Climate Action Network (CAN) sponsors The Fossil Awards at climate talks in Durban, South Africa. Photo by Heather King.

Welcome to the Fossil of the Day Awards. These awards recognize those countries that have done their “best” to impede progress in the UN climate talks. The German NGO Forum first presented ‘The Fossil’ in 1999 in Bonn. Today, the Climate Action Network (CAN) – an international coalition of 500 non-governmental organizations that promote environmentally sustainable policy – bestows the awards. Each afternoon during the UN negotiations, members of CAN nominate and select winners. At the close of the talks, they present a ‘Fossil of the Year’ Award.

Canada has captured more than its fair share of the awards.  The past two years, Canada won the ‘annual honor’. And it’s continuing that winning streak this year, taking first place for the first and second day of the annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change talks, known as COP17.  The reason: Canada’s environment minister Peter Kent’s statement earlier this week that we need ‘eventual solutions’ to ‘urgent problems’. COP participants have been abuzz about reports that Canada intends to formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol.

“Canada is becoming a bad joke,” broadcast 18-year-old Isaac Astill, the ‘master of ceremonies’ at the awards.

Despite the pageantry, a student activist from Canada who accepted the award said he does not expect that the award will have much impact on his country’s delegation. Although the Canadian government is aware of the ‘honor’, they have suggested that ‘they have greater concerns than The Fossil.” According to the Canadian CAN student and CAN Board member, Ian McGregor, the issue of tar sands dominates Canada’s agenda. Alberta Province’s Athabasca oil sands (a.k.a. tar sands) are the world’s largest deposits of heavy crude oil. Canada’s current effort to export this energy resource is a hotly contested issue throughout North America.

The accelerating need for action and agreement is at odds with the pace of the negotiations.  Just last week, the IPCC released a report that further confirms the risks and costs associated with climate change. Even so, expectations for this year’s UN conference are mixed. Ernst and Young reports that ‘the majority of business executives see binding international agreements on emissions cuts as essential, but few believe it will happen in Durban.’

So, why is COP17 important?

Climate Action Network hosted a call with NGO leaders last week which highlighted four reasons:

1.     The Kyoto Protocol is not the end game.

There is a risk that the Kyoto Protocol, the UN’s first ambitious attempt to secure multilateral commitment on GHG reductions, might collapse. Yet for many insiders, the Kyoto Protocol is not the end all. The focus has shifted to building a framework that better enables agreement. According to several NGO leaders, the Cancun talks successfully laid the foundation for such a framework. “We are not going to get a treaty in Durban,” states Lou Leonard, leader of Climate Change at WWF flatly. “It’s more important now that we lay out a road map and a mandate by which we will get agreement.”  There is clear recognition that such a road map – with financing, technology and other considerations – will require more cross-sector effort and more than just government investments. As for the Protocol, the real risk is perceived collapse of climate change negotiations.

2.     COP17 will be ‘The Finance Talks’.

Past COPs have made it clear that establishing funding parameters and identifying funding sources for clean energy, emission mitigation, and adaptation is critical. COP 17 will focus on the Green Climate Fund. The Fund is intended to finance climate change action, both adaptation and mitigation, in developing countries. It is an important signal for the private sector. Industry leaders will be looking to see whether government leaders can establish infrastructure for the Fund and secure agreement as to funding sources.

3.     The world is watching the US.

Last year, the two world leaders, the US and China, were bickering about transparency and accountability. According to NRDC’s Jake Schmidt, the dynamic this year is different.  “There is more constructive dialogue between the two countries.”

This year, the world is very much watching the US. The question: will the US show that it has a plan to reduce emissions and to act on the country’s commitments? In the lead up to COP, Obama’s decisions on two relevant issues – the Keystone Pipeline and emissions standards for power plants – signal what might be expected from the US in Durban. What happens in the US matters greatly to these international talks, and similarly what happens in Durban matters domestically.

