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  • Green shoots in the desert

    Green shoots in the desert

    The Arab world no longer dismisses environmentalism as a western luxury. Abu Dhabi is leading the way in averting disaster

    The Arab world is gradually awakening to the massive environmental challenges ahead for the region.

    The environmental movement has long been regarded with suspicion in the developing world. For two centuries, the west has had a more or less free hand to pollute with impunity, deplete the planet of natural resources, exterminate most of its stock of wildlife that might pose any kind of threat to human safety and wipe out biodiversity not only in its own backyard but also across the planet.

    Given this trail of destruction and distrust, it is perhaps unsurprising that well-meaning and far-sighted eco-warriors out to protect cuddly killer cats, hug trees against the deforester’s axe and fume over emissions have often been viewed as little more than latter-day missionaries sent out to subdue the restive natives and keep them from aspiring to better things.

    This unfortunate perception was partly a coincidence of history. Although environmental campaigners in Europe and north America are as old as the industrial revolution, widespread social awareness of environmental degradation did not emerge until after the second world war, with the industrialised level of destruction wrought by that conflict and the fearful potential consequences of the nuclear age.

    At about the same time, the newly independent former colonies embarked on a postcolonial drive for rapid industrialisation and the desire and ambition to match and perhaps better western standards of living. Despite the emergence of cleaner and greener technologies, this was largely done with little regard for the environmental impact of modernisation, partly because developing countries could not afford the new technologies.

    In recent years, many developing countries, faced with massive environmental degradation and poor air and water quality, have reached a similar stage in their industrialisation cycle as Europe and the west were at in the 1950s and 1960s, with the environmental movement gradually becoming more than a fringe concern. This, coupled with the impacts already being felt by climate change and the massive upheavals ahead, means they are slowly awakening to the reality that development and the environment are not two separate entities.

    In the Arab world, although direct industrialisation has slowed down over the past three decades, modernisation has not – stressing the environment enormously. The region may be the world’s main petrol pump, but this finite resource is rapidly dwindling and dependence on it has affected air quality in large urban centres and on the coastal plains where half of the region’s population lives. Major investment in harnessing the region’s massive solar resources makes both economic and environmental sense.

    In addition, although climate change largely carries a “made in the west” label, the region is set quite literally to take the heat for it. Both temperatures and populations are expected to rise over the coming decades, causing water reserves to diminish, or at best stagnate, and desertification to accelerate. This means that scarce water will become even scarcer. Rising sea levels could also threaten major coastal population centres.

    Faced with all these emerging challenges, it is unsurprising that the latest Arab Human Development Report dedicated an entire chapter to the environment and natural resources.

    As in many other areas, Arab leaders do not always set a good example. Take King Muhammed VI of Morocco, whose enthusiasm for cars prompted him to take the outrageous step of chartering a Hercules transporter plane to fly his Aston Martin from Rabat to Britain for repairs. Before we laugh off those eccentric and peculiar Arab leaders, it is worth recalling that the US president – who travels abroad with two planes and an entire fleet of cars – has a carbon footprint estimated to be the equivalent of 2,200 energy-guzzling US households.

    A group of independent experts has produced a report dedicated to the region’s environment. The Arab Environment Future Challenges Report estimates that environmental degradation costs the region about 5% of its GDP.

    The document also identified Abu Dhabi as a trailblazer in environmental action, commending its environment strategy for 2009 to 2013 as a “model” for other countries to emulate. Environmental action in the small emirate is also reaching the grassroots and the new generation. For instance, 50 Abu Dhabi schools are in the process of “going green” and reducing their ecological footprint.

    A few weeks before the Copenhagen climate conference, Beirut will play host to the 2009 conference of the Arab Forum for Environment and Development where a new report will be released and experts will debate what action needs to be taken. As occurred at Kyoto and may well happen in Copenhagen, it remains to be seen whether greater awareness of our heavy-footed environmental bootprint will translate into effective and sustained action.

     

  • Stop blaming the poor. It’s the wally yachters who are burning the planet

     

    A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for instance, sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world’s population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out only 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three percent of the world’s population growth happened in places with very low emissions.

    Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that about one sixth of the world’s population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning less than 3,000 rupees (£40) a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one seventh of the transport fuel of households earning 30,000 rupees or more. Street sleepers use almost nothing. Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce.

    Many of the emissions for which poorer countries are blamed should in fairness belong to the developed nations. Gas flaring by companies exporting oil from Nigeria, for instance, has produced more greenhouse gases than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa put together. Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial operations delivering timber, meat and animal feed to rich consumers. The rural poor do far less harm.

