable countries.

A longer-term target was set for the mobilisation of 100 billion dollars annually by 2020.

The World Bank was designated as the interim trustee of the Fund for the first three years.

A year later, in Durban, South Africa, a governing body was created: the 24-member GCF Board, composed of an equal number of members from developed and developing countries, responsible for the execution and oversight of the Fund’s resources.

At its next meeting, scheduled for this September in Paris, the Board will assess the progress made in the development of a business model framework, transparency policies, private financing and conditions for access to GCF resources.

“It’s important that, whatever is done, it has to do with small and medium enterprises. The approach should focus on the needs of ordinary people in the developing countries and then how the private sector is engaged,” Karen Orenstein, an international policy analyst at Friends of the Earth U.S., told Tierramérica.

“It’s incredibly important that a country decides what is good and the private sector obliges to it,” she added.

At a meeting on Jun. 25-28 in the South Korean city of Songdo, where it is based, the GCF Board decided that the Private Sector Facility will commence its operations through accredited national, regional and international implementing entities and intermediaries. It also established that it may over time work directly with private sector actors, subject to consideration by the Board.

This decision derailed attempts by the United States and Australia to give corporations direct access to the funds, bypassing government control.

A report published in June by a consortium of five civil society organisations, funded by the UK-based Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN), stressed the role of national institutions.

“Especially the GCF should prioritise access of local (…) actors to the available funds,” the report states, adding that “clear funding modalities must be put in place to ensure multi-stakeholder decision-making processes, including sub-national and non-state actors, as well as the devolvement of funds to the local level.”

Private sector companies, which also have representatives as GCF observers, want the funds transferred by the wealthy countries to cover their investments in clean development projects in developing countries, which they can claim as reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Latin American delegates were missing in Songdo, since neither Mexican Senator Ernesto Cordero, a Board member, nor his alternate, Rodrigo Rojo, deputy director for International Affairs at the Ministry of Finance of Chile, was in attendance.

But that was not the only problem.

“The last meeting was disastrous for citizen participation. They shut us out of some discussions, like the definition of the business model, on the pretext that our organisations have no experience in these matters,” said Puentes.

Orenstein commented that “the countries that were the major obstacles were Australia and the U.S., who boast they are the champions of transparency. The real champions were Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and indeed Sweden. It was regressive; they vetoed the presence of civil society delegates in the most important discussions.”

In November 2012 almost 34 billion dollars in climate finance had been pledged, according to an analysis conducted by institutions in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Norway. Of this total, 28 million had been requested and/or budgeted by the executive bodies of the countries that have pledged the funds.

However, it is difficult to determine if these resources are genuinely “new and additional” and not part of previously allocated assistance or financing. Every country uses different instruments and channels resources through different schemes and institutions. It also is not clear if priority has been placed on adaptation measures in the most vulnerable countries.

The funds actually invested total barely three billion dollars.

On Jun. 24, the day before the last GCF Board meeting began, a large group of non-governmental organisations sent the Board a letter highlighting key issues regarding transparency and public participation and requesting that they be addressed at the meeting.

“The Board would benefit from having civil society participation given the vast expertise and experience found among the different groups and individuals that represent civil society,” the letter emphasised.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Cutting trees in Nicaragua. Deforestation is inherent to the predatory economy, whether for the exploitation of the timber itself, the soil beneath the trees, or resources in the subsoil. Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS

By Katelyn Fossett
WASHINGTON, May 7 2013 (IPS)

More than two dozen environmental organisations are urging California Governor Jerry Brown to disregard recommendations from a United Nations task force to include so-called forest “offsets” in the state’s new emissions-trading scheme.

The offsets would serve as a mechanism by which emissions-producing companies in California could continue to pollute if they compensate foreign governments for the protection of their own forests."The carbon market is just proving to be extremely complicated, and not benefiting people at all." -- Bill Barclay of Rainforest Action Network

But critics say the consequences of such a policy would have repercussions that extend far beyond the environment.

“Independent investigations into the promotion of international forest offsets have raised serious concerns related to human rights violations and there is major opposition from indigenous peoples and local communities in both Chiapas, Mexico and in Acre, Brazil,” the groups said in an open letter sent this weekend.

Environmental groups say the move would simply shift the pollution from one country to another, rather than addressing the root causes of deforestation and climate pollution. The scheme would also create another set of economic and social problems for the communities in the regions paid to preserve their forests.

