Cancun Unpacked

In January 2010 Investec, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, hosted a very lively post Copenhagen breakfast to discuss the outcomes of the climate negotiations with an expert panel.

We are delighted to invite you to a similar breakfast where the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun (COP16) will be unpacked by a similarly expert panel.

We will be posing two main questions:

• What progress did Cancun’s COP16 make towards a legally binding international agreement and other subsidiary goals, and what are the implications for the South African economy?
• What have we learned that will shape our planning for South Africa’s hosting of COP17 at the end of 2011?

Date:     Wednesday 2 February 2011
Time:    07:30 for 08:00 – 10:30
Venue:  Auditorium, Investec Sandton (click here for map)

RSVP: Please confirm your attendance and special dietary requirments with Carryn Penhall by Wednesday 19 January 2011

Guest speakers:
Joanne Yawitch: Leader of the SA delegation to Cancun and Deputy Director General, Environmental Quality and Protection at the Department of Environmental Affairs

Richard Worthington: Climate Change Programme Manager, WWF South Africa

Dr Fred Goede: Group Safety, Health and Environment Centre Manager, Sasol

Prof Jorgen Randers: Director of the Centre for Climate Strategy, Norwegian School of Management and faculty member of the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability leadership

This is likely to be one of the benchmark discussions of Cancun’s outcomes within the South African business community. We hope you will join us.

Climate Finance for a Green Economy

By Monica Graaff

There are an increasing number of global climate funds available to invest in climate change mitigation projects and kick-start a green economy, but accessing these funds is not as simple as it might seem, according to speakers at a Cambridge Resilience Forum event in Cape Town this week.
 
The funds range from the $30 billion committed to climate friendly development at the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Copenhagen conference last year to private equity funds. But, according to Smita Nakhooda of the World Resources Institute based in Washington DC, many tensions exist as to how these funds should be sourced, committed and managed.
 
“At the heart of the debate is how to maintain high standards of financing, while ensuring that funding institutions are nimble enough to ensure that things get done,” she said. “And how do you ensure that the finance reaches the kind of projects that will have traction and bring about major change?”
 
Nakhooda said one of the major tensions was that developing nations wanted to have direct access to funding and many donors felt safest working through the tested international bodies such as the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). Advances in meeting this challenge of ‘top-down versus bottom-up’ had been made with the introduction of the Adaptation Fund and the growth of national low carbon development funds, but it was too early to judge how these would fare.
 
Richard Sherman of One World Sustainable Investments and a member of the South African delegation to the UNFCCC said that the Copenhagen Accord included an agreement to set up a new fund that was currently being negotiated. Debated issues were over global technology intellectual property rights, insurance mechanisms, whether to make grants or loans, and what the sources of funding should be.
 
A possible source for this new fund could be using 1% of GDP from developed countries, but then the question would be how the UN Secretary General would decide to mobilize these funds, he said.
 
Funds could also possibly be sourced from the private sector via climate transactions taxation, leveraging emissions of the transport industry, and implementing George Soros’s proposal of an IMF rights issue.
 
However, the good news, he said, was that the $30 billion committed at Copenhagen would flow through existing channels, and would therefore not be hampered by this process of negotiation.
 
The important thing for South Africa to remember was that it needed to ensure that it had established the right channels to receive these funds so that it would be ready to receive them, he said. Work still had to be done in this area.
 
Carl Wesselink of the South African Export Development Fund called for a pragmatic approach to accessing climate-related funds and putting them to good social and economic use. The point was not to focus on becoming ‘carbon neutral’ (which usually had “zero social impact” and had a “negative impact on the country’s Balance of Payments”) but rather to focus on “how we get energy and how we use it”.
 
“Our decisions need to be practical and socially responsible,” he said.
 
Best known for the role he played in implementing South Africa’s acclaimed flagship Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) housing retrofit project at Kuyasa in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, he said it would cost R1500 per unit over five years to retrofit an RDP house with a ceiling and a solar water geyser.
 
“This might not sound like a lot to us, but we need to understand the social and economic benefits from these simple interventions for the people who live in RDP houses. It means the inhabitants regain about 10% of their income in energy saving, get access to hot water for the first time, and avoid having to endure about 3 litres of condensation a night dampening their beds and affecting their health,” he said.
 
While the CDM was a useful mechanism, it was laden with bureaucratic processes that used up about 75% of the funds available, he said. Accessing funds from local funding institutions, such as the National Sustainable Settlements Facility, should not be ruled out as an interim measure to get things going.
 
Graham Sinclair, principal at Sinclair & Company, a boutique investment advisory firm specializing in sustainable investment in emerging markets, said private investment offered a possible source of climate finance.
 
“Investors are geared up to make investment decisions along ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) principles if people insist on them. The more investors ask for this kind of investment, the more the market will work in this direction,” he said.
 
But the bottom line for private funding, all agreed, was that the market required a reasonable degree of certainty that investment will be profitable.
 
As Nakhooda pointed out in her opening remarks, it is cheaper to mitigate the effects of climate change through climate friendly investments than to deal with post-event adaptation. Mitigation offers an opportunity for profiting from the development of a green economy. Adaptation is more likely to be expensive damage control.
 
Dirk Visser of the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, who chaired the session, noted that, according to the World Bank, $50 billion was needed annually for Africa to cope with climate change. According to some, this figure is severely underestimated.
 
Monica Graaff is a freelance journalist who works on projects with the University of Cambridge’s Programme for Sustainability Leadership.

Major emmitters set carbon goals post Copenhagen

The Copenhagen Accord that was negotiated on the last few days of the Copenhagen Summit in December ’09, set a 31 January deadline for countries to commit to national targets for curbs in emissions until 2020.