    The paper’s author, David Satterthwaite, points out that the old formula taught to students of development – that total impact equals population times affluence times technology (I = PAT) – is wrong. Total impact should be measured as I = CAT: consumers times affluence times technology. Many of the world’s people use so little that they wouldn’t figure in this equation. They are the ones who have most children.

    While there’s a weak correlation between global warming and population growth, there’s a strong correlation between global warming and wealth. I’ve been taking a look at a few super-yachts, as I’ll need somewhere to entertain Labour ministers in the style to which they are accustomed. First I went through the plans for Royal Falcon Fleet’s RFF135, but when I discovered that it burns only 750 litres of fuel per hour I realised that it wasn’t going to impress Lord Mandelson. I might raise half an eyebrow in Brighton with the Overmarine Mangusta 105, which sucks up 850 litres per hour. But the raft that’s really caught my eye is made by Wally Yachts in Monaco. The WallyPower 118 (which gives total wallies a sensation of power) consumes 3,400 litres per hour when travelling at 60 knots. That’s nearly a litre per second. Another way of putting it is 31 litres per kilometre.

    Of course, to make a real splash I’ll have to shell out on teak and mahogany fittings, carry a few jetskis and a mini-submarine, ferry my guests to the marina by private plane and helicopter, offer them bluefin tuna sushi and beluga caviar, and drive the beast so fast that I mash up half the marine life of the Mediterranean. As the owner of one of these yachts I’ll do more damage to the biosphere in 10 minutes than most Africans inflict in a lifetime. Now we’re burning, baby.

    Someone I know who hangs out with the very rich tells me that in the banker belt of the lower Thames valley there are people who heat their outdoor swimming pools to bath temperature, all round the year. They like to lie in the pool on winter nights, looking up at the stars. The fuel costs them £3,000 a month. One hundred thousand people living like these bankers would knacker our life support systems faster than 10 billion people living like the African peasantry. But at least the super wealthy have the good manners not to breed very much, so the rich old men who bang on about human reproduction leave them alone.

    In May the Sunday Times carried an article headlined “Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation“. It revealed that “some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly” to decide which good cause they should support. “A consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.” The ultra-rich, in other words, have decided that it’s the very poor who are trashing the planet. You grope for a metaphor, but it’s impossible to satirise.

    James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust. It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven’t been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich.

    The obsessives could argue that the people breeding rapidly today might one day become richer. But as the super wealthy grab an ever greater share and resources begin to run dry, this, for most of the very poor, is a diminishing prospect. There are strong social reasons for helping people to manage their reproduction, but weak environmental reasons – except among wealthier populations.

    The Optimum Population Trust glosses over the fact that the world is going through demographic transition: population growth rates are slowing down almost everywhere and the number of people is likely, according to a paper in Nature, to peak this century, probably at about 10 billion. Most of the growth will take place among those who consume almost nothing.

    But no one anticipates a consumption transition. People breed less as they become richer, but they don’t consume less – they consume more. As the habits of the super-rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance. Consumption can be expected to rise with economic growth until the biosphere hits the buffers. Anyone who understands this and still considers that population, not consumption, is the big issue is, in Lovelock’s words, “hiding from the truth”. It is the worst kind of paternalism, blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich.

    So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living systems? Where is the direct action against super-yachts and private jets? Where’s Class War when you need it?

    It’s time we had the guts to name the problem. It’s not sex; it’s money. It’s not the poor; it’s the rich.

  • Adelaide latest victim of global water shortages

     

    “Another dry year will deplete our reservoirs and the water in the Murray will become too saline to drink. We are talking about 1.3 million people, who are not far off becoming reliant on bottled water. We are talking a national emergency,” said South Australian MP David Winderlich.

    As early as next week, water from parts of the river may become too dangerous to drink, which would require the water authority to begin delivering supplies to hospitals, clinics, aged care facilities and local supermarkets in plastic bottles, said Winderlich.

    “There’s simply too many people pulling water out of the river,” said Roger Strother, Coorong council mayor. “We’ve been saying that one day it would catch up, and this summer is when it is going to happen. It could be next week.”

    Recent rains have topped up Adelaide’s dams, but only enough for one year, and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, which oversees water use across the whole of south-east Australia, says water levels in reservoirs are much lower than expected. Today the authority said the whole basin was at 25% capacity.

    Australia’s worst drought in a century has lasted over 10 years in places, and many cities have had to restrict water use.

