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

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

Rajendra Kumar Pachauri

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

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

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

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

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

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Excerpt:

At COP21 entrance are situated the ‘Wind Trees.’ Each “aeroleaf” generates energy by harnessing the power of the wind. Credit: IISD.ca

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
PARIS, France, Dec 10 2015 (IPS)

As the climate conference advances into its final stages amid the colossal challenge of having 195 countries agree on a single and unified global policy on climate change, urban areas appear a a different issue but complementary solution for all.

Cities are undeniably one of the key players in the global warming arena, being the leading source of greenhouse gases, of population settlements and of energy consumption, grouping three highly interconnected driving factors of global warming. As humanity walks deeper into the 21st century their relevance will only grow.

Cities and municipal level government offices have proven to move faster than the international country-driven negotiations in addressing climate change, as international alliances both inside and outside the UN umbrella show.

However, they don’t live in another world and their solution portfolio is intertwined with the fate of the 2015 UN Climate Conference (COP21).

“The way decisions will be made as part of the agreement, including the funding and the agenda of solutions, all these decisions will be implemented at that sub national level so they are key to success,” said French French Minister of Ecology, Energy and Sustainable Development Ségolène Royal.

The minister spoke during the presentation at COP21 of a five-year plan to raise action from cities and regions spanning across five continents representing almost one-fifth of the world’s population.

The plan was launched under the Lima to Paris Action Agenda (LPAA) platform, a mechanism created during last year’s climate conference as a way to include so-called non state actors into the search for the climate solution.

Its urban workstream currently includes over 2200 settlements around the world, from Mongolia’s capital Ulan Bator to globalization strongholds like New York and London and adds to previous efforts like C40.

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) says urban areas are responsible for up to 80 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and by mid century, they are estimated to hold about seven of every 10 human beings.

Tokyo, for instance, emits as much as 62 million tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per year, which accounts to the equivalent of the 37 countries least polluting countries in Africa.

Their transition to a greener economy is also an economic necessity. If the world keeps a business-as-usual high-carbon economy, about 90 trillion dollars, or an average of six trillion a year, will be invested in infrastructure in the world’s cities, agriculture and energy systems over the next 15 years, according to the New Climate Economy report “Better Growth, Better Climate”.

But the report adds that only around 270 billion dollars a year would be needed to accelerate the global transition to a low-carbon economy, through clean energy, more compact cities, better public transport systems and smarter land use.

These and other low-carbon local decisions are going to be taken by country delegates at the climate conference, but the actual heavy lifting will come from sub national efforts.

“COP21 is the first time that cities will have their voices fully recognized at a global UN conference on climate change and the first time mayors are gathering in great numbers to demand bold action,” said UN Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Michael Bloomberg during the Cities for Change, a parallel event in Paris.

The conference comes at a crucial moment. Earlier this year, Paris suffered from haze masking city’s landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and this week Beijing raised a “red alert” warning over smog and the city has gone on a shutdown to protect its people, so mayors and city planners are moving fast.

The city of Ghent in Belgium has implemented projects that address climate change. Speaking at a side event in COP21 called “Global Covenant of Mayors: Towards Carbon Neutral and Inclusive Cities,” the city’s mayor Tine Heyset emphasized climate policies at the local level.

“Climate policy should contribute to reduce emissions. It can contribute to a livable city, reduction of poverty, and better housing. Local authorities can demonstrate that local climate policy is not only good for climate but also good for citizens,” she said.

And it’s not just developed cities that are making bold steps of climate action. Mayor Josefa Errazuris of Chile’s Providencia also shared about their city-wide projects such as changing street lights to LED and having a target of 50 per cent carbon reduction of GHG based on 2014 levels.

“In order to protect our commune and the sustainability of our territory, we have efforts to include climate change as part of policies,” she said.

But urban areas also have to carry a heavy burden. During her intervention, minister Royal highlighted the double nature of the cities as “both places with highest greenhouse gases but also where you need concrete and urgent action” to address the negative impacts of climate change.

A 2013 paper published in Nature showed that without major new defences or emissions cuts, the global costs of flooding in cities could rise to one trillion dollars a year in 2050 and the negative effects span to all corners of the world.

As poverty hotspots around the world, cities lack the necessary resilience to withstand climate change and its impacts, which usually harder on the most vulnerable among communities and settlements.

The 2014 World Urbanization Prospects revealed that 828 million people are currently living in slums, as satellites or metropolis in all continents, a number enlarged by 6 million on a yearly basis.