The UN recently announced that fifty five countries, responsible for almost 80% of world greenhouse gas emissions have pledged various goals to combat climate change.

Most countries, including China and the US, mostly reiterated commitments unveiled prior to the COP 15 in Denmark. These include:

• President Obama’s plans for a 17% cut in US emissions from 2005 levels or 4% cut from 1990 levels.
• The European Union’s goal of a 20% cut from 1990 levels or 30% if other nations step up.
• China’s “endeavour” to cut carbon intensity (carbon produced per unit of economic output) by 40%-45% from 2005 levels
• South Africa’s commitment to a 34% reduction below business as usual

Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute commented: “Following a month of uncertainty, it is now clear that the Copenhagen Accord will support the world in moving forward to meaningful global action on climate change.”

According to Yvo de Boer, head of the UNFCCC, “greater ambition is required to meet the scale of the challenge. But I see these pledges as clear signals of willingness to move negotiations towards a successful conclusion.”

South Africa announced its pledge of  34% emission reduction below business as usual by 2020 and 42% by 2025 in early December.  This would enable South Africa’s emissions to peak between 2020 and 2025, stabilize for 10 years and then decline in absolute terms. The business as usual ‘baseline’ is as per the government’s Long Term Mitigation Scenarios.

Original article: Mail & Guardian. 3 February 2009. Read here…

Jeremy Baskin – SA has compelling reasons to cut hothouse emissions

SA has no detailed climate change policy, as the government acknowledges. It is too late to develop one before next month’s Copenhagen conference. This is disappointing, given that SA is a Group of 20 economy and the world’s 13th-biggest CO² emitter, but not fatal as long as detailed, informed policy measures are in the pipeline.

Most troubling is SA appears to be going into Copenhagen with a position arguably not in the national interest, nor in the interests of combating climate change. It is also hard to square with some of the strong policy signals given by the government to date.

I write as a South African living abroad, who has for the past eight years worked on issues of climate, development and business risk and watched the policy debates in a number of countries closely.

Southern Africa is likely to be among the world’s hardest-hit regions when it comes to the physical, human and economic effects of climate change. These effects will vary between regions, districts, towns and suburbs (the details urgently need more research). But all indications are that changes in temperature, weather patterns and rainfall are likely to be especially nasty in Southern Africa and affect the livelihood and physical existence of millions of people. So SA has a strong self-interest in achieving the maximum possible mitigation and the highest possible global emission-reduction targets.

Without cuts from all major emitters, including developing countries such as China, the biosphere won’t get the reprieve it needs to avoid dangerous climate change. It is vital to encourage deep cuts by China, the US and Europe, which together account for more than 55% of global emissions. Our focus in international talks should be on maximising the extent of overall global mitigation.

In relation to global mitigation targets, it is in our interests to bridge the developed/

developing country divide, notwithstanding our historic and emotional identification with the Third World. There is, of course, a real issue of climate justice. The argument is ethically persuasive that most developing countries are not responsible for historic emissions, and they need emissions headroom to develop and financial assistance to adapt.

This is the position adopted by the African bloc, and argued strongly by, among others, India and China. There is certainly a valid argument to be made by, say, Mali or Bangladesh or even India (which emits less than two tones of CO² per capita a year).

These are all poor countries using less than their share of a scientifically credible global carbon budget. On any consideration of equity, they deserve our support for special consideration. But even China (with about half SA’s per capita emissions) is not a credible member of this group, a fact it implicitly recognises when it makes major emissions- reduction commitments even as it avoids the language of targets.

We delude ourselves to think we are in this special category. We are already a high-emissions country, one of the highest per capita emitters both historically and today. The science now suggests that, if we are to reduce the risk of dangerous climate change, the biosphere can only tolerate concentrations closer to 350ppm than to the more commonly cited 450ppm. This, in turn, equates to a global carbon budget of about two or three tones per capita emissions by 2050, about a fifth of SA’s current emissions.

Other than in the very short term, we will not get away with the argument some in government are voicing, that we be allowed to increase emissions in the name of development and get financial assistance to cut later. We will be accused, as the middle class is in India, of “hiding behind the poor”. Not only will we not get away with it, but we risk undermining our primary interest, which is to see the highest possible global mitigation efforts. The most we can expect, and what we should push for, is some financial assistance to transition to a low-carbon economy now.

It is true that our average emissions, like our middle-income country status, conceal deep inequalities. This is an argument for ensuring our domestic adaptation and mitigation policies, at the very least, reduce inequality. It is not an argument for being given space to ramp up our emissions. Many countries have seen growth and development and still have lower emission profiles today than we do — South Korea, Brazil, and post- war Japan to name but a few.

To be credible in pushing for global reduction SA needs strong domestic mitigation targets. From outside it appears SA may be diluting its previously announced targets. This would be unfortunate. “Growth and development first, climate later” may be in the interests of the fossil fuel industry, or convenient for politicians facing other challenges. But it is a false dichotomy ultimately not in the national economic interest.

The truth is that globally we are seeing the emergence of a price on carbon. The price is still low, but the trend is clear and it is upwards. As one of the world’s most carbon- intensive economies, SA is highly exposed. Traditionally, we have used the lure of cheap electricity to attract investment and mineral- beneficiation projects. We are unlikely to do so in future if our electricity remains carbon intensive. Future aluminium smelters, for example, will gravitate to countries such as Iceland, Brazil or New Zealand, which have extensive geothermal or hydropower.

Our exports are vulnerable. Markets such as Japan, the US, Germany, China and the UK have signalled their carbon pricing intentions. A carbon tariff is emerging. Agricultural producers and component suppliers will have been asked by customers to account for the carbon-intensity of their products. If SA’s wine producers, for example, are not already planning to slash their footprint and lobby the government for low-carbon electricity they should sleep uneasily in the knowledge that their competitors in other countries are.