    Climate experts fear the continent faces a permanently drier future as the impact of global warming kicks in. South Australians have watched the waters stagnate as farmers, especially cotton and rice growers upstream, siphoned up to 83% of the water from the river system.

    The WHO says the acceptable level of salinity for safe drinking water is 800 EC (electrical conductivity) units but the salinity in parts of the Murray is now around 1,200 EC units. The water authority says it will begin shipping water when the salinity rises to 1,400 EC units.

    Adelaide is one of many cities around the world facing acute water shortages as populations grow, long-term droughts continue and ground water is not replenished. The Chinese water minister, Chen Lei, today told engineers at a water conference that two-thirds of Chinese cities now face serious shortages due to rapid industrialisation and climate change.

    “Compared to 1956-79, the average rainfall has dropped 6% in three major river basins,” Lei said. “Most parts in the north of China are now facing water shortages problems, especially because of the increasing influence of climate change and the faster speed of industrialisation and urbanisation.”

    By 2015, Lei said, water efficiency would have to be increased by 30%. “Water abstraction must be strictly controlled. We should have strict management of groundwater exploitation and consumption, put a limit on total use of groundwater, and ban or set quotas on groundwater exploitation. Nearly two out of three cities are facing water shortages, and the farmland affected by drought reaches nearly 15m sq km a year.”

    According to a new UN environment programme report, perennial drought conditions are developing in south-eastern Australia and south-western North America. “Projections suggest that persistent water scarcity will increase in a number of regions in coming years, including southern and northern Africa, the Mediterranean, much of the Middle East, a broad band in central Asia and the Indian subcontinent,” the report said.

    “There is growing concern that thresholds or tipping points may now be reached in a matter of years or a few decades, including dramatic changes to the Indian subcontinent’s monsoon rains, the Sahara and west Africa monsoons, and climate systems affecting the Amazon rainforest,” it said.

    Hopes in some countries that an El Niño weather event would bring rain to parched areas of the US this week declined as the US government climate prediction centre said temperatures in the equatorial Pacific had stopped climbing. During strong El Niños, abnormally warm waters in that region pump heat and moisture into the atmosphere, which leads to intense storms.

     

     

    Cities around the world under water stress

    BEIJING: Most of Beijing’s water comes from the Miyun reservoir, but a decade of drought and huge population increase has left extreme shortages. Water diversion projects are helping, but this is depleting resources from other regions. The city must spend $3.5bn (£2.2bn) in the next five years to cope with a population expected to rise to 17 million.

     

     

    NAIROBI: The city has imposed water rationing, following an acute drought that has affected all Kenya’s water catchment areas. River and reservoirs are at historically low levels. Flower farms and export-oriented agriculture are also reducing supplies available to people.

    MEXICO CITY: 2009 has been the driest year recorded in the city of 19 million people. Water is rationed and many areas have no piped water for days at a time. The government has imposed fines of up to $1,200 for hosing down cars and sidewalks or watering lawns during daytime hours. Signs warn that the city could run out of water next spring unless residents switch to low-flow showers and toilets, and plug leaks.

    GAZA: Water fit for human use will run out in the Gaza strip within 10 years, the Gaza Coastal Municipal Water Utility and UN agencies said this month. Tap water is already salty, and only 5-10% of groundwater is drinkable. Gaza’s population is expected to increase to 3 million by 2025.

    KATHMANDU: Erratic rainfall and drier winters have left Nepal’s capital very short of water. The water company can provide only 160m litres a day but the demand is well over 200m litres. Many households are drilling their own boreholes to extract groundwater with electric pumps, but the water table is sinking approximately 2.5 metres a year and this is not sustainable in the medium term.

  • Dust storms spread deadly diseases worldwide

     

    The Sydney storm, which left millions of people choking on some of the worst air pollution in 70 years, was a consequence of the 10-year drought that has turned parts of Australia’s interior into a giant dust bowl, providing perfect conditions for high winds to whip loose soil into the air and carry it thousands of miles across the continent.

    It followed major dust storms this year in northern China, Iraq and Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, east Africa, Arizona and other arid areas. Most of the storms are also linked to droughts, but are believed to have been exacerbated by deforestation, overgrazing of pastures and climate change.

    As diplomats prepare to meet in Bangkok tomorrow for the next round of climate talks, meteorologists predict that more major dust storms can be expected, carrying minute particles of beneficial soil and nutrients as well as potentially harmful bacteria, viruses and fungal spores.

    “The numbers of major dust storms go up and down over the years,” said Andrew Goudie, geography professor at Oxford University. “In Australia and China they tailed off from the 1970s then spiked in the 1990s and at the start of this decade. At the moment they are clearly on an upward trajectory.”

