Good news: Ban Ki-moon will save Antarctica!

Ban Ki-moon has just set out his plans for his second five year term. He is not unambitious:

“Today I want to share with you an action agenda for the coming five years,” he told the Assembly as he returned to the rostrum to brief Member States on his vision for his second term.

“A plan to make the most of the opportunities before us. A plan to help create a safer, more secure, more sustainable, more equitable future. A plan to build the future we want,” he said.

The “action agenda” presented today describes specific measures regarding each of the five imperatives, including an unprecedented campaign to wipe out five of the world’s major killers – malaria, polio, paediatric HIV infections, maternal and neonatal tetanus, and measles.

Mr. Ban also announced that the UN will work with Member States to make Antarctica a World Nature Preserve and that he will appoint a new special representative for youth.

Hm… a year ago, I published an article in which I noted that “Ban has oscillated between bouts of fatalism about the UN’s decline and curious bursts of overheated rhetoric about its importance.”  We seem to be in one the latter periods:

“Waves of change are surging around us,” he told the Assembly. “If we navigate wisely, we can create a more secure and sustainable future for all. The United Nations is the ship to navigate these waters…

“We are the venue for partnerships and action. Now is our moment. Now is the time to create the future we want,” he stated.

Interestingly, Ban didn’t use the words “South Sudan” once in his main speech (he nodded to it in a post-speech press conference) despite the evidence that the country may be falling apart on the UN’s watch.  But then he didn’t mention Syria either.  Still, he didn’t overlook the UN’s crisis management operations completely:

Our operations build bridges — literally and among communities.

Clever, huh?

It’s become an unlikely YouTube hit. No, not sneezing pandas or puppies on skateboards…but Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges talking on C-Span for three hours about the triumph of the corporate state, the failure of liberals, the over-reaching of US empire, the cost of war, climate change, Christianity, the Occupy movement…everything really! Quite a performance. Posted online in January and it already has a quarter of a million views. Difficult to turn off once you start watching.

From XKCD, via Tim Harford.

Later today in New York, a 2 day meeting on the idea of ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ will begin, bringing together numerous countries’ Permanent Representatives to the United Nations plus a whole host of environment and development experts from capitals. It’s going to be an interesting meeting.

The idea of ‘SDGs’, after all, has acquired a lot of political momentum in recent months. Partly that’s because they’re seen as a potential outcome from this summer’s Rio+20 sustainable development conference – at a point when very few concrete outcomes from Rio appear to be in prospect (see the ‘zero draft outcome document’ pdf that was published earlier this month). The SDGs agenda is also topical given that the Millennium Development Goals are due to hit their 2015 deadline pretty soon, raising the question of what should come after them. (See Claire’s excellent recent publications, like this and this, on that for a full briefing on where things stand on that front.)

But the funny thing is that there’s remarkably little clarity on what SDGs would cover, or how they’d work. Would they just run from now to 2015, alongside the existing MDGs, and cover a few ‘gaps’ that were missed out in the MDGs – like access to energy? Or would they in fact take over from the MDGs after 2015, thus becoming the new organising framework for global development policy? These are big questions – and at a time, of course, when multilateralism has really been struggling to make much running not just on Rio preparations, but also on climate, trade, and any number of other key issue areas.

Against this backdrop, David and I have just published a short CIC briefing paper (pdf) that discusses where we are on the SDGs agenda – and how it might usefully pan out from here. In a nutshell, our argument is that policymakers should think twice before regarding SDGs as an “easy win” from Rio. We argue that this is a very complex and potentially very contentious area of policy – and that policymakers should play a long game at this stage rather than going for quick wins that could all too easily backfire. Accordingly, we think that discussion of SDGs at Rio should go no further than discussion of broad principles and raising the level of ambition. A lot more shared awareness – not just between policymakers, but also with publics, private sector, media, civil society and so on – is needed before the discussion about specifics gets underway in earnest.

That’s what people keep asking former IMF Chief Economist Ken Rogoff, apparently. But, he observes,

It is a curious question, because it seems to presume that there is a viable replacement waiting in the wings. The truth of the matter is that, for now at least, the only serious alternatives to today’s dominant Anglo-American paradigm are other forms of capitalism.