“Offsets are problematic in a number of ways,” Jeff Conant, director of the International Forests Programme at the U.S. office of Friends of the Earth, an activist network, told IPS. “First, they don’t actually reduce emissions. They just misplace emissions.”

The recommendations to include the offsets in new climate change-related legislation in California (known as AB-32) came from the REDD Offset Working Group (ROW), formed to implement a collaborative effort designed by the United Nations called REDD (which stands for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).

As described by the U.N., REDD is “a mechanism to create an incentive for developing countries to protect, better manage and wisely use their forest resources, contributing to the global fight against climate change.”

Although California’s AB-32 already has a domestic offset exchange programme, the move to expand it globally prompted a vehement response last week from groups in Mexico worried about the possibility of “land-grabbing”.

The REDD programme “allows Northern polluters to purchase forest carbon offset credits from the global South,” the 15 groups, from Chiapas, Mexico, wrote in late April.

“This Agreement is underpinned by the logic of capitalist accumulation: it enables the purchase of carbon credits that will legally allow the continuation of the predatory and consumerist model.”

The response recommends instead that the “consumerist countries of the North … implement urgent mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without substitutions or offsets, and with a focus on the reduction goals of their own countries”.

‘Gaming, corruption, error’

“In Chiapas, you have customary titles and [land] rights that haven’t been fully resolved,” Bill Barclay, climate policy advisor at Rainforest Action Network, and advocacy group based here, told IPS.

“It’s a very complicated situation, and when you bring in someone who might come in and impose that and do it quickly and cheaply, it elevates social conflict.”

These critics are also wary of the potential pitfalls that could accompany payments to countries with little oversight and government accountability.

“Once you involve international entities – especially the most impoverished states in the hemisphere – you’re getting to a state … with a lot of gaming, corruption, fraud and error,” Jeff Conant says.

Activists say these problems shine a light on the broader complications that tend to lurk in a system as complicated as emissions trading or “carbon markets”.

“This is about the most complicated way you could come up with to try to bring money into the market to reduce emissions and generate innovations,” Conant says.

“There’s an ideology that says that allowing the markets to fix the climate problem is the most efficient way to go… Unfortunately, [the market] does not work in the favour of the most marginalised communities that are on the front lines.”

In fact, carbon offsets have critics even among pro-market economists. The new letter references the findings of a 2011 report that examined REDD from a “market perspective”, using the authors’ “experience in derivatives trading and systems architecture”.

Known as the Munden Report, it found that “using carbon markets to finance REDD… is likely to be a drain of resources, both in terms of money and time, away from the very serious problems REDD seeks to address.”

The letter from environmental groups also comes just as new reports have emerged on collapsing carbon prices in Europe, where the world’s first and most established carbon market is floundering.

Although the European system decided not to rely on forest offsets, many are still suggesting that the collapse of the E.U. carbon prices could have ripple effects for similar markets worldwide, particularly as advocates push for interlinking these systems down the road.

Both the price collapse in Europe and the social consequences of an international carbon offset exchange have bolstered support for the more direct carbon tax. Although this has been the preferred mechanism by environmental groups, it continues to be thought politically unviable in the U.S., at least for the time being.

“I think there is going to be a greater shift to carbon fees and away from carbon markets,” Barclay of the Rainforest Action Network told IPS.

“The carbon market is just proving to be extremely complicated, and not benefiting people at all. There’s just too much gaming and speculation, and it’s been too poorly regulated.”

Mining tar sands oil in Canada. Credit: Chris Arsenault/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Apr 28 2013 (IPS)

Nearly 70 percent of known reserves of oil, gas and coal must remain in the ground to avoid dangerous climate change. So why did the energy industry spend 674 billion dollars in 2012 looking for more?

A moratorium on investments new fossil fuel infrastructure is the obvious thing to do about this, said Asad Rehman, head of international climate at Friends of the Earth in the UK."It's bipolar…there is a complete lack of leadership." -- UCS's Alden Meyer

The United Nations is the place to get countries to begin a serious conversation about imposing such a moratorium starting Monday in Bonn, Germany, Rehman told IPS.

The 195 parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are meeting next week in Bonn on a new climate treaty that would go into force in 2020 and discuss ways reduce emissions from fossil fuels prior to 2020.

The World Bank, International Energy Agency and a new report from economist Lord Nicholas Stern all say that close to 70 percent of known reserves of fossil fuels are “unburnable” to have a chance of global warming staying below two degrees C.

