Tinus de Jager reports from COP 17 in Durban at the start of the high-level meetings on combatting climate change.

Climate change wreaks damage on infrastructure, ecosystems, livelihoods and lives in developing countries. Credit: Zukiswa Zimela/IPS

By Tim Ash Vie *

DURBAN, South Africa, Dec 1 (IPS) – As climate talks get underway in Durban, South Africa this week, progress on a Green Climate Fund is one of the hottest, most contentious tickets in town. It is also one of the great prizes to be won.

The fund would, in theory, provide a new, substantial source of funds to help developing countries adapt to the negative impacts of climate change and pursue low carbon development; it is meant to be a major vehicle for delivering 100 billion dollars a year in climate finance to developing countries by 2020.

Agreement on the structure of the fund and on sources of cash (at least for the medium term) must be secured in Durban, to keep this ambition on track. Developing country observers believe such an agreement on climate finance is vital. Why is it so urgent?

The Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period expires late next year, and international leaders have not yet agreed a framework to succeed it. With the clock ticking on this legal deal, there will be a gap until any new version is adopted.

As developing countries press for a new global deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions, caution dictates that they must prepare to adapt to a world in which climate change wreaks damage on infrastructure, ecosystems, livelihoods and lives.

In the words of Professor Robert Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, developing country decision makers are calling for a “two degree world” – where the average global temperature is curbed at two degrees above pre-industrial levels – but must prepare to adapt to a “three or four degree world.”

For developing countries, this means bracing for rising sea levels that will make atolls and coastal settlements less habitable. Droughts will become more prolonged and frequent, and rainfall patterns far more erratic.

The current drought in the Horn of Africa, and the devastating floods in El Salvador last month and Durban, South Africa this week are indicative of the weather extremes that will become more frequent by mid-century as climate change takes hold. These impacts will be felt even in a “two degree world”, but in a “three or four degree world” they will become even more severe and unpredictable.

Climate finance is not just a story about preparing for the worst, though. Developing countries also recognise opportunities to attract investment in low carbon technologies, which will increase their global competitiveness.

What could be a more compelling prospect that to leapfrog past soon-to-be obsolete technologies that guzzle fossil fuels, and avoid some of the carbon lock-in experienced by industrialised nations?

The Government of Rwanda will launch its National Green Growth and Climate Resilience Strategy at the 17th Conference of the Parties in Durban next week.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame has said he sees low carbon development as a win-win situation for Rwanda. It could reduce Rwanda’s dependence on foreign imported oil and create an economic stimulus by redirecting payments toward clean energy production at home, as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

However, financial support from foreign governments and the private sector will be needed in order to realise such ambitions.

Developing countries’ hopes for progress on climate finance in Durban are set against a background of frustrated ambition. They are approaching the end of the so-called “fast-start finance” commitment period that was agreed in Copenhagen in 2009.

The aspiration set out in the Copenhagen Accord was to raise 30 billion dollars of new and additional funding over the three years until 2012. Have industrialised countries even delivered on this deal?

The trouble is fast-start finance has no easily identifiable form, being typically delivered through existing channels of delivery and disbursement. Therefore, trying to track that funding has proved difficult and confusing.

Even seasoned observers cannot get an accurate handle on how much money has been allocated, and for what ends. While some “new and additional” funding has certainly been allocated, examples abound of projects being re-branded “fast-start” even when they pre-date Copenhagen and there is a large gap between pledges and good intention, and disbursement.

Chair of the African Group of Negotiators in the climate negotiations, Tosi Mpanu Mpanu has simply put it: “Fast start has not really delivered – only 10 percent of fast start is new and additional.”

A new online portal developed by the United Nations may start to address these issues but in the current circumstances, mistrust pervades.

The 2010 to 2012 fast start period was only ever just that: a start. Currently, we do not know where the money is going to come from to reach the loftier ambition to provide developing countries with 100 billion dollars a year by 2020.

Ideas for specific sources of revenue have been proposed, such as an air passenger levy, a tax on financial transactions and a carbon levy on polluting emissions from shipping.

Yet, mobilising such sources could take several years, which raises the prospect of a serious funding gap after the fast start period ends in 2013.

We know for sure that public sources will not fulfil that promise alone, and private sector money will be needed. In the meantime, developing countries expect public sources to lead the way.

The private sector role in the GCF is not a question of syphoning off scarce public funds. It is about using at least some of this public money to catalyse private investment at scale, to accelerate low carbon development. With public funds under pressure in many Annex 1 countries, the private sector role is going to be critical.

As well as hard cash, the institutional set up for financing climate compatible development is important. A good outcome from Durban would be if the GCF were formally established in line with the recommendations put to theUnited Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by its Transitional Committee on Finance.

Having the fund’s operational structure agreed would enable commitments made in Copenhagen and Cancun to be taken forward while meeting aid effectiveness principles.

A variety of other climate finance mechanisms already in operation, such as the Adaptation Fund, will also need to be shored up, and this would need to be done in parallel with agreements on the capitalisation of the GCF.

The prevailing economic climate makes discussions of climate finance difficult, but the time to deliver this fund is now.

World leaders must leave Durban with a clearer picture on what climate finance can be delivered between 2013 and 2019, beyond the fast-start period.

The form of the GCF and its capitalisation could be the “crown jewels” of a South African climate conference. They would provide real impetus for developing countries to step up climate action themselves.

* Tim Ash Vie is Head of Negotiations at Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

(END/2011)

Credit: Claudius/IPS

DURBAN, Nov 28, 2011 (IPS)  Science tells us that we are heading for a climate crisis, yet it is within our means to change course.

However, some very worrying false solutions are on the table in the United Nations Climate talks (UNFCCC), for instance promoting the biofuels currently on the market, such as ethanol.

The term ‘biofuels’ is misleading. These plant-based fuels are better described as agrofuels for they are far from green.

Those who still argue that agrofuels emit much less greenhouse gases than fossil fuels mostly ignore the fact that emissions are released during production, as a result of land-use change, fertiliser application and processing.

Still, many governments, international financial institutions such as the World Bank and multinational agribusiness, oil and transport companies are promoting agrofuels as a solution to world energy needs.

Shifting from fossil fuels to agrofuels is not increasing the poor’s access to energy but aggravating existing problems such as land grabs, and creating particular challenges to food supplies due to a shift from food cropping to fuel cropping. Crucially, agrofuels can divert resources from clean, renewable energies like wind and solar.

Large-scale cultivation of agrofuels, unlike small-scale, locally produced and owned agrofuels activities, is usually accompanied by problematic activities such as intensive use of water, chemicals, fertilisers, and pesticides.

These often result in polluting, depleting and degrading available water resources, which can trigger famines.

Analysts have shown that there is not enough agricultural land on earth to grow agrofuels crops to meet the huge energy needs driven by our current and unsustainable ways of living.

It is worthy to note that a recent 2011 report on the ‘Global Hunger Index’ points to climate change, growing demand for biofuels, and increasing commodities futures trading in global food markets as the causes of price increases in food, which it says were also exacerbating the unfolding food crisis in the Horn of Africa.