Given SA’s unemployment, the evidence globally is that renewable energy is substantially more employment friendly per megawatt hour or per rand invested than carbon-intensive alternatives. Viewed from afar, it is impressive SA is putting so much effort into fleshing out its climate policies and starting to pay more attention to the neglected challenge of adaptation. The devil will be in the detail and affected by electricity- sector investment, support for renewables at scale (such as pilot concentrated solar power plants), energy efficiency regulation, forestry policy, tax incentives, and so on.

It is in our interests to transition to a low- carbon economy sooner rather than later. notwithstanding our deep reliance on the resources sector, the best hope for the future is a low carbon one. It is not an easy route, and will involve higher energy prices and difficult structural changes. Handled skilfully it could also help to reduce inequality in the country. Those who argue, in relation to climate, “not us, not much, and not now” are being shortsighted and do the country a disservice.

* Jeremy Baskin is the Director of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership’s Australian office.

Original article: Jeremy Baskin. Business Day. 9 November 2009. Read more…

Can we manipulate the weather?

Chinese scientists claim to be able to control the weather by firing chemical filled rockets into the clouds to catalyze precipitation or to drive rain away.

Although the success of such weather alchemy is still disputed, there seems to be a growing interest in large scale geo-engineering exploits to counteract the impacts of climate change.

A recent article in the UK’s The Guardian newspaper asked: Can we manipulate the weather?

The unseasonal snow that fell on Beijing for 11 hours on Sunday was the earliest and heaviest there has been for years. It was also, China claims, man-made. By the end of last month, farmland in the already dry north of China was suffering badly due to drought. So on Saturday night China’s meteorologists fired 186 explosive rockets loaded with chemicals to “seed” clouds and encourage snow to fall. “We won’t miss any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from a lingering drought,” Zhang Qiang, head of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, told state media.

The US has tinkered with such cloud seeding to increase water flow from the Sierra Nevada mountains in California since the 1950s, but there remains widespread scientific sniffiness in the west at such attempts at weather control. The chemicals fired into the sky, usually dry ice or silver iodide, are supposed to provide a surface for water vapour to form liquid rain. But there is little evidence that it works – after all, how do investigating scientists know it would not have rained anyway?

Such doubts have not stopped China claiming mastery over the clouds. Officials said the blue skies that brightened Beijing’s parade to celebrate 60 years of communism last month were a result of the 18 cloud-seeding jets and 432 explosive rockets scrambled to empty the sky of rain beforehand. Last year, more than 1,000 rockets were fired to ensure a dry night for last year’s Olympic opening ceremony.

“Only a handful of countries in the world could organise such large-scale, magic-like weather modification,” Cui Lianqing, a senior meteorologist with the Chinese air force, told the Xinhua news agency after last month’s parade.

Magic or not, there is growing interest in such attempts to deliberately steer the weather, and on a much larger scale. Next spring, a group of the world’s leading experts on climate change will gather in California to plan how it could be done as a way to tackle global warming, and by whom. The ideas, some of which, similar to cloud-seeding, involve firing massive amounts of chemicals into the atmosphere, can sound far-fetched, but they are racing up the agenda as pessimism grows about the likely course of global warming.

As interest grows, so does concern about whether such techniques, known as geoengineering, could be developed and unleashed by a single nation, or even a wealthy individual, without wide international approval. “What will happen when Richard Branson decides he really does want to save the planet?” asks one climate expert. If China thinks it can make cloud seeding work, then what about geoengineering?

“If climate change turns ugly, then many countries will start looking at desperate measures,” says David Victor, an energy policy expert at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Logic points to a big risk of unilateral geoengineering. Unlike controlling emissions, which requires collective action, most highly capable nations could deploy geoengineering systems on their own.”

Victor is a heavyweight policy analyst, but one of his most impressive academic feats could have been to smuggle the name of the world’s favourite secret agent into the sober pages of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. “Geoengineering may not require any collective international effort to have an impact on climate,” he wrote in an article published last year. “A lone Greenfinger, self-appointed protector of the planet and working with a small fraction of the [Bill] Gates bank account, could force a lot of geoengineering on his own. Bond films of the future might [enjoy incorporating] the dilemma of unilateral planetary engineering.” Move over, Goldfinger.

Unilateral geoengineering worries experts for two reasons. First, the massive side effects; what it could do to the world’s rainfall, for example. Second, once started, geoengineering would probably have to be continued, as stopping could bring an abrupt change in climate. “One of the many dangers with unilateral geoengineering is that once a country starts, it becomes very hard to stop,” Victor says. “Removing a warming mask, even if it is a flawed mask, would expose the planet to even more rapid and probably dangerous warming.”

In a world where action on global warming has created new markets in carbon worth billions of pounds, countries are not the only players. Geoengineering would require investment and the private sector is already eyeing up opportunities. Two companies have emerged with a business plan based on dumping iron in the sea and then selling carbon offsets based on the extra pollution supposedly soaked up by the resulting algal bloom. And in their new book, Superfreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner talk approvingly of Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, whose company, Intellectual Ventures, is exploring the possibility of pumping large quantities of reflective sulphur dust into the Earth’s stratosphere through a patented 18-mile-long hose held up by helium balloons.

This is the point where most people will shake their heads, say the whole silly idea will never happen, and skip to the crossword. They could be right, but the global warming story has a tendency to outpace most attempts to predict its path. Just a few years ago, scientists and politicians talked of the need to avoid a 2C rise in global temperature, yet experts recently gathered at an Oxford University conference openly talked of a likely 4C rise, which, without urgent and unlikely action, a new report from the Met Office says could come within many of our lifetimes.

