The recent Warsaw Climate Change Conference ended with a couple of modest successes, the main one being that the conversation will continue between nations as to what to do about man-made impact on the climate.
An initiative to support efforts at slowing deforestation received funding to the tune of $280 million from three countries.
Developed countries couldn’t quite bring themselves to say more than they would be willing to ‘contribute’ to emission cuts, rather than ‘commit’ to them.
Mainly, the nations who use the most keep insisting that change will be slow, and expensive.
Developing countries requested the twenty developed nations which have contributed to and profited most from the fossil fuel economy to pledge funds to mitigate, adapt and readjust this economy and its effects.
Amounts requested were between $70 billion per year by 2016, or $100 billion by 2020.
Meanwhile, an editorial piece by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in the New York Times today states that the developed countries currently subsidize the fossil fuel economy to the tune of $485 billion.
That’s $485 billion every single year.
Not all expensive habits are worth keeping.
So here’s hoping that even a drop in the bucket will create enough ripples to make a change.
A friend posted these images of ‘starlings’ in flight on his Facebook page, and I was intrigued by their beauty.
So I followed the bread crumb trail of the photographer credit, and found out an unexpected fact about these images. Finally, I came upon the photographer himself, Alain Delorme, a French artist based in Paris.
When I requested permission to post his images here, he sent me a friendly word of warning about his Murmurations series that confirmed what I had discovered on my own: The images aren’t of starlings. They are composites of plastic sacks, in the configurations of starling flocks.
The images are meant to confound, to confuse expectations, to mingle beauty and dangerous debris that can take beautiful forms.
This week, the UNFCCC COP 19 conference has been taking place in Warsaw, Poland. This Climate Change Conference is the world’s key forum for discussing climate change, environmental issues, progress and solutions.
A large public-private initiative was announced that would oversee programs to alleviate deforestation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with funding pledged by Norway, the United Kingdom and (to a much smaller extent) the United States.
Good news, a lovely formation of proposals that take flight.
The initiative will be overseen by the World Bank, which demands reductions in greenhouse gases while continuing to support and fund the large-scale development of coal projects around the world. The World Bank track record on projects that succeed at both economic and environmental sustainability has been mixed.
(And in a nice ironic twist that did not go unnoticed by COP19 commentators, Warsaw also hosted the completely separate International Coal & Climate Summit at the same time, just down the road, and sponsored by the World Coal Association.)
Hm, maybe those aren’t starlings taking flight, after all.
For me, the level of global cooperation manifested in gatherings like the UNFCCC, however conflicted, still represents a major step forward in world governance just two generations after World War II.
Having said that, all major environmental groups staged a collective and resounding walkout of the Warsaw Climate Change Conference this week in protest against what they say is the one-sided, obstructive control of the conference by nations and groups not truly interested in climate change solutions.
According to this article on the science of starling flocks and their murmurations, their synchoronized movements “are best described with equations of ‘critical transitions’ — systems that are poised to tip, to be almost instantly and completely transformed, like metals becoming magnetized or liquid turning to gas. Each starling in a flock is connected to every other. When a flock turns in unison, it’s a phase transition.”
The Warsaw conference closes today. I’ll close with a short film of real starlings in flight, in the hope that real progress, and the positive, coordinated movement of groups and entities that are undeniably connected, will win out over something that looks like progress, but is actually something quite different.
The initial funding amount is set at $280 million USD. Norway has pledged up to $135 million to the initiative, Britain $120 million and the United States $25 million. The fund also hopes to attract further private and public funding.
I thought it would be an interesting exercise to use the Global Forest Change tool released this week to look at forest change in each of the contributing countries, also in relation to their contribution to this new initiative.
Forest change Norway 2000-2012. The blue and red colors indicate net forest gain and loss, respectively. The colors here are almost exclusively seen on the Swedish side of the border. Norway does not rank among the top 50 nations in terms of deforestation, Sweden ranks 13th. Image via Global Forest Change / Earth Engine Partners
With a goal of encouraging reduced greenhouse gas emissions from the land sector, including REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), ISFL is intended to “help countries identify and promote climate-smart agricultural and low-carbon land-use practices in selected geographical areas where agriculture is a major cause of deforestation.”
