Like a ghost in the night this jellyfish drifts near the seafloor in Barkley Canyon, May 30, 2012, at a depth of 892 metres. Credit: CSSF/NEPTUNE Canada/cc by 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 25 2015 (IPS)

After four days of intense negotiations – preceded by nine years of dilly-dallying – the United Nations has agreed to convene an intergovernmental conference aimed at drafting a legally binding treaty to conserve marine life and govern the mostly lawless high seas beyond national jurisdiction.

The final decision was taken in the wee hours of Saturday morning when the rest of the United Nations was fast asleep.

The open-ended Ad Hoc informal Working Group, which negotiated the deal, has been dragging its collective feet since it was initially convened back in 2006.

The High Seas Alliance, a coalition of 27 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) plus the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), played a significant role in pushing for negotiations on the proposed treaty.

Karen Sack, senior director of international oceans for The Pew Charitable Trusts, a member of the coalition, told IPS a Preparatory Committee (Prep Com), comprising of all 193 member states, will start next year.

A grey nurse shark at Shoal Bay, New South Wales, Australia. Credit: Klaus Stiefel/cc by 2.0

“As part of reaching consensus, however, there was no deadline set for finalising the treaty,” she said.

Asked if negotiations on the treaty would be difficult, she said, “Negotiations are always tough but a lot of discussion has happened over almost a decade on the issues under consideration and there are definitely certain issues where swift progress could be made.”

The Prep Com will report to the General Assembly with substantive recommendations in 2017 on convening an intergovernmental conference for the purpose of elaborating an internationally legally binding instrument.

The four-day discussions faced initial resistance from several countries, including the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and South Korea, and to some extent Iceland, according to one of the participants at the meeting.

But eventually they joined the large majority of states in favour of the development of a high seas agreement.

Still they resisted the adoption of a time-bound negotiating process, and “setting a start and end date was for them a step too far,” he added.

Sofia Tsenikli, senior oceans policy advisor at Greenpeace International, told IPS: “Regarding the United States in particular, we are very pleased to see them finally show flexibility and hope that moving forward they find a way to support a more ambitious timeline.”

In a statement released Saturday, the High Seas Alliance said progress came despite pressure from a small group of governments that questioned the need for a new legal framework.

“That minority blocked agreement on a faster timeline reflecting the clear scientific imperative for action, but all countries agreed on the need to act,” it added.

The members of the High Seas Alliance applauded the decision to move forward.

Lisa Speer of the Natural Resources Defence Council said many states have shown great efforts to protect the half of the planet that is the high seas.

“We know that these states will continue to champion the urgent need for more protection in the process before us,” she added.

Daniela Diz of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Saturday’s decision was a decisive step forward for ocean conservation. “We can now look to a future in which we bring conservation for the benefit of all humankind to these vital global commons.”

Mission Blue‘s Dr Sylvia Earle said, “Armed with new knowledge, we are taking our first steps to safeguard the high seas and keep the world safe for our children.”

The outcome of the meeting will now have to be approved by the General Assembly by September 2015, which is considered a formality.

The high seas is the ocean beyond any country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) ‑ amounting to 64 percent of the ocean ‑ and the ocean seabed that lies beyond the continental shelf of any country, according to a background briefing released by the Alliance.

These areas make up nearly 50 percent of the surface of the Earth and include some of the most environmentally important, critically threatened and least protected ecosystems on the planet.

Only an international High Seas Biodiversity Agreement would address the inadequate, highly fragmented and poorly implemented legal and institutional framework that is currently failing to protect the high seas ‑ and therefore the entire global ocean ‑ from the multiple threats they face in the 21st century.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

A trawler in Johnstone Strait, BC, Canada. Human activities such as pollution, overfishing, mining, geo-engineering and climate change have made an international agreement to protect the high seas more critical than ever. Credit: Winky/cc by 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 20 2015 (IPS)

The United Nations will make its third – and perhaps final – attempt at reaching an agreement to launch negotiations for an international biodiversity treaty governing the high seas.

A four-day meeting of a U.N. Ad Hoc Working Group is expected to take a decision by Friday against a September 2015 deadline to begin negotiations on the proposed treaty.“The world’s international waters, or high seas, are a modern-day Wild West, with weak rules and few sheriffs.” -- Lisa Speer of NRDC

Sofia Tsenikli, senior oceans policy advisor at Greenpeace International, told IPS, “This is the last scheduled meeting where we hope to see the decision to launch negotiations materialise.”

Asked about the timeline for the final treaty itself, she said “it really depends on the issues that will come up during the negotiations.”

In a statement released Monday, the High Seas Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups, said the high seas is a vast area that makes up nearly two-thirds of the ocean and about 50 percent of the planet’s surface, and currently falls outside of any country’s national jurisdiction.

