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  • Biodiversity criucial to lives of billions, says UNEP

    Biodiversity crucial to lives of billions, says UNEP

    Ecologist

    12th January, 2010

    Ecosystems are buffering humanity against the worst impacts of global warming and also alleviating poverty, says United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

    The continued loss of animal and plant species, and ecosystems such as forests, is causing poverty as well as environmental damage, said UNEP executive director Achim Steiner.

    Speaking at the launch of the UN’s international year of biodiversity in Berlin this week, Steiner re-iterated the economic value of coral and forest ecosystems.

    Value of nature

    According to estimates from the groundbreaking Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study published last year, coral reefs generate up to $189,000 per hectare in costal defence and even more in fisheries and tourism revenues. While continued deforestation and forest degradation is costing $2-4 trillion a year.

    ‘The world’s biodiversity and ecosystems might seem abstract and remote to many people. But there is nothing abstract about their role in economies and in the lives of billions of people,’ said Steiner.

    ‘The range of benefits generated by these ecosystems and the biodiversity underpinning them are all too often invisible and mainly undervalued by those in charge of national economies and international development support,’ he added.

    Coral and forests

    Steiner said one fifth of coral reefs were already degraded or at risk of collapse due to over-fishing, pollution or coastal developments.

    ‘If you factor the true value of coral reefs into economic planning, it is likely that far more rational and sustainable choices would be made in terms of development, emissions and pollution control and resource management.

    ‘It is a similar story in respect to all of the planet’s nature-based assets, from forests and freshwaters to mountains and soils,’ he said, adding that 15 per cent of the annual global carbon dioxide emissions currently absorbed by forests.

    New body

    UNEP is also due to decide next month whether to set up a body similar to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for biodiversity. The proposed International Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) would use the latest science to help drive forward policy recommendations.

    Steiner said he hoped the new body would ‘de-mystify terms such as biodiversity and ecosystems’, and start convincing countries to include the value of natural capital in their national accounts and economic decisions.

    Friends of the Earth said previous UN moves on biodiversity had not been successful.

    ‘The 193 countries known as Parties of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity have so far failed to significantly reduce the rate at which biodiversity is being lost, despite their 2003 pledge to reduce these rates by 2010,’ said Friends of the Earth International’s coordinator of the Forest and Biodiversity Programme Isaac Rojas.

    Useful links
    Friends of the Earth
    The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity report (TEEB)

  • Has the cold weather caused the nation’s carbon emissions to go up?

     

    C Dyer, by email

     

    There’s a temptation to immediately assume that emissions must have gone up during the freezing conditions as shivering folk around the country reach for the heating controls, or switch on the kettle to fill a hot water bottle. In fact, the National Grid has been reporting record surges in demand. But what about the reduction in road traffic over the same period? Does our reduction in mobility cancel out the heating-related emissions?

     

    Please do post your thoughts below and I’ll return later in the week to go through the responses.

  • European environmental miniisters meeting in Seville must raise their game

     

     

    There will, however, be those wishing to continue to offer a range of targets in order leverage other nations up to a higher level of ambition: the “we will if you will” approach. But one thing that was clear in Copenhagen was that the major power blocks were not there to negotiate their targets. The US arrived with a number and was not about to change it, not without domestic legislation in place, which may take another 12 months to pass. The Chinese also, for the first time, arrived with a number but they too offered it on a non-negotiable basis. So who was the EU was trying to tempt into accepting higher targets?

     

    The way forward agreed under the Copenhagen accord is a bottom-up approach: countries will voluntarily pledge targets. The EU knows that there is a yawning gulf between the targets rich countries have offered to date and what is needed to keep the world safe from more than 2C of global warming.

     

     

    They and many others also now know that the 20% target is far from stretching, and that they could very comfortably go further. Latest analysis from Sandbag, the emissions trading campaigners, finds that with greenhouse gas emissions dropping because of the recession, the EU could now meet a unilateral target of a 30% reduction very easily

     

    First, the EU is almost half way there already. Latest information from the European Environment Agency indicates that in 2008 our emissions levels were already at 10.7% below 1990 levels and that business-as-usual would take us close to 15%. Data for 2009 is very likely to show a further reduction.

