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

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Feb 27 2014 (IPS)

National governments across the globe have taken surprisingly robust action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, putting in place policies that researchers say collectively offer a strong foundation for ongoing international climate negotiations.

Developing countries, particularly China and Mexico, led much of this progress over the past year, according to the first comprehensive review of country-by-country climate-related legislation, released at the U.S. Senate on Thursday. Overall the report finds that 66 countries, accounting for almost 90 percent of global emissions, have nearly 500 national climate laws on their books."This report confirms what many have suspected: that international climate negotiations are the realm of the lowest common denominator." -- Daphne Wysham

The findings “inject positive momentum to the U.N. climate change negotiations. The study shows that countries across the world – from Africa to the Americas and from Asia to Europe – are legislating to tackle climate change and strengthen resilience to its impacts,” Terry Townshend, a co-author of the new report and deputy secretary-general for policy development with the Global Legislators Organisation (GLOBE), told IPS.

“This legislative activity is putting in place the national mechanisms and institutional structures to measure, report and manage greenhouse gas emissions, which is a fundamental pre-requisite to an effective international agreement.”

Townshend calls the findings “impressive”. But he hastens to note that the laws that have been passed are not enough to meet the overarching goal agreed upon by the international community: to keep the rise in global average temperature to within two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

“So much more needs to be done, and governments and international institutions must prioritise the support of national legislation between now and 2015,” Townshend says. “No international agreement would be effective, or credible, without commensurate legislation at the national level.”

Arzu Begum testifies at the climate hearings for women in the deltaic village of Char Nongolia in Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

The 700-page report was jointly produced by GLOBE International, the world’s largest organisation of sitting legislators, and the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics (LSE). Although the study is the fourth in a series, the new edition covers far more ground, having doubled the number of countries studied in the previous version.

Of the 66 countries reviewed, 64 have put in place “significant” legislation climate or energy legislation, or are in the process of doing so. In addition, 61 have laws to promote clean energy sources within their borders, while 54 have mandated strengthened efficiency standards.

“More countries than ever before are passing credible and significant national climate change laws,” John Gummer, GLOBE’s president, said Thursday at the U.S. Senate.

“This is changing the dynamics of the international response to climate change and poses a serious question to the international community about how we can recognise credible commitments made by governments within their national legislature. It is by implementing national legislation and regulations that the political conditions for a global agreement in 2015 will be created.”

2013’s transition

Final negotiations for a new international agreement on collective action on climate change are currently slated to take place in Paris in 2015, to come into effect after 2020.

Floods devastated the Mauritian capital, Port-Louis, but locals can expect the island to be affected by more floods, landslides and cyclones in the coming years because of climate change. Credit: Nasseem Ackbarally/IPS

Against this backdrop, the GLOBE and LSE researchers dub the past year a “period of transition” in international diplomacy on the issue. During that time, substantive legislative progress was seen in 8 of the 66 countries and additional “positive advances” in another 19.

The researchers highlight President Barack Obama’s unveiling of a national climate plan for the United States, as well as his strengthened attempts to tackle the issue through regulation rather than legislation. They also note that the European Union, having slowly begun to stabilise in the aftermath of the 2008 economic downturn, has been increasingly able to turn its focus to climate-related policy steps.

Australia and Japan, meanwhile, are called out as exceptions, having been two of the few countries to have backtracked on climate action over the past year (Canada and others are also reprimanded for as yet having no “flagship” climate legislation). Australia’s new government has pledged to repeal a landmark clean energy law, while Japan, in the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear disaster, has revised its emissions targets downwards.

Yet the other end of this transition is marked by a flurry of action by developing countries.

“[T]he momentum in climate change legislation [is] shifting from industrialised countries to developing countries and emerging markets,” the report states.

“This has gone hand in hand with a rise in legislation covering adaptation. The stock of climate laws in developing countries is still lower than in industrialised nations, but many have started to close the gap by passing sophisticated new legislation.”

Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America have seen particularly movement in this regard.