“This means it’s the largest unprotected and lawless region on Earth,” the Alliance noted.

The lack of governance on the high seas is widely accepted as one of the major factors contributing to ocean degradation from human activities.

The issues to be discussed include marine protected areas and environmental impact assessments in areas beyond national jurisdiction, as well as benefit-sharing of marine genetic resources, capacity building and transfer of marine technology.

At the same time, the growing threat from human activities, including pollution, overfishing, mining, geo-engineering, and climate change, have made an international agreement to protect these waters more critical than ever, says the High Seas Alliance.

Lisa Speer, international oceans programme director at the Natural Resources Defence Council, says “The world’s international waters, or high seas, are a modern-day Wild West, with weak rules and few sheriffs.”

Kristina M. Gjerde, senior high seas policy advisor at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), told IPS U.N. member states have the historic opportunity to launch negotiations for a new global agreement to better protect, conserve and sustain the nearly 50 percent of the planet that is found beyond national boundaries.

The U.N. process, initiated at the 2012 Rio+20 summit in Brazil, has extensively explored the scope, parameters and feasibility of a possible new international instrument under the 1994 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), she added.

“It is clear that by now the vast majority of States are overwhelmingly in support,” Gjerde said.

Though some outstanding issues remain, IUCN is confident that once negotiations are launched, rapid progress can be made toward achieving an effective and equitable agreement, she added.

“With good luck, good will and good faith, negotiations, including a preparatory stage, could be accomplished in as little as two to three years,” Gjerde declared.

At the Rio+20 meeting, member states pledged to launch negotiations for the new treaty by the end of the 69th U.N. General Assembly in September 2015.

In a briefing paper released Monday, Greenpeace called on the 193-member General Assembly to take a “historic decision to develop an agreement under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond the jurisdiction of States.”

Unfortunately a few countries, including the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and Iceland, have expressed opposition to an agreement going forward. But this could change, it added.

Norway – previously unconvinced – has now become supportive and calls for the launch of a meaningful implementing agreement for biodiversity in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ).

For the United States in particular, said Greenpeace, standing against progress towards a U.N. agreement that would provide the framework for establishing a global network of ocean sanctuaries would be at odds with the U.S.’s leadership on ocean issues such as the establishment of marine reserves in EEZ’s (Exclusive Economic Zones) as well as the Arctic, Antarctic and fight against illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing.

The environmental groups say there is overwhelming support for an UNCLOS implementing agreement from countries and regional country groupings across the world, from Southeast Asian nations, to African governments, European and Latin American countries and Small Island Developing States.

Among them are Australia, New Zealand, the African Union, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Group of 77 developing nations plus China, the 28-member European Union, Philippines, Brazil, South Africa, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica, Mexico, Benin, Pakistan, Uruguay, Uganda and many more.

Karen Sack, senior director of The Pew Charitable Trusts international oceans work, said the upcoming decision could signal a new era of international cooperation on the high seas.

“If countries can commit to work together on legal protections for biodiversity on the high seas, we can close existing management gaps and secure a path toward sustainable development and ecosystem recovery,” she added.

According to the environmental group, the high seas is defined as the ocean beyond any country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) – amounting to 64 percent of the ocean – and the ocean seabed that lies beyond the continental shelf of any country.

These areas make up nearly 50 percent of the surface of the Earth and include some of the most environmentally important, critically threatened and least protected ecosystems on the planet.

Only an international High Seas Biodiversity Agreement, says the coalition, would address the inadequate, highly fragmented and poorly implemented legal and institutional framework that is currently failing to protect the high seas – and therefore the entire global ocean – from the multiple threats they face in the 21st century.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

A gas drilling installation on the Marcellus Shale. It extends deep underground from Ohio and West Virginia northeast into Pennsylvania and southern New York. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jan 21 2014 (IPS)

A controversial new certification process that could cover a significant portion of the U.S. oil-and-gas “fracking” industry began accepting applications on Tuesday, indicating the formal start of an initiative that has the backing of some key industry players and some environmentalists – but by no means all of either.

In recent years, the Centre for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD), a non-profit based in Philadelphia, has been meeting with green groups, regulators and philanthropic foundations, as well as with major oil and gas producers with interests in a major petroleum-rich rock formation in the eastern part of the United States, known as the Marcellus Shale or Appalachian Basin."You can’t just say we’re giving in to the industry, and you can’t say the industry is ducking its responsibilities." -- Davitt Woodwell

The new certification process revolves around 15 performance standards aimed at mitigating against air and water pollution from the use of new technologies – known broadly as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” – that have upturned the U.S. energy market. While this has resulted particularly in a glut of natural gas, it has also led to a spectrum of environmental and health concerns.