     

    Second, and most strikingly, recent studies have shown the drop in emissions during the recession has now lowered the costs of meeting a 30% target to at least €100bn below the projected costs for the 20% target.

     

    Last, the presence in the EU of an emissions trading system and comprehensive policies to cut energy wastage and to boost the supply of lower carbon energy and fuels means the EU has the tools to meet a 30% cut effectively and efficiently.

     

    Although the 20% target looked impressive when it was set in 2008, much has changed internationally since then. The 20% target is now lower in ambition than targets offered by the US and Japan when expressed in relation to most recent emissions data. China has also offered a target to decrease the carbon intensity of its economy and other major economies such as Brazil have also pledged unilateral, ambitious targets. The EU can no longer claim that 20% is a credible and world-leading target.

     

    Other nations have made bold steps. President Lula of Brazil, a developing country with no current legal obligation to take action, has already enshrined in law its commitments to reduce emissions and deforestation [webcast of speech]. The newly elected President of Europe Hermann Van Rompuy, and the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose country currently holds the EU presidency, would do well to read his Copenhagen speech and reflect on what it means to lead.

     

    Europe has the opportunity to inject new enthusiasm and hope into the deflated international climate talks by entering an ambitious 30% target into the Copenhagen accord. If the EU sticks with 20%, allowing billions of extra tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it would add insult to injury for the least developed and vulnerable countries already experiencing the negative impacts of a warming globe.

     

    Now is not the time to sit back and wait, Europe must lead by example and demonstrate its commitment to making a low carbon economy a reality.

     

     

     

    Bryony Worthington is the founder of Sandbag.org.uk. Sandbag has launched a new briefing and targeted political action calling on Europe to lead. Please sign Sandbag’s online letter to urge Hermann Van Rompuy, and the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to commit to 30% cuts in emissions.

  • James Hansen rails against cap-and-trade in open letter

     

    Hansen’s letter advocates using the fee-and-dividend approach to reducing carbon emissions, rather than cap-and-trade. Fee-and-dividend is a “transparent, honest approach that benefits the public”, he says, in contrast to cap-and-trade, which “is a hidden tax … because cap-and-trade increases the cost of energy for the public, as utilities and other industries purchase the right to pollute with one hand, adding it to fuel prices, while with the other hand they take back most of the permit revenues from the government. Costs and profits of the trading infrastructure are also added to the public’s energy bill.”

    “The public must understand the difference between cap-and-trade and fee-and-dividend,” states Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Otherwise, “the present administration may jam down the public’s throat just such an approach, which, it can be shown, is not a solution at all.”

    The other speakers present, who included the Harlem community organiser Cecil Corbin-Mark of We Act for Environmental Justice, Charles Komanoff of the Carbon Tax Centre, and Father Paul Mayer of the Climate Crisis Coalition, spoke about the inequity of a cap-and-trade system. One of the organisers, Brian Tokar, said: “Carbon trading is unfair, it’s unethical, and it just doesn’t work.”

    A carbon trading system depends on allocating a market price to carbon emissions, and either hands out, auctions or sells carbon permits to industry sectors. A fee-and-dividend system imposes a fee on the initial sale of a fossil fuel which is then redistributed to the public; the rising cost of carbon-intensive products would, it is hoped, encourage families to keep their carbon footprints low.

    The civil disobedience planned for tomorrow outside the conference is part of the growing climate change activist movement in the US. Tokar told the Guardian: “In the last few months there’s been a real rising of awareness about climate change issues in the US. For a long time they were seen as kind of abstract, something that the scientists were talking about, but now, in the months leading up to Copenhagen, people fully realised that these were issues that are affecting vulnerable people around the world in the shape of floods and droughts.