4.     Business leaders are increasingly involved – across sectors and continents.

Industry leaders are increasingly involved in the COP talks. As clean energy deployments in over 80 countries have skyrocketed, clean energy suppliers and adopters need assurance that governments will support this market. In addition, COP 17 will work to establish a technology center that will serve as a hub for leveraging and deploying climate monitoring, management and adaptation solutions in different countries. This will require significant collaboration with technology and information industry leaders.

The net of it is COP17 does matter. It matters because global warming is becoming a more pressing global problem that the world community must work together to address. The US remains a global and industry powerhouse whose actions and example are of critical import. And, it’s clear that industry must play a role in providing leadership, technology, and financing innovations.

In this edition of Radio Netherlands Worldwide show Africa in Progress, four African climate change experts discuss why it is important for us to protect our trees and what would happen if we continue cut down our forest cover in Africa.

Take Tanzania. Its vulnerability to climate change is high yet its contribution to the problem is low. Meanwhile, the potential for its forests to be part of the solution hangs in the balance.

This is because last month in Cancún, Mexico, nearly 200 governments agreed the foundations of system known as REDD (reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation).

REDD would reward countries like Tanzania if they protect their forests because they store carbon and prevent it reaching the atmosphere where it can contribute to climate change.

But as Charles Meshack, the executive director of the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group, points out, over 87 percent of Tanzania’s population depends on charcoal and wood for cooking and heating and this puts immense pressure on the country’s woodlands.

Tanzania’s environment minister Terezya Luoga Huvisa, says it will not easy for African governments to protect their forests when they are their people’s only source of energy.

“In Tanzania we do not have an alternative source of energy, therefore we can’t stop our people from using wood or charcoal since that is their only source of energy. It’s their life,” she said during an interview in Cancún.

“Developed countries cannot survive without industries and developing countries also cannot survive without charcoal,” she added. “So we have reached a point at which we must compromise.”

That compromise could come in the form of finance and technology that developed nations could provide to enable countries like Tanzania to develop cleaner sources of energy.

The Cancún meeting – the 16th conference of parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – also saw the creation of a Green Climate Fund and an agreement on transfer of climate-friendly technologies from industrialised to developing nations.

And as Dr Markku Kanninen of Center for International Forest Research points out, the REDD agreement on forests would not mean that countries have to stop using charcoal altogether.

Under REDD, countries and communities could be rewarded financially if they manage their forests in a way that means new trees grow faster than old ones are used for charcoal of firewood.

“People should be encouraged to plant more trees for charcoal and donors can support such programs,” says Kanninen. “Forest conservation is a responsibility of all people not only forest departments.”

Development in this country has been rapid, with progress in health, education and infrastructure inviting global praise. Although still classified as a least developed country, Bhutan’s per capita income has gone up to more than 2000 USD, second only to Maldives in the region.

Given this success, Bhutan is now looking at a second phase in its development history: a self-dependent phase.

At the mid-term review in November 2010 of the first democratically elected government, the deputy prime minister of Bhutan said, “A country dependent on donor aid is not a sign of success.”

The government has identified hydropower as the primary income generator for its plans to accelerate progress in the country.

The hydropower plans for Bhutan are big. It has been long recognised that there is enormous power potential in the fast flowing rivers of Bhutan, and almost the entire country was powered until recently by less than 20 per cent of the power generated by a 330 megawatt plant built more than two decades ago. The rest was exported to India.

The government’s plans are to bank more heavily on the hydropower sector. By 2020, Bhutan aims to have built 10 hydropower projects in the country, and generate 10,000 megawatts of electricity, all for export to India.

But as these major plans are being executed speedily, not too much attention is being paid to the fact that these plants are greatly threatened by climate change, which is believed to cause glaciers in the high mountains, which are the sources of all the Bhutanese rivers, to melt.

In January this year, claims by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2030 was discredited in a media fiasco dubbed the ‘Glaciergate,’ resulting in increased scepticism of all climate science reflected in the panel’s reports.