Yet these technologies have proven so adept at obtaining previously hard-to-access gas formations that other countries are now moving quickly to use them.

“One of the most surprising and enjoyable parts of this launch has been the interest outside of the basin this has received,” Andrew Place, the CSSD’s interim executive director, told IPS during a press call Tuesday.

“While we were careful to build this process around the Appalachian Basin, the model, its collaborative nature, the certification and the robust assurance of its standards are scalable across other basins in North America and globally.”

Place says his office has already received calls from around the world expressing interest in the new CSSD certification process, from Brazil, China, Kazakhstan, Europe and other countries.

“They’re all interested in the diverse voices that built this collaborative effort, and are looking at this as a model for other basins and globally,” he says.

“The public conversation has been maturing in such a way as to get away from the polarisation and sensitivity that this issue has [taken on]. It’s absolutely fundamental that you need to have broad social discourse on these questions.”

Sustainable extraction

Founding members of the CSSD include major industry players (Shell, Chevron and others), a prominent green group (the Environmental Defense Fund), as well as local groups. While four oil and gas companies have signed onto the new protocol, many others have thus far declined, though Place says conversations with other companies are progressing.

For now, those that are a part of the initiative are expected to be among the first to start the certification process, which is slated to take about six months and will be overseen by an external auditor. Any companies that fail to pass the full certification process will be given a timeframe within which they will need to come into compliance, and all auditing processes are intended to result in significant documentation available to the public.

“We look forward to entering into the CSSD verification and certification process,” Paul Goodfellow, a vice president for Shell, told IPS.

“As a founding member of CSSD, we are proud of the achievements of this new organisation and look forward to other operators in the region seeing value in this approach and we hope our experience will encourage other operators to seek CSSD certification as well.”

Meanwhile much criticism remains around the industry’s response to fracking concerns. Local communities have complained of significant health impacts from hydraulic fracturing in their vicinities, particularly due to contaminated water tables.

Yet thus far major companies have downplayed or rejected outright such allegations. Even while fracking techniques involve the injecting of a cocktail of chemicals into deep underground rock formations, U.S. law does not require that these chemicals are disclosed to the public.

In some areas, the fracking boom has led to divisive fights within communities, as well as between communities and companies. In December, the Supreme Court in the state of Pennsylvania – a key area of the Marcellus Shale – struck down what was widely seen as an industry-friendly law allowing oil companies to engage in hydraulic fracturing even if local communities didn’t want them there.

“Our position all along has been that there are costs and benefits to this energy development. Because we all want to use energy, as it goes forward you have to push the envelope,” Davitt Woodwell, executive vice-president with the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, a coordinating organisation working on green issues in the state and a founding member of the CSSD, told IPS.

“In my view the resulting process is one that should be considered in other areas – the process of developing these standards and the certification is very defensible. You can’t just say we’re giving in to the industry, and you can’t say the industry is ducking its responsibilities, because all of this is meant to go beyond what they’re currently required to be doing.”

Yet others continue to question whether hydraulic fracturing – or any fossil fuel extraction – can ever be “sustainable”. Critics also question how much good any voluntary certification process can do, even one, like the CSSD, that imposes stricter requirements than either current state or federal regulations.

“While voluntary programmes like that of the Centre for Sustainable Shale Development have the potential to help raise standards for companies that participate, they do not eliminate the dire need for legally binding, enforceable federal and state rules that apply to every oil and gas company engaged in fracking, across the board,” Kate Kiely, a spokesperson for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), told IPS.

“If the oil and gas industry wants to get serious about protecting people and communities, it must stop fighting these at every turn.”

Kiely also noted that much will depend on the broader reaction among the oil and gas industry.

“We’ll be watching companies to see if they step up and participate,” she says. “And we’ll continue encouraging the oil and gas industry to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to best practices like these, and not only adhere to them voluntarily but support getting them on the books so that everyone has to play by the same rules.”

Illegally logged timber seized by the Ayun villagers in Pakistan's Chitral district. A ban on trade in illegally harvested timber, wildlife and fish is omitted from the current fast-track legislation in the U.S. Congress. Credit: Imran Schah/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jan 16 2014 (IPS)

An accord that would be the largest trade agreement ever negotiated appears to be rolling back environmental safeguards that have been a key part of U.S.-led trade deals for much of the past decade.