But it’s not only the world’s most vulnerable. A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that if global warming continues as it is now, half the homes in 21 cities in the United States will be underwater by 2100.

COP21 is scheduled to deliver a final text by Thursday noon, Paris time, in which all 195 countries that signed to the UN Climate Convention agree on a global plan to combat climate change.

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

By Wambi Michael
LIMA, Dec 4 2014 (IPS)

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

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

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

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

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

Q:  What has been achieved so far?

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

Q:  Where was the problem for the CDM?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Edited by Phil Harris)

African countries fought hard for the Kyoto Protocol not to die on African soil at the 2011 Climate Change Conference in South Africa, but they say it is now languishing in limbo because developed countries are taking what they called “baby steps” towards ratification of the Doha Amendment that gave it a new lease of life.

The African Group and other least developed country negotiators at the ongoing (Dec. 1-12) U.N. Climate Change Conference in Lima, Peru, say they are concerned about the slow progress towards giving a legal force to the international emission reduction treaty.

Nagmeldin El Hassa, Chair of the Africa Group in Lima – “In our view, the developed countries are reneging, abandoning and weakening the Kyoto Protocol”. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

“We would like to point out that slow ratification of Commitment Period Two of Kyoto by developed countries does not build confidence. In our view, the developed countries are reneging, abandoning and weakening the Kyoto Protocol,” Nagmeldin El Hassan, Chair of the African Group said at the opening of the conference.

He said failure by developed countries to ratify the Doha Amendment was forcing the least developed countries to assume legal commitments while relaxing the legal commitments of the historical greenhouse emitters. “If this is the game that some think we are ready to entertain, we must make it clear that we will not be party to this game,” El Hassan added.

In December 2012, the Doha Amendment to the Protocol was agreed, extending it into a new commitment period running from 1 January 2013 to 31 December 2020. The European Union (EU), its 28 Member States and other developed countries have ratified the protocol.

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, to which the Kyoto Protocol is linked, requires ratification by 144 countries before it can enter into force.“The responses of rich developed countries show no sense of urgency – they have presented less climate finance than last year, have not raised their pollution targets and have not even legally ratified the Kyoto Protocol as they promised two years ago” – Mithika Mwenda, Secretary-General of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA)

By the end of November 2014, only 20 countries had ratified the Doha Amendment establishing the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. Guyana was the latest to ratify as it prepared to join the negotiations in Lima.

El Hassan told IPS that the ratification process needs to be accelerated and clear accounting rules adopted in Lima so that the amendment enters into force by the next Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015.

African environment groups and NGOs are also calling on governments to hasten progress on ratification of the much fought for second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol.

Mithika Mwenda, Secretary-General of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) to which more than 30 Africa-based NGOs belong, told IPS that it was demoralised by the “baby step” speed of the developed countries towards ratification.

“Africans have sent their governments to Lima with urgent and creative demands to face the climate crisis,” said Mwenda. “Yet the responses of rich developed countries show no sense of urgency – they have presented less climate finance than last year, have not raised their pollution targets and have not even legally ratified the Kyoto Protocol as they promised two years ago.”

According to Mwenda, the developed countries are determined to delay their participation in the Kyoto Protocol’s second commitment period.  “They are letting their national interests trump over the global common good and are opting out of multilateral rules.”

Earlier in the week, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres said that both developed and developing country Parties to the Kyoto Protocol needed to save the protocol from languishing in limbo by ratifying it.

“I have said this before and let me say it again. For this international legal framework to enter into force, governments need to complete their ratification process as soon as possible. We need a positive political signal of the ambition of nations to step up crucial climate action,” said Figueres.

The African Group is pushing for ratification of the Doha Amendment because it extends a legal commitment to Annex 1 countries – members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) plus a group of countries whose economies are in transition – to contribute towards a global effort to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

Ram Prasad Lamsal from Nepal, who chairs the LDC Group, told IPS that “ratification is essential for the Kyoto Protocol to continue to serving as a cornerstone of the multilaterally agreed rules-based system under the [Climate Change] Convention and a full reflection of its principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities.”

However, while the African countries are pushing their developed country counterparts to ratify the Doha Amendment, just four of them had ratified it by the end of November – South Africa, Sudan, Morocco and Kenya.

A delegate from European Union speaking on condition of anonymity wondered why the African countries – as well as the LDC Group, the G77 and China – were not ratifying the second commitment period as they mount pressure on developed countries.