Agrofuels are simply not a solution to the climate and energy crisis, although there is evidence that small-scale, locally produced and owned biofuels can be part of the solution when they help meet local needs.

In my country, Nigeria, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and its foreign partners acquired large chunks of land, in almost all the 36 states of the country, for the production of ethanol, from staples like cassava, sorghum and sugarcane.

Some of the agrofuels plantations and production plants are located in communities with pre-existing water shortages, which leave the communities with almost nothing to live on. Researchers from Friends of the Earth Nigeria found during one field visit that local people had not even been consulted by the state government before community lands were appropriated.

Africa looms large on the radar of agrofuels promoters and African governments see in them potentially huge financial benefits for the political and financial elites of the country.

But a substantial and increasing amount of scientific research shows that agrofuels are fuelling deforestation, biodiversity loss and soil degradation, water pollution and depletion and even climate change.

Decision makers must acknowledge that, and the fact that agrofuels have also been proven to fuel food price increases, hunger, land rights violations, conflicts, displacement and human rights abuses.

The fact that agrofuels have triggered a new scramble for Africa is no longer news. Millions of hectares are being grabbed with little concern for the poor who are bound to face displacement and for the impact that this will have on family farms and other small-scale farms and food production on the continent.

Agriculture contributes to more than a fourth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, the UNFCCC texts do not make it clear that the main culprit is industrial agriculture with its dependence on chemical fertilisers and damaging monocultures, including agrofuel crops.

Small-scale farmers, on the other hand, mostly use agro-ecological practices which cool the planet instead of warming it.

Many governments, lobbied by companies, are pushing the UN climate negotiations to support false solutions to the climate crisis, for instance shifting to agrofuels and trading carbon emissions instead of cutting them.

As a consequence, our planet is heading for an average global temperature increase higher than 2 degrees, and the catastrophic consequences that science tells us will come with it.

Addressing the climate crisis requires binding targets for emissions reductions, targets enforced without so-called carbon offsetting, which is just a smokescreen to hide pollution-as-usual.

Voluntary emissions reduction targets such as those included in the Copenhagen Accord and the Cancun agreement are simply ineffective.

We have to stop all false solutions, including large-scale agrofuels. We should instead urgently invest in the real solutions, such as reducing consumption, improving energy efficiency, switching to clean renewable energy and to sustainable local food production.

While the official UN negotiations on climate change continue to progress at a snail’s pace, the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia in April 2010 made some headway and issued a ‘Peoples Agreement’ describing and demanding real solutions to the climate crisis.

* Nnimmo Bassey is the current Chair of Friends of the Earth International and the executive director and founding member of Environmental Rights Action.

BRIGHTON, United Kingdom, Nov 22, 2011 (Tierramérica) – Carbon markets are under attack on all sides, despite ongoing faith in their ability to deliver meaningful reductions in greenhouse gases (GHGs).

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As the Durban climate summit approaches and as the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol comes to an end in 2012, carbon markets have been adversely affected by low prices that are failing to drive necessary investment in low carbon technology and a series of scandals about their integrity.

Some are questioning whether it is right to call time on carbon markets – and not just NGOs.

Referring to the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme, which is a considerable source of demand for Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) credits, Henry Derwent, former head of the International Emissions Trading Association recently said “the market consists of individual participants, many of whom have other places to go if they find emissions trading has become too complicated and changeable a place to make money or secure investment income.”

At the international level the centerpiece of carbon markets is the CDM, an offset mechanism created under the Kyoto Protocol which allows richer countries to pay poorer countries to reduce emissions on their behalf where, in theory at least, it is cheaper to do so.

Projects have to show that they are additional (i.e. they wouldn’t have happened anyway) and different methodologies provide ways of ascertaining this. Doubts have been raised about the additionality of many CDM projects though, with many studies suggesting that for up to 40 percent of the projects additionality is unlikely or questionable.

Recent revelations from WikiLeaks cables in which government officials claim that no CDM projects from countries such as India (the world’s second largest host of CDM projects) can be considered genuinely additional give further cause for concern.

But the deal at Kyoto was that poorer countries were entitled to receive sustainable development benefits (technology, jobs, health benefits) from hosting these projects: lower-cost emissions reductions in return for development benefits.

The evidence is overwhelming that this has not occurred on anything like the scale anticipated.

Unless projects are also accredited by private standards (such as Gold Standard which now has 20 percent of the market share), you don’t get extra money for delivering sustainable development benefits.

Benefits claimed in Project Design Documents (PDDs) are not checked at the end of a project. The responsibility for assessing whether nationally defined sustainable development criteria have been met thus lies with national authorities whose backlog of work and the lack of time to scrutinise proposed projects fully means that they are not in a position to adequately screen projects for development benefits.

Carbon market advocates point to many CDM projects that have delivered GHG reductions and sustainable development benefits in spite of these problems. They highlight wind or solar energy projects, biomass and cooking stove projects that bring multiple cost, health and environmental benefits to poorer communities.

Critics contend that such projects can and should be financed by other means, such as direct aid, and not created as an offset opportunity which means industries in the North absolve themselves of some of the pressure to reduce their own emissions.

On the whole projects that bring substantial and lasting benefits are too few, and strong incentives still remain in place to go for “low-hanging fruit” opportunities that are low cost but earn lots of carbon credits – like eliminating industrial gases such as hydrofluorocarbon from refrigeration systems.

Still, many think it is too early to throw the baby out with the bathwater. According to the World Bank, CDM finance continues to represent the largest source of mitigation finance available to developing countries which could raise 18 billion dollars in direct carbon revenues over the period 2001-2012.

Reforms of the CDM have been proposed to address some of the problems confronted so far. But they are not teething problems that can be easily weeded out with further institutional learning and innovation – scaling up projects, reducing barriers to smaller ones, improving feedback to project developers.

They touch on the deeper politics of carbon markets and the role they play in responses to climate change which have to be addressed.

The challenge ultimately is to move from a carbon economy which is one small part of a global economy, largely run on fossil fuels, to a system of “climate capitalism” where growth and development are achieved on a low carbon basis.

This means working with powerful business and financial actors that will make money in a low carbon economy, in other words coalitions of the willing and the winning.

Given the urgency of tackling climate change to avoid three to four degrees warming, an argument for offsets is that they buy time for richer countries while they transition to a low carbon economy.

The problem, of course, is that most of them are not. Those that are also find that actions they do undertake are overwhelmed by fossil fuel-based growth elsewhere in the economy.

Are offsets, therefore, meant to be a temporary measure to bring down emissions while the necessary structural reforms take place in the economies that generate most emissions, or do they form part of a permanent solution?

Structural reforms will not happen quickly or easily, but how long should reliance on offsets be allowed as an alternative to tackling the sources of GHG emissions?

Strong rewards are needed for those businesses that are willing to invest in a low carbon future where, for the time being, the CDM remains just the icing on the cake, nice to have but not significant enough to change investment strategy.

Tackling climate change also means getting tough with businesses that continue to invest their money in fossil fuels in spite of evidence of the effect this is having.

* Peter Newell is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex and co-author of the just released paper ‘Governing Clean Development: what have we learnt?’, with Jon Phillips, from the University of East Anglia’s School of International Development. Copyright Tierramérica.