For four years, negotiators for 12 proposed Pacific-area member countries have been trying to come to agreement on a sweeping deal for what is being called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). While few details of the talks have been made public, WikiLeaks on Wednesday released a negotiating text for the environment chapter as well as a round-up of related country-level positions.“We’ve been pushing for safeguards around three things – fish stocks, wildlife trafficking and illegal logging – and the current draft falls short." -- Jake Schmidt

The documents allow the public a first-time glimpse of where talks stand on green issues, and some of the details have worried civil society. WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange suggested Wednesday that the environment chapter is little more than a “toothless public relations exercise”.

The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) “may be forced to back down from historic negotiating positions on environmental protections,” Larry Cohen, president of Communications Workers of America, a trade association, told a Senate hearing on Thursday, referring to media analysis of the leaked documents.

“At this point in our history, we should be making improvements, not negotiating a retreat on global environmental issues.”

Cohen appeared before the Senate Finance Committee to offer testimony on new legislation that would transfer significant power, known as “trade promotion” or “fast track” authorities, to President Barack Obama to move the TPP into its final stages. While such authorities have been a key component of past U.S. trade deals, critics say that they are undemocratic, barring the Congress from tweaking any eventual agreement.

On Thursday, Cohen told lawmakers that the new legislation would do nothing to ameliorate concerns about the TPP’s weaknesses on environmental safeguards. (Thus far, almost all Democratic members of Congress have refused to formally support the new fast track authorities.)

“Key negotiating objectives that would help ensure that natural resources are protected, such as a ban on trade in illegally harvested timber, wildlife and fish, are completely omitted from the current legislation,” he warned.

“It also does nothing to protect our environmental and climate policies from attack by foreign corporations or to put less stress on our scarce natural resources. More must be done to ensure that trade agreements don’t become a global race to the bottom on the environment.”

Unenforceable

The newly leaked environment chapter likely dates to November, and so may have changed by this week. If not, however, it appears to fail to include strong enforcement provisions – in a way that could directly contravene U.S. law.

The issue goes back to a 2007 agreement between the Congress and then-President George W. Bush, which set out a series of minimum standards for future trade agreements, including for the environment.

Congress stipulated that countries signing trade agreements with the United States would need to fulfil any international treaties they had signed. It also moved to ensure that agreed-upon environmental safeguards were not afterthoughts, requiring that such obligations be fully legally enforceable.

Green groups and others saw the agreement as an important step, and these requirements have been in place in subsequent trade accords between the United States and Panama, Colombia, South Korea and Peru. Yet while this U.S. law has not changed since then, the leaked TPP environment chapter contains weak requirements that critics say would be unenforceable.

“We’ve been pushing for safeguards around three things – fish stocks, wildlife trafficking and illegal logging – and the current draft falls short on all of these principles,” Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a watchdog group, told IPS.

“The current obligations for each of these give lots of wiggle room for countries not to enforce them. Effectively, there’s a reporting requirement for countries to say that they’re not enforcing these provisions, but no ability to actually apply trade sanctions. That’s like say it’s illegal to speed but then not funding any cops.”

(On Wednesday, NRDC and two other environment groups released a full analysis of the leaked TPP chapter.)

The leaked chapter, for instance, stipulates that member countries “recognize the importance of taking measures aimed at the conservation and the sustainable management of fisheries”. But governments are not required to do so.

Similarly, each country “shall seek to operate a fisheries management system … designed to prevent overfishing”. But, again, members are not required to do so.

“If passed without the proper enforcement, the current draft would be a major step back form previous trade agreements, even those passed by George Bush,” Schmidt says. “We know from lots of previous experience that if you have good laws on the books but no strong enforcement mechanisms, they don’t have any meaning.”

In fact, experience from the four trade agreements that have included the post-2007 environment safeguards has been mixed, as the USTR has never formally imposed sanctions on a country for failure to comply with environment-related provisions. Yet supporters note that the mere threat of trade repercussions has offered an important diplomatic tool in behind-the-scenes talks.

U.S. demands

As the TPP talks have progressed, the Obama administration has been roundly criticised by civil society groups who feel they have shut out of the negotiations, even as major multinational corporations have reportedly been given access to both the talks and certain negotiating texts.

On the environment chapter, however, the sense is that U.S. negotiators have indeed been working to ensure that the congressionally mandated safeguards are ultimately in place. In the aftermath of the leak, the office of the U.S. Trade Representative took the rare step of directly addressing the issue.

“The United States’ position on the environment in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations is this,” the USTR stated in the first sentence of a blog post released Wednesday, “environmental stewardship is a core American value, and we will insist on a robust, fully enforceable environment chapter in the TPP or we will not come to agreement.”

Yet NRDC’s Schmidt notes that the TPP remains a U.S.-driven agreement, and thus Washington negotiators have a key opportunity to insist on strong enforcement.