The global average temperature has already risen 0.8C, leading to the loss of most of the sea ice in the Arctic, extreme weather events around the world, rising sea levels and oceans that are 30 percent more acidic.

The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere will likely hit 400 parts per million (ppm) this May. That will be the first time in at least three million years.

All nations have agreed under the UNFCCC to keep temperatures below two degrees C, which is by no means a safe level of warming. However, scientists say we are on a path to at least three degrees C, which will trigger irreversible feedbacks leading to much higher temperatures and far worse impacts.

“It’s illogical to be making new investments in fossil fuel infrastructure,” Rehmand said.

The Carbon Tracker agrees. It’s a thinktank whose supporters include the big banks, Standard and Poor’s and the International Energy Agency. It co-authored the “Unburnable Carbon 2013” report with Lord Stern.

The Carbon Tracker says investments in fossil fuel are foolish and continuing them will inevitably crash the global economy because countries will be forced to severely limit how much fossil fuel is burned.

“The scale of ‘listed’ unburnable carbon revealed in this report is astonishing,” said Paul Spedding, an oil and gas analyst at HSBC.

“This report makes it clear that ‘business as usual’ is not a viable option for the fossil fuel industry in the long term,” Speeding said in statement.

While banks and investors are finally waking up to the carbon-climate problem, countries have struggled for two decades under the UNFCCC to construct a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions enough to stay below two degrees C. Perversely, those same countries are pumping 1.9 trillion of their taxpayer’s money each year into subsidising the fossil fuel industry, reported the International Monetary Fund last month. (1.9. trillion seconds is about 60,000 years.)

Countries have promised to reduce these subsidies for the world’s richest industry, but few have acted.

“It’s bipolar…there is a complete lack of leadership,” said Alden Meyer, Union of Concerned Scientists’ director of strategy and policy.

The result is that global carbon emissions rise ever higher each year when they need to begin to decline. The gap between where we are and where we need to go is getting wider every year, Meyer said at a press conference last week.

The UNFCCC meeting in Bonn Apr. 29 to May 3 is one of several weeks of meetings before the annual Convention of the Parties (COP 19) negotiations in Poland this November. The main issues, as always, will be deciding how big the emissions cuts will be, the timing of those cuts and what the contribution should be for each country.

“There are two things to tackle in Bonn: how developed countries fulfill their promises to cut emissions deep and meet their financial commitments to enable developing countries to address climate change now,” said Meena Raman, negotiation expert at the Third World Network.

Developed countries and blocs like the U.S., Canada and the European Union do not appear ready to increase their promised emission cuts even though they are insufficient to achieve the two-degree C target and are collectively less than those from developing countries, as previously reported by IPS.

China is now the world’s biggest carbon emitter but it will be many years yet before the carbon molecules in the atmosphere with little Chinese flags on them will match those with U.S. flags. Since CO2 resides in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, emissions of 50 years ago have the same impact on the climate as those emitted today.

“It’s not hard to figure out the total amount of CO2 from the U.S. and other developed countries already in the atmosphere,” said Sivan Kartha, Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute’s US Center.

“Taking responsibility for the mess you made is a widely-accepted principle,” Kartha told IPS.

This politically thorny issue is known as “historical emissions” and it pits the South against the North. More recently, countries in the North have been pushing the concept of “mitigation potential” suggesting that it is harder for the U.S. to reduce carbon emissions because of existing infrastructure than it is for poor countries like India who haven’t built them yet, he said.

While “moratorium” will only be whispered about, “equity” will be the buzzword in play in Bonn this week, Kartha said.

Positive developments on climate are largely found outside the UNFCCC process. China and the U.S. recently signed a landmark agreement on climate and clean energy. Both countries agreed climate change poses a serious risk and have agreed to take a global leadership position, said Alden Myer.

“I take this a very positive sign,” but it remains to be seen if this translates into action, Meyer said.

Genetically modified corn in Spain. Credit: Friends of the Earth

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain, Mar 27 2013 (IPS)

Spain has more large-scale plantations of genetically modified seeds than any other country in the European Union (EU).

Based on the number of trials conducted and the area of land planted, Spain accounts for 42 percent of all field trials of genetically modified crops in the EU, according to figures from the European Commission Joint Research Centre.

