Dateline: Copenhagen

Photo courtesy Crosby Allison

Jane Goodall, the venerable field biologist and chimpanzee champion, addressed the looming perils of climate change during a visit to the World Wilderness Congress in Mérida, Mexico.

Similar to her approach to wildlife awareness, Goodall chooses to describe the importance of curbing greenhouse gases through stories rather than statistics.

“I shall describe going to Greenland, standing at the foot of an ice cliff, watching and hearing vast loads of ice crash off and thunder down into the bowls of this ice cliff and a raging river coming out when before there was never even a trickle even during the summer,” she said, “seeing the elders with tears pouring down their faces because the animals are calling out for help.”

“Going almost straight from there to Panama where Kuna Yala indigenous people have been living for hundreds of years on an offshore island. They are now making careful plans to evacuate their people onto the mainland. They’ve found places for them to go. The first ones have already had to go because of rising sea levels,” she added.

Goodall stressed the importance of protecting forests as a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The Jane Goodall Institute is collaborating with Google to provide forest communities with detailed maps, which they can use to demonstrate forest re-growth and apply for carbon credits, she said.

A main cause of greenhouse gas emissions that warrant greater attention, Goodall said, is human diet. “The vast amounts of greenhouse gases, which we are producing through people wanting to eat more and more and more meat, through the creation of methane gas, is contributing as much to greenhouse gas emissions as the burning of fuel in automobiles, as well as leading to mass amounts of pain and suffering from the animals and the release into the environment of all the antibiotics used to try to keep them alive. We are creating superbugs. People have already died from scratches on their fingers,” she said. [Read the current edition of World Watch magazine for more information about the role of livestock in climate change.]

The board of the United Nations Adaptation Fund wrapped up its final round of meetings prior to Copenhagen today in Bonn, Germany. Much of the discussion will center on how adaptation projects, supported by a potentially massive fund, will be monitored and evaluated – a discussion that surely will not be settled in only three days. Luckily, the real work of adapting to climate change is not simply waiting for the slow-moving UNFCCC train to come around. Last week, 100 different not-for-profit adaptation projects from around the developing world showcased their work at the World Bank’s 2009 Development Marketplace event.

For me, the event was a refreshing break from tracking all the UNFCCC discussions on adaptation fund structure and management. The showcased projects had been selected as finalists for the World Bank’s annual competition, and in the end 26 projects were selected to receive funding, up to $200,000 each. The implementers I spoke to were motivated by real and dangerous climate impacts affecting their home communities, and all had a plan for scaling up their operations to reach other affected areas.

Floods devastated the state of Orissa in the summer of 2009. Climate adaptation is a must.

In Orissa, on the east coast of India, coastal villagers are being hit with a developing-world double whammy: highway construction has blocked many avenues for rainwater to flow into the ocean, and flood rains have increased in severity and frequency, especially in the last 10 years. Community elders have never seen anything like the massive floods that now hit Orissa almost yearly, and houses never needed as much post-flood repair or rebuilding as they do now.

Isaac from Catholic Relief Services (CRS) explained that his team used to come to areas like Orissa simply to rebuild flood-damaged buildings. “That wasn’t enough,” he said. “We were never going to get teams out to every flood-prone village in India to do that work.” Moving beyond the traditional aid model, CRS and local builders designed a training course for Orissa villagers on improving their building techniques. Improved techniques included cross supports, deeper foundations, and building houses higher on platforms. After one season of trainings and construction, people were already taking notice of the way that these new techniques kept structures intact through floods. Soon, houses throughout the area were sporting cross supports and higher platforms.

CRS was competing at the Development Marketplace for funding that would allow them to expand in the Orissa area with the eventual goal of pitching their training course to the Indian government for countrywide adoption. Such a vision for scale-up is far more conceivable than sending in an entourage of aid groups to build houses. The project is made even stronger by the fact that it is entirely dependent on local materials, which both speaks to the local culture and makes widespread adoption possible.

