China set to lead the world in wind power.

It's nice to see that the US and Europe are being joined by a third renewable energy super power.

According to projections at Renewable Energy World, China is going to be a world leader in wind power by next year!

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Price of Rice on the Rise

There are many reasons for the price of rice going up. Of course all grain prices are linked to varying degrees so this is part of a wider problem in agricultural production. The most often quoted drivers of increasing prices are the rise of asia up the economic scale, leading to more meat consumption, and more grain required to feed the animals grown for food; the rise of bofuels, perticularly of corn ethanol in the US is also a significant factor.

Other factors such as soil degredation, decline of water qaulity and the effects of climate change on global agriculture through shifting weather patterns and drought, are all likely to add to these pressures in the medium to long term.

If you live in the US then you will be aware of the pressure being exerted on China to unpin its currency. One of the main reasons they dont do this is that they need to subsidise food for the hundereds of millions of extremely impoverished Chineese who are not currently bennefiting from national accension.

• Past article on climate change and rice.

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Tiempo Climate Newsletters #64 and #65

The latest two issues, #64 & 65, of Tiempo: I like to pick these up at they are released so sorry about that delay. The Tiempo newsletter focuses on adaptation and development in the global south. The publication is a joint project of IIED and SEI.




Issue 65 Contents:

• National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPA). (Mohazurul Alam)
• The Sudanese NAPA. (Sumaya Ahmed ZakiEldeen and Nagmeldin Goutbi Elhassan)
• NAPA priorities to policies. (Bubu Pateh Jallow and Thomas Downing)
• Leassons learned in Africa. (Balgis Osman-Elasha and Thomas Downing)

Issue 64 Contents:

• Flooding and the urban poor. (Ian Douglas et. al.,)
• Climate risk integration. (Bert Koenders)
• Adaptation targets. (Ian Tellam)
• Community Adaptation. (Roger Jones and Atiq Rahman)
• Roadmap for Adaptation (Gary Yohe)
  

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UNDP 2007 Human Development Report

The 2007 Human Development Report made a bigger splash than any other report, bar the IPCC's latest edition. Going into Bali the report was big news, around the world, but perticularly in the nations of the global south. Now UNDP have created a superb video explaining the reports conclusions, it is very compelling viewing, highly reccomended.



Related:

• Summary Report (pdf, 800k)


• Full Report (pdf, 12,200k)
  

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Yangtze - a polluted lifeless trickle?

The Yangtze may be slowing to a heavily polluted, lifeless trickle, but as long as we can still get plastic novelties and cheap fashion items courtesy of a booming Chinese economy, all's right with the world.

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Nano Hypocrisy

I have been watching coverage (celsias, treehugger), of the Tata Nano in despair. There is a claim made, at times, that environmentalism is an attempt by the North to keep the South down. I`m skeptical about this but the hypocrisy shown in relation to the Tata Nano is mind boggling and dosent represent us well.

I was tempted to write an article on this, my angle being: if someone told you that India was going to take on 'Prius or better' emissions standards you would be pleased, right? No, it's not good enough! Or so say some environmentalists, despite the fact that developed nations arent even close to this level of fleet wide performance.

Here is a superb article by the World Watch institute 'Nano Hypocricy'.

The first paragraph sums things up:

"One car gets 46 miles per gallon, features fancy accessories, and sports two engines with a combined 145 horsepower. The other car reportedly gets 54 miles per gallon, runs on a diminutive 30-horsepower engine, and is positively spartan in its interior trimmings. The first is a darling of the environmentally conscious. The latter is reviled as a climate wrecker. These two vehicles are the Toyota Prius and the newly unveiled Tata Nano, dubbed “the people’s car.” Is there a double standard?"

Its only fair to not that there has already been a shot taken at the tata from this site by the highly talanted cartoonist in residence Marc from Throbgoblins International. This would be one of the few times that i havent agreed with his work.

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Report of the Week: Climate change--Impacts, vulnerability and adaptation in developing countries

Good judgement is something that we would all wish to have. However, the best decisions don't always come from your own judgement: in the case of climate change it is absurd for the global 'North' to presume to know how to help the south. As Almuth pointed out recently it is only by cooperation and working together with those effected by climate change that we can come to a reasonable idea of the challenges that they face. This week's report of the week comes via the UNFCCC so it is a top down look at issues. It does however give a better idea of what the least developed nations are worried about, and what there key climate agenda is.