Paul Isabirye, Uganda’s UNFCCC Focal Point, told IPS that African countries would easily ratify once the developed countries had taken the lead.

“But even if all the African countries ratified, it still cannot enter into force before our colleagues do it. They have the bulk of the emissions to cut. The issue is not that Africa has lagged behind, the big emitters don’t seem to be coming forward,” said Isabirye.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Oct 6 2014 (IPS)

If ever there was a need to prove that we are faced with a total lack of global governance, the U.N. Climate Summit, extraordinarily called by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Sep. 23, makes a very good case.

The convocation of the climate summit – albeit just for one day – appeared to indicate that it had finally dawned on political leaders that there is a problem, in fact an urgent problem, about the impact that climate change is having on our planet.

And yet, the array of leaders gathered together in New York, although full of general platitudes, gave another impressive display of failure to come up with a concrete answer. While acknowledging the problem, many leaders found a way to duck their responsibility, indicating domestic constraints.

Roberto Savio. Credit: IPS

Thus U.S. President Barack Obama made it clear that the U.S. Congress would not be ready to ratify an international climate treaty. Of course, this line of reasoning applies to the U.S. approach in general – Congress does not accept binding the United States to any international treaty because of its exceptional destiny, which cannot be brought under scrutiny or control by those who are not U.S. citizens.

Furthermore, the United States has become a dysfunctional country, where the judicial, legislative and executive powers cannot cooperate, even on crucial issues.“The array of leaders gathered together in New York [for the Sep. 23 Climate Summit], although full of general platitudes, gave another impressive display of failure to come up with a concrete answer. While acknowledging the problem, many leaders found a way to duck their responsibility”

Anant Geete, India’s new Ministry of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises, stated that growth in his country has priority over anything else, and therefore India will continue on its path towards industrialisation and energy fully based on coal, while other renewable energies will be brought in progressively, even if this will eventually make India the world’s biggest polluter.

The European Union could not make any commitment, because a new Commission was due to take over the following month (i.e. October) and the person earmarked for the post of Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy was Spanish Conservative Miguel Arias Canete,  who was a major shareholder in two Spanish oil companies – Petrolifera Ducal and Petrologis Canarias – until he sold his shares to garner support for his nomination

No problem, say his critics, Canete’s wife, son and brother-in-law did not follow suit and remain shareholders or even occupy positions on the boards of the companies.

In line with this same political sensibility, the new and more conservative European Commission has brought in a well-known City lobbyist, Lord Jonathan Hill, to the portfolio of Financial Services.

Such a system of political compromises is like bringing Count Dracula in to run a blood bank – hardly a system that is likely to appeal to blood donors!

What is sad is that there was no lack of background papers for the U.N. Climate Summit.

Beside one prepared by the Intergovernmental Council on Climate Change, bringing together 3.200 scientists from all over the world, there was, for example, a report prepared by the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture (clearly not part of a leftist government), based on a detailed study of Spanish coastal areas which found that by 2050 the level of the Mediterranean Sea will increase by a minimum of 30 centimetres (if climate control measures are taken now) up to a maximum of 60 centimetres (if no action is taken).

That means that the coastline will recede by between 20 to 40 metres, with an obvious impact on tourism, ports and costal settlements. One hundred years ago, only 12 percent of the coast was used, rising to 20 percent in 1950, 35 percent in 1988 and 75 percent in 2006. In Spain, 15 million people now live in area which will be affected by the climate change.

Obviously, France, Greece , Italy, Tunisia and all other Mediterranean countries  will share that same destiny.

Another more global study conducted by Climate Central, a U.S. research group, based on more detailed sea-level data than has previously been available, reports that about 1 person in every 40 in the world lives in an area which will be susceptible to flooding in the next 100 years – about 177 million people.

Even if immediate measures were taken for climate control, 1.9 percent of the population of coastal countries would be affected. At worst, the figure would be 3.1 percent. To give a concrete example, four percent of the Chinese population, 50 million people, would be affected. Eight of the 10 large countries most at risk are in Asia.

The voice of Abdulla Yameen, President of the Maldives, who reminded leaders at the Climate Summit that small island countries – which would be the first to suffer from any rise in sea levels – have formed a federation to defend their right to exist, went largely unheeded.

An entire new generation has been born since the debate over climate change started but there are no signs that the situation is improving.

In the decade up to 2012, global emissions of CO₂ rose by an average of 2.7 percent. In 2013, emissions were the highest in the last 30 years. And yet, the energy sector is mounting a strong campaign to deny that there is any climate change.