Continental European capitalism, which combines generous health and social benefits with reasonable working hours, long vacation periods, early retirement, and relatively equal income distributions, would seem to have everything to recommend it – except sustainability. China’s  Darwinian capitalism, with its fierce competition among export firms, a weak social-safety net, and widespread government intervention, is widely touted as the inevitable heir to Western capitalism, if only because of China’s huge size and consistent outsize growth rate. Yet China’s economic system is continually evolving.

Indeed, it is far from clear how far China’s political, economic, and financial structures will continue to transform themselves, and whether China will eventually morph into capitalism’s new exemplar. In any case, China is still encumbered by the usual social, economic, and financial vulnerabilities of a rapidly growing lower-income country.

Perhaps the real point is that, in the broad sweep of history, all current forms of capitalism are ultimately transitional.

So what are the key stresses that may push us on to the next transitional form[s] of capitalism? Five, reckons Rogoff: (1) failing to price public goods properly – like clean air, water or a stable climate; (2) inequality; (3) market failures on medical care; (4) failing to value the wellbeing of future generations, including through resource depletion; and (5) financial crises. Hard to disagree with any of those…

I can see why the world is warming to Newt. He talks a lot of sense on climate change.

My message is that the evidence is sufficient that we should move towards the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon loading in the atmosphere… and do it urgently.

Let me explain why this is a very challenging thing to do if you’re a Conservative. For most of the past thirty years, the environment has been a powerful emotional tool for bigger government and higher taxes. Therefore if you’re a Conservative, the minute you start hearing these arguments, you know what’s coming next. Just bigger government and higher taxes. So even though it might be the right thing to do, you end up fighting it because you don’t want the bigger government and the higher taxes. And so you end up in these cycles…

I think there has to be a green Conservatism. There has to be a willingness to stand up and say, “here’s the right way to solve these [problems] as seen through our value system. And now have a dialogue about what’s the most effective way to solve it, rather than get into a fight about whether to solve it. When I was speaker, on a whole range of biodiversity issues, I intervened again and again on the side of the environment. I really do believe [in the environment].

I would be delighted to see open ended hearings – not in time, but in terms of the topic – that started and said: “If we’re serious about a dramatic global reduction in carbon loading over the next twenty years – starting immediately – what are the different models that might work? Are there incentive based, market-oriented models that might work as well or faster? And is there a chance that they would produce the technology that would make it easier  for India and China to decide you can have green prosperity?”

Because if you can develop green prosperity, you change the entire trajectory for the planet, not just for the US… I would love to see hearings that didn’t start with a fight over cap and trade… which I don’t think is the way to start. The way to start is to ask what the optimum choices we can make strategically to minimize carbon loading in the next twenty years.

I believe we can bring a science, technology, and entrepreneurship/incentive-based model that would at least be worth being considered seriously by the House and Senate.

Two minor caveats. First, I don’t think  Gingrich ever developed his idea for an incentive-based model that wasn’t cap and trade. And, of course, this is from back in 2007. I hear the ex-Speaker’s position has evolved been more intelligently designed since then. Here’s the 2011 version:

Remember, in the mid-1970’s there was a cover of Newsweek and Time that says we’re in the age of a brand new glacial period and they had a cover of the Earth covered in ice. This is the 1970’s. Now many of those scientists are still alive and they were absolutely convinced. I mean, if Al Gore were able to in the 1970’s we would build huge furnaces to warm the planet against this inevitable coming Ice Age.

I’m not disputing or discrediting the National Academy of Sciences, I’m saying a topic large enough to change the behavior of the entire human race is a topic that is more than science and deserves public hearings with very tough minded public questions and we’ve had almost none of that on either side.

The ‘more than science’ hearings should be fun! Perhaps Newt will explain what happened to evidence that was sufficient to demand urgent action just four years ago…

Sustainable Development: more than just windmills?

A few months ago, the Colombian government created what passed for excitement among international climate and development types, with its proposal for ‘sustainable development goals’.  In a paper that is surprisingly short given the talk it’s generated, they proposed a set of goals which, in essence, incorporate the current Millennium Development Goals, but go well beyond them in including a range of possible goals on sustainability and the environment.

