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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.
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  • Millions at risk of flooding as river deltas sink

     

    The researchers found that 85% of the major river deltas studied experienced severe flooding in the past decade.

    The area of deltas vulnerable to flooding will increase by half if sea levels rise by an average of 44 centimetres this century as projected.

    They studied 33 river deltas, formed by deposits of sediment where a river joins another body of water such as an ocean, by combining satellite and remote sensing data with historical maps to determine their height relative to sea level, and looked at flooding events and sediment deposits.

    They found that 26 deltas were sinking relative to sea level.

    “A delta is a dynamic system, so a natural delta is sinking anyway,” Robert Nicholls, professor of coastal engineering at the United Kingdom’s University of Southampton and one of the authors of the study, told SciDev.Net. “But every flood season, sediment is brought back in and maintains the level of the land.”

    But in many rivers, sediment upstream of the deltas is getting trapped in reservoirs and dams, and the removal of oil, gas and groundwater is compacting the sediment.

    Large areas of delta are less than two metres above sea level, making them vulnerable to flooding, particularly from tropical storm surges, which can temporarily raise sea levels by 3–10 metres.

    For example, in 2008 a 3.5-metre storm surge caused by cyclone Nargis flooded the Irrawaddy Delta in Myanmar, killing thousands (see Ignored warnings ‘worsened’ Myanmar cyclone disaster).

    Nicholls says that the banks of many river deltas — particularly in South and South-East Asia — are densely populated. The Pearl Delta in China and the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, both home to millions, are particularly at risk of flooding.

    Many developing countries have yet to address the issue.

    “You cannot stop deltas from sinking, but you can reduce how much they sink, and developing countries need public funding and coordinated programmes [to prevent major consequences from the floodings],” says Nicholls. “But they have to start by recognising the problem.”

    • This article was shared by our content partner SciDev.net, part of the Guardian Environment Network

  • Loss of soil threatens food production, UK government warns.

     

    New housing and transport infrastructure as well as climate change are all adding to the pressures on soils, explained the environment secretary, Hilary Benn. “Soil erosion already results in the annual loss of around 2.2m tonnes of topsoil. This costs farmers £9m a year in lost production. Climate change has the potential to increase erosion rates through hotter, drier conditions that make soils more susceptible to wind erosion, coupled with intense rainfall incidents that can wash soil away,” he said.

    British soils contain around 10bn tonnes of carbon, half of which is found in peat habitats. Many of this habitat is under threat from climate change, mining, or poor land management. “Losing this [carbon] store to the atmosphere would create emissions that are equivalent to more than 50 times the UK’s current annual greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.

    Defra’s chief scientist, Professor Bob Watson, said safeguarding soil would be “critical” if food production was to increase in the next 20-30 years. “We face many challenges of climate change, we have to produce twice as much food, it needs to be more nutritious, and if we don’t take care of our soil and our water, we will not be able to accomplish that task,” he said.

    The government plans to improve soil conditions by tightening the planning system to make developers take soils into account, encouraging farmers to put back more organic matter back and preventing industrial pollution. Most soils in Britain are degraded by poor land management and the inefficient use of fertilisers, especially nitrogen.

    The Soil Association, the organisation that promotes organic farming, welcomed what it said was a recognition thatintroducing large amounts of nitrogen fertiliser was not sustainable in the long term, but said that the government’s proposed measures did not go nearly far enough.

    “They [the government] will not put right the huge degradation that our soils have suffered over the last 200 years, partly as a result of what the government calls intensive agricultural production. Organic farming should be acknowledged as a key approach to protect our vital soils,” said policy director, Peter Melchett.

    Kathryn Alton, soil scientist and executive officer of the British Society of Soil Science, said: “The numbers of professional soil scientists in the UK has declined over time in conjunction with the loss of soil science departments.  Investment is clearly needed in training soil scientists to meet these future challenges.”

  • World consumption plunges planet into’ecological debt’, says leading thinktank

     

    Andrew Simms, nef’s director, said the deep recession had delayed this “ecological debt day” by only 24 hours compared with last year, when it fell on 24 September. He warned that as G20 leaders gather in Pittsburgh to discuss global finance, there is a risk that the world economy will be kick-started again, without learning the lessons of the “consumption explosion”.

    “Debt-fuelled over-consumption not only brought the financial system to the edge of collapse, it is pushing many of our natural life support systems toward a precipice. Politicians tell us to get back to business as usual, but if we bankrupt critical ecosystems no amount of government spending will bring them back,” he said.