If anything, say the deniers of climate change, what is happening is part of a normal historical cycle, not the result of human activity. All data demonstrating the contrary are being ignored, and the upshot of this campaign is that many people believe that debate on the issue is still open.

Perhaps what happened a few days ago between Google and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is symptomatic of this “normal historical cycle”?

On Sep. 22, Google chairman Eric Schmidt announced that the high-tech company was withdrawing from ALEC, saying: “Everyone understands climate change is occurring and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And so we should not be aligned with such people – they’re  just, they’re just literally lying.”

ALEC is a conservative organisation that has urged repeal of state renewable power standards and other pro-renewable policies. It drafts proposals for regulations that it submits to politicians, asking them to make just the effort of passing them into law.

Reacting to Google’s decision, Lisa B. Nelson, CEO of ALEC, said: “It is unfortunate to learn Google has ended its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council as a result of public pressure from left-leaning individuals and organizations who intentionally confuse free market policy perspectives for climate change denial.”

So, if you are worried about climate change, you are left-wing and against the market!.

The fact is that executives from many large corporations are well ahead of political leaders. They can take decisions unencumbered by political constraint , and they have found out that working in the direction of climate controls makes sense not only in terms of public relations but also economically.

For example, forty major companies, including l’Oreal and Nestlè, issued a declaration on Sep. 23 pledging to help cut tropical deforestation in half by 2020, and stop it entirely by 2030. Some of these companies work with palm oil, profitable production which is at the expense of tropical forests, especially in Indonesia.

In fact, it was only corporations that made any concrete pledges at the New York Summit.

Apple CEO Timothy Cook said that his company was committing itself to focusing on the emissions of its main suppliers, which account for around 70 percent of the greenhouse gases that come from production and use of the company’s products.

Cook rejected the idea that society must choose between economic growth and environment protection, giving as an example a huge solar farm that his company built in North Carolina to help power a data centre there. ”People told us this couldn’t happen, it could not be done, but we did it. It is great for the environment, and by the way it is also good for economics.”

Not to be outdone, Cargill, the huge U.S. commodity processor, pledged to go even further with an existing no-deforestation commitment on palm oil and extend it to cover all its agricultural products. And, together with other companies processing Indonesian palm oil, Cargill called on the Indonesian government to get tougher on deforestation.

In the meantime, it is not that voices worldwide have been silent on the issue. Safeguarding the environment has long been a rallying banner for a large part of civil society worldwide, and a major cause for concern among the younger generations.

The hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets throughout the world ahead of the New York Summit in solidarity with the need to do something about climate were no mere figment of the media’s imagination. So why were they clearly invisible to the planet’s decision-makers?

The next important date for the climate on their agenda is the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP21) to be held in Paris in 2015. Will our political leaders again waste the chance to do something concrete – will they continue to stand by and watch as time runs out for the planet, and for humankind?

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

A traffic jam in Jaciara, Brazil, caused by repairs to the BR-364 road. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, Oct 2 2014 (IPS)

“We could be the last Latin American and Caribbean generation living together with hunger.”

The assertion, made by Raúl Benítez, a regional officer for the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), shows one side of the coin: only 4.6 percent of the region’s population is undernourished, according to the latest figures.

By 2030, however, most of the countries in the region will face a serious risk situation due to climate change.

With almost 600 million inhabitants, Latin America and the Caribbean has a third of the world’s fresh water and more than a quarter of its medium to high potential farmland, points out a book published this year by the Inter-American Development Bank in partnership with Global Harvest Initiative, a private-sector think-tank.

It is the largest net food-exporting region, while it uses just a fraction of its agricultural potential for both consuming and exporting.

But almost a quarter of the region’s rural people still live on less than two dollars a day, and the region is prone to disasters (earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and droughts), some of them exacerbated by climate change.

Global warming poses serious challenges to the international community’s goal of eradicating poverty and hunger. Changes in rainfall patterns, soils and temperatures are already stressing agricultural systems.

Currently, more than 800 million people worldwide are at risk of hunger. Through its devastating impact on crops and livelihoods, climate change is predicted to increase that number by as much as 20 percent by 2050, according to a recent United Nations report.

Changes in temperature and rainfall patterns could lead to food price rises of between three percent and 84 percent by 2050, thereby feeding a vicious cycle of poverty and inequality.

Oxfam reports that in the more extreme scenarios, heat and water stress could reduce crop yields by 25 percent between 2030 and 2049.