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

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 6, 2011 (IPS) – Unless civil society activists launch their own programme of action at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro next summer (Jun. 4-6), the event will be little more than an expensive talkfest.

That is because government delegates at the conference will not address the matter of reorienting the world economy, a task the United Nations has acknowledged is essential to deal with the growing crisis of environment sustainability.

The secretary-general’s report submitted earlier this year to the committee preparing for the conference noted that to succeed in “fundamentally shifting consumption and production patterns onto a more sustainable path”, public policy would have to extend “well beyond ‘getting prices right’”.

However, it did not say what specific policy measures would be necessary. Indeed, nowhere in the massive body of documentation the United Nations has produced since it convened the first Environment Conference in 1972 can we find a single analysis of that issue.

Agenda 21, the voluminous action plan adopted at the 1992 “Earth Summit” in Rio, did not deal with the matter, and the Commission on Sustainable Development that has overseen its implementation for most of two decades has not considered it. The U.N.’s World Economic Survey earlier this year estimated the cost of “greening” the world economy at 72 trillion dollars without spelling out a specific process.

These lacunae reflect an inescapable contemporary political reality, the power of the giant corporations that run the world economy. They have established existing global patterns of production and consumption with the singular aim of maximising their own profits, and strongly oppose accommodations to constrain negative social and environmental effects.

For 17 years, from the 1970s into the 1980s, the United Nations tried without success to negotiate a Code of Conduct for transnational corporations. In the subsequent decade, the U.N. tried a softer approach, inviting corporations to join a Global Compact for voluntary compliance with a set of environmental and human rights standards.

Fewer than 5,000 of the 60,000 corporations with annual revenues over one billion dollars have joined the Global Compact; even that minuscule figure inflates their participation, for it includes small and medium enterprises, many from developing countries.

During this continuing standoff, environmental problems have assumed crisis proportions. Pollution and habitat loss are now driving species to extinction at a rate not seen since the dinosaurs disappeared. Over the last decade, extreme weather patterns that scientists associate with global warming have caused unprecedented natural disasters in countries around the world.

Unless the warming is stopped, scientists project significant shifts in patterns of precipitation and aridity, with major implications for agricultural productivity. If nothing is done about global warming, we could be facing an era of turf wars that could destroy any semblance of international law and order.

Despite these frightening prospects, few governments are willing to take on corporate interests: with world population set to reach 10 billion by 2050, official policy makers have no stomach for confrontations that could upset the applecart of current benefits from corporate globalisation. Poverty reduction and job creation are their immediate and most urgent priorities.

In this scenario, civil society activists are uniquely capable of fashioning a safe exit strategy. They know the nature and scope of environmental problems, and the Internet and the Worldwide Web have given them unprecedented capacity to network globally.

If they combine that with a local capacity for effective action – the easiest way would be by allying with entrepreneurs running small and medium enterprises – they could create a powerful and flexible mechanism capable of mapping, monitoring and addressing environmental issues while promoting eco-friendly economic activity at local and regional levels.

Overall, that would gradually move the world economy from global exchanges massively wasteful of energy and other resources to much more efficient regional and sub-regional patterns of activity. Such change would be minimally disruptive of wealth and jobs creation; indeed, as small and medium enterprises are far more labour-intensive than the behemoths that now control the world economy, we could see an uptick in employment, consumer demand and socially equitable growth.

Also on the plus side, there would be no need for governments to negotiate common standards for nations and communities widely unequal in wealth and technical capacity. With decision-making and action entirely in the hands of national and sub-national authorities, the global network would become a strong mechanism of international solidarity, extending technical and financial support, coordinating action where necessary, and disseminating best practices.

To initiate this process, activists should go to the Rio+20 Conference prepared to agree on a Manifesto and Action Plan outlined in the following draft.

Rio+20 Activist Manifesto

Activists gathered at the Rio+20 Conference in June 2012 are convinced of the need for urgent action to reorient the world economy towards more sustainable patterns of production and consumption. We aim to do so while enhancing the global creation of wealth and decent employment in an inclusive frame of freedom, full enjoyment of fundamental human rights, and support for weak and vulnerable sections of the world’s people.

To those ends, we intend to create a global network supporting and drawing support from a new form of community level organisation formed by the alliance of environmental and social activists and business entrepreneurs. We call upon the world’s governments and peoples to support this initiative and contribute to its processes.

Action Plan

Within the framework of the aims and values expressed in the Manifesto activists at the Rio+20 Conference agree to do the following:

1. Network: Activists will create a global electronic network arranged in an easily accessible hierarchy (local, national, regional, global), to facilitate sharing of information, interactive discussion, and concerted action.

2. Organise: Activists will work with entrepreneurs running small and medium businesses to establish community-level organisations for cooperative action. These organisations will be the basic units of the global network and will have two primary aims, environmental protection and accelerate economic growth at the local, sub-regional and regional levels.

3. Survey and Monitor: The network will share the best available expertise in national and international agencies, with the U.N. Environment Programme playing a coordinating role. Activists will begin a global environmental survey based on community-level feedback, creating a permanent monitoring system to provide real time status reports for consideration by government policy-makers at the national, regional and global levels

4. Analyse: On the basis of the information collected, a panel of governmental experts working with the network will create a technical plan of action setting out the remedial and preventive measures to address all global environmental issues. Implementation of the plan will be by community-level action wherever possible, with governments and international agencies providing financial and technical capacity.

5. Educate and Mobilise: The community level organisations and their networks will engage in educating and mobilising popular support for environmental action.

These steps should create a global apparatus capable of monitoring damage to the natural environment from human activity and taking remedial action. That process should reorient the full range of economic activities to eco-friendly patterns and create the general public awareness and support for continuing action.

*Bhaskar Menon has four decades of experience in covering the United Nations and edits www.Undiplomatictimes.com.

Emissions at a manufacturing complex in North America. Credit: UN Photo/Kibae Park

In contrast, carbon emissions from natural gas use increased by six percent. The net effect of these trends was that U.S. carbon emissions dropped seven percent in four years. And this is only the beginning.

The initial fall in coal and oil use was triggered by the economic downturn, but now powerful new forces are reducing the use of both. For coal, the dominant force is the Beyond Coal campaign, an impressive national effort coordinated by the Sierra Club involving hundreds of local groups that oppose coal because of its effects on human health.

In the first phase, the campaign actively opposed the building of new coal-fired power plants. This hugely successful initiative, which led to a near de facto moratorium on new coal plants, was powered by Americans’ dislike of coal.

An Opinion Research Corporation poll found only three percent preferred coal as their electricity source – which is no surprise. Coal plant emissions are a leading cause of respiratory illnesses (such as asthma in children) and mercury contamination. Coal burning causes 13,200 U.S. deaths each year, a loss of life that exceeds U.S. combat losses in 10 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The campaign’s second phase is dedicated to closing existing coal plants. Of the U.S. total of 492 coal-fired power plants, 68 are already slated to close. With current and forthcoming U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air quality regulations on emissions of mercury, sulfur, and ozone precursors requiring costly retrofits, many more of the older, dirtier plants will be closed.

