EcoRadio

Category: News

Add your news
You can add news from your networks or groups through the website by becoming an author. Simply register as a member of the Generator, and then email Giovanni asking to become an author. He will then work with you to integrate your content into the site as effectively as possible.
Listen to the Generator News online

 
The Generator news service publishes articles on sustainable development, agriculture and energy as well as observations on current affairs. The news service is used on the weekly radio show, The Generator, as well as by a number of monthly and quarterly magazines. A podcast of the Generator news is also available.
As well as Giovanni’s articles it picks up the most pertinent articles from a range of other news services. You can publish the news feed on your website using RSS, free of charge.
 

  • A fairer formula for emission targets

    sitive, the fundamental problem of how to divide up necessary greenhouse gas reductions between developed and developing countries remains. And with the Copenhagen UN climate summit less than two months away, breaking this deadlock between the major developed and developing economic powers will be essential for progress towards the goal of forging a comprehensive global climate treaty.

    The 2C target requires that cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, expressed as carbon dioxide equivalents, do not exceed about 1,600bn tons over the next four decades. Developing countries want national emissions allowances to be allocated on the basis of equity of per capita emissions. Developed countries argue that this approach would subject them to politically and economically unacceptable emissions restrictions, and that the lack of binding emissions targets for developing countries would frustrate efforts to meet the 2C climate goal.

    A realistic compromise that can break the deadlock is possible, based on a less strict version of the per capita emissions equity principle. The compromise, which we term “progressive convergence”, would involve developed countries agreeing to make an early start on emissions reductions and developing countries committing never to exceed the average per capita emissions of developed countries – a commitment that India in fact has indicated that it would be willing to make.

    The net result will be a progressive convergence of nations to a declining per capita emission rate. To meet the 2C goal, the developed countries’ reduction targets must be sufficiently stringent, but not so stringent as to be politically or economically unacceptable.

    Consider, for example, carbon dioxide emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels. If the G8 countries as a bloc were to adopt the emissions targets similar to those in the Waxman-Markey bill that was passed by the US House of Representatives in June, their average annual per capita energy-related carbon dioxide emissions would decline from about 13 tons currently to less than two tons by 2050.

    Under the progressive convergence principle, other countries would be allowed to increase their emissions until their per capita emissions equalled that of the G8 bloc, and thereafter be required to mirror the declining per capita emissions of the G8 bloc.

    Our calculations, using emission projections by the US Energy Information Agency, indicate that the non-G8 European OECD bloc would hit the per capita emissions of the G8 bloc and have to commence emissions reductions around 2025. Developing economies such as Mexico and Brazil would commence reductions around 2040-2045. Per capita emissions in China would converge with the G8 around 2030, while India’s per capita emissions would not converge until around 2050, owing to its much lower per capita emissions today and projections of smaller emission growth rate and continued increase in population through 2050.

    In this scenario, cumulative energy-related carbon dioxide emissions between 2010 and 2050 would total about 1,200bn tons, leaving about 400bn tons for non-energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. To keep these emissions below 400bn tons, complementary reductions in emissions from deforestation and land use change, as well as other greenhouse gases, will also be necessary. After 2050, emissions reductions will still be needed, but with all the major nations now on an equal per capita carbon footing.

    The common perception that climate goals can be met only if large developing economies such as China and India commit to immediate emissions reductions, or if developed countries adopt draconian measures, is incorrect. Early action by developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, coupled with a commitment by developing countries to adhere to the progressive convergence framework, can be the basis of an agreement that is consistent with both the “common but differentiated responsibility” principle of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the goal of not exceeding a 2C increase in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels.

  • Copenhagen negotiaing text: 200 pages to save the world

     

    Running to some 200 pages, the draft agreement is being discussed for the first time this week as officials from 190 countries gather in Bangkok for the latest round of UN talks. There is only one short meeting after this before they meet in Copenhagen aiming to hammer out a final version.

    The draft text consolidates and reorders hundreds of changes demanded by countries to the previous version, which saw it balloon to an unmanageable 300 pages. It has no official status yet, and must be formally approved before negotiators can start to whittle it down. Here, we present key, edited sections from the text and attempt to decipher what the words mean.

    The text includes sections on the traditional sticking points that have delayed progress on climate change for a decade or longer.

    • How much are rich countries willing to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, and by when?

    • Will large developing nations such as China make an effort to put at least a dent in their soaring levels of pollution?

    • How much money must flow from the developed world to developing countries to grease the wheels and secure their approval? How much to compensate for the impact of past emissions, and how much to help prevent future emissions?