“They may be pushing hard,” he says, “but we’ll see if they now follow through and signal to other countries that this is a requirement that must be met before they can bring home any trade agreement.”

Jeff Adam works crop fields near Batavia, Iowa. Scientists say climate change could mean farmers like Adam will face new insects and plentiful weeds. Credit: Mary Chind/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

The news for environmental journalism in the United States is grim and getting grimmer.

On Mar. 1, the New York Times announced it was discontinuing the Green Blog that tracked environmental and energy news. In January, the paper had dismantled its three-year-old environment pod."Without journalists to uncover stories and speak to authoritative sources, the public loses." -- FERN's Samuel Fromartz

This year, too, Johns Hopkins University retired its 30-year-old science writing programme, following in the footsteps of Columbia University which, in 2009, closed its earth and environmental science journalism programme because of a poor job market.

Like climate change, the demise of science reporting is a slowly unfolding tragedy, say many environmental journalists in the United States.

At a time when conversations should be revolving around climate change, energy, natural resources and sustainable development, space for environmental reporting and coverage in the United States seems to be shrinking.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the fifth in a series, says the evidence is now overwhelming that humans are the primary drivers of global warming.

“A potential knowledge gap arises as environmental journalism shrinks. The public learns less about environmental and related health issues, but at the same time may fall prey to unscientific claims that often hold sway on the Internet,” a worried Samuel Fromartz, the editor-in-chief of the non-profit Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN), told IPS on the sidelines of the 23rd annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, held earlier this month in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

“Without journalists to uncover stories and speak to authoritative sources, the public loses,” he said.

Scott Dodd, editor of On Earth.org of the Natural Resources Defence Council, and who considers climate change the “most urgent story of our times”, told IPS that environmental issues are “consistently under-covered”.

From 85 weekly science sections in newspapers in the U.S in 1989, there were just 19 left by 2012.

“Environment is maybe 25 percent of a reporter’s beat,” Dodd said. “They are asked to cover city hall, night cops, the planning commission, and squeeze in an environmental story here and there when there’s time.”

In addition, climate change and the associated energy issues “tend to be complex, unspool over longer time periods, and require a level of knowledge and expertise that the average general assignment reporter might not have,” he added, noted that he is one himself.

“A long-term story like climate change, where the news today isn’t all that different from the news last week or last year, it’s difficult without a deep knowledge of the subject to find a fresh angle and sell an editor on why it should be front page news,” Dodd said.

Founded in 1990 by a small group of “full time” reporters and editors, the SEJ’s membership speaks volumes of this decline. Today, with a current strength of 1,300 members, a vast majority are “freelance journalists”, not all by choice, conceded Beth Parke, SEJ’s executive director.

But to be fair, if space for pure environmental journalism has shrunk, a bit of “cross-fertilisation” with other beats is still taking place.

“Editors generally understand that they cannot cover health, food, real estate, transportation, politics, energy, consumer issues… without bringing environmental questions into the story in one way or the other,” Parke said.

Interestingly, this meltdown of environmental reporting in the U.S., observed Adam Vaughan, editor of the U.K. based Guardian’s environment site, is not mirrored on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Guardian, for example, still has four reporters, two editors, two sub-editors and a picture editor dedicated to the subject, and earlier this year the paper hired an Australian environment correspondent for the first time. The Times, said Vaughan, recently moved one of its best reporters, Ben Webster, back to the environment beat.

So what did environmental journalism in the U.S. lose its glory to?

According to Parke, “Scandals, celebrities, sports – almost everything but serious investigative journalism is favoured as opposed to explanatory and public service journalism.”

The commercial media, she said, are “under severe pressure” to cover issues that increases their sales, ratings, listenerships and online views.

But all is not lost. This shuttering has led to a new genre – a rise in nonprofit journalism.

“I have seen the rise of more specialist sites online, such as InsideClimate, which won a Pulitzer recently, and Climate Central,” said Vaughan.

“There’s been the rising phenomenon of philanthropic-funded environmental efforts [such as Carbon Brief, China Dialogue, and Energy Desk], as well as freely-distributed public interest reporting from veteran journalists under the banner of the Climate News Network which were doing some of the best reporting on climate change,” he said.

“Look at what is winning prizes,” Parke said. “It’s news of oil spills, ocean health, contaminated food and building products, climate change. We see a lot of great work taking place outside the traditional media structure.”

And yet this kind of reporting has some obvious pitfalls.

“I’d view [blogs and magazines by NGOs] as an extension of their communications and marketing work, not what I’d recognise as traditional, independent journalism. It’s writing with an agenda, however impartial it appears to be,” said Vaughan.

Dodd, on the other hand, is worried “fewer people are seeing the important stories that these new outlets are telling” because these tend to be smaller, niche operations, without the resources or audience reach that national newspapers and the nightly network news were once able to command.