In August, the American Economic Review – the country’s most prestigious economics journal – published an article that can only be described as an epitaph for the coal industry. The authors conclude that the economic damage caused by air pollutants from coal burning exceeds the value of the electricity produced by coal-fired power plants. Coal fails the cost-benefit analysis even before the costs of climate change are tallied.

In July 2011, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a grant of 50 million dollars to the Beyond Coal campaign. It is one thing when Michael Brune, head of the Sierra Club, says that coal has to go, but quite another when Michael Bloomberg, one of the most successful businessmen of his generation, says so.

The move to close coal plants comes at a time when electricity use for lighting will be falling fast as old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs are phased out. In compliance with the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, by January 2012 there will be no 100-watt incandescent light bulbs on store shelves.

By January 2014, the 75-watt, 60-watt, and 40-watt incandescents will also disappear from shelves. As inefficient incandescents are replaced by compact fluorescents and LEDs, electricity use for lighting can drop by 80 percent. And much of the switch will occur within a few years.

The U.S. Department of Energy projects that residential electricity use per person will drop by five percent during this decade as light bulbs are replaced and as more-efficient refrigerators, water heaters, television sets, and other household appliances come to market.

Even as coal plants are closing, the use of wind, solar, and geothermally generated electricity is growing fast. Over the last four years, more than 400 wind farms – with a total generating capacity of 27,000 megawatts – have come online, enough to supply eight million homes with electricity. (See data at www.earth- policy.org.) Nearly 300,000 megawatts of proposed wind projects are in the pipeline awaiting access to the grid.

Texas, long the leading oil-producing state, is now the leading generator of electricity from wind. When the transmission lines linking the rich wind resources of west Texas and the Texas panhandle to the large cities in central and eastern Texas are completed, wind electric generation in the state will jump dramatically.

In installed wind-generating capacity, Texas is followed by Iowa, California, Minnesota, and Illinois. In the share of electricity generation in the state coming from wind, Iowa leads at 20 percent.

With electricity generated by solar panels, the United States has some 22,000 megawatts of utility-scale projects in the pipeline. And this does not include residential installations.

Closing coal plants also cuts oil use. With coal use falling, the near 40 percent of freight rail diesel fuel that is used to move coal from mines to power plants will also drop.

In fact, oil use has fallen fast in the United States over the last four years, thus reversing another long-term trend of rising consumption. The reasons for this include a shrinkage in the size of the national fleet, the rising fuel efficiency of new cars, and a reduction in the miles driven per vehicle.

Fleet size peaked at 250 million cars in 2008 just as the number of cars being scrapped eclipsed sales of new cars. Aside from economic conditions, car sales are down because many young people today are much less automobile-oriented than their parents.

In addition, the fuel efficiency of new cars, already rising, will soon increase sharply. The most recent efficiency standards mandate that new cars sold in 2025 use only half as much fuel as those sold in 2010. Thus with each passing year, the U.S. car fleet becomes more fuel-efficient, using less gasoline.

Miles driven per car are declining because of higher gasoline prices, the continuing recession, and the shift to public transit and bicycles. Bicycles are replacing cars as cities create cycling infrastructure by building bike paths, creating dedicated bike lanes, and installing sidewalk parking racks. Many U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York, are introducing bike-sharing programmes.

Furthermore, when people retire and no longer commute, miles driven drop by a third to a half. With so many baby boomers now retiring, this too will lower gasoline use.

As plug-in hybrid and all-electric cars come to market, electricity will replace gasoline. An analysis by Professor Michael McElroy of Harvard indicates that running a car on wind-generated electricity could cost the equivalent of 80-cent-a-gallon gasoline.

With emissions from coal burning heading for a free fall as plants are closed, and those from oil use also falling fast – both are falling faster than emissions from natural gas are ramping up – U.S. carbon emissions are falling.

We are now looking at a situation where the seven percent decline in carbon emissions since the 2007 peak could expand to 20 percent by 2020, and possibly even to 30 percent. If so, the United States could become a world leader in cutting carbon emissions and stabilising climate.

*Data and additional resources available at www.earth-policy.org. Lester R. Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of “World on the Edge”.

A delicious 500-gram Amazonian beef steak produced with 7,000 grams of carbon dioxide and 7,000 liters of water, mixed with belched methane, is the ideal recipe for climate change.

BELÉM, Brazil, Sep 19 (Tierramérica)- The livestock industry, and especially cattle production, is one of the world’s most significant contributors to climate change.

Increased buying capacity is leading many who have historically eaten mainly grains, fruits and vegetables to increasingly add meat and dairy products to their diets. This trend, combined with unsustainable production practices, particularly in the Brazilian Amazon, can lead to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest biome and the environmental services it provides to the planet.

According to a report published by FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture 2009, livestock production is responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increased deforestation in numerous countries, while contributing less than two percent of global gross domestic product (GDP).

This limited contribution to GDP, however, takes up 26 percent of the earth’s ice-free land surface for grazing, and 33 percent of agricultural cropland for the production of livestock feed.

There is pressure to double beef production from 228 million tons annually today to 463 million tons by 2050, which will mean an increase of more than 73 percent in cattle herds.

Since the 1970s, the Brazilian government has implemented policies and provided subsidies to support cattle ranching. As part of these policies, the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) has invested more than 10 billion dollars in the beef processing industry, with approximately 30 percent spent on loans and 60 percent on acquisitions (by companies like JBS/Friboi and Marfrig), while the other 10 percent is kept for future acquisitions.

The traditional slash-and-burn practices used in the Amazon to steal land from the rainforest for use as grazing land means its rich biodiversity is lost as a service to the planet.

These practices also release massive amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Amazon deforestation is estimated to represent five to six percent of the world’s GHG emissions, and contributes 75 percent of Brazil’s sizable carbon dioxide emissions.

By 2009, approximately 74 million hectares or 15 percent of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest – an area equivalent to Germany, Austria and Italy combined – had been deforested. Almost all of this land is now used for cattle pasture.

Beef is considered an expensive food in most of the world. But the price of a beef steak fails to incorporate the real cost of its production footprint: the production of one kilogram of beef leads to the emission of 15 kilograms of carbon dioxide and uses up 14,000 liters of water.

This means that the relatively “cheap” beef arriving on your plate from the Brazilian Amazon is actually extraordinarily costly in terms of its environmental and economic footprint.

Beef production in the Amazon also has serious social impacts. It generates little employment, most of it poorly paid, and on some Brazilian cattle ranches, slavery and child labor are still common practices.

The expansion of cattle production into the Amazon rainforest region over the last 50 years has been greater than at any other time in history.

If we project the growth of the Brazilian cattle herd for the next 20 years based on the 1.7 percent growth registered from 1994 to 2007, the result is 103.7 million head of cattle in the Amazon by 2030, which could lead to the deforestation of 55 percent of region.

All of these factors stand in contradiction to Brazil’s commitment to cut GHG emissions. The key challenge facing the country’s leaders is to respond to the livestock demands of the market in ways that do not endanger social equity, the environment and public health.