The report was formulated as a result of UNFCCC negotiations which required a series of regional workshops to asses the nature and severity of regional climatic impacts and to proffer some solutions.

Climate change: Impacts, vulnerability and adaptation in developing countries.

The book draws heavily on information provided by Parties to the UNFCCC, particularly that provided at three regional workshops held in Africa, Asia and Latin America and one expert meeting held in small island developing States during 2006 – 20071, as mandated by the Buenos Aires programme of work on adaptation and response measures (decision 1/CP.10 of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC)2, as well as information in national communications3 and national adaptation programmes of action4 submitted to the UNFCCC, reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007)and other sources, as referenced.

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Alter-Eco: news from the UN Climate Conference

Almuth Ernsting of Biofuelwatch sent me this email whith links to the Transnational Institute which gives a climate justice or global south perspective on the issues up for debate at Bali. I wasn't aware of this group but they are working on vital issues so i was glad to share there views.

Hi,

I thought people might like to see some alternative views from the Bali Climate Conference. I am here with a colleague from Biofuelwatch and we joined in with others who formed a Climate Justice Group - people who are horrified to see that the climate negotiations are little else than a carbon trade fair,
with critical NGOs being virtually excluded and completely marginalise, all NGOs moved to a venue 2minutes from the main conference centre, and with
indigenous peoples organisations not given a proper voice.

Here is the first [and second] edition of a short newsletter which our colleagues have written.

Good luck on 8th December!

Best wishes,

Almuth

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Clean Development and Coal : Boosting Health by Fighting Coal

The Worldwatch Institute have just released 'Powering China's Development', a report on Chinas renewable energy status and policy environment.

Here are two issues from the books introduction:
1. Coal and Health as a national emergency
2. Coal as a global emergency.

1. Earlier in the year a world bank report was not released because the Chinese govornment felt it would build social unrest. What did it say? More that 400'000 people a year are dying prematurely due to air pollution. As >70% of Chinas primary energy (c.f. 20% in the US) comes from coal most of these deaths are due to old fossil fool (sic) technology. Clean development is therefore attractive from both local and global perspectives. In cold economic terms, ill health and environmental degredation are placing strain on the economy. It is estimated that just one percent of all Chinese urban dwellers breathe air within EU permissible standards!


2. The Chinese government have many problems in the area of sustainability. In the area of Energy however, things are rather one dimensional. The question is one of coal. How can the exponential growth in coal powered fire plants be limited or the effects ameliorated? First the good news. The Chinese government released a report in June 2007 stating categorically that climate change was a great threat to the nation, and the worlds, development. Perhaps a couple of years ago this wouldn't have happend in the US and China are at the car ownership levels of the US when the Model T Ford was on forecourts! The debate is advanced for the nations state of development. This is reflected by the fact that central government has ordered vast closures of small inefficient coal fired power plants which are being replace with larger more efficient ones: would the US government, or European governments do this?

The bad news is that during 2006 China built 101GW or 101,000MW of power plants (mainly coal). That is more grid capacity than the whole of France! Equivalent to more than two 600MW coal fired power plants per week.

Which leads to my conclusion: we don't have enough wind, solar, biomass capacity in the world to replace this much incremental installed capacity if we wanted to. It cannot go on: we need carbon capture and storage to be rolled out. A global top priority for governments and NGO's must be to make sure that all new coal is CCS enabled and as efficient as possible.

We have a global carbon budget, if China continues building Coal power plants then to meet that budget it will have to decommission them again. This would be an economic nonsense. I can't stress strongly enough how badly the developed nations are failing in allowing this to happen. Funding, technology transfer and a real commitment to anything but coal without CCS must be international priorities and must receive funding commensurate with the global scale of the challenge.

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China and Climate Change: Policies and Measures

Clearly with a booming economy and a population of 1200 million people much depends on China's approach to the challenge of climate change.

The Climate Group have started a bi-monthly publication looking at Chinese policy. The first report is here the second here and they are updated to this website.

All Climate Change Action posts on China can be found here.

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Climate Change and Rice

Rice is the staple diet for 40% of the worlds population. Effects of climate change on rice are therefore of great significance.