“Experimentation is being carried out on a wide scale with no knowledge of its consequences for human health, the environment and the future of agriculture,” environmentalist Liliane Spendeler, director of Friends of the Earth Spain, told Tierramérica*.

Her organisation has launched a campaign, “Únicos en Europa”, to inform the public about these crops.

Genetically modified organisms or GMOs, also known as transgenic organisms, are the result of a laboratory process of taking genes from one species of plant or animal and inserting them into another species in an attempt to obtain a desired trait or characteristic, such as resistance to pests or adverse weather conditions like drought.

There is no conclusive evidence that GMOs are harmless to human health and the environment, which has led the World Health Organization to recommend that they be studied on a case-by-case basis.

In 2012, more than 116,300 hectares of land in Spain were planted with MON810 corn, produced by the U.S.-based biotech transnational Monsanto. This was 20 percent more than in 2011, according to figures from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment calculated on the basis of seed sales.

Environmentalists are critical of the fact that these figures are imprecise estimates, and that there is no public registry specifying the location of these transgenic corn fields.

When certified organic crops are contaminated by genetically modified crops, the farmers lose their organic certification, but cannot sue the owners of the transgenic crops because of the lack of a registry. They cannot demand compensation for losses and damages, either, because there is no provision for this in Spanish or European legislation, explained Spendeler.

In Spain, as in the rest of the EU, only transgenic corn is authorised. Genetically modified soy and cotton are imported from Argentina, Brazil, Canada and the United States.

“Transgenic crops produced in developing countries are filling the bellies of cows and pigs in industrialised countries,” Luís Ferreirim, the head of Greenpeace Spain’s anti-GMO campaign, told Tierramérica.

According to a report from the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), published Feb. 20, “From 1996 to 2011, biotech crops contributed to food security, sustainability and climate change” (sic).

A record 170.3 million hectares of transgenic crops were grown globally in 2012, up six percent from 2011, the ISAAA reports. The United States is the biggest producer, followed by Brazil.

But despite the benefits touted by their promoters, such as increased productivity and efficiency and decreased pesticide use, genetically modified seeds have been banned by a significant number of European countries, noted Ferreirim.

In Europe there are 11 countries that prohibit the use of genetically modified seeds, eight of them in the EU, following the addition of Poland in 2013. And in 2012, only Portugal, Spain, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic planted transgenic crops, he added.

A whopping 95 percent of these crops in the EU are concentrated in Spain (88 percent) and Portugal (seven percent).

The bulk of this transgenic corn is used to produce animal feed. “Given that the food pyramid has been turned upside down and there is an ever greater demand for animal protein, it ends up right on our plates,” said Ferreirim.

European legislation requires that food products be labelled if they contain GMOs, unless these account for 0.9 percent or less of the total ingredients.

The animal feed sold in Spain is a mixture of transgenic and conventional corn, which represents a serious violation of cattle farmers’ right to choose non-GMO feed for their livestock, said Spendeler.

Environmental activist Carmela San Segundo, a member of Ecologists in Action in the southern Spanish city of Málaga, stressed the “great power” wielded by the agrochemical corporations that sell genetically modified seeds.

Through the efforts of the non-governmental organisation she works with, a dozen towns in the province of Málaga have declared themselves Transgenic-Free Zones, a legal status recognised by the EU.

“It takes a lot of work, talking with community associations, farmers’ associations, members of local governments. It’s not a problem that people worry about much, because they know very little about it,” she told Tierramérica.

In Spain, the planting of transgenic corn began in 1998 as a means of confronting the economic consequences of insect invasions, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

But today there are no figures on the real incidence of the European corn borer, the crop’s main insect enemy.

“Can the use of this technology be justified without concrete figures on the losses caused by pests?” asked Ferreirim.

He explained that Monsanto’s genetically modified Bt corn does away with the need to use pesticides because its flowers produce a bacterium that is toxic to these insects.

But even though there is not always a threat of insect infestation, the corn constantly releases this gene, and after harvesting, it remains in the soil, decreasing its fertility, Ferreirim said.

“It has been shown in transgenic crops in various countries that over the long term, secondary pests appear, leading to the need to use other pesticides,” he added.

In addition, GMO field trials are not subjected to any safety controls in Spain, Ferreirem stressed.

According to a survey published in 2010 by the EU, 53 percent of Spaniards were against the splicing of genes from other species into food crops, while only 27 percent were in favour.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.