    In the UK, nef warns of increasing dependence on overseas energy, declining self-sufficiency in food, and the proliferation of “boomerang trade” — sending goods to foreign markets and receiving almost identical items back.

    The research also underlines the yawning gap between the energy consumption of the world’s poorest people, and the rich. Just 7% of the global population produces 50% of greenhouse gas emissions. A typical American will by 4am on January 2 have produced as many emissions as a Tanzanian generates in a year.

    Nef argues that while the arrival of reliable electricity and other energy resources could bring enormous improvements in life expectancy and quality of life in developing countries, when consumption increases above a certain level, it will stop improving people’s health or happiness.

    Beyond this point, they say, “to increase human well-being, the focus should shift away from a quantitative focus on income and consumption, towards more qualitative improvements in the human environment to do with culture, civic, community and family life, long-term learning and those other dimensions that contribute to relatively long and happy lives.”

    The analysis suggests many countries have passed far beyond saturation point, into wasteful “overconsumption”.

    In the past 50 years, the report argues, people in the rich world have changed their lifestyles radically, and “in doing so, we have generally assumed that the resources and energy these activities rely on are limitless and cheap.” In the 1970s, the average household in the UK had 17 domestic appliances, for example – but that had almost trebled, to 47, by 2006, and is expected to continue rising. Yet in fact, consumption has begun to gnaw away at natural resources at a rate which cannot be sustained.

    Concern about the damage caused by the unrestrained pursuit of economic growth echoes a call by President Nicolas Sarkozy last week for politicians to look beyond GDP, to wider measures of the quality of life. Sarkozy published a report from Nobel prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, advocating a broader approach to assessing the health of an economy.

    These arguments have been given added urgency by the financial crisis, which undermined the arguments for unfettered consumption-fuelled growth.

    “For years, we proclaimed the financial world a creator of wealth, until we learned one day that it had accumulated so much risk that it plunged us into chaos,” Sarkozy said last week.

    Simms calls for a radical redistribution between the millions of “underconsumers,” in the poorest countries, whose lives could be transformed by small amounts of energy a year — and the bloated overconsumers in the rest of the world.

    “We need a radically different approach to ‘rich world’ consumption. While billions in poorer countries subsist, we consume vastly more and yet with little or nothing to show for it in terms of greater life satisfaction. Defusing the consumption explosion will give us the chance of better lives,” he said.

  • UK launches 22m(UK) wave energy fund

     

    The government faced criticism last month from Conservative shadow energy and climate change secretary Greg Clark, after it emerged that none of the £50 million Deployment Fund had yet been distributed. Clark said that the government was guilty of providing over 20 times more subsidies to the coal industry than it has delivered to the marine energy sector.

    Energy and Climate Change Minister Lord Hunt said that the new Proving Fund would help marine projects “get off the drawing board and into the water, taking them a vital step closer to full scale commercial viability”.

    The launch of the new fund completes a good few weeks for the marine energy sector, after the Carbon Trust announced that it has awarded £500,000 from the deployment fund to marine energy firms Pelamis Wave Power and Marine Current Turbines to help them develop more cost effective means of installing their technologies, and the Department of Business and Skills unveiled plans to create 1,500 engineering graduate placements to support the sector.

    According to recent research from the Carbon Trust, a quarter of the world’s wave energy technologies are already developed in the UK, while the marine energy sector has the potential to contribute £2 billion a year to the country’s economy by 2050, employing 16,000 people in the process.

    In related news, the government announced that it is currently working on a new Marine Action Plan that will be published early next year and will detail the steps the industry needs to take to ensure the wider roll out of wave and tidal technologies.

  • China and India are leading the way.Yes, I’m optimistic

     

    Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, made specific commitments on curbing the growth in greenhouse gas emissions as China continues its extraordinary economic growth. While the president promised a reduction by a “notable margin” rather than a specific figure, there is no doubt that the cut will be significant. And the environment ministers of both China and India made important and constructive proposals for how their countries will reverse deforestation.

    This was the kind of leadership I had hoped to see at the summit – organised by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general – with developing and emerging countries showing that they can tackle climate change while continuing their efforts to reduce poverty. But we still have a long way to go before we can be sure that a strong agreement is in place for Copenhagen.