Climate change is likely to impact mostly small and family farmers, who produce more than half the food in the region and have inadequate resources with which to deal with unpredictable weather.

Despite this looming threat, strategies for sustainability are far from clear. Regional drivers of growth are export-oriented commodities, and while some sectors have advanced in added value, technology and innovation, natural resources exploitation is still the key of the whole regional boom.

By 2011, raw materials and commodities accounted for 60 percent of regional exports, compared to 40 percent in 2000. At the same time, this growth of commodities exports led to a replacement of domestic manufactures by imported goods, affecting manufacturing industries in the region.

In rural areas, conflicting models of small farming and extensive monocultures based on genetically modified seeds compete for the land in a David versus Goliath fight.

In Paraguay, the fourth largest exporter of soybeans in the world, 1.6 percent of owners hold 80 percent of the agricultural land. In Guatemala, eight percent of producers own 82 percent of farmlands, while 80 percent of productive land in Colombia is in the hands of 14 percent of landowners, according to Oxfam.

Agriculture and related deforestation are major sources of greenhouse gasses (GHG) in Latin America, though other sources are growing rapidly. Brazil, for example, is joining the club of big polluters, with the burning of fossil fuels accounting for the majority of its GHG emissions in the last five years.

As the extractive industries grow, they demand more highways, railroads and ports, putting pressure on governments to avoid the so-called logistics blackout.

Energy demand is increasing too, not only from industries, but also from millions of people lifted out of poverty, and thus with larger consumption needs. The region’s energy demand for the period 2010-2017 increases at an annual rate of five percent.

The region is poised to cross a new fossil fuel frontier, when Argentina, Brazil and Mexico overcome their own political, financial and technical challenges to exploit substantial reserves of unconventional hydrocarbons, like the Argentinian Vaca Muerta geological formation or the pre-salt layer located in the Brazilian continental shelf.

It is difficult to argue that a region so rich in natural resources has no right to thrive on the demand and supply of commodities, particularly when the resulting fiscal revenues have allowed impoverished countries like Bolivia to drastically reduce extreme poverty numbers (from 38 percent in 2005 to 20 percent in 2013).

However, experts warn this path is unsustainable and climate change impacts, felt across the region, can undermine any social gain.

In Guatemala, the worst drought in 40 years is putting 1.2 million people at risk of suffering hunger in the next months. Those who suffer the worst impacts of unsustainable development models will ironically be those who contribute the least to global warming.

A recent U.N. document summarising actions for the follow-up to the programme of action adopted at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) found that only about a “third of the world’s population could be considered as having consumption profiles that contribute to emissions.”

Fewer than one billion of them have a significant impact, while “a smaller minority is responsible for an overwhelming share of the damage,” the report added.

Still, it will be the poorest people who will bear the brunt, and Latin America, dubbed ‘the next global breadbasket’, is in desperate need of strong local and global action towards the goal of achieving sustainable development in the next decade.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gigatonne gap

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

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

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

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

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

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

International drumbeat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bleak findings

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

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

The report painted a bleak picture for many cities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policy recommendations

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

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

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

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

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

Hydro plants on the Lower Thjorsa, above, could potentially provide energy for a new aluminium smelter. Credit: Lowana Veal/IPS

By Lowana Veal
REYKJAVIK, Jun 9 2013 (IPS)

The new Icelandic government was only a day old when it announced in mid-May that it would do all it could to push ahead with the Helguvik aluminium smelter. Construction for the smelter began in in 2008 but since then has met with a variety of problems, mostly energy-related.

Critics of the project say that too many aspects of the project still remain unresolved and allege that the rush to build the smelter is a corporate tactic to draw Iceland’s government into developing infrastructure that it will be forced to continue supporting, to the detriment of the country’s protected areas.

Environmental concerns, meanwhile, were nearly inconspicuous during election campaigns, and on May 1, a few days after election results were announced, a Green March tagged along behind the trade unions’ march to remind political parties that the election had been won on a platform of cutting taxes and slashing home loans rather than on building new aluminium smelters.

The Green March focused on environmental issues and specifically the fact that the new government had no mandate to build more aluminium plants – which consume large quantities of energy and produce pollutants such as carbon dioxide and perfluorocarbons – or power plants.

Yet the day before the April 27 elections, Michael Bless, the head of Century Aluminium, which owns the plant, said he was optimistic a new government would ensure that development of the Helguvik plant could continue in earnest.