Although the CRS project was not selected as a winner, it helped me to define what adaptation really looks like. In the UNFCCC world, adaptation is being slowly defined through a series of bureaucratic steps that will help to manage adaptation funding, when it finally comes through.  However, real adaptation is already moving forward on the ground, and success will ultimately be defined by the values that CRS has applied in Orissa: locally managed, culturally viable, and scalable.

An open letter addressed to “leaders across India” was released last week by the Indian Youth Climate Network. The letter, whose targets include Ministers of State, climate negotiators, political party leaders, and business, media and civil society heads, calls for those in power to hear the voice of their future generations and look past the numbers to the deeper issues being faced by India today.

The letter  includes a call for a moratorium on disposable plastic, a major reforestation drive, education with sustainability at its core,  a weekly moratorium on vehicular and industrial air pollution, adherence to a development path that is based on the Gandhian principals of “need, not greed”, the promotion of ethical values through the media, and for community driven decision making.

“India has the resources herself to change things, the greatest resource is each and every Indian,” the letter states.

Linkesh Diwan, a member of the 20-strong Indian Youth Delegation to Copenhagen said of the letter, “We want to raise attention about the bare issues that confront our human race, relevant not only to people in India, but across the world… These are the deeper issues we must address and they resonate with people more strongly than numbers alone. The problem goes deeper than simply carbon,” he added.

The letter can be accessed here. [For those not familiar with the word “Ji”, it is a term of respect, meaning something like “sir” or “madam”, and in India is used to express respect when speaking to ones seniors.]

Image Courtesy: Sustainable Business Consulting

In parallel to the Barcelona international climate talks last week, a report on one of the major issues under discussion, green technology, was launched in Delhi. Entitled “A Policy Approach for Supporting Clean Energy Technology in India,” and produced by the Coalition for Innovation, Employment and Development (CIED), the report finds that developing and deploying advanced clean technologies, including biofuels, hydro, wind, and nuclear, could create almost 10 million jobs in India by 2025.

However, in order to capture this opportunity, the report states that removing Intellectual Property Rights (or IPRs), which are the fees charged by the innovator of a particular technology for purchasing their invention, would be a bad move, slowing down technology developments, and that, conversely, they must be strengthened.

A variety of forms of compulsory licensing, which is the granting of licenses by governments to circumvent international property costs, have been called for to broaden access to technologies for public purposes by developing nations in the climate talks. But Pawan Chopra, Director of Dua Consulting, and a lead author of the study, said this “is a red herring” at the report’s launch in Delhi, adding that “in the real world, people only develop technology for profit.”

The CIED report proffers that efforts, such as compulsory licensing, to avoid IPRs, would actually discourage innovators from sharing technologies with India and other developing countries. “Intellectual property will be the catalyst for cleantech innovation and deployment in India,” says the report, adding that it will pull in billions of dollars worth of private capital, which would translate into additional jobs.

In addition to enforcing and strengthening IPRs, the authors state that policies to reduce barriers to market access are also needed in India. These would include the provision of lower tariffs for clean technology, reduced time for patent awards on environmental technologies, and tax incentives for clean technologies.

However, recommendations to strengthen IPRs for green technologies, in particular, come in marked contrast to the position of many developing countries in the international climate talks that calls for the costs of green technology IPRs to be lowered or fully covered by a global regime.

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In an earlier article in the Wall Street Journal India, I had argued about why India should allow a review of its unilateral mitigation actions. Here I would like to explore why the developed world needs to make a stronger case to encourage India’s active engagement in the future climate treaty. Followers of climate change negotiations would have noticed the paradigm shift in the way in which India views its role in climate change mitigation. India’s earlier role as the de facto spokesperson for the developing world was proving counterproductive not only to its self-interest but to climate change negotiations as a whole. India has in the recent past demonstrated that it is willing to undertake actions to ensure that its growth does not contribute to climate change and has announced its intentions strong and clear to adopt a low-carbon economic growth trajectory.