Over the past year alone, nearly all countries in sub-Saharan Africa saw some sort of progress, particularly the passage of national climate strategies that set the grounds for future legislation. This process is even further along in many countries in Latin America, led by Mexico, Bolivia and Costa Rica.

“This report confirms what many have suspected: that international climate negotiations are the realm of the lowest common denominator, where powerful countries compete to lower, not raise, the bar for climate action,” Daphne Wysham, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“The impetus for aggressive climate action is strong at the national level, and even stronger at the subnational – or state – level. This suggests that the principle of subsidiarity” – whereby action should be taken at the lowest level – “ought to apply to this urgent problem, and, in some ways, that international climate negotiations may have outlived their usefulness.”

Domestic advantages

Building on this national-level focus, GLOBE, the United Nations and the World Bank on Thursday announced a new initiative that will work with legislators in each of the 66 countries covered by the new study. The Partnership for Climate Legislation will help policymakers create and implement climate legislation, while also examining federal budgets and social policies to offer assessments of their climate impact.

“During this critical year of 2014, nations have determined that they will assess the contributions they will make to a new universal climate agreement slated for 2015,” Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told 115 senior policymakers from 50 countries here for a two-day summit.

“…None of these countries are doing this to ‘save the planet’. They are doing it because they see specific social and economic advantages from these policies. And, each of these countries strengthens their position in climate talks with concrete targets and demonstrated openness to policy solutions.”

Since the Seleka coalition of rebels took power last March, over 200 000 people have been uprooted from their homes due to conflict. Credit: EU/ECHO/M.Morzaria/cc by 2.0

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Jan 22 2014 (IPS)

The appointment of a new transitional president, Catherine Samba-Panza, in the Central African Republic (CAR) is generating optimism in some quarters that the country’s first female leader will manage to quell mounting ethnic strife.

President Samba-Panza was appointed on Monday, in the midst of inter-communal violence between Muslim Seleka and Christian militias.“Right now the country’s on the brink of total anarchy.” -- Philippe Bolopion

“As CAR’s first woman head of state since the country’s independence, and with her special background in human rights work and mediation, [Samba-Panza] has a unique opportunity to advance the political transition process, bring all the parties together to end the violence, and move her country toward elections not later than February 2015,” John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, said Tuesday.

Yet some analysts here have quickly pushed back on the idea that the appointment of the new president offers a renewed chance for peace.

“There’s a predatory elite that has more or less sucked the country dry,” J. Peter Pham, the director of the Africa Centre at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank, told IPS. “Unfortunately they’ve just elected a member of that elite to be the interim head of state.”

While Samba-Panza is a Christian, she enjoyed close ties to the previous president, Michel Djotodia.

“She’s one of the Christian politicians who had thrown in their lot with the Seleka,” Pham says. “She has never been elected so much as a dogcatcher.”

Djotodia appointed Samba-Panza mayor of Bangui, the capital, in April, shortly after seizing the presidency. Although Samba-Panza was technically elected transitional president, the election took place within the National Transition Council, which is comprised of members appointed exclusively by Djotodia.

Pham believes that a Samba-Panza presidency raises questions about the international community’s long-term commitment to CAR.

“There’s no appetite in the international community, so there’s no long-term plan for the mission,” he says. “So I’m afraid what we’re actually facing is this so-called election spun in as positive a light as possible and used to cover an ignominious withdrawal.”

For the time being, the United States is still sending financial aid to help alleviate the crisis. On Monday, the government announced an additional 30 million dollars in relief funding for CAR, bringing the total U.S. contribution to humanitarian efforts in the country to approximately 45 million dollars.

That’s in addition to 101 million dollars designated for restoring security and 7.5 million dollars to support reconciliation efforts.

“One fifth of Bangui is now living in a vast, miserable encampment as terrified citizens seek safety from violence and looting,” Nancy Lindborg, an official with USAID, Washington’s main foreign aid arm, said Monday after a two-day trip to CAR.

“The U.S. government has urgently ramped up our assistance to help deliver lifesaving food, water, and medical help to the more than 2.6 million women, children and men in urgent need throughout the country.”

Inter-communal violence

CAR’s current crisis erupted when the Seleka seized control of Bangui, ousting former president Francois Bozize and installing Djotodia in April.