Urgent action is needed to transform the cattle and beef production value chain. We must campaign for change by demanding:

* National and international policies and regulations aimed at socioeconomically and environmentally sustainable cattle and beef production.

* Control and enforcement of legal standards for all activities in the cattle-beef production chain in Brazil, with an emphasis on the Amazon region.

* Monitoring systems to ensure the implementation of policies and regulations and the enforcement of laws.

* Sustainable and inclusive policies geared to the needs of traditional rural communities, peasant farmers and small-scale producers, to increase their capacity to implement more efficient and sustainable production practices, as well as promoting their active participation in the cattle-beef production value chain and access to technical and financial services.

* Greater awareness among consumers worldwide of the real cost of beef.

* The development of environmental awareness and promotion of environmentally friendly production practices among traditional rural communities, by involving them in a process of monitoring the impact of cattle production on their livelihoods and diversifying strategies for the valuation of the rainforest, such as the provision of environmental services and sale of other products that contribute to maintaining biodiversity.

* Research activity in which studies of the cattle-beef production value chain include the environmental and economic impact of this activity on economically and socially excluded communities.

* Strategies for better production practices that promote more sustainable production technologies, making more efficient use of resources.

* João Meirelles is the director and María José Barney González is a consultant at the Peabiru Institute, based in Belém, Brazil (http://www.peabiru.org.br/index-.htm). Copyright IPS.

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 15, 2011 (IPS) – All the analysis and commentary about safety and security on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 ignored by far the biggest ongoing threat to global security: climate change.Just days before Sunday’s commemoration of the attacks, German scientists pointed to yet another smoking gun of climate change: the Arctic sea ice reached a new historic minimum ice extent.

The rapidity with which the planet is losing its northern ice cap continues to astonish experts. The defrosting northern pole is one of the prime drivers of Earth’s climate system and is changing global weather patterns in unpredictable ways.

The Arctic ice melt is also accelerating the rate of climate change beyond what humanity is doing with every barrel of oil, tonne of coal or cubic metre of gas burned.

On Sep. 8, researchers at the University of Bremen in Germany reported that the Arctic ice melt bettered the previous minimum of 2007. Other research centres using different satellite and analysis tools say the extraordinary decline of ice in 2007 has not yet been exceeded this year and 2011 remains a close second.

“We think it will end up a little bit short of the record – not that it really matters,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the U.S. city of Boulder, Colorado.

“What is extraordinary this year is that there was no weird weather pattern that created the perfect conditions for the record melt in 2007,” Serreze told IPS.

This year, the summer weather was normal and yet it the ice vanished in similar amounts to 2007.

“That tells us the sea ice is too thin now to hold up under normal weather conditions,” he said.

Both the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route across the Arctic are wide open again, as has happened almost every year since 2007. An oil tanker recently crossed the Arctic Ocean in the record time of eight days travelling from Houston, Texas to Map Ta Phut, Thailand.

This summer’s ice loss is double the summer ice melt of 30 to 40 years ago. A child born at the advent of the satellite era, when humanity had its first complete look at the frozen vastness, would be 32 years old today. Now they would see that more than three million square kilometres of ice – about the size of India – has vanished this summer compared to the summer they were born.

It is now virtually certain a child born in 1979 will not reach 50 years of age before the Arctic is ice-free in the summer. That is a rapid change on a planetary scale, with far-reaching consequences that scientists are just beginning to understand.

One consequence is the acceleration of global warming as the Arctic flips from all white to dark blue, with the ocean absorbing tremendous amounts of heat from the 24-hour summer sun. That shift in albedo – from white to dark – is expected to add an additional amount of heat energy of about 0.3 watts per square metre over the entire land and water surface of the planet, calculates Stephen Hudson of the Norwegian Polar Institute.

Hudson based his calculation on the Arctic having no ice for one month and decreased ice at all other times of the year.

That’s enough additional energy to power an LED night light for each square metre of the 510 million square metres that comprise the Earth’s surface. That will raise global temperatures about 0.25 C, John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota told IPS.

Of course, most of that tremendous amount of heat will reside first in the Arctic, where temperatures are already an average of three to five degrees C higher than 30 to 40 years ago. This winter parts of the Arctic were 21 C above normal for a month.

All that additional heat threatens to light the fuse of the world’s biggest “carbon bomb”, the vast permafrost region spanning 13 million square kilometres across Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of northern Europe.

Permafrost contains at least twice as much carbon as is currently present in the atmosphere. Even if a small percentage of this is released, catastrophic climate change is likely, experts believe. Permafrost has been slowly thawing for the last two decades and the rate of thaw is accelerating with rising temperatures, world expert on permafrost Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks told IPS previously.

This will have profound impacts on human populations around the globe. According to figures from the Global Governance Project, by the year 2050, the world will have 200 million climate-displaced refugees on its hands, the majority of them from low-lying coastal areas, as a result of rising water levels.

While this climate change calamity gains momentum, the U.S. and most of the industrialised world have been distracted by the relatively trivial threat of terrorism and have spent trillions of dollars on defence and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. could generate 100 percent of its electricity from wind, solar, tidal and geothermal for much less than it has spent on defence and wars in the last decade, said Richard Heinberg, energy expert and senior fellow at the California-based Post Carbon Institute.

However, the U.S. economy is in such poor shape, Heinberg, author of the new book “The End of Growth“, told IPS, that the country is no longer financially capable of doing this. Nor can it afford to continue to burn fossil fuels.

“We’re going to be forced to use a lot less energy sooner or later,” he said.

(END)

WASHINGTON, Aug 23, 2011 (IPS) – People do not normally leave their homes, their families, and their communities unless they have no other option. Yet as environmental stresses mount, we can expect to see a growing number of environmental refugees. Rising seas and increasingly devastating storms grab headlines, but expanding deserts, falling water tables, and toxic waste and radiation are also forcing people from their homes.

Advancing deserts are now on the move almost everywhere. The Sahara desert, for example, is expanding in every direction. As it advances northward, it is squeezing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria against the Mediterranean coast.

The Sahelian region of Africa – the vast swath of savannah that separates the southern Sahara desert from the tropical rainforests of central Africa – is shrinking as the desert moves southward. As the desert invades Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, from the north, farmers and herders are forced southward, squeezed into a shrinking area of productive land.

A 2006 U.N. conference on desertification in Tunisia projected that by 2020 up to 60 million people could migrate from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and Europe.

In Iran, villages abandoned because of spreading deserts or a lack of water number in the thousands. In Brazil, some 250,000 square miles of land are affected by desertification, much of it concentrated in the country’s northeast.

In Mexico, many of the migrants who leave rural communities in arid and semiarid regions of the country each year are doing so because of desertification. Some of these environmental refugees end up in Mexican cities, others cross the northern border into the United States. U.S. analysts estimate that Mexico is forced to abandon 400 square miles of farmland to desertification each year.

In China, desert expansion has accelerated in each successive decade since 1950. Desert scholar Wang Tao reports that over the last half-century or so some 24,000 villages in northern and western China have been abandoned either entirely or partly because of desert expansion.

