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  • Senate passes motion on emissions cost modelling

     

    Senator Milne says if the Government fails to comply, it must explain why the Senate should pass its emissions trading legislation, when it has not examined the cost of alternatives

  • German village pioneers energy-saving ‘dial-a-light’ scheme

     

    The village has trialled the so-called Dial4Light scheme on several of its streets for a year and because of its success now plans to roll it out to the entire settlement, as well as further afield.

    All 9,000 residents of Dörentrup can register their details for the free system. They can then make a phone call, entering the code number displayed on a lamp post, which triggers the lights to go on within seconds. They stay on for up to 15 minutes before automatically switching off.

    Dörentrup’s mayor said the scheme aimed first and foremost to save money but was also a useful way of raising the community’s awareness of how they used energy.

    “We’re doing this for the sake of saving costs,” mayor Friedrich Ehlert told the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “But we also want to do our bit to protect the environment and take care of the climate. In this, the community should be held accountable just like every private individual.”

    The project came into being after the village council made the unpopular decision several years ago to turn out the lights at night because it could no longer afford the electricity bill. A frustrated local resident came up with the idea to allow the lights to be available on demand.

    “We took his idea very seriously,” said Bernd Klemme from the county council in Lemgo, which developed the system with the help of experts and secured a patent for it.

    “We developed a special modem and a software allowing every registered user the ability to control the lights,” he said.

    Data collected by the council shows that the Dial4Light will lead to an annual reduction in the community’s carbon dioxide emissions of almost 20 tonnes – the equivalent of the emissions of 11 four-person households.

    Publicity generated during the pilot stage of the project prompted inquiries to the Lemgo authorities from numerous European countries as well as Saudi Arabia, Japan, India and the US. Later this month Lemgo will launch the Dial4Light system internationally.

  • China suspends reforestation project over food shortage fears

     

    Lu Xinshe, deputy head of the ministry of land and resources, said the country was struggling to hold the 120 million hectare “red line” considered the minimum land areas needed for food self-sufficiency.

    With industrialisation eating into the countryside, he said the government would halt plans to restore arable land to nature.

    “We will not plan any new large scale projects to return farmland to its natural state, beyond those that have already been planned,” he was quoted as saying by the Reuters news agency.

    Any change in the balance of food production causes unease in a country where the elderly still remember the devastating famines of the early 1960s that killed between 15 million and 40 million people.

    But the decision to halt many environmental restoration programmes is likely to have a knock-on effect. The government has been compensating farmers in the north and west of China to give up farmland as a central pillar of its strategy to fight desertification and water shortages. The end of ploughing helps stabilise the soil, while stopping irrigation alleviates water shortages.

    Tree planting has also helped the country offset the increased emission of carbon dioxide from factories.

    But food is the more immediate priority. By the end of last year, the amount of arable land in China had decreased to within 1% of the “red line.”

    Against the backdrop of rising global food prices, Chinese companies have bought the rights to farm swaths of land in the Philippines, Laos, Russia, and Kazakshstan. They have invested in biofuel crops in Zambia and the Congo. By one estimate there are now one million Chinese farmers in Africa.

    But the government is committed to self-sufficiency, which requires the production of 500 million tonnes of grain a year. To maintain this level, prime minister Wen Jiabao has said the state would increase spending on agricultural production by 20%, well above inflation.

    He has also asked advisers to recommend new areas where cultivation can be expanded. Among the areas suggested is the Sanjiang region in Heilongjiang, a protected wetland.

    But as The Guardian reported last month, the pressure to industrialise the far western province of Xinjiang is likely to further erode food output, reducing the government’s options. With industrialisation set to continue for decades, the shrinkage of land is likely to increase the pressure to use more fertiliser and genetically modified crops. A fifth of the nation’s paddy fields now grow hybrid strains of rice, according to a report today by the Xinhua news agency.

  • We have the climate predictions but do we have the political will to adapt ?

     

     

    We are fortunate in having the best climate modelling capacity in the world here in the UK. Now the question is whether or not the British public and their councillors, planners, civil servants and politicians have the appetite to provide sufficient funding to devise and implement long-range schemes of adaptation across the 23 river basins, 16 administrative regions and eight coastal regions covered by the report.

     

    Until the past 10 years, risk management against extreme events such as storms at sea, flash floods and hot dry summers, was framed in terms of the frequency of these events.

     

    The Thames Barrier, for example, was designed to withstand a 1-in-2,000 year event, thus preventing London from flooding through surges up or down the river except in the most extreme cases.

     

    But with a changing climate, this language has to be altered. What was a 1-in-2,000 year event in 1982, when the barrier first became operational, will now be a 1-in-1,000 year event later this century. The barrier will need to be retro-fitted to face our changing climate challenges.

     

    Our changing climate has a built in inertia of about 30 years. The increase in greenhouse gases brought about largely by our use of fossil fuels and by deforestation over the past 50 years will continue to cause global warming over the coming decades, even if we were to terminate all emissions now.

     

    But decisions to cut back on emissions now – globally, not just in the UK – will have a dramatic effect on impacts in the period beyond 2040. Here is the political challenge: to reduce the impacts for future generations we must de-fossilise our economies now. Have we, as a global civilisation, developed the capability and the appetite for joint action on a scale never previously achieved for the benefit not of ourselves but for future generations?