Many scientists and glaciologists, including those who discredited the report, however, came forward to explain that they did not challenge the fact that Himalayan Glaciers were melting, and the issue was actually about how fast the glaciers would disappear.

“There is no doubt that glaciers are melting faster than ever before, the debate was on just how fast they are melting,” said Joydeep Gupta, director of Third Pole Project, a website that covers the impact of climate change on the Himalayan Region.

“The effect of glacial melt is non-linear. We will have more water in our rivers in the next couple of decades, meaning more flash floods, and then there will be a progressive reduction of water,” he said.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), which caters to countries in the Hindu Kush region, is cautious with doomsday prophecies for the glacial lakes, but admits that “it is well established that glacial lakes have melted quickly in the recent past (50 years) and such risks must be analysed.”

Madav Karki of ICIMOD said that data generation is a problem for the region while developing hydropower plants.

“Flood, rainfall, precipitation, siltation and melting should all be taken into account when hydropower plants are engineered,” he said, adding that we have 30-50 years of increased water supply in the Himalayas after which the science is vague.

“So you can say that today, we have 30- 50 years to make our Hydropower plants more resilient,” he said.

The agriculture and forests minister, Pema Gyamtsho, who led the Bhutanese delegation at the climate meeting in Cancun, said that his ministry is aware of these threats.

“We should leave at least some (undeveloped) river basins. We don’t want a plant on every river,” he said. “We have to find alternatives for producing the national income, and not put all our eggs in one basket.”

While some major industrialised countries refused to make commitments to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases, most of them thought the developing countries were united in their commitment to the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol, the global treaty on tackling climate change.

The Protocol, agreed in 1997 in Japan,  set a timetable for industrialised countries to cut their collective greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2% below their levels in 1990, and to do this by 2012. A number of countries, led by the US which refused to ratify the Protocol, are now opposed to any extension of the Protocol beyond 2012, but most developing countries want it to continue because they say it opens the way to the far more radical emission cuts which scientists say are urgently needed.

But Arab oil producers, headed by Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, are supporting the industrialised countries which oppose extending the Protocol.

One Saudi Environment Ministry official said this was because the Protocol represented an obstacle to his country’s exploitation of its oil wealth.

It owns the world’s largest oil reserves (264 billion barrels, 21% of the global total). Saudi oil revenues, the official said, account for around 55% of the Kingdom’s GDP. But the country is seeking ways to diversify its sources of income.

Extending the Kyoto Protocol, he said, would mean cutting demand for oil because of the effect of  the carbon taxes that would be imposed. In 2002 OPEC said the losses to its member countries of cutting greenhouse gas emissions under the Protocol were estimated at $22-63 bn.

Demand for OPEC’s oil is expected to double in the years after 2020, when it is estimated that the bloc’s production will have reached its peak. The Arab Petroleum Investment Corporation has estimated the investment needed to increase production in Arab member countries of OPEC at more than $40 bn over five years.

Many observers say this shows a convergence of interest between oil producers and some of their main customers, which has frustrated the will to protect the environment which everyone at the conference claims to share.

In this view, the economy has won and the environment has lost, with no-one prepared to be farsighted enough to see what destruction the environment would suffer in the near and medium future, together with societies, economies and life as a whole.

A few people at the Cancun conference had hoped it might be able to succeed where last year’s Copenhagen negotiations failed, by reaching a new global agreement on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases.

Most now expect that will have to wait till next year’s climate talks in the South African city of Durban, or even later. Cancun’s own achievements are likely to be much more modest.

As countries work through tough negotiations on how to step up green solutions through carbon control at on-going climate change talks in Cancun, international non-government organizations are pointing them to a possible blind spot in so-called green solutions – biofuel production.

Armed with research findings on biofuel projects in developing countries including UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 2008 report, they warn that biofuel crop fields are aggravating deforestation and threatening food security as they compete with agricultural lands for space. The Gaia Foundation is one of such groups advising African delegates to reject Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM) talks which include biofuels or genetic modification technology as more efficient energy options.

