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Category: General news

Managing director of Ebono Institute and major sponsor of The Generator, Geoff Ebbs, is running against Kevin Rudd in the seat of Griffith at the next Federal election. By the expression on their faces in this candid shot it looks like a pretty dull campaign. Read on

  • UK overseas aid ignoring small scale agriculture

    UK overseas aid ignoring small scale agriculture

    Ecologist

    3rd February, 2010

    Department for International Development (DfID) accused of failing to support long-term agricultural programmes and being obsessed with an ‘industrial model’ of food production

    MPs have criticised the Department for International Development (DfID) for overseeing a decline in support for agriculture in international development and ignoring the needs of smallholder farmers who make up the bulk of food production in less industrialised countries.

    A new report, ‘Why no thought for food?’, from the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Agriculture and Food for Development, revealed that spending on agricultural programmes currently makes up just 3 per cent of DfID’s total annual aid expenditure.

    Sub-Saharan Africa

    In sub-Saharan Africa, where hunger and malnutrition are pronounced, agriculture spending is just 0.3 per cent of the DFID’s total aid spend.

    MPs called on DfID and the UK Government to raise that figure and commit to 10 per cent of overseas aid to food security and sustainable agriculture.

    They said the funding should, as the findings of the groundbreaking IAASTD report recommended in 2008, focus efforts on small scale farmers, especially women smallholders.

    Smallholders

    The report said 500 million smallholder farmers across the less industrialised world faced a daily struggle to produce and provide enough food for their families and the 2 billion people they support.

    It highlighted that in many parts of Africa women farmers make up to 70 per cent of the total agricultural workforce.

    The report also said DfID aid should focus on safeguarding the farmers against unfair land tenure and inheritance and helping them gain access to microcredit facilities.

    MPs also called for increased and longer-term funding for the World Food Programme (WFP) to enable it to work on extended projects. They also called for an end trade-distorting subsidies that discriminated against the poorest countries in the world.

    These kinds of measures, rather than continued support for short term policies like fertiliser, seeds or the dumping of excess commodity produce in the form of food aid, ‘will help countries bring themselves out of hunger,’ said the report.

    DfID reluctance

    Patrick Mulveny, senior policy advisor at Practical Action and part of the global agricultural NGO, The UK Food Group, said the MPs’ report had sent a ‘wake-up call’ to DFID to implement the findings of the International Assessment on Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report.

    The IAASTD called for a reversal of international development policies and a move away from chemically intensive farming towards promoting localised agro-ecological solutions.

    Mulveny, who as part of The UK Food Group, made similar calls for a focus of aid towards the production of food by local food producers, said there was still a ‘reluctance by DfID to be able to visualise a food system which does not have industrial production at its heart.’

    Dfid say the UK government has pledged £1.1bn for agriculture and food security for the next three years. They also pointed out a number of on-going programmes they had in Africa that showed their commitment to long-term agricultural programmes.

    Useful links
    All Parliamentary Group for Food and Agricultural Development
    The UK Food Group report: More aid for African agriculture
    Dfid case studies on agricultural aid spending
    IAASTD report

  • Emissions drop due to recession, not government, say experts

     

    But energy experts said that the small decline was a result of the recession and record energy prices, rather than government policy. In 2008 petrol prices and utility bills soared, prompting motorists and households to be more frugal. Chris Goodall, energy and environment author, said: “What drove 2008 emissions lower were high energy prices and by the end of the year a decline in economic activity, rather than any structural changes. Although government policies are beginning to work they won’t be enough to meet 2020 targets on their own. It seems that, unfortunately, high energy prices are a more important part of reducing energy demand and emissions.”

    In 2007, according to government estimates, the UK emitted 636.6m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. The government issued provisional figures last year indicating that 2008 emissions stood at 623.8m tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent, 2% down on 2007.

  • Fifty-five countries pledge to cut greenhouse emissions

     

    Nonetheless, Yvo de Boer, head of the UN framework convention on climate change (Unfccc), welcomed the pledges. “This represents an important invigoration of the UN climate talks,” he said.

    At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen last year, all countries were asked to register their intentions to support the Copenhagen accord by 31 January. However, the deadline was relaxed last month when it became apparent that many of the world’s poorest countries were reluctant to sign up to the political accord without better understanding of its legal implications or stronger financial assurances. The UN now says the deadline is flexible, possibly allowing countries to submit their plans until next December.

    Many senior figures around the world contacted by the Guardian believe that a legally binding deal in 2010 is now impossible.

    Examination of the pledges shows that no countries have strengthened the commitments which they announced at Copenhagen, despite worldwide condemnation of the lack of ambition shown by world leaders in Denmark. Several rich countries have added clauses which could allow them to reduce emissions later.

    The US, which had pledged 17% cuts on a 2005 baseline by 2020 now says it will cut “in the range of 17%, in conformity with anticipated US energy and climate legislation, recognising that the final target will be reported to the Secretariat in light of enacted legislation”. Canada, too, has amended its Copenhagen target of 17% to make it align “with the final economy-wide emissions target of the US in enacted legislation“.