The governmental agreement issued two weeks ago by the winning Independence Party (IP) and Progressive Party (PP) emphasised that conservation and utilisation could proceed hand-in-hand.

The environment section began, “Clean renewable energy…offers great marketing opportunities that could lay the base for increased exports and a stronger image of the country.”

As Iceland’s geothermal and hydro energy is seen as renewable, a previous environment minister, Siv Fridleiksdottir, justified building the Karahnjukar dam and Fjardaal aluminium plant by saying that building energy-sucking aluminium plants in Iceland, where the energy is clean and renewable, was preferable to building them where they would run on dirty energy.

Energy blocks

The new minister for industry, Ragnheidur Elin Arnadottir, comes from the constituency which houses the partly built Helguvik smelter. It also has the highest unemployment rate in the country, and the municipality sees the smelter as a potential source of employment. She is keen for the project to go ahead.

Arnadottir told IPS that she is looking into possible incentives from the government side to facilitate the project, including possible state aid for various aspects of infrastructure such as road building and harbour expansion.

But the main stumbling block is still the lack of energy needed to fuel the plant and the price that Century Aluminium is willing to pay for the electricity, especially with the current global price of aluminium at rock-bottom.

Until a few years ago, aluminium companies in Iceland paid very little for electricity, as they consumed so much electricity and their operation was considered good for the economy.

But times have changed, and now energy companies are demanding higher prices for the electricity they produce.

The environmental impact assessment for Helguvik assumed a total capacity of 250,000 tonnes of aluminium produced annually, although ideally Century would like the smelter to produce 360,000 tonnes to be more cost-effective.

Energy for the plant was supposed to be provided by the regional heating company HS Orka and capital city-based Orkuveita Reykjavikur (OR) and sourced from geothermal plants, none of which have been built yet.

New pollution regulations for hydrogen sulphide (H2S), which is produced by geothermal plants, will also mean that at least one of these plants cannot be built until H2S emissions can be contained.

Despite these plans, Ketill Sigurjonsson, an energy specialist from the energy consultancy firm Askja Energy Partners, says that geothermal plants will probably be too expensive for an aluminium smelter.

“There may be some options in low cost hydropower, but it is still unclear if these will be enough to provide a full-sized aluminium smelter with sufficient electricity,” he said.

Earlier this year, the Icelandic government approved the Master Plan for Hydro and Geothermal Resources, which categorises all potential hydro and geothermal power plants into three categories: utilisation, meaning the plant faces no obstacles for development; pending, meaning more research is needed; or protection, meaning development is not allowed.

But in late May, Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson, the minister for fisheries, agriculture and the environment, announced that he had ordered a review of the plan, with the aim of moving some of the plants from the pending category, such as the hydro plants in the Lower Thjorsa River, into the utilisation group.

These plants could potentially provide energy for Helguvik or other large-scale industrial projects, such as a silicon factory. But Johannsson’s statement has caused unrest amongst environmentalists, some of whom have campaigned to save the Lower Thjorsa from development.

Tactical moves?

Arni Finnsson, from the Iceland Nature Conservation Association, has strong views on the matter. “Century Aluminium has conducted its business in a totally irresponsible manner with regard to a new smelter in Helguvik,” he said.

“Without having secured any energy at all for a new aluminium smelter…it started building the smelter, apparently in order to put pressure on politicians who are sensitive to high unemployment rates, for them to deliver the energy,” Finnsson told IPS.

“To build a smelter of 250-360,000 tonnes a year would require major destruction of valuable nature areas,” he added, pointing out that both local and national energy companies would have to draw on energy from several projects that had not yet been designed or planned.

“Century Aluminium’s plan is to start the smelter with some 180,000 tonnes a year and then force the Icelandic government to provide more energy against a threat of decommissioning the plant,” he explained.

“Iceland would have to build power plants in areas which are currently protected or have been slated for protection,” he concluded.

Clutching a plastic bag containing a tree sapling in his right hand and a slim notebook in his left, 11-year-old Rizki Fauzi is the picture of a young climate change expert.

“I will plant this seedling in my school to catch carbon emissions and prevent erosion,” said the fifth- grade student at the state-owned Karet Tengsin Elementary School in Central Jakarta, busily consulting his notes

Rizki, together with 24 other students from his school, recently attended the four-day climate change education forum and expo from Apr. 19-22, organised by the Indonesian National Council on Climate Change (DNPI), as part of efforts to raise environmental awareness ahead of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20, that will take place in Brazil from Jun. 20-22.