A decade ago, an unproven idea called carbon sequestration, that would see carbon emissions from power stations trapped under the ground, was talked up by a small group of advocates, but was dismissed by most people as too expensive and unworkable on a large scale. Renamed carbon capture and storage, the idea is now mainstream energy policy in countries including Britain, despite still being unproven and dismissed by many as too expensive and unworkable on a large scale. Last month, the International Energy Agency said the world should build 100 full-scale carbon-capture power stations by 2020, and 850 by 2030.

If the geoengineering narrative follows a similar arc, then how long until nations or individuals that have the most to lose, or are the first to accept that the required massive emission cuts are impossible, turn to the presently unthinkable option? The US government, under President Bush, has already lobbied the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to promote geoengineering research as “insurance”. When the Royal Society recently carried out an investigation of the options, senior figures privately expected it to dismiss the whole concept as nonsense. Instead the society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, concluded in September that methods to block out the sun “may provide a potentially useful short-term backup to mitigation in case rapid reductions in global temperature are needed”. The society stressed that emissions reductions were the way to go, but recommended international research and development of the “more promising” geoengineering techniques.

“My guess is that we will be taking geoengineering a lot more seriously in the next decade,” says Victor, “but we won’t be in a position to deploy systems for some time. Most nations will decide it is needed only if we have really bad luck as warming unfolds and if we fail miserably in controlling emissions. I put the odds of using such systems in the next 40 years at perhaps one in five.”

Of all the apparent obstacles to geoengineering, cost is not likely to be among them. Compared with the expense of investing in renewable energy and phasing out fossil fuels, the cheapest geoengineering options come with a price tag of just a few billion pounds, perhaps 1% of what it could cost to tackle global warming through emissions cuts.

Alan Robock, an expert on volcanos and climate at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has looked at how much it might cost to carry out one of the most commonly discussed geoengineering options, to mimic the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption by filling the high atmosphere with sulphur compounds, which reflect sunlight.

The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 threw so much shiny sulphurous dust into the atmosphere that temperatures across a shaded Earth dropped a year later by about 0.5C. The 1815 explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia triggered the notorious “year without a summer” and widespread failure of harvests across northern regions including Europe, the north-east US and Canada.

Robock has worked out the likely cost of technology needed to deposit a million tonnes of sulphur in the stratosphere each year, an amount equivalent to a Mount Pinatubo eruption every four to eight years, and which scientists think could be enough to cancel out the global warming caused by a continued rise in carbon emissions.

The cheapest option could be to use giant mid-air refuelling aircraft, such as the US air force’s KC-10 Extender, filled with sulphur dioxide or hydrogen sulphide gas. It would be a round-the-clock operation, with nine aircraft each required to fly three sorties a day. In a new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Robock and his colleagues say it could be done for “several billion” dollars a year. The results have forced Robock to revise a high-profile list of 20 objections to geoengineering he published last year. “It turns out that being way too expensive is not the case.”

Robock’s new analysis still includes 17 reasons why geoengineering is a bad idea. Throwing sulphur into the atmosphere could slow down the world’s water cycle and do more damage to rainfall patterns than the global warming it aims to prevent. And because techniques that focus on stopping sunlight do nothing to stop carbon dioxide pollution from cars, factories and power stations, they cannot address the looming disaster of ocean acidification. The surface of the world’s ocean is slowly turning to acid as our extra carbon pollution dissolves in seawater. Coral reefs already appear doomed and many shellfish could follow. Altering the atmosphere could also weaken solar power and reverse years of work to close the hole in the ozone layer.

With such a catalogue of potential disasters waiting to unfold, there must be a law against geoengineering? The international rulebook is fuzzy on this issue. The only international framework that directly covers many geoengineering techniques, the 1976 Environmental Modification Convention, designed to stop nations at war from meddling with each other’s weather, has never been tested. The 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty could be used to regulate activities and experiments in those shared spaces, but releases to the atmosphere are legally more problematic because nations have sovereignty over their own airspace.

Rather than laws and treaties, many experts argue that the best way to prevent countries or companies from going it alone is to plunge in and start serious research. “The way to tame the worst forms of unilateral geoengineering is to promote a lot more research, especially [into] the side effects,” Victor says. “One of the biggest dangers is that some governments will try to create a taboo against geoengineering. A taboo would stop a lot of research but it wouldn’t stop determined rogues. That scenario would probably be the worst, because rogues would not abandon their efforts and the rest of us would not have done enough research to know what to expect.”

Mike MacCracken, chief scientist at the Climate Institute in Washington, is organising the California meeting next spring, which aims to figure out some guidelines. He says large-scale unilateral geoengineering is “not very plausible” and his main concern is fairness to future generations. Once started by anybody, a geoengineering attempt would probably need to be continued by everybody else because it would offer a mask on global warming that could be dangerous to remove.

“It might be that this is how unilateral concerns should be reframed; this generation more or less deciding it will take only slow action on any type of emissions, essentially forcing the next generation to be more likely to have to invoke geoengineering to save much that anyone considers beneficial and unique about the Earth.”

Read between the lines of most scientific reports on geoengineering and there is a tacit assumption that the idea sounds so extreme that merely discussing it will refocus efforts on emission cuts. But what if the reverse is true? What if a heavily funded research programme, and articles such as this, promote the idea to people who have little interest in moving to a low-carbon world?

“Knowledge is hard to hide,” says Robock. “It would be great if people didn’t know how to build nuclear bombs, but they do. We need to research and debate the consequences and then use politics and influence to let people know what would happen.”

Original article: David Adam. 4 November 2009. The Guardian. Read more…

Lester Brown – The rising tide of environmental refugees

Original article: Lester Brown. Earth Policy Institute. 22 October 2009. Read here…

A very though provoking excerpt from the book ‘Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to save Civilization’. It concludes with these spine chilling words: “During this century we must deal with the effects of trends—rapid population growth, advancing deserts, and rising seas—that we set in motion during the last century. Our choice is a simple one: reverse these trends or risk being overwhelmed by them.”

