Introducing Sustainable Development Goals

Interview with Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University

The Earth Institute: Columbia University

Is Environmentally Sustainable Economic Growth Possible in China?

                                                                           Pollution over Shanghai.

China has achieved miraculous economic growth over the past 30 years to become the world's second largest single-country economy. Since the introduction of market-oriented reforms began in 1979, economic growth has been the central task of the Chinese government. Economic performance is even linked to career advancement. Incentivized by both financial rewards and political futures, policy makers have a vested interested in growing the economy.

However, growing gross domestic product (GDP) at any cost has created a series of social and environmental problems, and consequently, economic losses. In 2008, pollution and environmental degradation accounted for 10.51 percent of gross national income, according to calculations based on figures provided by the World Bank. Though problems have been prevalent since the beginning of China's modern industrialization, environmental challenges have dramatically increased over the past three decades, raising both international and domestic concern. China is currently ranked 116 of 132 countries on the Environmental Performance Index, and since 2007, China has overtaken the U.S. as the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter. Rapid industrial development has depended upon increasing inputs of energy, natural resources, and environmental services. As a result, resource depletion and environmental pollution have become serious problems that require the rethinking of governmental policies.

Recognizing the unsustainability of its growth model, the Chinese government has called for a major policy shift to address the environmental impacts of economic growth. In fact, China claims it is one of the first developing countries to propose and implement sustainable development as a national strategy. The government has achieved substantial advancements in sustainable development, including poverty reduction and population control. These efforts are not pure political slogans; they are important policy experiments in sustainable development.

China still faces numerous challenges. Most of the country is in the early to middle stages of economic development and must deal with critical natural resource and environmental constraints. Significant economic and social structural problems also remain. The inadequacy of China's existing strategies can be explained in part through universal shortfalls of the concept of sustainable development, which is difficult to define and measure. According to 2012's Rio+20 Conference, any action that a country performs to improve social welfare can be counted toward sustainable development. However, the trade-offs among the economic, environmental, and social pillars are often ignored. For example, if poverty eradication is accompanied by environmental degradation, is this development pattern sustainable?

China also faces many of its own conflicting goals and trade-offs in sustainable development. The population living in poverty within rural areas numbered 122.38 million at the end of 2011. Though the government hopes to reduce the poverty rate by furthering economic growth, poverty and environmental problems are interrelated, and the worst-case scenario is a vicious cycle: on the one hand, poverty alleviation requires economic development that puts further pressure on the fragile ecosystem; on the other hand, the environment and natural resources can be constraints on low-income regions as they attempt to emerge from poverty. For example, deforestation, overgrazing, and overdevelopment of agricultural land lead to resource degradation and increasing natural disasters, which disproportionally occur in the poor regions and reduce their developmental capacities. Many are also concerned that because China is still at an early stage of industrialization and urbanization, addressing the key global environmental issue of reducing greenhouse gas emissions could increase industrial costs and slow further economic growth.

Contrary to traditional analyses, new economic theories and empirical evidence refute the idea that economic growth, openness, and the environment are inevitable enemies. While an increase in income will not automatically improve the environment, studies have failed to prove that economic growth and openness necessitate environmental degradation. This is good news for China, which is not likely to amend its quest for growth. If China implements the correct policies now, it may not have to slow down economic growth in order to avoid environmental deterioration.

These changes will not take root unless policy makers provide incentives and enact environmental regulations. Policy, not income, will lead to a better environment. For China to improve its sustainability model, new polices must be implemented that explicitly address trade-offs in sustainable development. Furthermore, the stringency of enforcement rather than the letter of the law determines the de facto environmental standards. Poor enforcement can partially explain the overall poor state of the environment and may be due to a lack of respect for laws or standards that have been set too high.

Perhaps most importantly, the selection of environmental policies depends on the preference of a country's citizens. Even in an authoritarian regime, the central government tries to reflect individuals' preferences in its decision making to maintain social stability. However, without a voting mechanism it is difficult for the central government to know median preference, and policy making is likely to be determined only by the information that can be observed. The government in China has thus paid more attention to problems that are more visible, such as air pollution in big cities. The Chinese government's preference always leans toward faster economic growth with lower environmental standards, which is not necessarily aligned with individual citizens' preferences. The public knows best its own preference for the combination of income and pollution, making public participation instrumental to sustainable development.

Although the Chinese government has taken important steps to address environmental concerns, new policies — such as the aforementioned — are needed to enforce and regulate systems that are both environmentally and economically sustainable. China will not amend its goal of economic growth, but if the correct policies are implemented and enforced, the country will not have to slow down or reverse its growth or return to autarky to address issues of environmental instability.

For a more comprehensive picture of China's current environmental and economic policies, as well as policy recommendations to facilitate an environmentally sustainable economic growth strategy in China, download the full Asia Society report, Delivering Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Economic Growth: The Case of China, which was made possible with support from the Bertelsmann Foundation.