“Since the Seleka took over power in March they have unleashed a wave of killings, burning entire villages, looting and viciously attacking civilians on a pretty large scale,” Philippe Bolopion, the United Nations director for Human Rights Watch (HRW), a watchdog group, tells IPS. “They descend on a village, kill a few people, chase everyone out of their houses, loot everything they can, burn the houses and move on.”

President Djotodia attempted to dissolve the Seleka because of the extremity of their war crimes and attacks on civilians.

“In late September, Djotodia decided he would dismiss [the Seleka] because they were getting out of control, and that’s when things went downhill,” the Atlantic Council’s Pham says. “He dismissed them but they had no place to go, and he never had the loyalty of the people on whom he hoisted himself.”

The Seleka continue to operate outside of government control and target civilians, which has led to clashes with the predominantly Christian militias. While former president Bozize initially created these militias – known as anti-balaka – to combat banditry, they began responding to Seleka abuses on Christians with similar attacks on Muslims, rapidly escalating the violence.

“They have targeted Muslim civilians only because they are Muslim. Their attacks are just as brutal and as vicious as the Seleka attacks were,” says HRW’s Bolopion. “When I was in CAR in November I talked to a Muslim villager who described how anti-balaka came to his house in the morning to take his grandkids, kids, and two wives out and slit every one of their throats.”

Although the conflict in CAR appears to be purely sectarian on the surface, the appointment of a Christian to the presidency by other Djotodia appointees indicates that the conflict is more nuanced. Pham posits that the violence is ethnic, rather than religious.

“The political elite have never had religion as a divisive issue, so religion isn’t really a source of conflict,” he says. “It’s not a religious conflict but religion marks people’s ethnic groups.”

The Seleka themselves have even killed Muslims living in majority Christian areas.

Tensions between the Seleka and anti-balaka reached a boiling point in December, as clashes between the two groups and their attacks on civilians drastically increased. Even though President Djotodia resigned on 10 January in an attempt to alleviate the chaos, the violence continues to raise fears of genocide.

“The situation has not stabilised at all on the ground, and we are very worried about mass retaliations against the Muslim population now that the Seleka are on the run,” says Bolopion. “Right now the country’s on the brink of total anarchy.”

Two-track solution

As the violence continues, analysts have made proposals to help end the conflict.

“We think you need a two-track approach,” explains Bolopion. “One track is to bolster the capacity of civilian power on the ground. But we must also work on many tasks to reconstruct the country such as the longer-term solution of rebuilding the army, justice system and basic function of administration.”

France currently has 1,600 troops on the ground in CAR, while the European Union is expected to offer 500 soldiers to supplement French forces.

“They need all the help they can get because it’s very difficult,” Bolopion says.

Pham notes that the United Nations has authorised a force of up to 10,000, but states that nowhere near that number has materialised. “What we’re seeing in CAR is simply the evaporation of what few institutions there were,” he says.

A Bangladeshi farmer shows off vegetables grown on his small, sustainable “dyke” garden. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Mar 18 2013 (IPS)

The current growth model is not sustainable. Neither the green economy nor alternative sources of energy can prevent global warming. Solutions will come from concerted actions at the local and national levels, from the adoption of instruments and practices borrowed from other disciplines like peacebuilding, and from the move to a “no-waste economy”, according to experts here.

In its milestone report, “The Limits to Growth”, published in 1972, the Club of Rome warned that the human ecological footprint had grown dangerously quickly from 1900 to 1972. Shortly thereafter, the warning proved to be prophetic: by 1986 the human ecological footprint had overshot the carrying capacity of the Earth. At current production and consumption levels, we need 1.5 planets to survive; if everyone lived like a U.S. citizen, we would need five planets.

Land, water and biodiversity continue to decline. Global CO2 emissions are on the rise. The oceans are warming and the sea level is rising continuously. Forest cover has decreased by 300 million hectares since 1990.