Our early twenty-first century civilization is being squeezed between advancing deserts and rising seas. Measured by the biologically productive land area that can support human habitation, the earth is shrinking. Mounting population densities, once generated solely by population growth, are now also fueled by the relentless advance of deserts and may soon be affected by the projected rise in sea level. As overpumping depletes aquifers, millions more are forced to relocate in search of water.

Desert expansion in sub-Saharan Africa, principally in the Sahelian countries, is displacing millions of people—forcing them to either move southward or migrate to North Africa. 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. This flow of migrants has been under way for many years.

In mid-October 2003, Italian authorities discovered a boat bound for Italy carrying refugees from Africa. After being adrift for more than two weeks and having run out of fuel, food, and water, many of the passengers had died. At first the dead were tossed overboard. But after a point, the remaining survivors lacked the strength to hoist the bodies over the side. The dead and the living shared the boat, resembling what a rescuer described as “a scene from Dante’s Inferno.”

The refugees were believed to be Somalis who had embarked from Libya, but the survivors would not reveal their country of origin, lest they be sent home. We do not know whether they were political, economic, or environmental refugees. Failed states like Somalia produce all three. We do know that Somalia is an ecological disaster, with overpopulation, overgrazing, and the resulting desertification destroying its pastoral economy.

Perhaps the largest flow of Somali migrants is into Yemen, another failing state. In 2008 an estimated 50,000 migrants and asylum seekers reached Yemen, 70 percent more than in 2007. And during the first three months of 2009 the migrant flow was up 30 percent over the same period in 2008. These numbers simply add to the already unsustainable pressures on Yemen’s land and water resources, hastening its decline.

On April 30, 2006, a man fishing off the coast of Barbados discovered a 20-foot boat adrift with the bodies of 11 young men on board, bodies that were “virtually mummified” by the sun and salty ocean spray. As the end drew near, one passenger left a note tucked between two bodies: “I would like to send my family in Basada [Senegal] a sum of money. Please excuse me and goodbye.” The author of the note was apparently one of a group of 52 who had left Senegal on Christmas Eve aboard a boat destined for the Canary Islands, a jumping off point for Europe. They must have drifted for some 2,000 miles, ending their trip in the Caribbean. This boat was not unique. During the first weekend of September 2006, police intercepted boats from Mauritania with a record total of nearly 1,200 people on board.

For those living in Central American countries, including Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, Mexico is often the gateway to the United States. In 2008, Mexican immigration authorities reported some 39,000 detentions and 89,000 deportations.

In the city of Tapachula on the Guatemala-Mexico border, young men in search of jobs wait along the tracks for a slow-moving freight train passing through the city en route to the north. Some make it onto the train. Others do not. The Jesús el Buen Pastor refuge is home to 25 amputees who lost their grip and fell under a train while trying to board. For these young men, says Olga Sánchez Martínez, the director of the refuge, this is the “end of their American dream.” A local priest, Flor María Rigoni, calls the migrants attempting to board the trains “the kamikazes of poverty.”

Today, bodies washing ashore in Italy, Spain, and Turkey are a daily occurrence, the result of desperate acts by desperate people. And each day Mexicans risk their lives in the Arizona desert trying to reach jobs in the United States. On average, some 100,000 or more Mexicans leave rural areas every year, abandoning plots of land too small or too eroded to make a living. They either head for Mexican cities or try to cross illegally into the United States. Many of those who try to cross the Arizona desert perish in its punishing heat. Since 2001, some 200 bodies have been found along the Arizona border each year.

With the vast majority of the 2.4 billion people to be added to the world by 2050 coming in countries where water tables are already 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 parts of Mexico may have to move because of a lack of water.

Advancing deserts are squeezing expanding populations into an ever smaller geographic area. Whereas the U.S. Dust Bowl displaced 3 million people, the advancing desert in China’s Dust Bowl provinces could displace tens of millions.

Africa, too, is facing this problem. The Sahara Desert is pushing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria northward toward the Mediterranean. In a desperate effort to deal with drought and desertification, Morocco is geographically restructuring its agriculture, replacing grain with less thirsty orchards and vineyards.

In Iran, villages abandoned because of spreading deserts or a lack of water already number in the thousands. In the vicinity of Damavand, a small town within an hour’s drive of Tehran, 88 villages have been abandoned. And as the desert takes over in Nigeria, farmers and herders are forced to move, squeezed into a shrinking area of productive land. Desertification refugees typically end up in cities, many in squatter settlements. Others migrate abroad.

In Latin America, deserts are expanding and forcing people to move in both Brazil and Mexico. In Brazil, some 66 million hectares of land are affected, much of it concentrated in the country’s northeast. In Mexico, with a much larger share of arid and semiarid land, the degradation of cropland now extends over 59 million hectares.

While desert expansion and water shortages are now displacing millions of people, rising seas promise to displace far greater numbers in the future, given the concentration of the world’s population in low-lying coastal cities and rice-growing river deltas. The numbers could eventually reach the hundreds of millions, offering yet another powerful reason for stabilizing both climate and population.

In the end, the issue with rising seas is whether governments are strong enough to withstand the political and economic stress of relocating large numbers of people while suffering heavy coastal losses of housing and industrial facilities.

During this century we must deal with the effects of trends—rapid population growth, advancing deserts, and rising seas—that we set in motion during the last century. Our choice is a simple one: reverse these trends or risk being overwhelmed by them.

Paul Gilding – The Climate Giant Awakes. Have we turned a corner?