By Junjie Zhang is a Senior Advisor at Asia Society@asiasociety.org

Dambisa Moyo: 'The World Will be Drawn into a War for Resources'

                                                   Dambisa Moyo: 'I think we'll see more wars'. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Massive geopolitical shifts seldom announce themselves with a bang. They tend instead to creep up slowly, until it's hard to be sure exactly when they began. I remember going to buy some steel about six years ago, and being staggered by the price. "Ah," the man in the hardware store explained, "it's the Chinese, you see. They're buying up so much steel, the price has gone through the roof." The last time I visited my brother, all the lead had been stripped from his garden shed – the second theft in two months – thanks to rocketing lead prices. And it must have been around the time of the Iraq war that I recall first hearing someone say the next big war would be fought over water. At the time the prediction had sounded far-fetched; these days, it's a commonplace.

These sort of random, disconnected events look neither random nor disconnected once you read Dambisa Moyo's account of what's happening to the world's commodities. In 1950 the world's population stood at 2.5 billion; by last year it had reached 7 billion, and is projected to hit 10 billion by 2050. With almost all the population growth occurring in the emerging economies, by 2030 some 2 billion people will have joined the global middle classes. "Put another way," Moyo writes, "in less than 20 years we will witness the creation of a middle class of roughly the same size as the current total population of Africa, North America and Europe." Naturally, they will want mobile phones, fridges, cars and washing machines; 2,000 new cars already join Beijing's streets every day. In 2010 China had 40 cities with populations of more than a million; by 2020 it plans to have added another 225. The implications for the world's commodity resources are stark and sobering: global demand for food and water is expected to increase by 50% and 30% respectively by 2030, the pressure on copper, lead, zinc and corn is already becoming unsustainable, and no one has a clue where the energy we'll need is going to come from.

If Moyo's calculations are correct, we are in big trouble – which makes the central premise of her book, Winner Takes All, all the more arresting. Governments across the world, she writes, have singularly failed to grasp what's coming – with one sensational exception. "Simply put, the Chinese are on a global shopping spree." State-sponsored Chinese corporations are busy buying up commodities across Africa, North America, the Middle East, South America – anywhere they can – in a concerted strategy to seize control of resources before the rest of the world wakes up to the looming crisis. They're striking deals with what she calls the "axis of the unloved" – developing countries rich in commodities but poor in political and economic capital – in return for much needed investment, employment and infrastructure. Extravagant shoppers, the Chinese are happy to pay over the odds, treating their trading partners not as poverty-ridden charity cases nor political pariahs but valued commercial equals. But when the resources begin to run dry, the consequences will be catastrophic. Already, since 1990 at least 18 violent conflicts worldwide have been triggered by competition for resources. If nothing is done now, warns Moyo, commodity wars on a terrifying scale are all but inevitable.

To western eyes, Winner Take All makes for scary reading. Viewed through Chinese eyes, on the other hand, it's an altogether different story. For all its premonitions of armageddon, the book's tone feels more congratulatory than cautionary – reflecting the particular perspective of its author.

Moyo stepped off a transatlantic flight only hours before we meet, but arrives looking like a supermodel, shrugging off jet lag with the indifference of someone who, when asked where she lives, replies: "Oh, on a plane." Born in Zambia in 1969, she spent her first eight years in the US before returning with her parents, both economists, to the capital, Lusaka. At 19 she left again for good, acquiring a masters from Harvard and a doctorate from Oxford, and working for the World Bank and Goldman Sachs, before publishing her first book, Dead Aid, in 2009.

A turbocharged attack on aid, it caused quite a sensation – here was an African denouncing western aid as patronising and counterproductive – earning Moyo the nickname "the anti-Bono" and securing her reputation as a box-office star of the global high-finance circuit. Her second book, How The West Was Lost, was a devastating obituary of America's supremacy, the cause of death diagnosed as a fatal overdose of greed and laziness. With blue-chip western academic credentials, yet a distinctly non-western way of looking at the world, she was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine. Yet her latest work, she says, was inspired by her own ignorance.

"I'm pretty savvy; I kind of understand what's going on in the world. So I was quite surprised to learn how little I knew about commodity scarcity. I was very shocked by my own ignorance. It just seemed to me surprising that the only country that seemed to be doing something in a very systematic and deliberate way was China."

Winner Take All is presented as a warning to the west – it's subtitled China's Race For Resources, and What It Means For Us – but the book reads more like a hymn of praise to China. When I ask if she regards its story as scary or thrilling, she doesn't hesitate. "Oh, I think it's fantastic. I think it's fundamentally fantastic – and also in the literal sense of the word. You know, it's fantastic – it's a good thing – but also 'fantastic' as in something really tremendous. They bought a mountain in Peru – half the height of Mount Everest – they bought the mineral rights. I flew in from Canada this morning, where they've done a laptops-for-pork deal. They're importing beef from Brazil, and in return they'll build roads and railways. It's just an amazing display of discipline, and a systematic approach – it's unparalleled. I don't know any other country that does it in this way."

