Climate change « Climate Equity

Observed around the world with varying degrees of curiosity, high expectations and hopes, skepticism, potential good will or schadenfreude, Germany, Europe’s largest economy, has embarked on probably the furthest reaching energy transformation of any industrialized country by its recent government decision – confirmed by a parliamentary vote end of June – to phase out nuclear energy by 2022.  This will be a costly endeavor, no doubt, a multibillion-dollar experiment to improve the country’s electricity grid and scale up generation and use of renewable energy domestically.  If Germany’s great energy transformation effort succeeds, other industrialized countries will have a harder time arguing that a low-carbon energy transformation will necessarily cost jobs, reduce a country’s economic growth and threaten its global competitiveness. 

Yet, the German experiment can only then be judged a true success, if Germany does not fund its national energy transformation  at the expense of its international obligations and pledges to help developing countries finance their own low-carbon and climate-resilient development.  Funding both the energy transformation at home and internationally at the same time, without short-cuts and excuses:  this  will set Germany apart from the rest of the industrialized world and cement a true German leadership position in climate actions globally ….. (more…)

The World Bank’s series of World Development Reports (WDR)is special: conceived as the “flagship publication” of the international development bank, whose self-declared primary mission is poverty reduction, WDRs are meant to showcase the most advanced thinking from within the World Bank, detailing — and suggesting ways to overcome – major political, social and economic obstacles to global development targeted at development policy makers and practitioners. Given this premise, and the world’s acknowledgement of gender equality as critical for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), one might wonder why it has taken the World Bank research staff that long to zoom in on gender equality (the Bank has published 32 WDRs so far since 1978) as the topic for a WDR, with “Gender Equality and Development” now being the official focus of the upcoming WDR 2012 to be released in late 2011.

But if a first 65-page draft outline of the possible several hundred pages long final report is any indication, the World Bank’s staff, despite its stated intention to use the WDR to take a look at the “various dimensions“ of gender equality, will not be able to overcome its own parochial view of women and gender equality.  Missing most prominently: an understanding of development in the context of sustainability, which – in the day and age of persistently high poverty rates, food insecurity, gender inequalities, environmental destruction and climate change globally – should be redefined as low-carbon, climate-resilient, livelihood focused, gender equitable development.  After all, almost 20 years after the Earth Summit, next year a serious reconsideration and refocusing of the concept in the context  of Rio+20 seems unavoidable. (more…)

I know you know that your and my individual eating habits have a big influence on the global commons that is our climate, not to mention our waistlines. Eating locally produced food, preferably vegetarian, is better for the climate than foodstuff shipped, flown or trucked over wide distances — although there are some finer notes about the development contributions for poor countries involved in the food miles debate that should at least be honestly acknowledged. And it keeps us healthier and fitter, too.

So the climate connection is obvious (too much food, wrongly produced, too many food miles) when I tell you that in the United States alone, by 2020 some 75 % percent of the adult population are expected to be overweight and obese (meaning, those folks are not just chubby like the average middle aged person living in the United States, such as myself, but extremely overweight). All that extra food is adding up to tons of emissions overweight, too.

But did you know that the economic cost to the United States for that collective belly fat – in lost productivity because of shortened life-spans, more illnesses and thus increased health care costs — already is at least at 1 percent of the United States gross domestic product (GDP) and expected to rise?  A new OECD study says so.

Now, that caught my eye and should catch yours, if you are concerned with fighting climate change: not only is the fattest OECD country also the biggest climate polluter in the industrialized country club, but the trajectories for both GHG emissions and belly girth in the United States specifically and the wider OECD world in general are trending seemingly unstoppable upwards — and with it the costs…. (more…)

Illegal logging and trading in illegally sourced wood products is globally one of the major causes of deforestation and forest degradation in many developing countries.  It not only robs cash-strapped developing country governments of much needed revenues, it also destroys the livelihood of worldwide several hundreds of million of people who depend on forests. The destruction of forests — illegal or government-sanctioned — is also a significant contributor to global carbon dioxide emissions, according to some estimates close to 20 percent.  So, it must be considered good news that a new study by the British Chatham House finds by looking at twelve major producer, processing and consumer countries that illegal logging globally has fallen by 22 percent over the course of the last decade, or more specifically by about 50 to 75 percent in the Brazilian Amazon, by 75 percent in Indonesia, and still by half in Cameroon.

As a result up to 17 million hectares of forest are estimated to have been protected from degradation in the five tropical timber producers studied. This adds up to at least 1.2 billion tons  and possibly many more of avoided carbon dioxide emissions since 2002.  In comparison: in 2009, Germany, globally the sixth biggest CO2 polluter, blasted 760 million tons into the atmosphere. (more…)

In the end, the appointment for the new UN climate change chief came faster than expected and not for the person that was widely considered — at least in the press speculations of the last weeks — to be the front runner to replace departing Yvo de Boer who had announced his resignation as UNFCCC Executive Secretary just two months after Copenhagen.  In place of Marthinus van Schalkwyk, the former South African Environment and current Tourism Minister, on whose win most climate bookies had placed their bets, Christiana Figueres (pictured at the center), a 53 year old Costa Rican veteran climate negotiator, was chosen yesterday by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon just a week before climate talks are to resume in Bonn. She certainly is a UNFCCC insider having been involved in UN climate negotiations since 1994 in many functions, including repeatedly as contact groups chair for the CDM or emissions trading. But can Christiana Figueres catalyze climate talks with only six months to go to the next crucial COP in Cancun?  

Personally, I hope she has at least a good fighting change, mainly because of some of her strengths and distinct qualifications …  among which I would certainly count the fact that it is MADAME Figueres not MISTER Figueres assuming leadership of the UNFCCC Secretariat.  (more…)

By Tigere Chagutah

As we hurtle along towards Copenhagen 2009, hoping for the best, but expecting the worst, developing countries have called for new and enhanced funds for adaptation and mitigation actions.

At a recent gathering of 10 African leaders in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa delegates agreed to demand a massive 67 billion dollar annual package to counter the impacts of climate change on the continent.

The meeting also sought to put in place a sturdy climate change negotiating architecture for the continent after years of grappling with the intricacies of multilateral environmental negotiations.

However, in the event that such a package and additional, predictable financial support for adaptation and mitigation actions materialises, how ought the funds to be governed?

Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC Executive Secretary, has outlined two main positions regarding the governance of climate funds.

Developing countries are proposing that climate funds be under the authority of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC, with operating bodies to supervise financial flows.

This proposal, based on the equitable representation of Parties, would ensure a break with inequitable structures of the past and ensure direct control over funds by Parties under the Convention.

The developed countries, from whom the bulk of these funds are expected to flow, are pushing for governance of funds through existing channels.

This stance is based on their belief that existing multilateral institutions and regional development banks are efficient and therefore have an important role to play in the governance of the generated finances.

Industrialised countries also want to ensure that there is no proliferation of financial institutions, which would gobble up the resources.

Either way, one thing is certain, developing countries have for long been dissatisfied with the magnitude and current governance of climate funds and they will demand up-scaled support and a greater say in the management of resources in a post-Kyoto regime.

Tigere Chagutah is a PhD Candidate in Communication Studies at North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus – South Africa. He currently works for the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Regional Office for Southern Africa in Cape Town.