In his new book, “The Crisis of Global Sustainability”, presented in Geneva on Mar. 15, Tapio Kanninen, co-director of a project on sustainable global governance at the City University of New York and member of the Club of Rome, warms that we cannot continue with the current model of economic growth whilst limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius.

Technology cannot help us – it would be environmentally damaging and too costly, he says. We cannot move to alternative sources of energy – the present alternatives like solar, nuclear and wind contribute relatively little of global energy needs and they are unlikely to replace fossil fuel completely. In short: humanity has reached a stalemate.

“Many U.N. summits after the (1987) Brundtland Commission have avoided concrete action,” Kanninen said at the book launch Friday.

The recent Rio+20 Earth Summit held in Brazil this past June is just one example of the limitations of these international gatherings. Though thousands of participants had hoped the conference would generate concrete solutions and commitments to reducing global warning, the concluding document made no mention of the 30-billion-dollar fund need to transition to a green economy, nor did it outline a blueprint for sustainable development post 2015.

“Institutions and policies have been weak,” Kanninen said. “The concept of sustainable development has not been able to compete with the neoliberal economic paradigm, the Washington consensus and the paradigm of globalisation. These have advocated fiscal and monetary soundness and economic growth rather than the health of the ecosystem. And developed countries have not met their commitments to developing ones.”

Most of these summits draw very high-level attendance, but in the end industrialised countries’ national interests dominate the bargaining universe. The global North wants to safeguard its neoliberal economic targets, while the South continues to defend its development goals.

“Unless societies build alternatives to carbon-emitting energy technologies over the next five years, the world is doomed to a warmer climate, harsher weather, drought, famine, water scarcity, rising sea level, loss of island nations and increasing ocean acidification.”

Kanninen advocates for a second review conference of the U.N. charter and a complete paradigm shift.

“It is impossible to know exactly how the latter is going to play out because it will be so big,” he admitted to IPS. “We need joint action (involving) all sectors of society.”

Kanninen advocates abandoning the old approach of viewing sustainable development as a battlefield and adopting instead instruments from peace-building processes.

Yves Lador, consultant and representative of the U.S.-based Earthjustice at the U.N. in Geneva, told IPS on the sidelines of the book launch that this was an interesting approach.

“Particularly (with regards) to climate change, we need some trust building measures inspired by the disarmament agreements”, through which governments allow outsiders to monitor their progress. He added that cross verification between different independent monitors could bolster the exercise.

“This would be very useful because we don’t know the reality of various countries’ emissions. China, for example, does not make this data readily available. India has problems in data collection, but welcomes outside advice on how to share this data with the public.

“It is an information and trust issue,” Lador said. “At the 2009 Copenhagen Conference, the U.S. put forward the idea of cross-checking greenhouse gas emissions, but China refused.”

He cited growing awareness of the link between climate change and human rights as a salient example of the right to information – namely, the right of the public to know the extent and impacts of climate change and to participate in decision-making.

Alexander Likhotal, president of the Green Cross International, has a different paradigm shift in mind. “All the euphemisms like green economy will not help,” he told IPS. “We need a circular economy to decouple economic growth from the use of energy and materials.”

A circular economy is, by definition, a restorative economy: products should be designed for longer use and materials reused and recycled, which would increase the demand for maintenance and repairs. The concept has been around since the 1970s but it has gained momentum again due to the activities of the U.S.-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation and to “Bankrupting Nature”, a recent report authored by Ander Wijkman and Johan Rockström, co-president of the Club of Rome.

The circular economy “is creating a new model for business”, Likhotal continued. “Rolls Royce, for example, in addition to providing luxury cars, constructs engines and turbines for aircrafts. But they have stopped selling the engines to air companies – instead, they lease them. They benefit not from the bulk sales of the engines but from maintenance and competitiveness of the services, and are dramatically reducing their expenses.”

He believes an increase in services like leasing would compensate for the loss of jobs resulting from the decrease in production. Other major companies like Caterpillar have stopped selling huge trucks, and have begun to lease them.

“It is a win-win situation that is gaining more ground,” he stressed. “The change is coming…but it will not come without legislation and taxation incentives – political systems should provide some motivation for more openness and competiveness in terms of services provision.”