    “Back in November we had the day of Climate Justice Action on 30 November on the 10th anniversary of the Seattle day of action. People blockaded the Chicago Climate Exchange, and blockaded a shipment of components for a new coal burning power plant, and protested outside the Bank of America in San Francisco. Activists are definitely beginning to focus on climate change in a way that they weren’t a couple of years ago.”

  • China,India,Brazil and South Africa prepare for post-Copenhagen meeting

     

    Fewer than 30 countries out of the 192 who are signed up to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which organised Copenhagen, have indicated that they will sign. Many are known to be deeply unhappy with the $100bn pledged for climate aid and the decision not to make deeper cuts in emissions. Under UN laws, consensus is required for a binding agreement to be made.

    Countries have until January 31 to sign up to the accord and provide the UN with information on the specific commitments and actions they plan to take to reduce emissions. But there is growing confusion over the legal standing of the agreement reached in Copenhagen and many countries may not be in a position to sign because they have yet to consult their parliaments.

    Meanwhile, Bolivia, one of a handful of poor countries which openly opposed the deal in Copenhagen, has invited countries and non-governmental groups which want a much stronger climate deal to the World Conference of the People on Climate Change.

    The conference, to be held in Cochabamba in Bolivia from April 20-22, is expected to attract heads of state from the loose alliance of socialist “Alba” countries, including Venezuela and Cuba. ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America countries, was set up to provide an alternative to the US-led free trade area of the Americas.

    Bolivia this week urged leaders of the world’s indigenous ethnic groups and scientists to come. “The invitation is to heads of state but chiefly to civil society. We think that social movements and non government groups, people not at decision level, have an important role in climate talks,” said Maria Souviron, Bolivian ambassador in London.

    The meeting, which is intended to cement ties between the seven Alba countries, is also expected to persue the idea of an international court for environmental crimes, as well as the radical idea of “mother earth rights”. This would give all entities, from man to endangered animal species, an equal right to life.

    “Our objective is to save humanity and not just half of humanity,” said Morales in a speech at Copenhagen. “We are here to save mother earth. Our objective is to reduce climate change to [under] 1C. [Above this] many islands will disappear and Africa will suffer a holocaust … the real cause of climate change is the capitalist system. If we want to save the earth then we must end that economic model.”

  • US cult of greed is now a global environmenal threat

     

    The consumer culture is no longer a mostly American habit but is spreading across the planet. Over the last 50 years, excess has been adopted as a symbol of success in developing countries from Brazil to India to China, the report said. China this week overtook the US as the world’s top car market. It is already the biggest producer of greenhouse gas emissions.

    Such trends were not a natural consequence of economic growth, the report said, but the result of deliberate efforts by businesses to win over consumers. Products such as the hamburger – dismissed as an unwholesome food for the poor at the beginning of the 20th century – and bottled water are now commonplace.

    The average western family spends more on their pet than is spent by a human in Bangladesh.

    The report did note encouraging signs of a shift away from the high spend culture. It said school meals programmes marked greater efforts to encourage healthier eating habits among children. The younger generation was also more aware of their impact on the environment.

    There has to be a wholesale transformation of values and attitudes, the report said. At current rates of consumption, the world needs to erect 24 wind turbines an hour to produce enough energy to replace fossil fuel.

    “We’ve seen some encouraging efforts to combat the world’s climate crisis in the past few years,” said Assadourian. “But making policy and technology changes while keeping cultures centred on consumerism and growth can only go so far.

    “If we don’t shift our very culture there will be new crises we have to face. Ultimately, consumerism is not going to be viable as the world population grows by 2bn and as more countries grow in economic power.”

    In the preface to the report, Worldwatch Institute’s president, Christopher Flavin, writes: “As the world struggles to recover from the most serious global economic crisis since the Great Depression, we have an unprecedented opportunity to turn away from consumerism. In the end, the human instinct for survival must triumph over the urge to consume at any cost.”

    • This article was amended on Wednesday 13 January 2010. We said “In the last decade, consumption of goods and services rose 28% to $30.5tn (£18.8bn)”. We meant £18.8tn. This has been corrected