If anything, the chief inspiration for Winner Take All seems to have been Moyo's irritation with western attitudes to Chinese growth. "There is this obsession with China being a culprit," she agrees. "Even now, people will still say: 'Oh, the reason why the United States' economy is not doing well is because the Chinese are manipulating the exchange rate,' or, 'The Chinese have human-rights issues,' and, 'The Chinese don't do democracy, and the Chinese cheat.' You know, it's always about the Chinese, and no one actually takes a step back and thinks: 'Gosh, actually, it's our fault that productivity is declining. It's got nothing to do with the Chinese.'"

The hypocrisy of western criticism is, she says, quite breathtaking. We accuse the Chinese government of meddling in free-market capitalism, clean forgetting that US farm subsidy programmes and Europe's Common Agricultural Policy have condemned Africa's farmers to poverty. The US is perfectly happy to take China's money – more than $1tn worth of government bonds – yet expects the emerging markets to say: "No, we don't want Chinese money because there's an issue of human rights." We complain that the Chinese are paying too much for commodities, instead of wondering whether China might in fact have grasped their true value. And we have the nerve, she marvels, to accuse China of neocolonialism, failing to understand that "the rest of the world actually thinks what China is doing is pretty damn clever". It was the west which got rich by invading and plundering the rest of the world, whereas China is engaging with it on respectful, peaceful, generous terms.

"What the Chinese are trying to do – move a billion people out of poverty – is just an unheard-of thing in history. The fact that they have moved 300 million in 30 years is unheard of. It took Britain 156 years to double its per capita income. It took America 57 years, Germany 65 years. It's taken the Chinese 12-and-a-half years."

Moyo stresses more than once: "I'm an economist, not a political scientist," and her writing is full of the maddeningly opaque jargon of commodity trading. Yet the book's fundamental message seems to be as much about the contrasting politics of Washington and Beijing as commodity prices. She is always described as a passionate free-market capitalist, so I ask how that fits with her admiration of China.

"I have to tell you, this is my favourite thing about being raised in Africa; we don't do labels very well, we don't do this, 'Oh, you're a Democrat; oh, you're a Republican.' Because we live in the real world. There's not a single country that actually approaches economics in a pure, free market, capitalist way. I like the free market – but it very much exists only in textbooks. If I had a choice, and we could live in a very pure world, I would be a supporter of the free markets. But because we don't live in that world, I do really admire what the Chinese have done. Having the good fortune of being born in Africa – I absolutely love the fact that I was raised and born in Africa – I love people who deliver results."

Moyo's critics say her predictions of a commodity crisis are alarmist, failing to account for future technological solutions to shortages. People have been worrying about unsustainable population growth ever since Thomas Malthus in 1798, goes this critique, and yet the world always somehow manages to muddle through.

"Right, but the people who are saying: 'We'll muddle through,' are people sitting in the west who get clean water when they turn the tap on. If you're in India, and the Brahmaputra river is being rerouted by the Chinese, you're not muddling through; lives are being lost. Wars are being fought right now. 'Oh, we'll muddle through,' is a very western view, because you're not killing each other yet, and oil prices haven't risen to $1,000 a barrel. If you live in a poor country, where you have to walk miles for water, or you have to fight for water or resources, it is already happening." She invests her money in technology and innovation, she adds. "And my sense is that we're not close to any big discovery in any of the categories – land, water, energy and minerals – that has made me not nervous about the coming headwinds."

Other critics dismiss her predictions of scarcity as miscalculations based upon a flawed assumption that China and other emerging markets will continue to grow at their recent prodigious rate – when in fact, their economies are starting to slow, and have probably already peaked. "People do not understand," she says, with a hint of weary incredulity, "that the Chinese government will and can do pretty much anything to make sure they don't have a recession. They're not going to sit there and do nothing while an economy slows down to 5% growth a year. They will have a political problem; they will have Tiananmen Square, they will have people on the streets. So what do they do? They'll turn the taps on." The notion that African aspirations could now be switched off strikes Moyo as equally laughable. "I go to Africa all the time. You talk to a young person and tell them they can't have Facebook? Seriously? You try telling them that."

It's not hard to see why Moyo is such a hit as a public intellectual. But when we come to the logical conclusion of her thesis, her position seems to become somewhat illogical. She calls for the creation of a global body focused exclusively on commodity issues – but when I ask what it would look like, her only clear stipulation is a central role within it for China. If China is winning the commodity race, its interest in any such body strikes me as doubtful, but Moyo thinks self-interest will ensure their support for a strategy to prevent resource depletion and consequent conflict. "I think the world will be drawn into a war for resources," she says firmly. "I think we'll see more wars."

Yet if all her predictions are correct, at that point surely the Chinese will flex their considerable military might in order to protect the worldwide interests they've paid for. It would be perverse of them not to, wouldn't it? Moyo flatly refuses to see it.