As with all outcomes from climate models when we are looking at precipitation, temperature, and other factors, along with non-climatic factors the conclusions are not definitive or precise. However, the heterogeneity of the situation is significant of itself, and indeed is perhaps the most important aspect of the models. With more than 2-3 degrees warming all the trends are negative and the yields of many crops in many areas are declining, before that point there are a lot of areas making gains, and a lot loosing out. This is not a situation that farmers are going to easily adapt to and large scale migrations from one area to another will be significant without the yield necessarily decreasing.

Unfortuntely areas of Africa are amongst the hardest hit in Tyndall Centre projections:

• Between 0.9 and 1.4°C above 1990, poor farmers income declines globally (Hare 2003). This information may not show in model results for countries whose farmers have a range of incomes.
  
• 
  
• Even if there are no overall impacts on the yield of a crop within a country as a whole, this picture can mask a large amount of local variation. For example, in Venezuela where a global temperature rise of 1.4-1.7°C has been predicted to decrease maize yields by 10-15%, 15% decrease maize yield (Gitay . 2001); adaptation could offset 10% of this but it hides huge local variation (Jones &Thornton 2003.
  

The results are more mixed in China.


Relevant Documents:
Introduction to Rice and Climate Change (effects on rice and contribution by rice farming)
Climate Change and Impacts on Grain in China
Feeding Billions, A Grain at a Time (WSJ, Article)
Least Developed Countries and Climate Change.(IIED)
*Understanding the Regional Effects of Climate Change (Tyndall Centre)

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peace is like a cake...

It’s Saturday and it was great to sleep in and not feel guilty about it …Yesterday was world peace day and so I went to a place called the India habitat centre where they were showing some really good films on the subject of peace. All were very moving the first “peace one day” was about a young English guy called Jeremy who had an idea at the Womad music festival.: what if there was one day when the world stopped fighting? A worldwide ceasefire - a non-violence day? A Peace Day?

In 1998, Jeremy began meeting with students, peace negotiators, NGOs, government representatives, heads of state, United Nations' officials,as well as many more eminent people He learned that a UN resolution would be the best way to establish such a day. He filmed all of his travels and meetings and compiled them to create the amazing documentary film Peace One Day. After years of persistence and hard work, Jeremy's dream came true. On 7 September 2001, a United Nations General Assembly Resolution (A/Res/55/282), put forward by the UK and Costa Rican governments, was unanimously adopted by UN member states formally establishing an annual day of global ceasefire and non-violence on the UN International Day of Peace - Peace Day - fixed in the global calendar on 21 September. Good on you son …….
…….

The following film was called Redifining peace:women lead the way tells the story of women from varying backgrounds they are peasants, lawyers, refugees and doctors; they have ethnic, religious and generational differences, but they share in common a determination to work for peace and justice. Before leaving I approached the organiser in order to ask her whether she had any contacts with environmental grassroots organisations working in India. She was very helpful and told me to return on Monday when there would an open day on the environment and many activists present…..bingo result!

To mark peace day children’s little sayings were displayed on a board here are a couple of their thoughts “Peace is like a cake everyone deserves it “ “we should not just rest in peace but live in peace as well” It made me think of a saying a friend of mine had found scratched into a table which read “bombing for peace is like f*****g for virginity”.

In the evening I was wined and dined by …….a bit of narcissist . “ I feel bad I have spend the entire night talking about me…..so what do you think about me “ recognize the type ?. He is a big importer of the finer things in life like wine and champagne. Funnily enough the other night I met a lovely man who was the first person to import Mango juice to the UK and in doing so had made silly amounts of money had left his family back in Blightey and had moved to Delhi in order fully enjoy the fruits of his labour. It’s quite bizarre to be mixing by night with such a wealthy crowd and being taken to these really glitzy places ….not really my style at all but I suppose it is different and interesting and you never know who you could meet ……could be handy for the campaign!

On Thursday we had a small ramshackle meeting in tiny hotel room. The campaign s main coordinator and two of his helpers made the two hour trip from their home in a suburb of Delhi in order to see me and discuss strategies for DEC. 8th. Travelling in this city is a bloody nightmare I frequently spend a couple of hours in a rickshaw in order to get around. There is an excellent metro system but it s reach is rather restricted at the moment, by the commonwealth games in 2010 the network should be completeted.

We took the decision that we would march on the American embassy in Delhi but it has a 500 metres exclusion zone, paranoid or what!. Well we have “friends in high paces’ and will try and get permission but should we fail we will just try and get as close as possible to it. Apparently the mere fact that we will be in such close proximity will have a huge media impact. Someone came up with the idea of begging in front of the embassy or polishing shoes in order to amass funds in order to send Bush to a mental hospital …..quite an amusing idea apparently the press will love it.