As mentioned by the U.S. special envoy to climate change, Todd Stern, in a recent interview, it is now widely recognized that major developing countries like India are undertaking substantial unilateral efforts in the fight against climate change. However, he also mentioned that the expectations from China and India are not just unilateral efforts but also formal engagement with the international climate change architecture that is currently being negotiated. India, for obvious reasons, is reluctant to codify its unilateral actions in any international climate treaty because it is fearful that such commitments could be used to hold its feet to the fire at a later date. India’s approach to other concepts in climate change have been similar. With respect to sector-based approaches to mitigation which could also include sectoral crediting mechanisms, there is paranoia about the imposition of global sector-wide benchmarks that could be used to restrict India’s exports under the garb of environmental protection. Obviously, for the government of a fast growing developing country like India, such an eventuality goes against its developmental mandate and could lead to severe political repercussions.

Hence, given the mistrust in the developing world due to historical reasons, the perceived political fallout of engagement could be seen as far greater than the incentives that are currently visible. If the world wants to convince India to back its unilateral actions with an international agreement, then it should also make the effort to demonstrate to India what the benefits of engagement could be. For India, who hitherto was unwilling to even act unilaterally, it is essential that any co-benefits that it garners by adopting a low-carbon economy are not negated by its efforts to engage with the international community. It is clear that incentives provided by the developed world through the same climate change treaty that it wants India to be a part of will be the ideal way to attract active engagement.

This comment is an exclusive contribution to our blog by Anmol Vanamali (avanamali@ccap.org), International Policy Analyst at the Center for Clean Air Policy in Washington DC.

Mock Annex I leaders prepare to cut up a climate finance check for developing countries (Photo courtesy of Oxfam))

Last Monday, Alexander Ochs called November the “month for ambition.” After already slow progress at the last Copenhagen preparatory meeting in Bangkok in October, the creeping pace this week has left even more unresolved business for negotiators to get through for the world to get a binding global agreement in Copenhagen.

United States negotiators continued to stall on offering guaranteed and quantified greenhouse gas pollution cuts. A U.S. target will have no credibility until the Senate passes climate legislation, which is so far not on track to happen before Copenhagen 15^th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the UN climate convention ends. Given this uncertainty, the industrialized nations continued to hesitate on raising the level of their reduction commitments. High-emitting emerging countries have also mostly balked at being asked to limit their own emissions.

Pushing negotiations into 2010, possibly as far as COP 16 (likely in Mexico in December), would buy the U.S. time to create domestic law, but at the risk of countries not ratifying an agreement before the Kyoto Protocol’s commitments expire in 2012. Governments are now talking about reaching a politically binding agreement in Copenhagen, instead of a legally binding one. Reaching agreement on a strong treaty without tying all the legal bows is better than getting a weak treaty that is legally binding. Still, every meeting that fails to wrap up a post-Kyoto agreement puts us one step closer to the commitment-free void that still waits for us on 1 January 2013 when Kyoto currently expires.

Big gaps also remain in the forest negotiations. The Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) rules for developed countries still don’t distinguish between intact, natural forests and tree plantations. Turning the first into the second releases significant amount of carbon and kills forest species. Protection against developing country conversion of natural forests remains in the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) section, but only in vague terms, the text still in brackets to signify that governments haven’t yet agreed on the exact definition. These loopholes leave a major source of emissions unregulated.

Financing discussions also only inched forward, with funding for adaptation, technology transfer, and climate disaster insurance still having far to go. An adaptation fund for developing countries was nearly finished last year in Poland, and has served as a good model for other funds. Nations looked to a proposal by the Japanese government this week to fill in the details for formulating the other funds, but the proposal was vague and looked strikingly similar to a U.S. architecture already under consideration. Meanwhile, governments fought over text that would have industrialized nations paying a risk insurance premium for climate change-induced disasters in developing countries. No clarity on any of these funding proposals emerged by the end of the week.

Developing countries, international youth, and sustainable development advocates reacted with panic at the agonizing pace of negotiations. The Africa Group delegates staged a temporary walkout in protest of industrialized countries’ failure to finalize their reduction commitments. Youth, environment, and development groups called out Saudi Arabia’s persistent attempts to stall any progress with banners and actions outside the negotiating hall and 18 Saudi embassies worldwide. These groups are anxious to see a swifter commitment to an agreement. As the youth said at the meeting’s only intervention speech late Friday, “take the brackets off our future.”