"They have been very deliberate in their speeches that this is about the peaceful rise of China. And by the way, what kind of campaign would they launch? They would go to all those countries and be fighting in all those different countries at the same time? I don't know how they would be able to do it. I can't play that scenario out." Perhaps my scepticism is simply evidence of the sort of suspicious western mindset Moyo scorns, but I wonder if her determination to champion China might not be in danger of tipping over into blind faith.

Moyo is clearly well aware that her critics dismiss her as more of a showy controversialist than a sober-minded thinker. When I ask about the factual errors that have been seized upon in all three books – in Winner Take All, for example, she says Opec stands for Oil Producing Exporting Countries – she bristles defensively. "Well, I wish I had been more perfect. But my book hit the New York Times bestseller list last week, and people seem interested in what I have to say." She considers it "rather cheap" to indict a book because of a few inaccuracies, and suspects critics make so much of her mistakes because they cannot forgive the heresy of Dead Aid. "They think I'm speaking out of my place." As for "the anti-Bono" nickname, "I absolutely despise it. When people make those type of cheap headlines, it takes away from fundamental points."

There certainly seems to be more than a hint of subtle prejudice in some of the comments she has attracted – both positive and negative. Nigel Lawson called her "confused" and "muddled" in a BBC radio debate, while his son Dominic has praised her as "a very serious lady indeed", and I can't imagine him describing a white male equivalent as a "very serious gentleman indeed".

She has homes in New York and London, but is anxious to point out: "That sounds all very glamorous, but it's just where I throw my stuff," and insists: "My core, core, core: I'm an African." I ask to what extent she suspects her work is viewed through the prism of her identity as an African woman. "Woman? Zero. African? 100." Given her own emphasis on the influence of African origins on her work, I can't work out if she considers this unfair or not.

"I think," she reflects with an elegant shrug, "I'm kind of a hard bird to figure out."

By Decca Aitkenhead@The Guardian

Farmers Must Lead Environmental Sustainability Fight

Joao Lisboa, 30, picks the last batch of tomatoes at his farm, having lost 90 percent of crops due to a major drought, to feed his livestock in Maracas in Bahia state, northeast Brazil, May 3, 2012. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes

From persuading Brazilians to eat less beef and more tilapia fish, to getting Malawi’s farmers to lay down their hoes, agriculture needs to be a major part of a shift towards a more environmentally sustainable future, agricultural experts said on Monday.

Farming uses the largest share of the world’s land and freshwater, and is one of the main producers of climate-changing gases, as well as being a huge employer. So finding ways to make agricultural production more sustainable - and ensuring they are put into widespread practice fast - will be crucial to achieving the aims of the Rio+20 gathering, experts said at an agriculture conference, held as part of the U.N. development summit.

“There’s so much good (research) work going on. The question is speed and scale,” said Rachel Kyte, vice president for sustainable development at the World Bank. “Agricultural research has to be applied. It’s no use when it’s simply in a test plot, in a lab, bound up in rules and red tape and procedures that keep it from being used.”

One of the biggest changes underway in agriculture is efforts to make apparent the connections between agricultural success and the health of natural ecosystems like forests and water supplies, experts said. Without forests to help stabilise rainfall patterns and protect fresh water supplies, “we can’t achieve food security,” Kyte warned.

A key factor in protecting natural systems and agricultural production will be including currently “free” services like rainfall and crop pollination on national balance sheets and in corporations’ accounts through “natural capital accounting”, she said.

So far almost 50 countries and more than 50 companies have agreed to use natural capital accounting alongside their current measures of economic growth such as gross domestic product (GDP), she added.

LESSONS FROM BRAZIL

Brazil has, in many ways, been a leader in improving agricultural production while protecting the environment, some analysts say. The country has, over the past 20 years, seen a 178 percent boost in food production while land for agriculture has expanded only 37 percent, said Roberto Rodrigues, a former Brazilian agriculture minister.

That intensification of farming - just what experts say is needed to feed an expected extra 2 billion people by 2050 - has come about in large part because of investment in agricultural research, and cooperation between research institutes and the country’s strong farming cooperatives, which have quickly taken up new ideas.

Brazil “has shown us lessons on how we can do this elsewhere”, Kyte said.

Just as important for raising production will be finding ways to persuade young people to become farmers when the job - particularly in many developing countries - is increasingly seen as too difficult or too perilous as climate change disrupts weather patterns, experts said.

Young people think “agriculture is a drudgery, and they don’t want to go in (to the field),” said Dyborn Chibonga, head of the National Smallholder Farmers Association of Malawi.

But conservation agriculture – including planting crops in mulch rather than tilling fields with a hand hoe – can make a difference, both to the amount of work and the climate resilience of agriculture, he said.

“In the next five years, we have to declare the hand hoe as a weapon of mass urbanisation” and eliminate it, Chibonga said.