Critics say the EPA should not have approved clothianidin, a potent pesticide that belongs to a family of substances linked to the current widespread die-off of global honeybee populations. Credit: Bob Peterson/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Mar 28 2013 (IPS)

An environment group here is warning that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a key government regulator, may have been haphazardly approving thousands of pesticides for decades, some of which pose risks to both human and environmental health.

Following on two years of research, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a watchdog group, has found that as much as 65 percent of the 16,000 pesticides the EPA approved between the late 1970s and 2010 were greenlighted through a hasty and potentially incomplete process.The public is under the false impression that if a substance has been registered by the EPA, it has gone through a thorough government review.

NRDC says these 11,000 substances were approved using a loophole in strict regulatory legislation known as “conditional registration”, created by the U.S. Congress to be used only in very limited circumstances.

“Properly used, conditionally registering a new pesticide provides an important benefit in special situations such as allowing new pesticides on the market to address a public health emergency,” a new NRDC report, released Wednesday, states.

“However, improper use of conditional registration means that scores of untested or undertested pesticides may litter the market, potentially threatening human health.”

The EPA told IPS it has yet to fully review the new report. However, the agency says it has found that “the data required pursuant to conditional registrations have been submitted and reviewed in a timely fashion. EPA’s review of the data confirms that products initially registered on a conditional basis are not posing unacceptable risks to human health or the environment.”

Congress created the conditional registration option in the late 1970s, a half-decade after it passed stringent new regulatory legislation covering pesticides, in response to industry complaints that the new testing requirements were too onerous and were gumming up the development process.

As such, lawmakers said they would allow the use of conditional registration if a developer claimed to have insufficient time to come up with the data required, and if the temporary granting of approval would not have an overly negative environmental impact.

Both of these requirements – temporary use and follow-up data – remain central components for the use of conditional registration. And yet, according to the NRDC findings, not only has the EPA appeared to massively over-rely on this loophole, but it has also failed to adhere to these additional reporting requirements.

Abdication

“The EPA’s database is seriously disorganized. Once a pesticide is conditionally registered, the EPA does not have a system to track the data it had requested as a condition of the registration,” the report states.

“In addition, the agency does not follow whether those data were received, what the data show regarding the pesticide’s potential for harm or other aspects of the registration decision, or what, if any, changes were made in response to the received data.”

Coupled with the fact that the EPA also offers no public comment period on its decisions, alongside a broader lack of transparency, NRDC is calling the approvals process “grievously flawed” and accusing the agency of an “abdication” of its duties towards public health and the environment.

“The big problem is we have to take EPA at their word, because what the public has access to doesn’t offer us some critical information,” Mae Wu, an NRDC attorney and co-author of the new report, told IPS.

“It sounds as though we’re just talking about a messy database here, but we’ve identified at least two real-life examples of pesticides that went through this process that, had it been more open, EPA might have realised shouldn’t be approved.”

Those two substances are nanosilver, tiny pieces of silver used for their antibacterial properties, including in infants’ toys; and clothianidin, a potent pesticide that belongs to a family of substances linked to the current widespread die-off of global honeybee populations.

To a certain extent, the EPA appears to implicitly agree with at least some of these concerns. In an internal report last year, the agency admitted to administrative mistakes regarding the use of conditional registration in around 95 percent of cases.

In an e-mail to IPS, the EPA says it is currently working “on improving record-keeping and have developed a plan to update the IT systems to address that need.”

Further, after being privately briefed on the NRDC initial findings in 2010, the agency’s use of conditional registration appears to have plummeted, to about 20 percent of pesticides approved in 2011 and 2012. “It really did seem to open their eyes to a problem they didn’t realise they had,” Wu says.

Birds and bees

EPA has stated that it would be moving up a required periodic re-appraisal of approved pesticides. But even under the new timeframe it is not expected to rule on clothianidin until 2018.

Since the introduction of this substance’s broader family of pesticides (known as neonicotinoids), in the mid-2000s, mass honeybee deaths have threatened the huge food crop industry – worth some 15 billion dollars a year here in the United States alone – that depends on their pollination.

With U.S. beekeepers currently reporting hive losses of up to 50 percent, last week a group of beekeepers, environmental and consumer groups formally accused the EPA of failing to protect bees from harmful pesticides. (Also last week, a major new report was published detailing the harmful effect of neonicotinoids on the U.S. bird population.)

The lawsuit follows an EPA decision last year to deny a petition to halt the use of clothianidin – despite the agency itself having rejected research on the substance’s safety by its producer, Bayer.