Regular readers may be a little surprised by this column. I am regularly arguing that the science shows we are inevitably approaching, or may have past, a tipping point where widespread, rolling ecological and economic crises take hold.

But there’s another critical tipping point, of a very different character – where the world’s political and business leaders turn firmly towards action. Here’s the surprise – I think we may be at this tipping point already.

Scientists have become increasingly alarmed in recent years, as climate change reality has raced ahead of the political response. They point to countless examples of accelerating feedbacks, such as the reduction in the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2 and rapid Arctic melting.

While they regularly point these out to our political masters, many of them express despair at the slow response.

So on what basis do I think the global political system has started to turn?

I think we have recently seen a number of developments that, taken together, indicate a profound shift is under way. When such a shift takes hold, it will rapidly accelerate – with significant implications for campaign and business strategy in this area over the years ahead.

The most significant and encouraging shift is what Tom Friedman in his recent NYT column called the shift from Red China to Green China. The Chinese leadership has for many years been talking about the need to act on climate but has in recent months shown serious potential to lead on this issue.

The rationale for them to do so is certainly there. As they have reeled under the negative economic and social impacts of pollution, China has accepted that the growth model followed by Western capitalism cannot work for them. Will they now pursue clean energy so vigorously they will dominate this new global market? Could climate even provide the issue on which China can manifest its global leadership ambitions?

I increasingly think the answer to both questions is likely to be yes, with far reaching economic and geopolitical implications. There is a good summary of recent developments and this potential for leadership, including China’s potential to see its emissions peak by 2030 in the article “Peaking Duck” by the Centre for American Progress’ Julian L. Wong.

Another important indicator is the recognition in the US political debate that the strength of the Chinese response is an economic threat to the US. The fear is growing that the resistance to change in the US may leave that economy floundering in what will be the largest economic transformation in history. As argued by Tom Friedman in the column referred to earlier, while America is currently strong on innovation, research ultimately follows the market. Friedman pointed out that “America’s premier solar equipment maker, Applied Materials, is about to open the world’s largest privately funded solar research facility — in Xian, China.”

The goal posts are also shifting in the science. An increasing number of scientists are coming to the view that the global CO2 target should be closer to 350ppm rather than 450ppm. In recent months we’ve seen this get global credence in response to the 350.org campaign, with eminent figures like the climate economist Nicholas Stern and the IPCC Chair Pachauri coming out in personal support of the 350 target. They would both be well aware that such a target would require cuts far more dramatic than anything on the table now. With such a goal, the task becomes the elimination of net CO2 emissions from the economy rather than their reduction.

At a deeper level, Stern also lent his considerable intellectual weight to the debate on economic growth, stating what was previously heresy – that economic growth itself must now be questioned. He recently put the case that there were probably only 20 years left for further economic growth before the earth was full.

Equally important as these scientific and political developments are shifts in the business community. While debates are raging in Western economies including in the US, Japan and Australia on climate policy, there are signs of a profound underlying shift emerging in corporate attitudes. Symbolising this in the United States is the rapid withdrawal of major companies from the US Chamber of Commerce over their lobbying against action to regulate greenhouse gases. In recent weeks, major corporates such as PG&E and Apple have resigned, Nike has quit the Board of the organisation and GE and Johnson & Johnson have both publicly distanced themselves from the Chamber’s anti-climate action lobbying efforts.

Another example was a recent initiative by Cambridge Program for Sustainability Leadership’s Corporate Leaders Group, with 500 companies signing on to the Copenhagen Communiqué which endorsed strong action on climate by the world’s governments including keeping warning below 2 degrees and urging early action. “There is nothing to be gained by delay”, the communiqué states.

Many other countries previously in the background on the global climate debate like Indonesia (which is the world’s 3rd largest net emitter due to its extensive deforestation) recently announced its intention to cut emissions by 26% by 2020 compared to Business As Usual and by 41% if they get international financial support to go further. They also believe they can turn their forests into a net carbon sink by 2030.

And of course there is a storm of grassroots campaigning erupting around the world in the lead up to Copenhagen with campaigns like 350.org and many others.

Many of you will have the correct response that these are all only words – that we are yet to see action of real substance. That’s certainly true. Words are early signs, not conclusive evidence. But I think I can smell it now, and when these things do turn, they do so remarkably quickly – as we saw when governments responded to the recent financial crisis.

Of course this does not mean we can relax and it will all be OK! The climate system is now rapidly descending into crisis and the consequences will be felt for decades even with strong action now. What it does indicate however is that we will not be the proverbial boiling frogs who just sit here passively as the system collapses around us. It is only early signs of the turn, but it gives us an indication of what’s coming.

So we mustn’t back off, not even a little bit, with the pressure being applied to the system to encourage change. But we should perhaps reconsider tactics.

I think some of our energy should be focused for example on developing an emergency plan to fix the climate. The science clearly lays out what a stable climate looks like and it requires the elimination of net CO2 emissions from the economy within decades. Any rational analysis says this is going to require the equivalent of a war plan to achieve it. In future columns I’ll be saying a great deal more on that topic.

But for now, take a look around. The world is turning our way and while the crisis is still coming, the crisis response may not be as far behind it as we thought.

Original article: Paul Gilding. www.paulgilding.com. 8 October 2009. Read it…

The R20bn risk – discussion on impacts of Sea Level Rise

As part of the Cambridge Resilience Forum, we present a Forum Discussion on:

The Financial and Human Impact of Sea Level Rise
Wednesday 30 September 2009
17:30 – 19:30
Townhouse Hotel, 60 Corporation Street, Cape Town

Some climate scientists believe that we may have underestimated the tempo of sea level rise. Sea level rise could have a severe human and financial impact on low-lying coastal areas. What is the latest scientific evidence indicating? How will sea level rise impact property investment and insurance? How are we going to deal with disaster impact and the mass resettlement of people?

