It matters to us and to the 1.5 billion people in Asia: Dixit
Republica (Nepal)
There are very few journalists and even less editors in Nepal who know what they are talking about when it comes to the environment, energy, and climate change. Kunda Dixit, the editor of Nepali Times weekly, is one of those few who can be trusted on the issues of environment and its politics and everything in between. He was a scientist before he became a journalist, researching the microbiological pathways of making biogas work in cold climates. His book, Dateline Earth: Journalism As If the Planet Mattered is used as a textbook in journalism schools all over the world to train scribes to write more intelligently about environment and development issues. A graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York, he is the authority in Nepali media to talk on climate change and global warming.
… Q: It seems people in Kathmandu don’t really care until it hits them hard. How does climate change affect the residents of Kathmandu, if it does?
We have to be careful. There is a tendency these days to blame everything – from Kathmandu’s water crisis and the garbage on the streets – on climate change. Like all cities, Kathmandu sucks resources and it burns fossil carbon. It should be worried because it is the REASON for climate change. We need to be worried about the fossil fuel we burn and pump into the atmosphere not just because it enlarges our carbon footprint but because it is economically unviable. For a country that has so much hydropower to import petroleum is bad economics, forget about bad for ecology.
Fifty years ago, we should have gone for electric trains, cargo ropeways, and urban electric transport. It makes economic sense because we reduce our petroleum import bill – and fuel is going to get more and more expensive as we approach peak oil use – it doesn’t pollute, it uses renewable energy, it is cheaper. It’s still not too late. We need to go electric not to save the planet, but to save ourselves.
… Q: Nepal is such a small contributor to global warming. Why should it even matter to us at all?
It matters to us and it matters to the 1.5 billion people in Asia who depend directly on the rivers fed by melting ice in the “water towers” of the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau. If the mass balance of this ice goes negative, the entire region will be affected. In fact, river flows are already affected. But we need more data to give us a better idea of what to plan for. Countries in the region also need better trans-boundary early warning so when a glacial lake bursts behind Mt Everest, villages on the Nepali side are warned in time.
… Q: What is the single largest threat to environment in Nepal?
All natural systems are interlinked. We are living in the most densely populated mountain region in the world, but these mountains are also the youngest and most fragile. Even without global warming, we have problems like deforestation-induced landslides, erosion, water sources going dry. Overexploitation of groundwater, uncontrolled sand and boulder mining on river beds which increases river velocity during floods.
And then there are all the other results of unplanned and unregulated urbanization: rivers polluted by untreated city waste, agrochemicals poisoning the land and water, lack of emission control dirtying the air. Nepal’s eco-systems were fragile even without global warming. Climate change just magnifies all the problems we have many times over. How to ensure that the changes of climate change are not too drastic and global average temperatures don’t rise more than two degrees is not in our hands. It is in the hands of the big polluters, two of whom are our next-door neighbors.
Q: What can individuals do to improve the situation?
For many of us who live in countries in the periphery like Nepal, there is a real feeling that we don’t just have to suffer for someone else’s crime for global warming but we actually have to pay for them as well. But we have to stop blaming the government and the rich countries all the time and change our own lifestyles first. We need to install solar systems in our homes not just to save our planet but because winter load-shedding will be around for the next 10 years. Ride in electric transport not because it is cool but because it makes economic sense. Reduce your household use of energy and water. Harvest rainwater. Ride a bicycle where possible. Compost biodegradable waste and start a kitchen garden. Plant trees wherever you can.
(5 June 2009)
The original for the article seemed to be removed not long after Google News mentioned it. -BA
Forest carbon market already shows cracks
Gerard Wynn and Sunanda Creagh, Reuters
LONDON/NUSA DUA, Indonesia – It could save the rainforests of Borneo, slow climate change and the international community backs it. But a plan to pay tropical countries not to chop down trees risks being discredited by opportunists even before it starts.
A forest carbon market is emerging in anticipation of a global, U.N. climate deal in December in Copenhagen, expected to allow rich countries to pay to protect rainforests as a cheap alternative to cutting their own greenhouse gases.
Officials in Papua New Guinea (PNG) have underlined how things may go awry.
Reuters has uncovered evidence of a multi-million-dollar offer of assistance from carbon brokers to a government agency, and confusion over whether offset sales were from valid projects.
There is growing interest from countries and companies in the developed world to buy the rights to the carbon stored in trees as they grow, to offset their own emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
But development and environment groups have long warned that suddenly placing a big value on rainforests could spur friction and even conflict in some developing nations, because of uncertain tenure rights, corruption and inadequate policing.
(3 June 2009)
California forests hold one answer to climate change
Margot Roosevelt, Los Angeles Times
… This 2,200-acre spread in Humboldt County does well by doing good. For the last four years, Van Eck’s foresters restricted logging, allowing trees to do what trees do: absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The conservation foundation that oversees the forest then calculated that carbon bonus and sold it for $2 million to individuals and companies trying to offset some 185,000 metric tons of their greenhouse gas emissions.
“Forests can be managed like a long-term carbon bank,” said Laurie Wayburn, president of the Pacific Forest Trust, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that oversees Van Eck. Selling offsets, she said, is like “writing checks on the account.”
In the struggle over how to address climate change nationally and globally, forests play a major role. “Cap-and-trade” programs set limits on greenhouse gases and allow industries to trade emissions permits among themselves. And they can include provisions for offsetting heat-trapping pollution by investing in woodlands.
Offsets are poised for explosive growth. In the next two years, California is expected to roll out a statewide carbon market that may be expanded to other Western states. Nationally, climate legislation approved by a key congressional committee last week would allow U.S. industries to use offsets worth up to 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, part of which could come from forest projects here and abroad.
(1 June 2009)
Nicholas Stern’s heresy: conceding the West’s climate burden
Geoffrey Lean, Grist
Nick Stern is a relatively recent recruit to the battle against climate change, but he has rapidly become one of its most formidable champions. A former Chief Economist at the World Bank and top official at the British Treasury, Baron Stern of Brentford (to pay him due deference) is very much an establishment figure, far removed from the traditional environmental campaigner.
… So when he throws a new proposal into the melting pot of the negotiations on a new international climate change treaty, as he did just the other day, it is worth pausing to consider it. And this one is both controversial and a potential gamechanger. For it both breaks radically with the position of Britain and other developed countries, and could resolve a key deadlock threatening to prevent agreement at December’s vital meeting in Copenhagen.
Put simply, Stern suggested—in answer to a question after a speech to the Hay literary festival in Wales—that Britain, the United States and other rich countries should take ownership of part of the greenhouse gas emissions of rapidly industrializing countries like China and India.
These have long been one of the chief stumbling blocks in the negotiations, a new bout of which opened in Bonn at the beginning of this week. These emissions are increasing fast; China’s carbon dioxide emissions doubled in just ten years between 1996 and 2006, and the country is believed to have recently overtaken the United States as the world’s biggest polluter. China announced in January that it planned to increase coal production by another 30 percent by 2015.
Though everyone accepts that the world’s rich nations will have to make the biggest and earliest emission cuts, the climate simply will not be able to tolerate the increasing pollution from the rapidly industrializing world. Though both China and India have already taken some strong measures—particularly in boosting the use of renewables—the two countries say that there is a limit to what they can do. The Chinese regime even privately fears that really tough action could bring an end to the Communist Party’s 60-year lock on power.
The rapidly developing nations point out that it was industrialized countries that caused the problem in the first place, and that their per capita emissions remain far lower than in the developed world. And they add that much of their pollution results from making goods for export to rich countries, and so they should therefore not be held responsible for them.
(2 June 2009)