    Ed Miliband, UK energy and climate secretary, said the figures were “significant”. “If countries, including the EU, implement their commitments to the maximum levels we will be in striking distance of ensuring that global emissions peak by 2020. This is a crucial first step to keeping temperature rises to no more than two degrees.”

    But the pledges made only guarantee the minimum carbon reductions offered by countries, with the higher cuts conditional on other nations following suit.

    Leo Johnson, PricewaterhouseCoopers partner for Sustainability and Climate Change said the cuts were substantially short of what was needed to control climate change. “The Copenhagen Accord pledges are relatively unchanged from those made prior to the Copenhagen Summit. At 9.7 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, the pledges total just under half the 20GTC02e reduction required from business as usual to stay on the low carbon pathway. There is still a big gap between the pledges and the 2 degree pathway.”

    Greenpeace’s head of the Climate and Energy Campaign agreed. “Together [these cuts] amount only to an 11-19% reduction in their overall emissions. Staying well below the warming threshold requires industrialised nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2020 and provide substantial funding to developing countries which need to reduce their projected growth in emissions by 15-30%.”

    The influential South Centre, a Geneva-based intergovernmental thinktank funded by developing countries, advised countries to be in no hurry to sign. It warned that the Copenhagen accord, created by a small group of countries, could become the blueprint for a new international regime that would replace the Unfccc and the Kyoto protocol, which was created with the unanimous support of all 192 nations.

    “Such a regime of rights and obligations, if based on the Copenhagen accord, would have the potential to drastically curtail the development prospects of developing countries,” it said.

    Country/bloc
    Percentage cut by 2020 (unconditional)
    Percentage cut by 2020 (conditional, e.g. on global deal)
    Base year
    Australia 5 25 2000
    Canada 17   2005
    Croatia 5   1990
    EU 20 30 1990
    Japan   25 1990
    Kazakhstan 15   1992
    New Zealand   20 1990
    Norway 30 40 1990
    Russia   25 1990
    US 17   2005
    Brazil 38.9   “business as usual” – the emissions level if no action were taken
    Costa Rica No specific pledge, but will “significantly deviate from business as usual greenhouse gas emissions”    
    Ethiopia No specific pledge    
    Georgia No specific pledge    
    Indonesia 26   “business as usual” – the emissions level if no action were taken
    Israel 20   “business as usual” – the emissions level if no action were taken
    Jordan No specific pledge    
    Macedonia No specific pledge    
    Madagascar No specific pledge    
    Maldives 1   “business as usual” – the emissions level if no action were taken
    Marshall Islands   40 2009
    Moldova 25   1990
    Morocco No specific pledge    
    Republic of Congo 1    
    Republic of Korea 30   “business as usual” – the emissions level if no action were taken
    Sierra Leone No specific pledge    
    Singapore   16 “business as usual” – the emissions level if no action were taken
    South Africa   34 “business as usual” – the emissions level if no action were taken
      Carbon intensity cuts (the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of economic growth), by percentage   Base year
    China 45   2005
    India 25   2005
    Where targets were submitted as a range, higher figure has been chosen (eg 10-20% for New Zealand is 20% in table)      
           
           
           
           

    “To agree to associate with the accord before seeing its entire contents would be to grant a blank cheque to the proponents of the accord, by accepting a document before some of its most important components are revealed.”

  • UK Government nuclear consultation ‘farcical’, say locals

    UK Government nuclear consultation ‘farcical’, say locals

    Ecologist

    29th January, 2010

    Local residents say they have been ‘insulted’ rather than ‘consulted’ over Government plans for new nuclear power stations

    Local campaign groups have given a damning verdict on Government engagement with local communities over its plans for new nuclear power stations and have called for a new round of consultations to take place.

    The groups, representing residents in ten of the communities earmarked by the Government as potential sites for new reactors, gave evidence to MPs from the Energy and Climate Change Committee earlier this week. 

    Jim Duffy, from campaign group Stop Hinkley, told MPs that the timing, advertising and location of the consultations had been unacceptable. 

    ‘DECC (the Department of Energy and Climate Change) really didn’t seem to want to involve the local people. It seemed to be an accident if you happened to attend. The Government announcement on this came out on November 9th and the meeting was scheduled for 19th November,’ he said.

    Out of the blue

    Jenny Hawke, from the Residents of Braystone group, told MPs that the news that her area had been listed as a potential site ‘came out of the blue and was a complete shock.’ She said residents had received just ten days notice about the consultation, during which time it emerged that work had already begun on the site.

    ‘By the time we got to that meeting we found that RWE had already purchased an option to buy the necessary farm land and had already undertaken exploratory drilling on the farms,’ she said. 

    ‘I believe now that this consultation process is a total failure and falls far short of the Government’s own statements on public engagement. The short duration of the consultation on one of the most significant and complex planning decisions to be made this century renders the whole approach unacceptable and open to legal challenge,’ said Hawke.