These are just some of the questions that will be discussed by our expert panel consisting of:

• Prof Geoff Brundrit – Special Advisor on Oceans and Climate Change, National Department of Environmental Affairs
• Anton Cartwright - Economist, Stockholm Environmental Institute
• Rian Mouton – Santam Facultative Reinsurance
• Gregg Oelofse – Environmental Resource Management, City of Cape Town

A 2008 sea-level rise risk assessment done on behalf of the City of Cape Town concluded that within the next 25 years there is a 85% probability of 60,9km2 (2% of Metro area) being covered by sea for a short period. The accompanying expected loss of real estate value is just under R20bn.

The report concludes:
“The sovereign risk of sea-level rise for the City of Cape Town is significant and will increase in the next 25 years regardless of reductions in greenhouse gas”.

This importance of gaining understanding on sea level rise therefore cannot be over emphasized. Come and join us to learn, with other professionals, about this topic.

Non Forum members pay R230 to attend, but why not join the Forum and get great discount on a year’s seminars?

For more information and to book your seat, please contact Magda de Kok on magda.dekok@cpsl.cam.ac.uk

Editor’s workshop on climate change

Climate Change: The biggest story ever?

A Workshop for South African Editors with Global and Local Experts
Park Hyatt Hotel, Rosebank, Thursday 6th August 2009

In Copenhagen in December the world will negotiate a new agreement on climate change and carbon emissions that will profoundly affect South Africa’s development in the next decades. What can we expect from this negotiation and what are its implications for South Africa’s economy in the years to come?

Up till now human-induced Climate Change has been regarded by most media and politicians as an ‘environmental’ issue. This view is fast becoming dangerously inaccurate. The growing involvement of all major governments and many of the world’s largest companies in finding ways to mitigate this turbulence indicates that Climate Change is now a central economic and social issue, capable of dramatically altering political and economic landscapes over the coming years.

What confronts South Africa? Who is doing what to develop a coherent response? And what might the media’s role be? These and other questions will be addressed during a workshop for editors and senior journalists hosted by Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership (CPSL) on 6 August 2009.

The day features contributions by James Smith, Chairman of Shell UK, and a veritable line-up of local climate experts including three contributors to the 4th UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of 2007.

A further highlight of the day is a visit by British Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change, Mr. Ed Milliband.

The workshop is funded by the Danish government in support of its hosting the UN climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.

The day’s programme consist of two parts: A breakfast session with inputs from two leading voices on climate change and business; and small group discussions with local climate scientists, policy experts and business leaders facilitated by Peter Willis & Richard Calland.

For any further details, you can get in touch with Magda de Kok at magda.dekok@cpsl.cam.ac.uk or 021 469 4765.

TRUTH or COMFORT?

On Reading James Lovelock’s “The Vanishing Face of Gaia – A Final Warning”

By: Peter Willis

If I look back on the many moments of challenge and disturbance in my life it’s clear that a critical question at such moments has always been “How much truth am I willing to expose myself to?” I think it’s fair to say that the only reason I’ve been able to come through some of those challenges and move on has been because I’ve opened myself to a fresh degree of truth, usually truth about my character, assumptions or behaviour. This is always uncomfortable as it involves having to acknowledge that some aspects of my self with which I was perfectly content have in fact been causing problems for others and if I want the benefit of good relations with those others the old behaviours will have to change. And giving up on a view of myself that used to work just fine (at least, so I thought) is a hard wrench.

Of course there is always the option of denial, to which I am no stranger. I simply discount the new, challenging information and re-affirm that I am fine just as I am and it is the others who have misunderstood the situation. It is usually possible to find evidence that validates this ‘status quo’ and allows me to carry on in my groove. That is, until the next time, when the challenge tends to arrive with much greater force.

If you are wondering why this bout of psychological introspection, it is because I have just read “The Vanishing Face of Gaia – A Final Warning” (Allen Lane 2009), written by one of the greatest living earth scientists, James Lovelock. At the age of 90 Lovelock is a master with no need to prove anything to anyone. An independent scientist and inventor for the past 45 years, reliant not on government grants but what he could make from his own inventions and advisory work, he speaks about the future of human civilization on Earth with a breadth of knowledge and a freedom of perspective that comes like a breath of fresh air…and fresh truth. I cannot remember when I was so challenged by a single, short book.

Lovelock is widely known as the creator of Gaia theory, named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth. Gaia theory states that, rather than life taking place on an inert planet made up of rocks, gases and other lifeless elements, living organisms (including us) form an interactive system with these elements in order to create the conditions for further life to emerge and flourish. For example living organisms will use all their evolutionary ingenuity to, for example, create and maintain an atmosphere that favours their own survival and growth. The idea that plants, microbes and animals could influence the atmosphere has been a hard one for most physicists, geologists, chemists and others to accept, maintaining as they do that the atmosphere is made up of a mixture of inert gases and particles driven primarily by the power of the sun. Indeed it has taken all of 40 years for the wider scientific community to allow the validity of this theory and even now its full implications are far from being grasped by both mainstream scientists and certainly the wider public.

So why is Gaia theory important, and especially now? Any scientific theory is only as important as its ability to predict how the system that it refers to will behave in future. Look at how successful the theory of Gravity has been in predicting how and where objects will fall, even though nobody fully understands why gravity operates in the way it does.

Gaia theory is critically important now because it has been pointing all along to a strong link between the health of the Earth’s living systems and the state of the climate. Nobody doubts that a hotter climate will have big impacts on living systems like agriculture, forests, water and indeed us humans, but Lovelock has for years been saying the opposite as well – that the more we interfere with (i.e. destroy, pollute or build over) nature’s complex eco-systems, the less able they are to do their work of regulating atmospheric temperature. One of the predictions he made using Gaia theory was that tropical and boreal forests play an important role in regulating global temperature. This has been proven and is now generally accepted, hence the growing focus on preserving what we have left of these forest systems.