Experts at Monday’s gathering also called for better land tenure for smallholder farmers, and for programmes and government offices on agriculture, water, forest and energy issues to become much more integrated and collaborative, to avoid policies in one area causing problems in another.

“Working in isolation means we will not get the right solutions,” Kyte warned.

CONTROVERSIAL ISSUES

Other issues raised at the meeting were much more controversial.

Brazil’s environment minister, Izasbella Veira Texeira, insisted that the country’s much-criticised new forestry code - which environmentalists fear will spur a surge in Amazon deforestation - is a good idea.

“It’s easy to say we are encouraging deforestation (but) it’s not true. I don’t see any other country making the effort Brazil is making today to protect forest and advance agriculture,” she said.

She also defended the expanding production of biofuels as “a solid path”, saying it is a “false idea that we’re replacing food” with fuel by turning agricultural land to biofuel production.

Kyte, in turn, called for limits on large-scale land grabs in places like Africa, saying they might “get out of control”. She also urged a reduction in the use of nitrogen-based fertilisers, which when overused can seep away from farm fields and cause dead zones in oceans, as well as disruption to other natural systems.

Audience members also called for agricultural leaders to push for reduced consumption of meat rather than intensifying production of it, and for efforts to dramatically reduce food waste. They also warned that one big problem for sustainable agriculture is “big agricultural industries wanting to make profits at the expense of the environment”.

At the meeting, the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) - a consortium of 15 major farm research institutes around the world - announced its members would spend $5 billion over the next five years on research aimed at making agriculture more sustainable.

That will include work on reducing greenhouse gases in farming, making crops less vulnerable to extreme weather and pests, and bringing sustainable irrigation to 12 million households in sub-Saharan Africa by 2020.

Farmers are “the largest group of natural resource managers on Earth”, said Ann Tutwiler, deputy director general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “We will not be able to feed the people we need to feed by 2050 unless we can bring together these issues of food and sustainability.”

By Laurie Goering@Trust.org AlertNet


This video illustrates the proper use of water for irrigation. You don't just spray fields, as most American farmers still do, but put the water by the roots where the crops need it. Drip irrigation saves up to 50% compared to wasteful sprinklers. 

Sustainability Index Points Finger at US, Emerging Giants

Maps produced by Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution devoted to the study of sustainable development and global governance. 

Emerging giant economies and the United States lived beyond their environmental means as they raced for growth, said a UN survey unveiled Sunday at the conference on sustainability here.

China, Brazil, South Africa and the US all dug deep into Nature's treasure chest between 1990 and 2008 as their economies expanded voraciously, it said in a look at 20 nations accounting for three-quarters of global GDP.

The findings came through a new benchmark called the Inclusive Wealth Index, or IWI, presented at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio.

The 10-gathering is due to climax in a three-day summit of world leaders, ending on Friday.

IWI aims at going beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which looks at prosperity through the narrow lens of economic activity.

GDP has long been criticized for encouraging short-term growth, ignoring what can be devastating impacts on the ecosystem and failing to show whether all sectors of society are benefiting.

"Rio+20 is an opportunity to call time on Gross Domestic Product as a measure of prosperity in the 21st century and as a barometer of an inclusive green economy transition," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), which co-authored the report.

"It is far too silent on major measures of human well-being, namely many social issues and the state of a nation's natural resources."

The new index looks at four baskets of assets, including use of natural resources, level of education and health, in the search for a wider picture of fair and sustainable growth.

From 1990-2008, GDP expanded by 422 percent in China, by 37 percent in the United States, by 31 percent in Brazil and by 24 percent in South Africa.

But when seen through IWI's prism, things looked quite different.

On this basis, China's economy expanded by only 45 percent, Brazil's by 18 percent and the United States' by just 13 percent. South Africa's actually decreased by one percent.

The differences are explained largely by population growth in many countries, but also by declining natural resources, especially fossil fuels, according to the IWI.

The change with GDP is especially stark when assessed only for natural capital, one of the four assets used in the IWI mix.

During 1990-2008, natural resources per capita declined by 33 percent in South Africa, by 25 percent in Brazil, 20 percent in the United States and 17 percent in China.

Only Japan, among the 20 nations, did not see a fall in natural capital, thanks mainly to an increase in forest cover.

The 20 countries in the assessment were Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Germany, India, Japan, Kenya, Nigeria, Norway, Russia. Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the United States and Venezuela.

The aim is to update the IWI every two years and widen its areas of coverage so that it becomes a useful tool for policymakers.

The other author of the report was the International Human Dimensions Program on Global Environmental Change, an initiative hosted by the United Nations University.

Agence France-Presse

Countries Must End Fossil Fuel Subsidies at Rio+20

How can world leaders at the Rio+20 Earth Summit next week show that they are serious about sustainable development and environmental protection? The answer is simple: end fossil fuel subsidies.

Every year, governments around the world give nearly $1 trillion dollars of public money to the fossil fuel industry. Three years ago, the G20 committed to phase-out these handouts to coal, oil and gas companies, but they haven't taken any action since.