At the time, Alex raised a set of important questions here on GD about the what, the who and the how of any future SDGs.  And over at CGD, Charles Kenny made a plea for the SDG and the MDG people to start talking to each other to provide some of the substance to underpin these ideas. 

And since then?  Global negotiations are funny things.  In the absence of almost any of the substance that Charles was asking for, and without answers to any of the questions posed by Alex, the SDGs have continued their onward march.  Representatives of thirty countries recently met in Bogata to agree some objectives for SDGs, based around reconciling poverty reduction and sustainability.

 The SDG train has clearly left the station – even though no one really knows what they are.  This is a little disheartening for innocent folk like me who like to believe that facts matter (yeah, I know, hopelessly outdated – I may as well be writing this on a Smith-Corona). 

Given that no one really knows what SDGs are, but they sound good and people seem to like them, what might they actually be?  Where is the meeting ground between environment and development that could form the basis of a set of goals, and what difference would it make to go about things this way? 

Putting sustainability into poverty reduction:

If the MDG project has been about putting forward a set of positive things that need to happen for poor people: more money, more health, more education, what are the sustainability goals that could fit into this sort of framework?  The things we need more of, from a sustainability and a development point of view, are, among others, more clean energy, more sustainable sources of water, and more food grown in ways that does not irrevocably deplete natural resources.  These are things one could imagine putting into a new set of goals to go alongside the more traditional MDG concerns of health, education and income.  Some of them, like water, are even in there already, though almost ignored.

So far so good, but the poverty reduction bit is actually the easy bit. (more…)

Surprising news from the US via Lester Brown:

Between 2007 and 2011, carbon emissions from coal use in the United States dropped 10 percent. During the same period, emissions from oil use dropped 11 percent. In contrast, carbon emissions from natural gas use increased by 6 percent. The net effect of these trends was that U.S. carbon emissions dropped 7 percent in four years.

So what’s driving it?

The initial fall in coal and oil use was triggered by the economic downturn, but now powerful new forces are reducing the use of both. For coal, the dominant force is the Beyond Coal campaign, an impressive national effort coordinated by the Sierra Club involving hundreds of local groups that oppose coal because of its effects on human health.

The campaign started by focusing on opposing new coal power stations, which Brown says was “hugely successful”, before turning its focus to closing existing plants – and now 68 of a total of 492 are slated to close. This helps reduce oil emissions, too, given that 40% of US freigh rail diesel fuel is used to transport coal. (Brown doesn’t talk about the shale gas glut, one of the other reasons why emissions are falling – instead focusing on the high rate of growth in renewables. But let’s forgive him that.) Meanwhile, US oil emissions are falling for other reasons too, including…

…a shrinkage in the size of the national fleet, the rising fuel efficiency of new cars, and a reduction in the miles driven per vehicle.

Fleet size peaked at 250 million cars in 2008 just as the number of cars being scrapped eclipsed sales of new cars. Aside from economic conditions, car sales are down because many young people today are much less automobile-oriented than their parents. In addition, the fuel efficiency of new cars, already rising, will soon increase sharply. The most recent efficiency standards mandate that new cars sold in 2025 use only half as much fuel as those sold in 2010. Thus with each passing year, the U.S. car fleet becomes more fuel-efficient, using less gsoline.

Miles driven per car are declining because of higher gasoline prices, the continuing recession, and the shift to public transit and bicycles. Bicycles are replacing cars as cities create cycling infrastructure by building bike paths, creating dedicated bike lanes, and installing sidewalk parking racks. Many U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York, are introducing bike-sharing programs. Furthermore, when people retire and no longer commute, miles driven drop by a third to a half. With so many baby boomers now retiring, this too will lower gasoline use.

Cheery stuff, eh? And that’s all before the spread of electric cars gets factored in to the equation – which will decarbonise things still further if emissions from power generation continue to fall.

Meanwhile, in the UK…

2001 may turn out to be the year that the UK’s consumption of ‘stuff’ – the total weight of everything we use, from food and fuel to flat-pack furniture – reached its peak and began to decline.

That’s according to  Chris Goodall, a Green Party candidate and former McKinsey consultant who’s been trawling through the UK Material Flow Accounts, prepared by the Office of National Statistics. The Guardian’s Duncan Clark isn’t so sure that the 2001 peak is accurate (he thinks it might be a blip) – but he does conclude from exploring Goodall’s data that

…despite rising GDP, material consumption started falling from 2005; second, that after the recession hit, our consumption rates quickly dropped all the way down to sub-1970 levels.