China is heading for a ‘Dust Bowl’ like the one that forced more than 2 million “Okies” to leave their land in the U.S. in the 1930s. But the dust bowl forming in China is much larger and so is the population: China’s migration may measure in the tens of millions. And as a U.S. embassy report entitled ‘Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolia’ noted, “unfortunately, China’s twenty-first century ‘Okies’ have no California to escape to – at least not in China.”

With the vast majority of the 2.3 billion people projected to be added to the world by 2050 being born in countries where water tables are falling, water refugees are likely to become commonplace. They will be most common in arid and semiarid regions where populations are outgrowing the water supply and sinking into hydrological poverty.

Villages in northwestern India are being abandoned as aquifers are depleted and people can no longer find water. Millions of villagers in northern and western China and in northern Mexico may have to move because of a lack of water.

Thus far the evacuations resulting from water shortages have been confined to villages, but eventually whole cities might have to be relocated, such as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.

Sana’a, a fast-growing city of more than 2 million people, is literally running out of water. Quetta, originally designed for 50,000 people, now has a population exceeding 1 million – all of whom depend on 2,000 wells pumping water from what is believed to be a fossil aquifer. In the words of one study assessing its water prospect, Quetta will soon be “a dead city”.

Two other semiarid Middle Eastern countries that are suffering from water shortages are Syria and Iraq. Both are beginning to reap the consequences of over-pumping their aquifers – namely irrigation wells going dry. In Syria, these trends have forced the abandonment of 160 villages. And a U.N. report estimates that more than 100,000 people in northern Iraq have been uprooted because of water shortages.

A final category of environmental refugee has appeared only in the last 50 years or so: people who are trying to escape toxic waste or dangerous radiation levels.

During the late 1970s, Love Canal – a small town in upstate New York, part of which was built on top of a toxic waste disposal site – made national and international headlines. Beginning in August 1978, families were relocated at government expense and reimbursed for their homes at market prices. By October 1980, a total of 950 families had been permanently relocated. A few years later, the federal government arranged for the permanent evacuation and relocation of all 2,000 residents of Times Beach, Missouri, after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discovered dioxin levels well above the public health standards.

While the U.S. has relocated two communities because of health-damaging pollutants, the identification of more than 450 “cancer villages” in China suggests the need to evacuate hundreds of communities. China’s Ministry of Health statistics show that cancer is now the country’s leading cause of death, and with little pollution control, whole communities near chemical factories are suffering from unprecedented rates of cancer. Young people are leaving for the city in droves, for jobs and possibly for better health. Yet many others are too sick or too poor to leave.

Another infamous source of environmental refugees is the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Kiev, which exploded in April 1986. This started a powerful fire that lasted for 10 days. Massive amounts of radioactive material were spewed into the atmosphere, showering communities in the region with heavy doses of radiation. As a result, the residents of the nearby town of Pripyat and several other communities in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were evacuated – requiring the resettlement of 350,400 people.

In 1992, six years after the accident, Belarus was devoting 20 percent of its national budget to resettlement and the many other costs associated with the accident.

When a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in March 2011, the ensuing nuclear crisis at the badly damaged Fukushima Daiichi power plant forced tens of thousands of people from their homes. Whether they will be able to return or will become permanently displaced is a question that remains unanswered.

Separating out the geneses of today’s refugees is not always easy. Often the environmental and economic stresses that drive migration are closely intertwined. But whatever the reason for leaving home, people are taking increasingly desperate measures. Some of their stories are heartrending beyond belief.

As a general matter, environmental refugees are migrating from poor countries to rich ones, from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to North America and Europe. Some of the largest flows will be across national borders and they are likely to be illegal. The potentially massive movement of people across national boundaries is already affecting some countries. The U.S. is erecting a fence along the border with Mexico. The Mediterranean Sea is now routinely patrolled by naval vessels trying to intercept the small boats of African migrants bound for Europe. India, with a steady stream of migrants from Bangladesh and the prospect of millions more to come, is building a 10-foot-high fence along their shared border.

Maybe it is time for governments to consider whether it might not be cheaper and far less painful in human terms to treat the causes of migration rather than merely respond to it. This means working with developing countries to restore their economy’s natural support systems – the soils, the water tables, the grasslands, the forests – and it means accelerating the shift to smaller families to help people break out of poverty.

Treating symptoms instead of causes is not good medicine. Nor is it good public policy.

*Lester R. Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article highlights data presented in Lester R. Brown, ‘World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse’ (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), available online at www.earth- policy.org/books/wote

(END)

The reality of a globalized economy seems to be that poverty is its only sustainable phenomenon, says entrepreneur Gunter Pauli in this column.

BERLIN, Aug 8 (Tierramérica).- For decades the world economy has been on a path towards globalization. The drive to achieve ever larger economies of scale at ever lower marginal costs pushed manufacturing to standardize, slashing expenses by outsourcing and supply chain management, consolidating suppliers, eliminating unnecessary in-house middle management, pushing for mergers and acquisitions, purging excess to deliver better returns to investors and ever lower prices to customers, thus strengthening their purchasing power and bringing more citizens into the sought-after middle class.

This process of globalization-driven growth is supposed to have a trickle-down effect, bringing wealth to many while more middle class members rise from rags into riches.

But the reality of a globalised economy seems to be that poverty is its only sustainable phenomenon. While one can claim there has been growth and market expansion, the number of people living on less than one dollar a day has never been so high.

Controlling the population explosion has been considered one of the key factors in bringing equitable and social development to everyone on the globe. But population control is simply not enough.

The most critical though least debated action required is changing the business model.

Our economic system has long been driven by efficiency without ever considering sufficiency. Greed, not need, has been the muse of the ranks of business. And the gap between the world’s richest and the poorest has never been so large.

The Blue Economy proposes that we respond to basic needs with what we have. The time has come to stop consuming more than the carrying capacity of our earth.

We have to introduce innovations and technologies that cascade nutrients, energy, and matter the way ecosystems do, so that we can exit the trap of scarcity and enter the world of sufficiency for all living sentient beings, not only the human species.

Amory Lovins and his energy experts at the Rocky Mountain Institute have proven that modern society reached Peak Oil in 2007, meaning that annual extraction of fossil fuels reached its highest point, subsequently beginning a long decline in reserves. With Peak Oil, reducing consumption and searching for renewables became an absolute necessity.

But the end of the age of unlimited access to fossil fuel brings another “peak” with it: Peak Globalization. Companies that have undergone a brutal transformation to become the global players will now face a downturn in their underlying growth dynamics.

The winners will be the small and medium-sized companies, inspired by millions of entrepreneurs who will respond to basic needs for all with what is locally available.

This shift permits the design of a competitive business world where free trade and free direct foreign investment are not the key to economic success.

The new business model will provide opportunities for the local risk taker who is capable of creating a broader coalition of economic and social activities with multiple revenues and multiple benefits, going beyond the straightjacket of the core business and core competence mantra of the highly standardized globalized world and its fetish of discounted cash flow analysis.

The shift away from the Harvard Business School model, which forces management to focus on one product and one process at a time, will insure that David will win against Goliath.