    Laurence Barrie is chief researcher at the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in Geneva, which is working with 40 countries to develop a dust storm warning system. He said: “I think the droughts [and dust storms] in Australia are a harbinger. Dust storms are a natural phenomenon, but are influenced by human activities and are now just as serious as traffic and industrial air pollution. The minute particles act like urban smog or acid rain. They can penetrate deep into the human body.”

    Saharan storms are thought to be responsible for spreading lethal meningitis spores throughout semi-arid central Africa, where up to 250,000 people, particularly children, contract the disease each year and 25,000 die. “There is evidence that the dust can mobilise meningitis in the bloodstream,” said Barrie.

    Higher temperatures and more intense storms are also linked to “valley fever”, a disease contracted from a fungus in the soil of the central valley of California. The American Academy of Microbiology estimates that about 200,000 Americans go down with valley fever each year, 200 of whom die. The number of cases in Arizona and California almost quadrupled in the decade to 2006.

    Scientists who had thought diseases were mostly transmitted by people or animals now see dust clouds as possible transmitters of influenza, Sars and foot-and-mouth, and increasingly responsible for respiratory diseases. A rise in the number of cases of asthma in children on Caribbean islands has been linked to an increase in the dust blown across the Atlantic from Africa. The asthma rate in Barbados is 17 times greater than it was in 1973, when a major African drought began, according to one major study. Researchers have also documented more hospital admissions when the dust storms are at their worst.

    “We are just beginning to accumulate the evidence of airborne dust implications on health,” said William Sprigg, a climate expert at Arizona University.

    The scale and range of some recent dust storms has surprised scientists. Japanese academics reported in July that a giant dust storm in China’s Taklimakan desert in 2007 picked up nearly 800,000 tonnes of dust which winds carried twice around the world.

    Dust from the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts is often present over the western United States in the spring and can lead to disastrous air quality in Korean, Japanese and Russian cities. It frequently contributes to the smogs over Los Angeles. Britain and northern Europe are not immune from dust storms. Dust blown from the Sahara is commonly found in Spain, Italy and Greece and the WMO says that storms deposit Saharan dust north of the Alps about once a month. Last year Britain’s Meteorological Office reported it in south Wales.

    Some scientists sought to attribute the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak to a giant storm in north Africa that carried dust and possibly spores of the animal disease as far as northern Britain only a week before the first reported cases.

    The scale and spread of the dust storms has also surprised researchers. Satellite photographs have shown some of the clouds coming out of Africa to be as big as the whole land mass of the US, with a major storm able to whip more than a million tonnes of soil into the atmosphere. Sydney was covered by an estimated 5,000 tonnes of dust last week, but the WMO says Beijing was enveloped by more than 300,000 tonnes in one storm in 2006.

    “The 2-3 billion tonnes of fine soil particles that leave Africa each year in dust storms are slowly draining the continent of its fertility and biological productivity,” said Lester Brown, director of the Earth Policy Institute research group in Washington DC. “Those big storms take millions of tonnes of soil, which takes centuries to replace.”

    Brown and Chinese scientists say the increased number of major dust storms in China is directly linked to deforestation and the massive increase in numbers of sheep and goats since the 1980s, when restrictions on herders were removed. “Goats will strip vegetation,” said Brown. “They ate everything and dust storms are now routine. If climate change leads to a reduction in rainfall, then the two trends reinforce themselves.” China is planting tens of millions of trees to act as a barrier to the advancing desert.

    However, research increasingly suggests that the dust could be mitigating climate change, both by reflecting sunlight in the atmosphere and fertilising the oceans with nutrients. Iron-rich dust blown from Australia and from the Gobi and Sahara deserts is largely deposited in oceans, where it has been observed to feed phytoplankton, the microscopic marine plants that are the first link in the oceanic food chain and absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide. In addition, the upper layers of the rainforest in Brazil are thought to derive much of their nutrient supply from dust transported across the Atlantic from the Sahara.

    Just as scientists struggle to understand how dust is affecting climate, evidence is growing that another airborne pollutant, soot, is potentially disastrous. Minute particles of carbon produced by diesel engines, forest fires and the inefficient burning of wood in stoves is being carried just like dust to the remotest regions of the world.

    A study by the United Nations Environment Programme has just concluded that the pollutant has played a major part in shrinking the Himalayan glaciers and has helped to disrupt the south Asian monsoon.