We decided on putting our energies into having demonstrations in four major cities Delhi, Bhopal, Allahabad and Lucknow. These cities are press hubs and focussing on them will apparently have a ripple effect all around India. Our next meeting will be on Thursday and I am hiring a small conference room at the YMCA for this purpose. We also elected a Delhi coordinator the lovely Navim he is a former journalist and now a social activist.
.

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New blogger on Climate Change Action!

There are now two bloggers on Climate Change Action, myself and secret mystery girl Honey Tan Bunzl (that's her porn name).

Honey (I have to abbreviate!) is helping the Global Climate Campaign to build a presence in India. A very important and worthwhile thing to do as i`m sure you will agree.

All her posts will have the label 'indiacampaign' and to view the whole collection you just click that label.

Stay tuned!

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Urban Management In Asia: Recommended Reading

My interest for the last week or two has been urban planning and sustainable transport. Well, to be honest it was sustainable transport and has broadened out into planning.

In particular i have been reading about bus rapid transit, cycle cities, suburban sprawl, transport and health etc., I have been reading about cases from all over the world but i thought i would be nice to look at what is (or could be) happening is Asia.

The institute for global environmental stratgegies (IGES) has done pioneering research on post-2012 priorities for Asian nations. It does, however, get a touch less theoretical.

There are a great series of report/articles/papers on climate change and urban development on this page. Including entire books for free download!

A few highlights:

'Air pollution control in the transport sector' is a publication most interesting to me for its case studies, which i ususally find to be far more interesting than discussion in the abstract. Atleast for an amateur it is easy to understand the issues through comparison.

The fourth chapter consists of six case studies and one comparative analysis on policies related to transport and environment in Asian cities.

'Urban Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Asian Mega-Cities' is a lot broader than transport policy however it maintains the comparative approach and takes care to analyse the data. If you can see the numbers then there is a good chance you can realistically appraise the issues for yourself. As with many issues related to climate change good data is really the start.

[the report] aims to quantify CO2 emissions from energy use and analyse their driving factors for selected Asian Mega-Cities-Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing and Shanghai.

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China Climate Plan (English Translation At Last)

The pew centre for global climate change has just started a China page.

The first item to be posted is the first Chineese climate plan, when this came out earlier in the year i couldn't find an english translation. Well, here it is.

China's First Climate Change Plan (PDF)

China Releases New Climate Change Plan

On June 4, 2007, China released its first national climate change plan. Prepared by China’s National Development and Reform Commission, the plan outlines China’s strategy for addressing climate change through national programs aimed at mitigation, adaptation, science and technology research, and increasing public awareness.

Information on China and climate change is not the easiest thing in the world to come across but one good site for keeping up with the debate is ChinaDialogue a great site, which, due to it's team of transltors, allows you to leave comments that are then translated...also all the articles are in both english and chinese.

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Coal: It's the reason that peak oil dosent matter.

Peak oil is not simply the theory that oil production will peak at some time (that is a statement of fact with a finite resources), rather it is a belief that economically severe consequences will result.

Personally i dont see it, we have concervation, energy efficiency, fuel switching and smarter business between the problem and that predicted result. These options mean that i am not even slightly woried about peak oil.

I mentioned in a previous article that my biggest concern was an increase in carbon intensity as oil runs low. Coal to oil, tar sands and heavy crude are likely to become more significant.

In terms of global energy supplies coal would be encouraged, along with gas, unfortunately we have rather a lot more coal than gas!


These where concerns, today they are being reflected in events around the world. There is a whole lot of lobbying going on in Washington DC in favour of Coal to liquids technology. This would be disasterous...costly subsidies to entrenched power, ohh great. It is telling
that in the US support for coal to liquids by presidential candidates of both parties is virtually unanimous! In China, much to the chargrin of us developed people living >10MtCo2 per capita per year (and often above 20) the are deciding that they want some of what we have, namely higher living standards and a lifestyle that our marketing people have established. In china rapid economic development is being powered by coal. A recent BBC report suggested two power stations a week being built. It's clearly a disastrous state of affairs, but until the developed world (so called) gets its own house in order and outlaws these technologies and takes climate change seriously rather than rhetorically we are in no position to change this.



We are heading towards a cliff and we are stoking the fires with coal.

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