This comment is an exclusive contribution to our blog by Kyle Gracey (chair@sustainus.org), Chair of  SustainUS – a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of young people advancing sustainable development and youth empowerment in the United States.

If you believe only divine intervention will produce a climate agreement in December, here’s encouraging news. A major interreligious conference called   “Many Heavens, One Earth” was held this week at Windsor Castle, where many of the world’s faiths presented  seven-years plans for greening their activities and promoting climate stabilization.   The conference was convened by the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme.  Thirty-one plans were presented by the major faiths, including the Baha’i Faith, Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism, and Sikhism.

Many religions are leveraging their extensive holdings of land and buildings to show leadership in reducing their carbon and environmental footprint, as described in this article.  A few highlights:  The Church of England has pledged to reduce carbon emissions by at least 42 percent by 2020, and by 80 percent by 2050–a front-loaded commitment that ought to embarrass US Congressional efforts, which aim only for 17-20 percent reductions by 2020 (though the 80% by 2050 number is the same). The U.S. Catholic Coalition on Climate Change is targeting the tens of thousands of Catholic parishes, schools, hospitals, and colleges and universities in the United States to green their operations, and is working with treasurers of these institutions to green their investment portfolios.

Perhaps most notable are the commitments by Muslim leaders, which appear to signal a new and substantial engagement on environmental issues by Islamic institutions. Under the Muslim seven year plan submitted at the conference, the holy city of Medina will become a model green city.  It also calls for creation of a Muslim Associations for Climate Change Action (MACCA) that will represent Islamic nations and faith communities from around the world and for a “Green Hajj” to make the traditional Islamic pilgrimage environmentally friendly within a decade.
The involvement of faith groups is an especially encouraging development for the environment and climate.   My book, Inspiring Progress: Religions’ Contributions to Sustainable Development, points out that roughly 85 percent of the world’s people, making them a potentially powerful political force on environmental issues.   And the moral authority of religions is a strong influence in shaping worldviews.  More concretely, according to ARC, the world’s faiths own 7 percent of habitable land, run more than half of the world’s schools, control 7 percent of the world’s investments, and make major purchases of paper, equipment, and building materials.    Thus, greening religious activities, and involving religions in pushing for environmental legislation, regulations, and norms could give an enormous boost to the effort to build sustainable societies. Insha’Allah.

The Washington Times-organized briefing at the Willard Hotel in Washington on November 4 certainly started under the ambitious title ”Advancing the Global Debate over Climate Change Policy.” With a heavy representation of the Republican side, the briefing seemed to offer a chance to hear these representatives’ proposals on how to move the discussions on climate protection forward in the run-up to the Copenhagen conference. But instead of advancement, their debate rather reflected the logjam that Washington seems to have gotten used to.

While representatives from the American Farm Bureau Association or the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association and Senator Mike Johanns (R-NE) alike recognized the importance of reacting to climate change, they failed to deliver solutions on how to  precisely decrease emissions in their view. Instead, they repeated that they disagree with the (according to a range of environmental, social and religious organizations) already heavily loophole-destructed cap-and-trade system currently under discussion in the Senate.

The ‘no-sayers’ statements were intercepted when Charles Ebinger from the Brookings Institution reminded the conference of the realities in many regions across the globe, where India is building a wall to stop climate refugees from Bangladesh, and where the Himalayan Glaciers are melting, threatening millions of people’s water supplies. But it did not take long for many speakers to resume the statements on why not to take action.

Just 30 days before the Copenhagen climate-negotiations, what are decision-makers waiting for? David Bookbinder of the Sierra Club as well as Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) reminded the participants of the Environmental Protection Agency’s responsibility to act with emission regulation measures if the U.S. Congress fails to agree on sufficient measures. Is this going to become the only credible response to the ongoing blockade and the continued creation of loopholes in the climate bill?