The convergence, which marks the 20th anniversary of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, will focus on two primary themes: a green economy within the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, and the institutional framework for sustainable development.

In July 2011 Indonesia hosted a high-level dialogue on the latter topic, with the aim of drafting concrete proposals to be presented at Rio+20. In September of that year, the country organised the Tunza International Children and Youth Conference on the Environment that brought together more than 1,000 youth participants from around the world to generate input for Rio+20.

Rizki and his classmates were briefed on the importance of planting trees to capture carbon dioxide, the most deadly greenhouse gas produced primarily by the combustion of fossil fuels, and forest fires.

At the end of the forum, students were invited to take home a sapling each to be planted in their schools or homes.

Urgent need for awareness

An archipelagic country comprised of about 13,000 islands, Indonesia has been increasingly plagued by a host of deadly climate-related hazards, including floods, drought, landslides, and forest fires.

The country’s annual rainfall has also fallen by two to three percent, while seasonal changes have made it difficult for farmers to decide when to plant crops, a situation that is threatening the country’s food security.

A 2007 World Bank report named Indonesia as the planet’s third largest emitter, with annual carbon dioxide emissions standing at 3,014 billion tonnes, trailing only the United States – the world’s top emitter – with 6,005 billion tonnes, and China with 5,017 billion tonnes.

DNPI Chairman Rachmat Witoelar, a former environment minister, suggested that lack of awareness among local government officials may compromise the country’s efforts to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change.

“Local administrations are still reluctant to promote public transportation, while the people in general don’t want to use public transportation or join car pools going to work,” said Witoelar, who is also the presidential special envoy on climate change.

However, for Rukdi, the principal of Karet Tengsin Elementary School who dutifully accompanied his students to the expo in Jakarta, the challenge lies in convincing parents to take the first step in educating the next generation about solutions to the climate crisis.

Children as agents of change

According to Amanda Katili Niode, communications, information, and education coordinator of the DNPI, the forum and expo were part of efforts to educate, empower, and engage all stakeholders on policies relating to climate change as stipulated in Article 6 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“We invited at least 5,000 elementary and high school students from the Greater Jakarta area. Many other schools have organised their own trips,” she said, adding that the number of visitors was expected to reach 50,000 people, compared to 30,000 in 2011.

Most of the 75 exhibition participants were government departments and local governments, showcasing activities conducted under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) programmess funded by, among others, AusAID, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

M. Wahyu Rozhy, a student of the state-owned 109 Junior High School in East Jakarta, said he learned a lot about climate change and its impacts on humans during the visit.

“This is my first trip to this kind of exhibition and I am really happy. Now I know more about climate change and what we can do to mitigate its effects,” said the eighth-grader.

“I want to introduce recycling in my school. I will discuss the idea with my teachers first and hopefully they will support me,” said Rozhy, who was disturbed by the fact that most students at his school dump all types of trash in the same rubbish bins.

One booth at the exhibition displayed a clean batik initiative, a project funded by the European Union and the German government to encourage batik companies to use gas stoves and natural colours instead of wood and chemical dyes; while a British Council-sponsored stand displayed a local bicycle that produces and saves electrical energy.

The state-owned oil company PT Pertamina exhibited technology that converts coal into gas, while the publicly-listed mining company PT Aneka Tambang showcased a successful reclamation project at its mining site. Other stalls highlighted the environmental benefits of recycling and organic farming.

“We’ve just learned that our paper and books come from trees and that the more papers we use or waste, the more trees are cut down,” Vania Mailia, a tenth-grade student at the state-owned 6 Vocational School in South Jakarta, told IPS.

Luniar Aulia Rachmah, Vania’s classmate, said she learned that cutting trees would not only releases more carbons into the atmosphere but also deprives humans of oxygen.

Organisers challenged the students to have mock passports stamped with the words CLIMATE CHANGE 2012 in order to get a goody bag.

With each booth holding just one letter or number stamp, the students had to visit various stalls, whose representatives insisted on explaining their initiatives and posing environment-related questions to the students before stamping their ‘passports’.

But educating children alone will not be enough.

“This exhibition is very important as it teaches us how to deal with climate change. However, why does it draw so little interest from the public at large?” Rukdi lamented.

“It is easy to tell students to recycle their waste or plant trees at school, but what if they are told otherwise at home?” he said.

He believes that teachers must educate parents on environmental issues. “We usually invite parents to school to receive their child’s academic report, that will be the right time to tell them to recycle or plant trees,” Rukdi said.