Now is the perfect time. This June 18, finance ministers and heads of state from G20 countries will come together in Los Cabos, Mexico. Three days later, more than 100 presidents and prime ministers will join over 50,000 people at the Rio+20 Earth Summit, the largest environmental conference in world history. Both meetings offer a clear opportunity for world leaders to step up to the plate and stop these outrageous handouts.

After all, how can you have a serious discussion about funding sustainable development without taking on the hundreds of billions of dollars handed over to the fossil fuel sector each year? A mere fraction of these subsidies could jumpstart thousands of clean energy projects around the world. Large scale transfers of money from dirty to clean investments could catalyze the type of worldwide energy transformation that is desperately needed.

It's still unclear if leaders will take the type of bold action necessary, but the push to end fossil fuel subsidies is gaining momentum around the world. On June 18, a dozen major groups -- from World Wildlife Fund to Avaaz -- are taking part in a 24-hour "Twitter Storm" to try and flood the online airwaves with the #endfossilfuelsubsidies hashtag. The coalition may even be within striking distance of taking down Justin Bieber's twitter world record for the most tweets on a single hashtag.

The slogan for the Rio+20 meetings is, "The Future We Want." By next week, we'll know if our politicians have lived up to that promise or once again bought into "The Future Exxon Wants," a world where our tax dollars continue to get sucked up by the world's richest corporations so that they can continue to profit from destroying the planet.

By Jamie Henn Co-founder and Communications Director, 350.org@HUFFPOST Green

 

Rivers Will Generate a Quarter of GDP by 2050, Study Shows

Water is the very stuff of life, yet billions of people do not have access to a clean, reliable source. Changing that takes investment - public and private - so winning the economic argument about the value of such investment is very valuable. And a new report commissioned by HSBC makes the argument in a striking way.

By mid-century, a full quarter of global GDP will be generated from within the world's ten most populous river basins, predict researchers from Frontier Economics. In contrast, the current contribution from the people living on the banks of great rivers such as Ganges, Yangtze, Nile and the Niger, is just a tenth.

But that economic growth, lifting millions of people out of poverty, is far from guaranteed. If water is not better managed in seven of the 10 river basins, they will be suffering from severe water scarcity by 2050.

"The findings show that the future of river basins is critical for global economic growth," said HSBC chairman Douglas Flint. "Rapid, collaborative action worldwide is needed. The report also highlights the powerful economic rationale for improving access to freshwater and sanitation, at a time when total aid for water access and sanitation has actually declined."

Frontier Economics found the global average return on each dollar invested in access to water and sanitation was just under $5, even after taking maintenance costs into account. But it was much higher in some regions: $16 in Latin America, for example. In some African countries, the capital investment would be paid back in only three years. The researchers concluded that providing universal access to safe water and sanitation could deliver a potential economic gain of $220 billion a year.

"There has been an assumption up to now that water will always be available. People are realising that now is not the case," said Nick Robins, head of HSBC's Climate Change Centre of Excellence. He said water investments are potentially attractive, for both the public and private sector: "They are fairly long-lived secure assets, so there is not much risk there. But you do need to give investors reassurance that the assets are safe" from government interference.

HSBC is giving $100m over five years to WaterAid, EarthWatch and WWF to tackle water problems. Barbara Frost, CEO of WaterAid said: "This partnership will result in 1.1 million people gaining access to safe water and 1.9 million to improved hygiene and sanitation in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Nigeria and Ghana."

The programme follows a previous five-year, $100m project focused on climate change. But Robins says the focus on water is not really a great shift of emphasis. "Water is the way in which climate change is expressed," he said. "You get the disruption of traditional weather patterns; dry areas get drier while wet areas get wetter; and there are extreme weather events too. Water is at the heart of adaptation to climate change."

Water is also at the heart of economies, and perhaps civil unrest and even wars. The taps of investment need to start gushing soon.

Note: The 10 river basins in declining order of population are: Ganges, Yangtze, Indus, Nile, Huang He (Yellow river), Huai He, Niger, Hai, Krishna and the Danube.

Written by Damian Carrington@The Guardian

The Girl Who Silenced The World For 5 Minutes

 
The 20-year-old video predated YouTube, yet it has since gone viral, with 20 million views.

Its picture is grainy but the words are crystal clear.

“We’ve come 5,000 miles to tell you adults you must change your ways.”

A 12-year-old Canadian girl stands before world leaders, expressing the fears and despair of a young generation facing at a bleak future for the planet they will inherit.

All listened raptly. Some wept at the starkness of her appeal.

She became known as “the girl who silenced the world for five minutes.”

It was 1992, and representatives of world governments were gathered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the first United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development — the Earth Summit.

The girl was Severn Cullis-Suzuki, daughter of environmentalist David Suzuki. Two decades later, Cullis-Suzuki, with a child of her own, cares even more passionately about the issues now than she did then.