Biofuels also known as agrofuels have been hailed as green solution to climate change by American scientific researchers as well as some energy experts from other developed economies. While industrialized countries look to biofuels as a way of reducing emissions, developing countries eye the potential profits from biofuel crops and also meeting their growing energy needs.

So-called large fallow lands not used for any agriculture purposes labeled as marginal lands in Africa coupled with its climate, according to pro biofuel experts, are conducive for industrial cultivation of biofuel crops like sugar cane, castor, and jatropha. But counter research from the Gaia foundation suggests that these fuels are as dangerous to the climate as the fossil fuels they desire to replace and the crops can only fare well on fertile and watered lands.

Ghana, Ethiopia and Zambia are among African countries who have graciously embraced biofuel investments often led by partnerships between local and foreign investors. For instance UK based D1 oils is running a Jatropha project in Zambia on over 10,000 hectares of land and the country has promised the company 174,000 hectares in the next five years.

But according to the African Biodiversity Network and the Gaia foundation, Ethiopia’s experience with biofuel production has sobering lessons for caution. The government’s ambition to solve its energy insufficiency through biofuel investment suffered a snag causing a rethink of its biofuel policy.

“Biofuel feedstock produced in Ethiopia is being exported for processing and sale in Europe and Asia markets. Thus it is not in any way addressing the government’s stated need for energy security,” the NGOS publication ‘Biofuel – A failure for Africa’ stated.

Ethiopian farmers were lured into switching to castor – a biofuel crop and used their fertile lands for production instead of marginal lands thereby displacing their own food production. The outcome was damning as farmers experienced low yields of the biofuel crop, incurring huge losses imposed on them by the investors.

“The government is also convinced that it is better….they have accepted that they shouldn’t have done it….after all doing this, it is important to go for green energy, yes we agree but not to export it somewhere…we are doing it on the ground, managed and handled by local communities, inter cropping with the crops without affecting food cultivation,” Captain Gebremedhine Gagaga, director of the Ethiopian Society for Consumer Protection said.

Ghana has also seen a rush of foreign investors and their local partners grabbing lands indiscriminately including fertile farmlands while accused of paying little compensation to owners sometimes to the point of displacing farmers. The situation has prompted a civil society agitation for government intervention. The country is still yet to release its policy on the growing bioenergy sector though it has set a 2015 deadline to do so. The Civil Society Coalition on Land (CICOL) has been mounting pressure on state actors to hurry the pace of setting the ground rules to regulate biofuel production before it gets out of hand.

But among the key concerns of the Gaia Foundation and its allies is the pressure on forests to make way for large plantations of biofuel crops. They argue this may substantially erode gains from carbon storage through forest preservation strategies under the REDD program. Forests cleared up for biofuel crop cultivation will reduce the forest cover of countries and lessen aggregate benefits of forest and biodiversity preservation anticipated through REDD.

According to Teresa Anderson of the Gaia Foundation, at the same time that a massive demand for biomass is being created, using lands for carbon sequestration (as offsets via REDD,) is being promoted. REDD is a proposed strategy under climate change negotiations where countries get financial benefits for preserving their forests

“Creating an industrial demand for biomass is clearly incompatible with slowing deforestation. Yet, predictably, industry players are pushing to ensure that the expansion of industrial monocultures plantations and practices associated with growing, harvesting and using biomass will be rewarded by offset-financing,” she said.

Together with other civil society groups, they are alerting African governments to what they describe as under reported harmful effects of biofuels especially with regards to their contribution to deforestation and for that matter global warming.

This caution highlights more danger spots for Ghana’s REDD program entering its pilot phase next year. Already the REDD readiness plan have identified huge challenges including forest governance problems to overcome for a successful implementation. Could this deflect the optimistic expectations of program managers? Ghana’s Forestry Commission Chief, Robert Bamfo is hopeful that “REDD can address such teething issues” and is looking forward to the silver lining in the cloud.

Central Asia