    “Soot accounts from 10% to more than 45% of the contribution to global warming,” said Achim Steiner, director of the UN’s environment programme. “It is linked to accelerated losses of glaciers in Asia because soot deposits darken ice, making it more vulnerable to melting.”

  • Saving our rail lines

    The Greens strongly support a big increase in funding for cycleway and
    pedestrian infrastructure. There is no need to close rail lines and sell off
    associated land to do it.

    This is our campaign page
    http://leerhiannon.org.au/Campaigns/stop-rail-sell-off-1

    Facebook page by rail activists from northern NSW
    http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=150753837663

    Parliament is not sitting for the next weeks so we will be campaigning
    across the state on this issue.

    If you could forward this email to your contact lists it would be
    appreciated.

    Please urge your friends and colleagues to lobby these MPs with the message:
    Save NSW rail, don’t vote for the Transport Administration Amendment (Rail
    Trails) Bill 2009.

    David Campbell – Minister for Transport – david@campbell.minister.nsw.gov.au
    Tony Kelly – Minister for Lands – sharon.armstrong@lands.nsw.gov.au Gladys
    Berejiklian – shadow minister for transport –
    gladys.berejiklian@parliament.nsw.gov.au
    Roy Smith – Shooters MP – roy.smith@parliament.nsw.gov.au
    Robert Brown – Shooters MP – robert.brown@parliament.nsw.gov.au  
    Fred Nile – Christian Democrat MP – fred.nile@parliament.nsw.gov.au Gordon
    Moyes – Independent MP – gordon.moyes@parliament.nsw.gov.au

    Regards
    Lee

    ————————————————–
    Lee Rhiannon, MLC
    The Greens
    Parliament of New South Wales
    Macquarie St
    Sydney 2000
    Tel: +61-2-9230 3551 Fax: +61-2-9230 3550 Email
    lee.rhiannon@parliament.nsw.gov.au
    Web http://www.lee.greens.org.au/

  • The Thaw at the Roof of the World

     

    Because the Tibetan Plateau and its environs shelter the largest perennial ice mass on the planet after the Arctic and Antarctica, it has come to be known as “the Third Pole.” Its snowfields and glaciers feed almost every major river system of Asia during hot, dry seasons when the monsoons cease, and their melt waters supply rivers from the Indus in the west to the Yellow in the east, with the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong and Yangtze Rivers in between. (The glaciers on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain contribute much of their water to the upper reaches of the Yangtze River.)

    From a distance, Baishui Glacier No. 1 looks as immovable as the defiant mountain above. In reality, it is a fluid field of ice and rock in constant downward motion. Scientists speak about the reactive behavior of these glaciers as if they were almost human. The Tibetan and Naxi peoples who inhabit this region treat them, and their mountain hosts, as embodiments of deities and spirits.

    Now, a growing number of glaciers are losing their equilibrium, or their capacity to build up enough snow and ice at high altitudes to compensate for the rate of melting at lower ones. After surveying the Himalayas for many years, the respected Chinese glaciologist Yao Tandong recently warned that, given present trends, almost two-thirds of the plateau’s glaciers could well disappear within the next 40 years. With the planet having just experienced the 10 hottest years on record, the average annual melting rate of mountain glaciers seems to have doubled after the turn of the millennium from the two decades before.

    Moreover, temperatures on the Tibetan plateau are rising much faster than the global average. A good portion of the area’s existing ice fields has been lost over the past four decades, and the rate of retreat has increased in recent years.

    The slow-motion demise of Baishui Glacier No. 1 will have far-reaching consequences. In the short run, there will, of course, be an abundance of water. But in the long run there will be deficits. These will have national security consequences as countries compete for ever scarcer water resources supplied by transnational rivers with as many as two billion users.

    It was not so long ago that the Tibetan Plateau was seen as a region of little consequence, save to those few Western adventurers drawn to remote regions that the early 20th-century Swedish explorer Sven Hedin once called the “white spaces” on the map. Today, these white spaces play a crucial role in Asia’s ecology.

    Sadly, it may be too late to change the destiny of Baishui Glacier No. 1. But President Hu, by promising this week to try to cut carbon dioxide emissions per unit of gross domestic product and to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption, signaled his willingness to act. China can’t solve this problem alone, and President Obama’s scheduled visit to Beijing in November presents an opportunity to forge a bilateral alliance on climate change. After all, the ice fields in the majestic arc of peaks that runs from China to Afghanistan are melting in large part because of greenhouse gases emitted thousands of miles away.

    Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society’s Center on United States-China Relations, is the author of “Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La From the Himalayas to Hollywood.”