    According to the UN rules, for a new treaty to be agreed, every country must sign up – a challenging requirement. The new treaty is designed to follow the Kyoto protocol, the world’s existing treaty to regulate greenhouse gases, the first phase of which expires in 2012. Because the US did not ratify Kyoto, the climate talks have been forced on to awkward parallel tracks, with one set of negotiations, from which the US is excluded, debating how the treaty could be extended past 2012. This new text comes from the second track, which lays out a plan to include all countries in long-term co-operative action.

    Behind the scenes, pessimism about the Copenhagen talks is rising. Despite references in the text to a global goal and collective emission cuts of 25-40% by 2020 for rich countries, many observers believe there is little chance such an approach will succeed.

    Stuart Eizenstat, who negotiated Kyoto for the US, said: “Copenhagen is more likely to be a way station to a final agreement, where each country posts the best that it can do… The key thing is let’s not go into Copenhagen with all the same kind of guns blazing like we did in Kyoto.”

    A top European official told the Guardian: “We’ve moved on from the idea that we can negotiate on targets. That’s naive and just not the way the deal will be done. The best we can get is that countries will put in what they want to commit to.”

    Once all the carbon offsets – buying pollution credits instead of cutting emissions – and “fudges” are taken into account, the outcome is likely to be that emissions in 2020 from rich countries will be broadly similar to those in 1990, he said. “That’s really scary stuff.”

     

  • Aectic to be ice-free in summer in 20 years

     

    Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge, said cargo ships would no longer need to rely on special ice-breaking vessels to cross from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Northwest Passage. The route would be ice-free for months every year, cutting more than 4800km from the normal journey from East Asia to Europe via the Suez canal.

    “The North Pole will be exposed in 10 years. You would be able to sail a Japanese car carrier across the North Pole and out into the Atlantic,” Professor Wadhams said. “The ice will retreat to a zone north of Greenland and Ellesmere Island by 2020 and that area will be less than half the present summer area. The change in the Arctic summer sea ice is the biggest impact global warming is having on the physical appearance of the planet.”

    This month, the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, which is part of the University of Colorado, said Arctic ice coverage was the third-lowest since satellite records began in 1979. The coverage was greater than in 2007 and last year largely because of cloudy skies during late summer. Each of the past five years has been one of the five lowest years.

    Professor Wadhams, who was on board the submarine supervising sonar measurements of the ice, said Mr Hadow’s findings confirmed the underlying trend was towards increasingly thin and patchy ice cover.

    Mr Hadow and his two team members spent 73 days between March 1 and May 7 this year walking 450km across the Arctic while taking measurements. They drilled 1500 holes and found the average thickness of ice floes was 1.8m. This was too thin to have survived the previous year’s summer melting and indicated the ice had been formed in open sea during the winter.

    Mr Hadow said future expeditions to the Arctic in summer would need to change their techniques and equipment to cope with more frequent stretches of open water. “A hundred years ago, explorers used dogs to haul sledges and then we went through the stage of people hauling sledges,” he said. “Now we have people wearing immersion suits and needing to swim, with the sledge floating. I foresee a time when the sledge will become more of a canoe.”

    Martin Summerkorn, climate change adviser to the WWF Arctic Program, said the loss of sea ice predicted by the study would have profound consequences beyond the polar region.

    Without ice to reflect sunlight, the Arctic Ocean would warm faster, resulting in the release of greenhouse gases stored in the Arctic permafrost soils. These soils contain twice as much carbon as is in the atmosphere.

    Mr Summerkorn said the warming of the Arctic surface waters would accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, speeding up the sea-level rise.

    “This could lead to flooding affecting one quarter of the world’s population and extreme global weather changes,” he said.

  • Bangkok climate talks end in recrimination

     

     

    With just five days of negotiating time now left before the concluding talks in Copenhagen in December, delegates said it appeared a weak deal was the most likely outcome, and no deal at all was a possibility.

     

    However, President Obama’s expected visit to Oslo to receive the Nobel peace prize in the middle of the climate talks raised hopes that he would make the short journey to Copenhagen to galvanise governments.

     

    “World leadership is now vital if the talks are not to fail completely. It is inconceivable that Obama could now ignore the climate change talks,” said one diplomat.

     

    The citation for the prize specifically mentions the president “now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting”.

     

    However, China, India, Brazil and other major developing countries lined up with environment and development groups to condemn both the US and EU for demanding a brand-new climate agreement.

     

    This would bring the US aboard an agreement but in the eyes of most countries would mean the effective end of the Kyoto protocol and possibly allow countries to set their own targets and timetables for cuts.

     

    “It’s irresponsible to even contemplate the idea of discarding the Kyoto protocol. It’s the lifeblood of any future agreement. It is the only legally binding agreement that gives the certainty of moving rapidly to addressing the climate concerns of billions of people,” said said Di-Aping Lumumba, Sudanese chair of the G77, a group of 130 developing countries.