    Farcical

    Peter Lanyon, of the Shutdown Sizewell campaign, called the DECC consultation ‘farcical’ and told MPs that residents in his community thought that the nuclear plan was a ‘done deal.’

    ‘Public consultations under the Aarhus convention are supposed to be a formative stage where there is still the possibility of changing things.’

    ‘The stuff that DECC are coming to down to exhibit and meet us about will just be a whitewash,’ he said. 

    Useful links
    Energy and Climate Change Committee

     

  • Barack Obama commits to climate change bill

     

    “This year, I am eager to help advance the bipartisan effort in the Senate,” he said.

    But Obama made it clear that he supported a “bipartisan” effort which would incorporate energy policies that are popular among Republicans – and fiercely opposed by the liberal wing of his own party.

    “That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies,” Obama said.

    The endorsement for nuclear power and especially offshore drilling will be difficult for some Democratic voters to swallow.

    Most of the instant reaction to the speech from environmental groups was positive – though few commented directly on Obama’s support for nuclear power or drilling.

    However, the Centre for Biological Diversity was scathing. “A clean energy economy does not include continued reliance on dirty coal and further risky drilling for oil in fragile offshore areas,” the centre’s director, Kieran Suckling said in a statement.

    “The president failed tonight, as he failed over the past twelve months, to use his bully pulpit to advocate a bright line goal for greenhouse gas reductions. “

    Obama’s endorsement of a nuclear renaissance – 30 years since the last new nuclear plant – was calculated to help the efforts of Democratic Senator John Kerry and Republican Lindsey Graham craft a compromise bill that could get broad support in the Senate.

    The house narrowly passed a climate change bill last June, but the effort has bogged down in the Senate.

    The two Senators told reporters earlier Wednesday that they were closely focused on pulling in Republican support, and damping down fears among Democratic senators from oil, coal and heavy manufacturing states that energy reform would hurt local economies.

    Obama hewed closely to the same strategy, peppering his speech with references to new “clean energy” jobs and the “profitable kind of energy”. He uttered the words “climate change” precisely once, referring to America assuming a leadership role in the negotiations to get a global deal to halt warming.

    But the president did voice support for a “comprehensive” Senate bill – code in Washington for a broad set of proposals that would also include establishment of a cap and trade programme.

    The nod for a “comprehensive” bill could help head off attempts to get the Senate to scale back its ambitions, and pass a narrowly focused energy bill that would not attempt to establish a carbon market.

    And he said he wanted a bill through the Senate in 2010 – timing that is seen as crucial both for the prospects of energy reform in America and for getting a global change deal.

    Obama also took a shot at climate change deniers, which brought some mutterings from Republicans.

    “I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change,” he said. “But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future.”

  • Global warming: Undeniable evidence

     

    There is plenty of room for argument about the rate at which the world is warming, the degree to which humans are culpable, the likely outcomes and the most effective steps to be taken. But there is not much argument about the big picture. The climate researchers at East Anglia were early in the field, but they were not alone. Their conclusions have been backed by scientists at the Met Office, from other British universities, and from the British Antarctic Survey; by oceanographers from Germany, California and Massachusetts; by planetary scientists from Nasa and the European Space Agency; by naturalists in a Europe-wide network of botanical gardens; and by climate historians, foresters, zoologists, palaeontologists, glaciologists and geographers on six continents. Scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have repeatedly released findings that broadly confirm the same big picture, and for eight of the past nine years those researchers were funded by a Republican administration that would have much preferred to hear a different story. In 2001, the national science academies of 17 nations – including Britain’s Royal Society – urged governments to avert future calamity by agreeing to limit greenhouse gas emissions; within three weeks, the US National Academy of Sciences had joined the chorus, and begun to sing from the same hymnal. Although any single piece of evidence is open to reinterpretation, the mass of data assembled all seems to point in one direction: towards a warmer and increasingly uncomfortable world.

    Global average temperatures have gone on rising. Nine of the 10 warmest years ever recorded have occurred in the past decade. In the past three decades, glaciers have receded at alarming rates in Alpine Europe, tropical Africa and sub-Arctic Alaska. The Greenland icecap has begun to melt and the north polar sea ice has become both smaller and thinner. The northern hemisphere growing season has been extended by 11 days. For reasons connected with human pressure, but also possibly with global warming, arid regions have become more arid, floods more catastrophic, hurricanes and cyclones more destructive. Millions of very poor people have been forced to abandon their homes, to kill their cattle, to walk away from their farms. Oceans have become more acidic, and coral reefs have been bleached. Forests have burned; rivers in the drier regions have slowed to a trickle, or dried up altogether.

    Some events may be considered as consequences of natural variation in a climate cycle, but the intensity and frequency of such extreme events is expected to grow as the world warms. The lesson to be drawn from the latest round of questions about climate science is not that scientists make mistakes, and could get the future wrong. It is that we still don’t know enough about our own planet, and should be spending more on research, instead of cutting science budgets. Knowledge is expensive, but wilful ignorance could cost immeasurably more.