As the world prepares for another Earth Summit in Rio, we spoke with her about her recollections of that seminal conference and what in her opinion has — and has not — changed in the years since.

Cullis-Suzuki remembers the Earth Summit coming at a time of high environmental concern. Two weeks were allotted for the talks. The heads of state from 108 countries attended, including U.S. president George Bush Sr. and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney. Over 10,000 journalists were on hand.

Back then, Cullis-Suzuki recalls, addressing the depletion of the ozone layer was high on the environmental agenda, as was a growing awareness of a new environmental issue called climate change. A big concern was bringing on side the developing countries who were worried that being forced to comply with environmental measures would hinder their efforts to develop.

The end of the summit saw the signing of legally-binding agreements, including the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which would pave the way for the Kyoto Protocol. The nations of the world agreed to a global action plan for sustainable development: Agenda 21.

The world emerged from Rio with a sense of hope and promise.

“I look back at those documents that came out of Rio, and they were pretty amazing,” Cullis-Suzuki says. “Great promises were made at Rio, then it kind of fell off people’s agenda.”

The hope and promise were short-lived. Cullis-Suzuki recalls that, in the years following the Earth Summit, the global economy slipped into recession and economic constraints meant the environment was no longer a priority.

Cullis-Suzuki notes the parallels to today, as economic woes again displace the environment as a top concern for world leaders. She cites the fact the 2012 Earth Summit will last only three days. President Barack Obama will not be there, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not indicated if he will attend.

Climate change has risen to a pre-eminent concern.

“We’re in a new reality, living in a time of climate change. We already have climate refugees around the globe and now have to talk about adaptation and mitigation,” says Cullis-Suzuki, who holds a B.Sc. in ecology and evolutionary biology, and a masters of science specializing in ethnoecology.

In an ironic reversal, smaller developing countries like the island nations Grenada and the Maldives, who are already feeling the effects of climate change, are the ones begging industrial nations to address climate change.

However, this time there will be no agreements that legally bind countries to meet environmental targets. Instead countries will be asked to work voluntarily towards targets they set for themselves.

Cullis-Suzuki is now coaching young Canadians to represent the interests of the next generation as delegates at Rio 2012. We asked her if she were to stand before the Rio Summit 20 years after she first held the world’s leaders rapt, what would she say now?

“I’m hearing from a lot of people that the same speech I gave then could be given again today. That is a sobering thought,” she told us.

“Sometimes it’s hard not to feel really negative. I think I would ask why we have not succeeded? Why are we not further along?”

The answer may come from her father. In a recent blog, David Suzuki declared environmentalism a failure. Creating environment ministries and holding environment-focused conferences, he argued, made the environment just “another special interest” like agriculture or education. It was something separate from the economy and so fell to the wayside when recessions struck.

Ironically, Rio’s goal in 1992 was to integrate environmental awareness into global development. As Suzuki put it, “The event was meant to signal that economic activity could not proceed without considering ecological consequences.”

Twenty years later, world leaders once again need a child to stand up and remind them that, for the next generation, the environment is not a special interest, it’s their future.

Summit for Sustainability in Africa

                                 Declaration

For the foreseeable future, development in Africa will be based on improving agricultural production and generating sustainable revenue from non-renewable natural resources such as minerals and oil and renewable natural resources such as forests and water. In order for this to be truly sustainable, especially under climate change, countries and their investment partners must be able to integrate the value of natural capital in their development plans.

The goal of the Summit for Sustainability in Africa is to demonstrate how African nations and their investment partners understand, manage and value natural capital. We will be taking a practical, results-focused approach that will put the African nations in the driving seat and help investment partners bring support in a coordinated and coherent fashion.

First we will look at the relevance of natural capital management to development in Africa — what challenges we face and the opportunities that exist. Then we will highlight how these challenges are being viewed and addressed through partnerships between the private sector, governments and the public sector, creating a new momentum for change in development. We will then examine how we can bring these demonstrations to scale, using the momentum generated by field experience and new ideas to build increased resilience and sustainability.

We envisage that the Summit will initiate a dialogue which will stimulate new and unexpected collaborations, built from solid field experience and extended to new audiences and partners. These partnerships will be further consolidated at such milestone events as the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio +20) in June and the UN General Assembly in September.

'Green bullet' Innovations Aim to Feed World of 9 Billion

In flood-hit fields in the Philippines, farmers are testing a hardy new variety of rice that can survive completely submerged for more than two weeks.

In Kenya's Kibera slum, poor urban families are turning around their diets and incomes just by learning to grow vegetables in sack gardens outside their doors.

And in India, a push to help marginalised rural communities gain title to their land is leading to a significant drop in hunger.

These are just a few of the kinds of innovations and intitiatives that experts say will be critical if the world is to feed itself over coming decades as the population soars, cities sprawl and climate change takes its toll.

By 2050, the planet will need at least 70 percent more food than it does today to meet both an expected rise in population to 9 billion from 7 billion and changing appetites as many poor people grow richer, experts say.