He will win not because of privileged access to global capital, labor, energy, and mineral markets, but because the drive towards globalization has left the giants of industry extremely vulnerable.

And unlike companies listed in the Fortune 500, few entrepreneurs aspire to replace the giants; rather they are happy with the 2-3 percent market share each can nibble off their formidable opponents.

This new paradigm will facilitate the arrival of decentralized production and consumption systems that are now technically and competitively viable in all sectors of the economy. including mining, forestry, agriculture, metals, chemistry, energy, paper and pulp and so many more.

The portfolio of 100 innovations described in The Blue Economy, and their growing successes on the market in all four corners of the world demonstrate that these individual breakthroughs are not isolated cases but are part of a new trend which I call “The End of Globalization”.

While its complete penetration of our social and economic tissue may take another few decades, it is already shaping competitive forces, driven by local needs and local resources.

This will shape a new society in which jobs are generated, the best products for health and environment are cheaper, and social capital is created by simply being more productive and competitive.

After all, that is what is expected of the homo economic: achieving much more with much less. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* (*) Gunter Pauli, author of “The Blue Economy” and entrepreneur.

Kumi Naidoo. Credit:Greenpeace

With me I carried the signatures of some 50,000 people who are demanding that the oil rigs operators Cairn Energy publish its ‘oil spill response plan’. I also wanted to personally call for drilling to stop immediately. Since my arrest I am told over 20,000 more people have gone to the Greenpeace web site -www.greenpeace.org – and added their names to the growing petition.

I came in defence of the fragile Arctic environment. I became the 22nd Greenpeace activist who in the last few weeks has volunteered to climb the rig in the middle of the Arctic. I came to add my body to the protest and my voice to the call for sanity and an end to dangerous deep water oil drilling in the Arctic. I became the 22nd activist to be arrested and held in a Greenlandic cell.

How can it be that in the wake of the 2010 Deep Water Horizon oil spill disaster an oil company can be allowed to drill at a similar depth in the Arctic, where any clean up operation would be all but impossible. Given the events of the Gulf of Mexico blow-out it would be logical that greater transparency and public scrutiny would be needed, not less or none.

The reason for Cairn’s secrecy is clear, a clean up would be impossible, the ecosystem would be decimated, Greenland’s fisheries would be destroyed and the 10 billion dollar Cairn oil company would be bankrupt: not a good look at the start of an oil rush, and a poor signal to the venture capitalists who hope to turn a big profit.

All of the above is more than enough reason to say no to deep water oil drilling in the Arctic. But, there are many more reasons to say no to Arctic drilling and to call for the world to go beyond oil.

Fossil fuel burning is altering our climate and melting the Arctic sea ice, changing the nature of one of the remotest places on earth, and one of the most hostile. The radically reducing ‘summer sea’ ice is a stark warning of a warming world. Yet the oil industry and the politicians who are beholden to it are treating the warning as an invitation to ‘drill baby drill!’

Climate change is already wreaking havoc around the world, it is hitting the poorest hardest and fastest. The Arctic is not only a victim of the change but in turn will likely reflect and magnify that change.

As an African I care about what’s happening in the Arctic in part because scientists say that the unprecedented warming up here could have grave knock-on consequences for vulnerable people across the world. A warming Arctic could dramatically change weather patterns many thousands of miles away.

At some point we have to draw a line and say: no more, and I say we draw that line here and now in the Arctic ice. I say we draw it in the world’s rainforests. I say we draw it in the wake of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, I say we draw it when someone proposes wasting billions on new fossil fuel stations when they should be investing in energy efficiency and clean, safe and secure renewable energy sources.

As I sit in jail, a Cairns dangerous drilling rig gets closer and closer to the oil and gas it is looking for, closer and closer to the spill zone, where a deep water blow-out could happen. Yet we are no closer to seeing their secret clean up plan.

As they drill deeper and deeper under the Arctic the world spins closer and closer to a climate tipping point, a point of no return in which our fossil fuel burning creates climate chaos, propelling extreme weather events, sea level rise, hunger and conflict.

Nature has presented us with warning and with that warning comes a test. An intelligence test, one we cannot afford to fail. How we respond here and now will decide what kind of world we are going to live in and what kind of world we will pass on to our children….

My stay in Nuuk will be a short one, soon I am likely to be set free and deported. But, I will think of Nuuk and the lesson of the metaphor of deep drilling in the Arctic when I return home to Durban in November. When I lobby and demand a fair, ambitious and legally binding agreement at the 17th annual UN meeting designed to save the climate.

Let’s not be stupid, let’s say no to Arctic oil and yes to a world free of the threat of catastrophic climate change.

*Kumi Naidoo is executive director of Greenpeace International. (END)

LONDON/ISLAMABAD, Jun 6, 2011 (IPS) – Last week, the world received a warning. A disturbing report from the International Energy Agency, the respected international authority on energy policy, found that CO2 emissions in 2010 were the highest ever recorded.

The IEA concluded that if the world is to keep global warming to two degrees above pre-industrial levels, we’ve got very little time to act. Two degrees has long been an important threshold in the minds of climate scientists and policy-makers. Beyond this, the impacts of climate change could become catastrophic.

Against this background, the U.N. climate change talks starting on Monday in Bonn, Germany, take on a new urgency. The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process allows every country to play a role in confronting the challenge. But, as so often in international negotiations, the voices of richer and more industrialised states threaten to drown out those of the least developed countries (LDCs).

Delegates in Bonn will discuss issues of major importance to LDCs. The meetings are a crucial milestone on the road to the UNFCCC’s Conference of the Parties in Durban, South Africa in December. By then, developing countries hope for agreement on an ambitious, legally binding global deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol (the Protocol expires next year).

The likelihood of reaching such an agreement by December is already in the balance. For a credible and truly ambitious deal to be reached, it is vital that LDCs’ voices are given an adequate hearing now.

On the negotiating table in Bonn are a range of issues around mitigation (how to reduce carbon emissions); adaptation (how to deal with the effects of a more volatile climate) and climate financing (how to pay for measures to tackle climate change).

This last issue is particularly poignant for LDCs. Most are already experiencing documented impacts from manmade climate change, from sea-level rise in small island states such as Tuvalu, to extraordinary floods in Bangladesh, to extended droughts in the horn of Africa. Generous funding is urgently needed to manage disasters that aren’t not of such countries’ own making – and to set nations on greener, more resilient development paths.

In Bonn, members of a Transitional Committee will meet to hammer out progress towards creating a Green Climate Fund, one of the big commitments from last year’s U.N. climate talks. This Fund is intended to help developing countries shift to more climate compatible development. Achieving this will require resources from the Fund sooner rather than later.

It is also expected that the Bonn meetings will produce a committee to improve coordination and delivery of climate change financing. If achieved, this will be a big step in making donor aid more effective.

Parties to the talks will discuss the establishment of an Adaptation Committee to conduct vulnerability assessments and an agreement from developing countries to improve the way they measure emissions reductions. They will work toward establishing a Technology Mechanism to accelerate technology transfers between the rich world and developing countries, and aim to finesse plans for reducing emissions from deforestation.

For a number of reasons, the least developed countries risk missing out on the potential benefits of a global deal.