    In the next couple of years, annual emissions of greenhouse gases are likely to reach a level of 50 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. If we are to have a reasonable chance of avoiding a rise in global average temperature by more than 2C, annual emissions have to be cut to no more than 20 gigatonnes by 2050.

    That means that the 9 billion people who will be living on the planet in 2050 must be producing, on average, no more than about two tonnes of greenhouse gases per year each.

    At the moment, the rich industrialised countries of the European Union average about 10-12 tonnes per head of population, while the figure for the United States is almost 24 tonnes. China, by contrast, emits about 6 tonnes per head at present. Thus rich industrialised countries in particular must substantially reduce their emissions.

    The developed countries must now demonstrate that they have the political will to reach a strong agreement in Copenhagen. In New York, Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, outlined how his country will reduce its emissions by 25% by 2020, compared with 1990. This was a positive example that few others matched.

    President Obama has already committed to a cut of 80% in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, compared with 1990. But the American Clean Energy and Security Act passed by the House of Representatives sets an interim target for 2020 that is not considered ambitious enough by many other countries. And it is not clear when, or even if, the Senate will pass a comparable act to reduce emissions.

    It is these interim targets that should now be addressed by all countries during the coming weeks. If we are to reach the goal of reducing emissions to 20 gigatonnes by 2050, we must be at about 35 gigatonnes by the halfway point of 2030.

    That means global emissions have to peak within the next five years and be steadily falling by 2020. And while the commitments by the largest emitters already on the table for 2020 offer significant cuts relative to today’s emissions, they collectively fall 4 or 5 gigatonnes short of what is necessary if we are to be on a realistic trajectory to reach the 2030 and 2050 targets.

    Developing countries should also sharply reduce their emissions – but they must be supported, financially and through technology sharing with the rich industrialised countries. Without commitments to such support, the negotiations ahead will prove very difficult.

    Although the political leaders must devise and implement the right policies to guide national and global emissions trajectories, it is the private sector that will be the main engine in the transition to a low-carbon global economy.

    In that respect it was very encouraging that 181 investors, collectively responsible for the management of more than $13 trillion in assets globally, launched a statement in New York last week to support a global agreement on climate change. The Leadership Forum for business leaders, which ran alongside the summit, also highlighted a tremendous variety of innovative ideas from within the private sector for the low-carbon transition.

    So there are some reasons to be more optimistic about the prospects for securing a strong agreement in Copenhagen, following the New York summit. But the obstacles that remain are very big and will require an even stronger effort to overcome, starting at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh and continuing during the coming round of treaty negotiations in Bangkok next week.

    There must be real vision, leadership and creativity, as well as a mutual understanding of the difficulties of making and implementing domestic policies. But if we can muster the effort, we can, as a world, forge a path towards a more prosperous and sustainable future – for us, our children, and generations to follow.

  • Spending crisis could put brake on clean coal project

     

    Miliband has said that the government will provide funding for up to four demonstration plants, but this is now likely to be revised downwards. Energy companies believe two new plants could now get public support.

    It will also take years for those plants which are promised funding to be built. Ministers will use a “gradualist” approach, staggering the tenders to build the new plants, which will also have the effect of deferring public spending commitments. The current tender, which began in 2007, may not be concluded until 2011.

    On Monday the energy minister Lord Hunt met industry body the Coal Forum. His claim that the UK was in the lead in promoting the technology was challenged by frustrated executives who believe other countries have now moved ahead.

    In April Miliband announced a radical policy to ban the construction of coal plants which do not fit expensive new CCS technology to store their carbon emissions underground. He said that the government would fund the additional new demonstration projects mainly via levies on consumers’ electricity bills. But the Treasury still needs to approve any levies because they amount to a tax, and the proceeds are treated as public spending. Officials fear that the need to slash public spending to cut the estimated £805bn of public sector debt could have an impact on such green energy subsidies.

    Matthew Lockwood, from thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research, said: “Back in April Ed Miliband made a bold decision to expand the UK’s ambitions on developing CCS, but unless the government follows through with clarity on the financing of new power stations and infrastructure, and an accelerated timetable, that ambition will fall at the first hurdle.”

    A spokeswoman for the energy department insisted that it was still a target to fund four projects and that there was no change in its plans. “The UK has set out bold proposals for coal and CCS – they are a world first – and our ambitions remain firm. We’re determined to drive the development of CCS as part of the transition to a low carbon economy.”