"Can we feed a world of 9 billion? I would say the answer is yes," said Robert Watson, chief scientific adviser to Britain's Department of Environment and Rural Affairs and a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But doing so will require fundamental changes to unsustainable but well-entrenched policies and practices, from eating so much meat to spending trillions on agriculture and fuel subsidies, he said.

In the meantime, many hunger fighters say the answer lies in clever alterations to the way food is planted, watered, harvested, stored, transported, sold, owned and shared.

Many of those changes are already being tested in the world's farms and fields, in laboratories and government offices, in factories and markets. Some are even speaking of the beginnings of a 21st century food revolution.

MYRIAD 'GREEN BULLETS'

Unlike the last century's agricultural "Green Revolution", which dramatically boosted world food production with new high-yielding crop varieties and more irrigation, this revolution must rely on myriad "green bullets" to tackle hunger.

They range from persuading farmers in Africa's drought zones to switch from water-hungry rice to hardier crops like sorghum or millet, to helping them build pest-proof grain silos that allow food to be stored longer or sold when prices are higher.

With 70 percent of the world's people expected to live in cities by 2050, finding ways to help city dwellers grow food in small urban plots or roof gardens, or group together to buy food at cheaper prices, is a major focus.

In California's East Palo Alto, for instance, older inner-city residents - who are particularly vulnerable to high food prices - are learning growing techniques for the first time and producing food for themselves and a neighbourhood market.

Other urban areas are turning to vertical hydroponic gardens clinging to the edge of skyscrapers.

Women - who grow at least 40 percent of food in Africa and Asia - will need improved land rights and better access to information, something being made much easier by the spread of mobile phone technology, experts say.

Rural women in India's Andhra Pradesh state now use advance drought warnings, relayed by Internet and mobile phone, to switch to more drought-tolerant crops -- a move that has saved harvests and helped stem the usual wave of migration to cities in drought times.

Changing farming practices by adopting more water-conserving drip irrigation or planting crops amid fertilizing trees, as is now happening throughout Africa, will also be key.

So will cutting the at least 30 percent of the world's food supply eaten by pests, spoiled on the way to market or thrown away unused from plates and supermarkets.

Simply getting supermarkets to stop offering two-for-one specials - which can encourage people to overbuy - would be a start, some anti-hunger activists say, as would improving roads in regions like South Asia and Africa where transport delays mean produce often rots on the way to market.

Solutions to the threat of worsening hunger will vary by region, by country, sometimes even from one farm or village or apartment building to the next, experts say. Not all ideas will succeed, and scaling up those that do prove to work, as quickly as possible, will be essential.

In a world where an estimated 900 million people are already hungry today, curbing surging consumption in rich nations and those fast getting rich, especially India and China, will be particularly important, experts say.

"If we look at the graph of (rising) human consumption, that's the one to worry about," said Phil Bloomer, director of campaigns and policy for Oxfam Great Britain. "That is a graph that should strike panic in our hearts."

Persuading rich people to eat less meat and fewer milk products, which take a lot of grain to produce, would go a long way toward curbing ever-rising demand for grain.

'NO NORMAL TO GO BACK TO'

Many innovations focus on easing the adverse effects of climate change on food production.

While warmer weather and growing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could spur plant growth and food production in some regions -- and open a few northern reaches of the world to farming -- many more regions are expected to see worsening losses from droughts, floods, storms, rising sea levels and higher temperatures that can cause crop yields to drop.

"It used to be there was an extreme weather event here or there but we knew that in a year or so things would go back to normal," said Lester Brown, a food security and sustainability expert, and president of the U.S.-based Earth Policy Institute.

"Now there is no normal to go back to."

That's why scientists from Bangladesh to Tanzania are developing new resilient varieties of 

maize, wheat, rice and other crops that can survive underwater, or with very little rain, or even both extremes in the same season, and still produce a reliable crop.

Other innovators are focusing on the effects of growing water scarcity.

"A substantial amount of our food production worldwide comes from non-renewable groundwater sources, and in the long run that is not sustainable," said Peter Gleick, a leading water expert and head of the U.S.-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security.

In villages where glacier-fed streams are set to become more irregular or disappear in the years ahead, or where flooding from heavy rain is quickly followed by drought, communities are learning to harvest and store water to ensure supplies throughout the year.

They are also developing water-conserving irrigation methods to make what they have available last.

Will all such innovations be enough to feed 9 billion people by 2050? Possibly, say experts, but success will depend on making enough key changes fast enough.

In addition to on-the-ground solutions, those changes will need to include major policy shifts -- including potentially a ban on turning grain into biofuel or limits on food speculation.

"Food insecurity and climate change are already inhibiting human well-being and economic growth throughout the world, and these problems are poised to accelerate," said John Beddington, Britain's chief science adviser, in a March report by the International Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change.

"Decisive policy action is required if we are to preserve the planet's capacity to produce adequate food in the future."

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