The deforestation culprit in question is, by and large, commercial agriculture in regions including Latin America; subsistence and commercial agriculture contribute equally to an estimated two-thirds of deforestation in other areas like Africa and subtropical Asia.
The initiative sets itself the task of “adopting a landscape approach, (which) means implementing a development strategy that is climate smart, equitable, productive and profitable at scale and strives for environmental, social, and economic impact.”
Measures include “protecting forests, restoring degraded lands, enhancing agricultural productivity, and improving livelihoods and local environments.”
According to this Reuters article, one of the key problems faced by initiatives seeking to reduce deforestation is that “parties are focusing all their energy arguing about the politics of who governs REDD+ finance, when the real issue is a lack of demand.”
This is according to Matt Leggett, head of policy at forest think-tank Global Canopy Programme, who also stated that “the program must create demand for nearly 1.5 billion tones of carbon dioxide equivalent to cut deforestation by half, but current projects are only set to cut emissions by 160 million tones.”
I’ve been thinking about the World Bank call for more investment in solutions to combat climate change, and the effect it might have on encouraging nations and companies to choose new, sustainable investment targets.
The only thing that’s really new about this call is that this time it’s from the World Bank, an institution that hasn’t really won any awards in the past for choosing investment strategies that promote environmental and social sustainability. It’s good to see them on board – maybe it’s that times have gotten increasingly dire, maybe it’s that this is the first time the head of the World Bank is someone with actual scientific training. Still, it’s an uphill road.
Many years ago, I was giving a presentation to a large group of investors from major firms. My job was to provide insight into the infrastructure necessary for getting renewable energy crops from field to tank. Getting the fuel from the fuel factory to retail fuel stations (either by blending or directly) is a challenge in itself, but one people are used to thinking about. Getting the agricultural product from field to factory was, for many of these potential energy investors, a new process. If they hadn’t invested in agriculture before, they were in for a surprise.
At any rate, I laid out the various stations of going from seed to fuel – in this case, the crop was rapeseed – and showed the kind of supply lines, storage facilities, treatment mechanisms and so on to get the oil from the seed. Perhaps as important, I discussed a few junctures at which the supply side could go awry. Aside from weather difficulties, the harvested crop could suffer from poor storage and rot, the standard points of hazard when dealing with things that grow and decay.
At the end of the presentation, there was time for questions. At least two dozen hands went up. The presentation hadn’t been overly complicated, so I wondered what lay in store for me. I called on one man.
“You’re saying these risks are for this one crop. What about other crops? Surely that can’t be the case for all crops.”
“Well, when you invest in renewable energy from plant material, you are investing in agriculture. So anything that applies to agricultural investment on a fundamental level will apply here. Both risks and benefits.” He frowned, made a couple of notes, and nodded.
I asked for more questions – as it turned out, that question had been the same one everyone else wanted to ask, and they were all equally disappointed by my answer.
It’s certainly not the case that all investment into renewable crops and alternative energies is sustainable or environmentally sound – the palm oil plantations that have spread across vast land tracts that were once pristine jungle in Indonesia and Malaysia are easy examples. The big difference between investment in alternative energies vis-a-vis investment in existing energy technologies for coal, oil, gas, etc. isn’t that the existing technologies aren’t renewable (even if for the moment it doesn’t look like we’ll run out anytime soon), it’s that they generate more problems, both short and long term, than they solve. Not to mention the various costs of the occasional massive oil spill.
We know more oil will bring more money and employment and tax revenue and possibly, increased geo-political security.
We also know we don’t have the time, in global climate and environmental terms, to keep using oil and coal as energy resources.
So, go for it, World Bank. Show us what you can do, and show us how it’s done.