But as a student of the field of sustainability for the past twelve years all of this on its own would not have been enough to surprise or shock me. What has stopped me in my tracks is Lovelock’s argument that we humans have done so much damage to eco-systems and have put so much CO2 up into the atmosphere at such an extraordinary speed during the past 200 years that we have overwhelmed nature’s ability to regulate the atmospheric temperature at an optimal level and he believes that we are very close to witnessing a swift rise of 5°C in global average temperature, from which it will take thousands of years to retreat back to our current ‘normal’. Such a ‘hot state’ will make it impossible for human settlement to continue in many parts of the world as agriculture will fail. This will almost certainly result in mass migration, conflict over shrinking resources and much premature death. By the second half of this century Lovelock sees the Earth carrying only about 100 million people instead of the current load of about 6,3 billion, a culling of 62 out of every 63 people now alive.

Those who survive will, he suggests, be clustered in the few areas still blessed with an ability to grow food. His hope is that, from this new, stable ‘hot state’ human civilization will be able – if all goes well – to partner with Gaia much more consciously and help ‘her’ to become a more fully intelligent planet with a much longer life span than she might otherwise manage.

He reminds us that since humans first emerged on earth about 1 million years ago there have been seven extreme climatic shifts, from cool to warm and from warm to cool. Each of them was devastating to the humans alive at the time and some geneticists believe that one of the incidents caused the human population to sink as low as around 2,000 people, a period known as “the genetic bottleneck”. Lovelock believes our enormous population growth and burning of fossil fuels have made it likely that the coming transition will be more violent than any before, requiring all our best qualities of leadership and collective compassion and ingenuity to avoid it becoming the end of human civilization altogether.

When one of the finest scientific minds our species has produced makes an assessment like this after 90 years of life and still in full possession of his brilliant faculties (see his fascinating interview about the book on YouTube) one must take notice. Though he would be the last to say he had discovered “the truth” about our future, his arguments for predicting a very rough time ahead are based on rigorous scientific method and a lifetime of experiment and engagement with the great scientific minds of his age. Though he comes across as a cheerful man, Lovelock has clearly thought deeply about the consequences of what he is seeing. Being responsible, he shares what he sees with us.

What we do with his unpalatable information is, of course, up to us. I’ve taken the decision to hold his analysis in the front of my mind from now on (until it is superseded by something even more convincing) and not do what I’m strongly tempted to do, which is to sweep it under the rug and go on believing that we are merely facing a set of severe problems to which we may, if we work hard and swiftly at it, soon find the solutions.

I am now working on the assumption that we have passed that point. There is nothing we can currently conceive of doing that will preserve a remotely decent life – indeed any life at all – for between 6 and 7 billion people on earth. How soon will the large-scale destruction of life-supporting systems begin? Interestingly, Lovelock sees this coming not next year or even necessarily within the next 5-10 years, but he believes that once it begins “it will be very rapid indeed”.

So where has this left me? Two thoughts predominate for me as I write this – one looks backward, the other looks forward. First, I am profoundly struck by the realization that we humans, in what has been our ‘grand project’ of the past seven millennia, to settle the earth and achieve the comfortable living of our dreams, have failed comprehensively. For just as that dream appears within our grasp (look at the extraordinary levels of comfort in which about 1 billion people now live all over the world) it is revealed to us as being built on illusory foundations. Before we embarked on agriculture we barely disturbed Gaia, in fact probably contributed to the evolution of her self-regulatory systems. Once we learned how to create food surpluses and started altering large landscapes we began to weaken other aspects of the Gaia system. With the Industrial Revolution we slammed our foot to the floor and have not lifted it since.

As Lovelock puts it, “If there were only 100 million of us on the Earth we could do almost anything we liked without harm. At 7 billion I doubt anything sustainable is possible or will significantly reduce fossil fuel combustion; by significantly I mean enough to reduce global heating. Seven billion living as we do, and aspire to do, is too many for a planet that tries to self-regulate its climate.”

This being the case, I look around me at so many examples of human success (technological, institutional, cultural, etc.) and ask “How can we judge anything a success if the whole project of human civilization is basically a failure?” Something in me refuses to take this in fully. I still find pleasure and joy in small things human and man-made – I am still terribly attached to my tribe and its achievements. But in the harsh reckoning of the likely near future so many of my tribe’s successes are going to look so very hollow.

The second thought that arises for me is about what is worth doing now. For despite feeling a disabling sense of grief and near despair, I also feel moved respond by taking action. Each of us has a different gift to bring to the world and mine, I think, is to do with bringing diverse people together to think beyond their normal boundaries. So I am thinking about how to draw together people of influence from all corners of South African society to start thinking through the practical implications of what Lovelock and other systems scientists are telling us. I have no illusions that this will be easy – my own attempts to imagine what it might be like to plan for mass migration away from low-lying coastal areas, to take just one example, show me that this is no picnic, and as the great early 19th century philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “The average man would rather face death or torture than think.” But I believe that once any group of intelligent, responsible people is given the chance to engage with the science and start their own personal journey of grasping what may lie ahead, they will become available for creative, humane leadership, of which we will need plenty.

I am not sorry to have been shaken out of my comfort. I fully expect to seek out fresh comfort in different forms for the rest of my life – I think it’s part of my nature – but I also acknowledge that comfort can bring great danger and to be shaken out of it by an exposure to new truths is a necessary part of being fully alive and enables me to play my own modest, ephemeral part in this much greater story of Life.

2 August 2009

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