     

    “Developed countries have a massive leadership deficit. It’s now up to their leaders to intervene and give a direction to the negotiations rather than waste everyone’s time,” he said.

     

    Shyam Saran, Indian special envoy on climate change, said: “The EU must change its position. There have been inadmissible attempts to abandon the Kyoto protocol. This would mean rewriting the key principles. This is not what we agreed by consensus.”

     

    But the EU and UN brushed off concerns. “We are not killing Kyoto,” said Anders Turesson, chair of the EU working group in the negotiations. “We want to preserve the contents [of the protocol]. The only way to do that is to find a new home for it in a new single legal instrument.”

     

    “This is trying to build something bigger and better than Kyoto. The fear is that there would be a race to the bottom. It is the opposite,” he said.

     

    Yvo de Boer, executive director of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted there were now “serious” problems. “The spirit remains constructive and we have seen advances in Bangkok, but there is a strong fear that there is an attempt to kill the Kyoto protocol. That is causing great dissatisfaction,” he said.

     

    Environment and development groups accused the EU and US of holding poor countries to ransom. “The rift between rich and poor has intensified because rich countries have not put serious money on the table to help poor countries adapt to escalating impacts of climate change,” said Oxfam senior climate adviser Antonio Hill. “The US has been silent on the scale of finance it will commit to.”

     

    “Both the US and the EU have tried to shift the burden on to developing countries, arguing that they should even pay towards the costs of adapting to climate change despite their minimal contribution to the problem,” said Tom Sharman, ActionAid’s head of climate change. The only bright spot in the negotiations was Norway’s decision to increase its emissions reduction target to 40% on 1990 levels by 2020, he said.

     

    “The EU has only increased developing country mistrust and the US is trying to impose its own domestic limitations on the world. It’s time for President Obama to be the climate leader he says he is,” said Martin Kaiser, Greenpeace International climate policy adviser

  • Financial crisis leaving billions malnourished:UN

     

    The annual survey of world hunger describes a food price crisis with prices settling at levels too high for many people in developing countries to afford.

    The general increase in population, the number of mouths to feed – is one factor.

    But the authors of the Global Hunger Index say today’s high food prices are also caused by the global economic downturn, erratic weather patterns and higher oil and fertiliser prices.

    The report also identifies one possible solution – the empowerment of women through better education and access to jobs.

    – BBC

  • America makes first move to allow independent fund for poor countries

     

     

    Although US negotiators have not made any specific promises on finance at talks currently under way in Bangkok, the US has accepted the principle of a single independent fund to be administered at least in part by the UN.

     

    This is a long way from what developing countries want – firm pledges of large sums of money to allow poor countries to buy technologies to help them develop cleanly and to adapt to climate change. But because talks have been frozen on the issue for months, the movement in the US position is being seen as a positive step.

     

    Until now, America, backed by Britain, has proposed that any money paid should be channelled through existing organisations like the World Bank. In addition it has insisted that contributions by rich countries should be voluntary.

     

    This has been flatly rejected in the past by G77 countries (an umbrella group of 130 developing nations) who have long mistrusted the bank, saying it is institutionally biased against poor countries. They have said they want the UN to administer a separate fund which would be guided, controlled and managed by all countries. In addition they do not want promises of cash, but guaranteed, predictable flows of money.

     

    Under the new US proposal, countries would be allowed to choose how much they paid and to direct it to specific areas, such as forestry or technology. Rich countries would come together every few years for what have been called “pledge parties”, where they would indicate how much they intended to pay. In addition, they want businesses and other groups including NGOs to have access to the funds.

     

    The proposal will almost certainly be rejected by G77 countries and insiders do not expect it to form part of the final Copenhagen deal, but the US move is considered significant because it represents some movement in the negotiating positions. The talks have been deadlocked on finance for months.

     

    “The positions are becoming clearer. The US has opened the door to a single fund. The worrying sign is that it assumes that the developing countries will take what they can get and will not walk out of the talks. That’s a dangerous assumption,” said Oxfam analyst Antonio Hill.

     

    “We still have a deadlock on finance. The key to unlocking it is with the Annex 1 [rich] countries. At the moment no money has been put forward,” said Raman Metha of Action Aid who suggested that the US proposal was a negotiating tactic to force the G77 to compromise.

     

    Countries have made no progress in Bangkok on how much money they are prepared to put up, or what proportion would be new rather than come from carbon markets or existing aid. Discussions are expected to go to the wire at Copenhagen in December.

     

    At present the leading contender is still Gordon Brown’s suggestion of $100bn a year (£61bn) which has been endorsed by the EU’s environment minister Stavros Dimas.