(END)

Rising temperatures are drying out northern forests and peatlands, producing bigger and more intense fires. And this will only get much worse as the planet heats up from the use of ever larger amounts of fossil fuels, scientists warned last week at the end of a major science meeting in Vancouver.

“In a warmer world, there will be more fire. That’s a virtual certainty,” said Mike Flannigan, a forest researcher at the University of Alberta, Canada.

“I’d say a doubling or even tripling of fire events is a conservative estimate,” Flannigan told IPS.

While Flannigan’s research reveals forest fire risk may triple in future, a similar increase in peat fires will be far more dangerous. There are millions of square kilometres of tundra and peatlands in the northern hemisphere and they hold more than enough carbon to ramp up global temperatures high enough to render most of the planet uninhabitable if they burn.

A forest fire in Indonesia that ignited peatlands in 1997 smouldered for months, releasing the equivalent of 20 to 40 percent of the worldwide fossil fuel emissions for the entire year, he said.

“There is the potential for significant releases of carbon and other greenhouse gases (from future peat fires),” Flannigan said.

If peat fires release large amounts of carbon, then temperatures will rise faster and higher, leading to further drying of forests and peat, and increasing the likelihood of fires in what is called a positive feedback, he said.

When the increased fire from global warming was first detected in 2006, Johann Goldammer of the Global Fire Monitoring Center at Germany’s Freiburg University called the northern forest a “carbon bomb”.

“It’s sitting there waiting to be ignited, and there is already ignition going on,” Goldammer said according to media reports in 2006.

Flannigan’s research is based on climate projections for 2070 to 2090. Forests will be drier and there will be more lightning with rising temperatures. Around the world, most fires are caused by humans, except in remote regions like boreal forest and treeless tundra, he said.

Lightning sparked the 1,000-square-kilometre tundra fire fuelled by peat in Alaska’s Anaktuvuk River region in 2007. Lightning, once nearly unknown in the far north, is becoming more common as the region is now two to three degrees C warmer. Until the past decade, fire had largely been absent from the tundra over the past 12,000 years.

The Anaktuvuk River peat fire burned for nearly three months, releasing about two million tonnes of CO2 before it was extinguished by snow. That’s about half of the annual emissions of a country like Nepal or Uganda. Surprisingly, the severely burned tundra continued to release CO2 in the following years.

Peat can grow several metres deep beneath the ground. In fact, some peat fires burn right through winter, beneath the snow, then pick up again in the spring, said Flannigan.

About half the world’s soil carbon is locked in northern permafrost and peatland soils, said Merritt Turetsky, an ecologist at Canada’s University of Guelph. This carbon has been accumulating for thousands of years, but fires can release much of this into the atmosphere rapidly, Turetsky said in a release.

Over the past 10 years, fires are burning far more boreal forest than ever before. Longer snow-free seasons, melting permafrost and rising temperatures are large-scale changes underway in the north, Turetsky and colleagues have found.

Other researchers have shown that the average size of forest fires in the boreal zone of western Canada has tripled since the 1980s. Much of Canada’s vast forest region is approaching a tipping point, warned researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Germany’s largest research organisation.

This “drastic change” in normal fire pattern has occurred with a only a small increase in temperatures relative to future temperatures, the German researchers concluded in a study published in the December 2011 issue of The American Naturalist.

Worldwide, fires burn an estimated 350 to 450 million ha of forest and grasslands every year. That’s an area larger than the size of India.

The first-ever assessment of forest and bush fires’ impact on human health estimated that 339,000 people die per year from respiratory and other fire-related illness.

“I was surprised the number was this high,” said Fay Johnston, co-author and researcher at University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia.

Half of the deaths were in Africa and 100,000 in Southeast Asia. Deforestation fires in the tropics are the worst when it comes to human health impacts, she said. Heavy smoke contains high volumes of tiny particles that are very damaging to the lungs and cardiovascular system and can produce heart attacks.

“It takes humans to burn a rainforest. This would be the easiest to stop compared to other fires,” Johnston told IPS.

Forest and bush fires result in many billions of dollars in material losses every year. Last year, fires in drought-stricken Texas resulted in at least five billion dollars in losses, while the Slave Lake, Alberta fire was Canada’s second worst disaster at 750 million dollars.

Future fires will be bigger and more intense and largely beyond our abilities to control or suppress, said Flannigan.

“Virtually all of Russia, Canada, the U.S.” will be impacted, he said.