“The EPA denied the suspension request by essentially concluding that there was no ‘imminent hazard’, but it didn’t review a majority of the new studies that further support the charge of imminent hazard,” Sylvia Wu, a staff attorney at the Center for Food Safety, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, told IPS.

“We believe that EPA has been abusing the conditional registration process. The public is under the false impression that if a substance has been registered by the EPA, it has gone through a thorough government review. The reality is that a lot of these substances are being widely applied even though EPA has been aware of potential harms.”

Elsewhere, while the European Union earlier this month failed to ban three neonicotinoids pesticides thought to be endangering European bees, the European Commission is reportedly continuing to pursue action on one unless a compromise with industry is reached.

On Thursday, the two largest neonicotinoid producers, Bayer and Syngenta, proposed a package plan in the E.U. that would include greater monitoring of neonicotinoids, more research on bee viruses, and planting of more flowers around the edges of agricultural fields.

By mid-September, the Royal Dutch Shell Oil (Shell) group hopes to begin exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of northern Alaska, provided it can secure federal permission from the U.S. government and overcome other logistical obstacles. But a prominent environmental group warns that drilling will do “irreparable damage” to the area.

The Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) published a reportMonday urging the U.S. government to oppose Shell’s drilling, citing concern, along with other green groups, about Shell’s inability to clean up and prevent oil spills.

The oil drilling ship Noble Discoverer on April 5, 2012 in the Port of Seattle before its trip to Alaska for the summer Arctic drilling season. Credit: James Brooks/CC by 2.0

Pro-Shell groups and the Republican party criticise these organisations, however. They argue that oil found in the Arctic Ocean will lead to cheaper energy resources for more than a decade for the United States.

Shell has admitted that it cannot effectively clean up oil spills, and that its response barge, Arctic Challenger, may not be able to endure an Arctic storm.

Greenpeace Lead Arctic Campaigner Jackie Dragon was harsh in her criticism of Shell’s proposed venture.

“Shell can’t keep its drill rig under control in a protected harbor, so what will happen when it faces 20-foot swells and sea ice while drilling in the Arctic?” asked Dragon. “The company has admitted its drill rig can’t meet the standards required to avoid polluting Arctic air” and has “broken promises about its oil spill response plan and Arctic storm preparedness”.

“Shell cannot be trusted, and President Obama should not let its Arctic drilling program move forward,” said Dragon.

Shell, on the other hand, is hoping to make the most of a fast-shrinking summer drilling timeline. If the company begins drilling now, it will have to stop by October at the latest, before the advent of the sea ice.

But the U.S. government and Shell are currently embroiled in negotiations, even as environmental groups hope that after the 2010 BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and a damning inspection that showed Arctic Challenger to be lacking in the electrical, piping and fire departments, Shell will not be granted permission for the summer drilling.

The NRDC report outlined  eight primary reasons why Shell should not be drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean.

First and foremost is that the oil industry has a deplorable track record for oil spills that are never effectively cleaned up. One need not look far for examples. The British Petroleum, Gulf Coast oil disaster in 2010 is a vivid reminder of how wrong an oil spill can go, and how far-reaching its effects are.

Lawrence Neil, a spokesperson for the NRDC, pointed out that oil production is statistically almost guaranteed to lead to spills. Furthermore, “there is still no proven way to keep a drilling rig on location in the shifting pack ice of an Arctic winter,” so drilling in the Arctic presents even greater risks than those of a normal spill.

Marine noise created by production will have adverse impacts on marine mammals, added Neil. In addition, production will “create huge pressure for a pipeline to carry the oil (that could) lead to bisecting extraordinary wild lands and vital wildlife habitat.”

“The history of development shows that the camel’s nose is a real phenomenon:  the more you spoil pristine places, the less resistance there is to additional development,” he told IPS.

The lack of rapid response and infrastructure in the area is further cause for alarm for green groups, as well as the fact that an oil spill or even disturbance within the area could lead to the migration of wildlife. Among the species that would be threatened are endangered bowhead whales, female polar bears and birds, all of which depend on the icy ecosystem for survival.

But if Shell finds oil, a barrage of oil and energy companies will descend upon this pristine area. The NRDC report outlines many more drawbacks to the proposed drilling, including a rise in greenhouse gases.

Still, not everyone believes that the risks outweigh the gains.

If oil is found in this icy tundra, dependence on foreign oil could drastically decrease. Republicans say that an oil discovery in the region would create thousands of jobs and provide a much needed boost to the lagging U.S. economy.

Lobbyists and politicians are pushing for an extension the deadline for summer drilling, and Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is at the forefront. She is also a senior official at the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

But Lawrence and other green group activists claim that the risks outweigh any political gain.