Clark has a more detailed analysis piece about the data on the Guardian’s Environment Blog, which breaks the data down by sector – and shows steep declines on variables including household waste per capita (down about 15% since 2000), overall fertiliser use (nitrogen fertilisers down by a third since the early 80s, phosphate more than halved since 1970), per capita food consumption (down from almost 2,280 calories a day in the mid-90s to less than 2,070 today), and energy (total primary energy use down 10% since 2000.

Of course, there are lots of methodological issues behind these data: how much is due to the economic downturn, and how much due to genuine ‘decoupling’ of environmental impact from economic growth; how much is due to ‘exporting’ dirty industries to China and elsewhere; how much is due to one-off political factors like the ‘dash for gas’ in UK power generation in the late 1990s and so on. But still – good news is good news, and being rather a scarce commodity, you have to grab it when you see it…

Brand identity is important for a high-profile global agency. Your logo tells your stakeholders who you are, what you stand for, and where you’re going. It’s about your values. Your story. Your people.

So it’s unfortunate that the new brand for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – launched yesterday amid much fanfare, and with just over a month to go until the Durban climate summit…

…bears a remarkable similarity to that of … er … Comedy Central.

D’oh! (H/t Jeff Hatcher.)

Oh dear. From today’s Observer (for non-Brits, that’s the Sunday edition of the Guardian):

The United Nations will warn this week that the world’s population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century, putting a catastrophic strain on the planet’s resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates, the Observer can reveal.

That figure is likely to shock many experts as it is far higher than many current estimates. A previous UN estimate had expected the world to have more than 10 billion people by 2100; currently, there are nearly 7 billion.

Yeah, yeah. Actually, the forthcoming UNFPA State of World Population report that’s cited in the article simply uses the 2010 revision of the main UN population database (which you can find here). The 2100 figure of 15bn (actually, 16 bn if you did maths GCSE and know how to round 15.8bn to the nearest billion) is the top end estimate.

The medium variant? You guessed it, 10 billion: in other words, the “previous UN estimate” referred to in the Guardian piece. Nothing that a 5 minute fact check wouldn’t immediately have revealed, but hey, let’s not let details get in the way of a good headline.

Always amazes me that a paper with such outstanding foreign affairs coverage is so bad on environment – John Vidal’s dreadful Copenhagen reporting being the example par excellence.

A while ago, there used to be a magazine called Whole Earth Review. Not all that many people remember it now, but at the time it brought together some of the most cutting edge thinkers around. It was an offshot from the seminal Whole Earth Catalog, which ran from 1968 to 1972, and which had been set up by Stewart Brand – who also founded Global Business Network and the Long Now Foundation. Among Whole Earth Review’s early editors were Kevin Kelly, who would go on to set up a magazine called Wired,  and Howard Rheingold, who would years later identify the phenomenon of smart mobs.

The Whole Earth Review emerged, in other words, out of conversations between people who had a habit of being a long way ahead of their time. (All of the Review’s back issues are online, by the way – go read.) And in the winter of 1989, an especially interesting issue of the Review came out. Its subject: “the global teenager”.

Before you ask, no, the Review didn’t predict the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, or the London riots; not exactly, anyway (although there is an article on a certain technology, “gradually becoming accessible to the general public”, called Usenet – which noted with interest how “Chinese students in North America used it to organise support for the pro-democracy movement back home”).

Instead, it did something arguably more interesting and important: it jumped, feet first, in to what the global youth bulge would mean for the world. Not just in consumption patterns, or the need for investment in education or job creation or whatever, but at a much more subtle, interesting and fundamental level.

(more…)

This arresting question was raised at every stop on a recent visit to four European capitals to present the findings of the World Resources 2010-2011: Decision Making in a Changing Climate, which was jointly launched this week by the World Resources Institute, UNDP, UNEP and the World Bank.