To conclude, however, the set-up of the briefing did not allow for any further discussion of this and other questions of how to act against climate change. The only two speakers in the final panel were Czech President Vaclav Klaus and Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who are both known for their denial of human-induced climate change. It must be considered irresponsible and far from non-partisan practice of the Washington Times to select just two speakers, who are both repudiating the broad scientific consensus on climate change and who are neither representative of the EU, nor the Congress view.

In an article in the November/December 2009 [PDF] edition of World Watch Magazine (“Livestock and Climate Change”), authors Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang argue that livestock emissions have been severely underestimated. In their view, livestock and their byproducts account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent each year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions.  Based on their analysis, Goodland and Anhang recommend a radical decrease in meat consumption in order to help slow climate change.

Goodland and Anhang’s numbers are far above those reported in a widely cited 2006 report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. It  estimates that 18 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions are attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs, and poultry. “Livestock and Climate Change” has stirred intensive discussion in a number of fora. While some readers supported the authors’ assessment and recommendations, others disagreed with either or both.

We want to provide everyone who is interested in this important debate—experts or not—with an open forum for discussion. While the magazine’s masthead clearly states that “Opinions expressed in World Watch are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Worldwatch Institute,” scientific integrity and the search for viable sustainability solutions are the foundation of the Institute’s daily work.

We invite you to contribute to the discussion by commenting on the article here. The most constructive and compelling comments will also be printed in a future issue of World Watch. In addition, please check out our blog, Nourishing the Planet, where the Worldwatch food and agriculture team argues for a different, and in their view more effective, way to address mixed-crop livestock and sustainable food than the Goodland/ Anhang article recommends.

Photo courtesy of Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

As a former Minister of the Environment turned Chancellor, Angela Merkel had already proven those wrong who surmised that environment positions are a dead end to high-rising political aspirations; now she became only the second German politician (after Konrad Adenauer, the first head of a German government after the Second World War, in 1957) who received the honor to address the U.S. Congress; and as a widely respected leader on environmental issues who is, at the same time, the leader of a conservative party, she would be well positioned to appeal to cautious Republicans when talking about climate change and energy reformation—at least I had hoped so in a recent interview with Reuters.

Angela Merkel in her speech on Capitol Hill yesterday, just weeks after her reelection for a second term (this time as a leader of a center-right coalition) was moved by the honor and the standing ovations she received from U.S. lawmakers even before she had started her speech. Following up on her promises, she spent a good portion of her talk on climate change, urging Congress and the Obama administration to take bold steps to address the issue, in her view one of the “great tests” of the 21st century. “We all know we have no time to lose,” she said.

But her remarks did not resonate with most Republicans. While Merkel’s remarks were met with passionate applause from Democrats, almost the entire Republican side—including key swing voters, such as Independent Senator Dick Lugar from Indiana and Republican Senator Olympia Snowe from Maine—remained silent. When the Chancellor pointed out that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would spur economic and jobs growth worldwide, the same partisan gulf occurred.

Already earlier in the day, Republicans had refused to attend the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s markup of Senators John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer’s (D-Calif.) important climate bill (Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act). The only one out of seven Republican Senators on the committee who showed up for the meeting was Sen. George V. Voinovich (Ohio) who briefly expressed the Republican opposition to the committee’s proceedings. In their view, the Environmental Protection Agency has not done enough economic analysis of the Kerry-Boxer bill. Democrats, however, accuse their opponents of pure gamesmanship pointing out that the Kerry-Boxer bill is modeled after the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, which passed the House side of Congress earlier this year and underwent intense economic scrutiny, including from the EPA.

Angela Merkel can tell a great success story about green jobs creation in Germany. The country—home to Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Opel, and Volkswagen—is on track to have more people employed in the environmental technology sector than in the automobile industry as early as 2015. It has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by more than 20% since the beginning of the 1990s. But it seemed yesterday as if only half of the U.S. representatives were ready for Merkel’s optimism—one that has often been echoed by President Obama in the past.  Regarding the Copenhagen UN climate summit, Merkel said: “I’m convinced, once we in Europe and America show ourselves ready to adopt binding agreements, we will also be able to persuade China and India to join in ….No doubt about it, in December, the world will look to us, to the Europeans and to the Americans. ” Thus far, only half of America looks back.