For Lawrence, it’s simple. “There are certainly more direct ways to reduce dependence on foreign oil than drilling our last pristine ocean,” he pointed out.

“Arctic drilling is a huge investment, including an investment of federal resources to regulate, police, and provide emergency services; every such investment detracts from – and undercuts – investment in sources of energy that don’t contribute to the risk of catastrophic climate change,” he concluded.

On the eve of the Rio+20 Summit in Brazil, the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a report Monday ranking the world’s biggest countries on their use of renewable energy.

It shows the European Union’s clear leadership in the field, but also the significant progress made by developing countries.

Solar panel fields in Provence, France. Credit: Coralie Tripier/IPS

The last time that world leaders met to discuss sustainable development was at the Rio+10 Earth Summit in Johannesburg a decade ago. Since then, significant changes have been made in terms of renewable energy.

“We decided to look at the progress made since 2002 and check how countries were doing,” said Jake Schmidt, international climate programme director for NRDC, a nonprofit environmental organisation.

The report shows that the world’s biggest countries have taken some steps towards a more sustainable world.

“Since 2004, new clean-energy investment in the G20 countries has grown by almost 600 percent,” the report says, but there is still much work to be done, as renewable energy only accounts for 2.6 percent of the overall energy for the G20 as a whole.

European countries get more of their electricity from wind, solar, geothermal, tidal and wave power than any other region in the world. Germany is leading the way in green energy, followed by the EU as a group and Italy, according to the NRDC.

The NRDC scorecard also shows clear gaps in terms of renewable energy among the countries of the G20. Indeed, while a substantial 10.7 percent of Germany’s energy comes from clean sources, only 2.7 percent of the United States’ energy does, and some of the world’s biggest countries such as Russia are still investing very little in renewable energy.

Some developing countries, while still playing a minor role in green energy, are increasingly investing in clean sources. China, Brazil and Turkey are leading the way for developing nations, with China showing a staggering 7,605 percent increase in clean energy investments since 2002, according to the report.

“You see a diverse list of countries with South Africa, India, China, Indonesia and a lot of others playing key roles as well as the traditional G20,” said Dan Kammen, a professor in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley.

Although the results show some significant progress coming from a range of countries, it is far from enough. Under current trends, the amount of energy produced from renewable sources throughout the world should increase from about two to seven percent by 2020, a number that has to be doubled, according to the report.

“That’s what the world needs,” Schmidt said.

As countries are focusing on Rio, they are working on long-term targets, which are critical but not essential, according to Schmidt.

“What we really need at Rio is a set of targeted short-term commitments from individual countries, companies, cities, to really scale up renewable energy,” he said.

“It is more important that key actors come to Rio+20 with individual country commitments to increase the amount of renewable energy to 15 percent of total electricity by 2020,” he added.

Urgent actions are also needed to elimiate Environmentally Harmful Subsidies (EHS), through which polluting energies are funded, according to Kammen.

“While the overall investment in renewables, estimated to have been around 160 billion dollars last year, is very impressive, we must also keep in mind that the the global subsidies are estimated to be around 400 to 500 billion dollars… and that’s just for fossil fuels,” he said. “The landscape is truly far from level.”

“That’s not just a threat to the thousands of new jobs being created by the renewable energy industry, but also a threat to our health, our environment and our planet,” Schmidt added.

In order to achieve these short-term goals, the cooperation between countries must increase, according to NRDC’s experts.

“There’s always a lot of collaboration around renewable electricity, in terms of helping countries overcome technology barriers, or cost barriers, and we need to take that to the next level. We need to step up the efforts to work together,” Schmidt said.

The benefits would be substantial. “There is a very diverse set of benefits, some local benefits ranging from improvement in the local air quality, local water quality, to diversifying the energy mix and of course global benefits as well,” Kammen said.

But for these benefits to become a reality, the progress made needs to be tracked overtime and regulary published in scorecards.

“We need to make sure that commitments are followed through. We need to hold them (governments) accountable for the progress, or lack of progress,” Schmidt warned.

The Jun. 20-22 summit in Rio is widely viewed as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to gather world leaders, participants from governments, the private sector, NGOs and other groups to discuss renewable energy, one of the top priorities of the conference.

But the outcome of Rio+20 will mainly depend on the involvement of the participating states, and only six out of the G20 countries have already confirmed that their leaders would attend the meeting.

“The G20 countries are not essential, but they are major economies around the world, so whether or not their head of government comes and makes a commitment would be a marker of the success at Rio,” Schmidt explained. “It is a clear signal of the will of these countries to put the world on a more sustainable growth.”

“There’s still a lot of work to be done but the progress is quite impressive,” Kammen concluded. “The challenge is to move along.”