First, LDCs have to rely on broad coalitions such as the Group of 77 to cover all the issues covered by the talks. This means that a diverse group of countries often has to find a common denominator when negotiating vital policy. Consensus-building may overlook the needs of individual nations.

Second, to stand a chance of getting their voices heard, LDCs need to assess complex scientific studies and reports. On many occasions, these studies originate from industrial economies or international think tanks and other non-developing country sources. Developing economies can find it hard to obtain alternative, more relevant, views.

Third, with the growing legal dimension to the talks, there’s a wide disparity between access to legal resources. LDCs struggle to mobilise legal expertise at the necessary speed to influence and direct proceedings. And lastly, the proliferation of meetings makes it difficult for least developed countries to maintain continuity and consistency in their negotiating strategies.

The risk is that crucial stakeholders end up with limited participation in the talks. Those countries that suffer the most from climate change are unlikely to get the help they need because their positions are not articulated clearly enough. Multilateral negotiations should be more inclusive; instead they’re a convoluted process. Delegates need strong communication, persuasion and other interpersonal skills to have real influence.

Success, then, requires strong capacity in all these areas, but this is exactly what many LDCs lack. To help counteract these structural disadvantages, CDKN will work to help LDCs interpret the language and mechanics of the negotiations.

The best outcomes will result from combining this short-term support with longer-term capacity-building for decision-makers. This will include efforts at the national level. CDKN is supporting countries to invest sufficient funds in research, explore policy options, and strengthen government and civil society institutions to influence the climate talks.

Why should industrialised countries be concerned about LDCs’ performance in the talks? If a climate deal is agreed that’s inconsistent with the needs of developing economies, everyone will lose out. Weak LDC capacity could mean an international framework that fails to account for the impacts of climate change on the poorest people, with significant consequences for global economic growth, migration patterns, and resource depletion.

LDCs will not achieve the negotiating might of the G20 countries overnight, and they alone cannot force a meaningful climate deal in 2011. However, giving LDCs the support and the space to intervene effectively in the climate talks is the right thing to do. It increases the chances of a global deal and international financial framework that will protect the world’s most vulnerable people, and will help protect us all.

*Sam Bickersteth is the Chief Executive of the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN). Ali Tauqeer Sheikh is the Regional Director for Asia. CDKN is a five-year project to assist developing country decision-makers to design and deliver climate compatible development. www.cdkn.org

BANGKOK, Apr 14, 2011 (IPS) – China’s rise as a leader in the environmentally friendly, low-carbon economy is giving the Asian giant new diplomatic muscle for this year’s round of climate change negotiations leading up to the COP17 U.N. summit in Durban, South Africa in November.

The first round of U.N. climate change talks, just concluded in the Thai capital, brought to relief the recognition that China’s expanding green economy is receiving, with China’s negotiators taking on their counterparts from the United States and the European Union – among the traditional adversaries of China at U.N. global warming talks.

Governments from the richer, industrialised nations – the major emitters of polluting greenhouse gases (GHG) since the industrial revolution – had to come to terms with China’s 12th five-year plan, which was unveiled on the eve of the U.N. climate change talks here, Apr. 3-8. This central pillar of policy-making in the Communist-ruled country spelled out an unprecedented raft of initiatives to build an eco-friendly economy.

“China’s five-year plan just came out. We need to congratulate China for doing so,” Artur Runge-Metzger, chief climate change negotiator for the EU, told journalists here, before adding a caveat: “We need to see how those measures are to be implemented.”

“China’s five-year plan makes a central point in moving towards finding solutions,” said Jonathan Pershing, who headed the U.S. government’s delegation at the Bangkok climate change talks. “This is a problem that no country can solve by itself.”

Climate change negotiators from the developing world measure China’s growing dominance in the low-carbon economic landscape differently, as they prepare for the next round of U.N. climate talks in Bonn, in mid-June. “China’s emergence as a leader in clean technology and the plans unveiled to reduce its carbon intensity through the new five-year plan will make it more difficult for industrialised countries to target China at these negotiations,” revealed a negotiator from an Asian country, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Beijing is not going to play by the rules of the U.S. or the EU at these talks, now that it is showing greater commitment to tackle climate change issues from its vantage point,” the diplomat explained to IPS. “We will see more of this in Bonn and later in Durban.”

Analysts have also commented on the unprecedented profile Beijing’s climate change policies have been given in the country’s development plans from 2011 through 2015, where targets to reduce carbon intensity have been spelled out for the first time – in addition to new goals on renewable energy development and energy efficiency.

“With China’s introduction of the 12th five-year plan on March 5, 2011, we see the many new and expanded strong policy initiatives and green targets in the plan as clear evidence that China’s low-carbon policies remain global best-in-class,” observed climate change analysts for Germany’s Deutsche Bank.

“Over the next 10 years, China is expected to spend 740 billion U.S. dollars in renewable energy products,” noted ‘China Daily’, an English language publication, this month. “Already it accounts for 50 percent of total global investments in wind energy, and leads the world in solar energy investment and development.”

In fact, the new carbon intensity reduction targets – to ensure that carbon emissions for units of carbon consumed in the country are below 17 percent, when measured against 2010 levels – was an assurance Beijing gave at the acrimonious U.N. climate change summit in Copenhagen. At that December 2009 summit for the 192 countries who have backed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Asian giant was portrayed in some quarters as a villain for standing its ground against pressure from the industrialised world to accept the final summit document the richer nations were pushing for.

In that year – 2009 – China saw an estimated 34 billion dollars pumped into green technology, nearly twice the amount invested for similar technology in the U.S., an estimated 18 billion dollars.

China’s green tide is up against climate change negotiators from the 37 industrialised nations and the European Community, who – with the exception of the U.S. – are bound by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This international treaty, the world’s only legally binding agreement under which the industrialised nations have agreed to slash their GHGs, is a key pillar in the U.N.’s international climate change regime, the UNFCCC.

For negotiators from Western capitals, one fact about China continues to dominate: the Asian giant’s 23 percent GHG emission rates – making it currently the largest emitter of the environment polluting gases, followed by the U.S., which emits 20 percent of carbon dioxide.

“Rather than meet their commitments to slash GHGs, negotiators from the industrialised world are laying plans to undermine the Kyoto Protocol by targeting countries like China, which is not bound by this treaty,” Meena Raman, a senior policy adviser at Friends of the Earth International, a global green lobby, told IPS. “It has become clear that the road to Durban will see the industrialised nations attempt to deregulate the internationally binding mitigation regime with a voluntary pledge system with no guarantees.”

The pressure on China comes at a time when the industrialised countries have to meet their Kyoto commitments: slash five percent of GHGs, measured according to 1990 levels, by 2012, when the first deadline of the protocol runs out, and then commit to deeper cuts for the next phase.

For their part, Beijing’s climate change negotiators have already pooh-poohed efforts by industrialised nations to find alternatives to the protocol, including one aimed to draw China in as part of a new global climate change regime. “On the KP obligation being conditional, China said that this was wrong and against the convention and the KP,” writes Raman in an analysis for the Third World Network, a Malaysia-based think tank.  (END)