     

    In 2005, on behalf of the UK government, I signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese government to enable members of our foresight flood and coastal defence team to work with Chinese engineers, scientists and economists on the flood risk to Shanghai and the Yangse basin area of China. The outcome, I believe, was a startling realisation for the Chinese that Shanghai, the jewel in the crown of China’s economic miracle, was itself at risk of unmanageable levels of flooding before the end of the century, under a business-as-usual scenario for carbon emissions.

     

    I believe that this may well have been a major factor in the clear change in the Chinese leadership’s approach to the need for global action on emissions. Today, China is possibly the most progressive country in the world on taking action on climate change, including significant use of stimulus funds to green its development. The Chinese negotiating position for Copenhagen climate talks in December is now very critical of the laggards among the developed nations, particularly Japan and Canada.

     

    This report is therefore very welcome as a further step towards managing risks for the UK from the global warming impacts that are already in the pipeline. But this is one step in the process. We need to have a full-scale review and refinancing of our adaptation procedures. And on the international scale, we will have to redouble our efforts if there is to be any useful outcome from the Copenhagen negotiations. In the face of the global economic downturn and, specifically, the further major downturn in the Japanese economy and the emerging dependence of the Canadian economy on extracting oil from tar sands, do we have the global political appetite for action on the scale required?

     

    • Professor Sir David King is director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He was chief scientific advisor to the UK government from 2000 to 2007.

  • One in six UK homes ‘ at risk of flooding ‘

    Thousands of health centres and doctors’ surgeries, schools and miles of railways and roads are also at risk, according to the agency’s Flooding In England report.

    Almost half a million homes, offices, factories and warehouses are at a significant risk of flooding from rivers or sea, with a greater than one in 75 chance of being flooded in any year.

    The highest number of properties at significant risk are in the south-east of England, where 111,356 are threatened with flooding.

    Boston, Lincolnshire, has the greatest number of properties at high risk – 23,700 – of any local authority.

    According to the latest analysis of the impacts of climate change on the UK released this week, the risk of flooding is set to increase due to rising sea levels, more rapid coastal erosion and increasingly severe and frequent rainstorms.

    Without an increase in investment in flood defences, an extra 350,000 properties, including 280,000 more homes, will face a significant risk of flooding by 2035, bringing the total to 840,000 under threat, the EA said.

    Funding for maintaining and constructing defences will need to double from £570m in 2010/11 to more than £1bn in 2035 to safeguard the same number of properties as are currently protected, the Environment Agency said.

    Approximately £150m each year will be needed just to address the risk of surface water flooding, which caused some of the problems in the devastating 2007 floods, the agency said.

    In the floods two years ago, which hit parts of Yorkshire, the Midlands and the south-west of England, 13 adults died as well as two premature twins, while 55,000 properties were flooded and thousands had to be rescued from the flood waters.

    Without increasing funding for defences, the annual cost of damage to residential and commercial properties could rise from £2.5bn to £4bn, the agency warned as it released its long-term investment strategy for England.

    The Environment Agency’s chairman Lord Chris Smith said: “The latest climate change data shows that the risk of flooding and coastal erosion will continue to increase in the future due to rising sea levels and more frequent and heavy storms.The Environment Agency has completed 90 flood defence schemes in the past two years, providing increased protection to over 58,000 properties.”

     

    The Environment Agency said more than 430,000 people in flood risk areas had signed up to its free warning service, which provides alerts by text message, telephone or email, and urged those who have not subscribed to join.

    The environment secretary, Hilary Benn, said: “We have invested record levels of funding in recent years but, as the UK climate projections we published yesterday make clear, climate change means all of us will need to do much more in the future to adapt and manage the risks of flooding and erosion.”

     

    The shadow environment secretary, Nick Herbert, said: “The Environment Agency’s call for more investment in flood defence brings home the reality of climate change, and there will need to be a debate on the priorities, but the public must be protected.

    “When a staggering one in six homes in England are at risk, it is essential that flood defence schemes are cost-effective and delivered on time, and that no unnecessary development takes place in areas that are susceptible to flooding.”

     

    In April, the Environment Agency and Met Office opened a new £10m Flood Forecasting Centre to provide earlier and more accurate flood warnings.

     

     

     

    English regions ranked in order of the number of properties at significant risk of flooding:

    South-east England: 111,356

    South-west: 86,178

    East Midlands: 81,096

    Yorkshire and Humber: 65,380

    Greater London: 40,412

    East of England: 33,050

    North-west: 28,941

    West Midlands: 19,173

    North-east: 19,167

    Total: 484,753

     

    Top 10 local authorities with the highest number of properties in areas with a significant chance of flooding:

    Boston district: 23,700

    North Somerset: 20,415

    East Lindsey district: 14,949

    Windsor and Maidenhead: 11,477

    Kingston upon Hull: 9,825

    Shepway district: 9,065

    Sedgemoor district: 8,092

    East Riding of Yorkshire: 7,513

    Runnymede district: 7,007

    Warrington: 6,533

  • Another renewable energy rebate goes

     

    A solar energy businessman, Adrian Ferraretto, says it is disappointing.

    “Right now there is no rebate for the solar energy industry, well we got dealt another blow this morning with the Government pulling the stand-alone power system rebate,” he said.

    The rebate for solar installations was withdrawn by the Federal Government recently.

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