The question came variably from journalists, think tankers, academics and government officials. Invariably, the US record on the issue was contrasted with China’s apparent boldness and resolve in embracing a low-carbon future. But it’s not just the US. Across the ‘free world’ governments appear to be shirking in front of the formidable challenges and difficult decisions that climate change throws up, backpedaling on earlier pledges and commitments as economic and financial turmoil knocks climate change in to the long grass, politically.

Is there something about democracies then that make them singularly ill-equipped to adapt to the vagaries of a changing climate? Could it be, for example, that the political myopia enforced by electoral cycles makes it inherently difficult for democracies to address long term issues? While the question is thought-provoking and in tune with the current mood of self-questioning and soul searching in the West, I wonder if anyone asking the question was seriously suggesting democracy be sacrificed on the altar of climate change adaptation. A recent Eurobarometer survey carried out in June 2011, indicates that public sentiment would in fact favour a higher prioritization of climate change than was the case the last time the poll was taken in 2009.

A reading of this World Resources Report 2011 suggests that the more important, useful (and interesting) question to pose is whether – regardless the political system in place – the decision-making process can be improved to make for more effective adaptations to a changing climate. A clear message from the report is that good decisions – i.e. those that are responsive, proactive, flexible, durable and robust to a range of climate outcomes – are the ones that are opened up to the public and grounded in participatory processes that are unmistakably democratic in character. Given the deep uncertainties and long time horizons characteristic of decisions relevant to climate change adaptation, effective public engagement is all the more critical to ensure legitimacy and durability of policy decisions. And public participation is important in another important regard: in ensuring that public values and interests are reflected in decisions about what constitutes acceptable levels of risk. On this point, see also Voice and Choice – an excellent report which delves deeper into the benefits of public participation in decision-making.

The findings of the World Resources Report 2010-11 are on the whole intuitive. The report is well worth a read in particular for the case studies of adaptation decision-making at the national level in the developing world which are particularly rich and illustrative of the inventiveness and initiative of governments of all political shades in adapting to a changing climate.

I spent yesterday afternoon at the launch of the new Foresight report on Migration and Global Environmental Change, a study commissioned and led by the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington.  Drawing on the best available science and analysis from other disciplines, the project aimed to develop a picture of how international and internal migration patterns might be affected by global environmental changes between now and 2060, and the implications of these developments for policymakers.

It is a substantial report, and looks like important reading for those working on migration, climate change and many other related issues.  It is also full of crunchy data and pretty charts, which always helps.   Some of the top-line conclusions are unsurprising.  It states that environmental change has a clear impact on migration through its influence on the web of political, economic and social drivers that lead people to move, and that this impact will only increase in the future as the world becomes more populated and as natural hazards proliferate.  It also argues that the complex interaction of drivers will lead to different migration outcomes, and that well-planned and coordinated policy responses will reduce the risks of humanitarian emergencies and displacement.  So far, so predictable.

However, some of its findings and recommendations are more counterintuitive, and should be studied carefully by policymakers.  Three in particular jumped out at me. (more…)

At a meeting on Global Green Growth in Denmark yesterday, Ban Ki-moon went on an alphabetical rampage:

The three Gs of Global Green Growth must respond to social, economic and environmental challenges equally.  Because we live in an era of three Fs:  crises on Food, Fuel and Finance.  So we need to enhance the three Es:  the Economy, the Environment and global Equity.

It’s a pity that, having turned to the economy, he didn’t talk about major powers losing their AAA ratings.  Although I’m afraid this rhetoric will have elicited a few Zzz’s…

I just finished a fantastic and provocative book – a wake up call to the aid and development ‘industry’ (of which I am a part so good to be woken up once in a while)…

The book is ‘Delivering Development ’ by rising star of the blogosphere Edward Carr (see his blog Open the Echo Chamber and good posts on all sorts of stuff). He’s part of what seems to be a growing group of people who have academic backgrounds, blogs and work in policy or what Nora Lustig calls the ‘scholar-practitioner’. In fact he is currently on secondment to USAID from University of South Carolina, working on issues at the intersection of development and climate change.

Ed has an interesting background. He went to Ghana to do an archeological dig, became more interested in events in the present, and ended up a social scientist mashup of geographer/anthropologist/aid and development policy wonk, focused on understanding how the global poor manage economic, environmental and other challenges in their everyday lives.

Given Ed’s book draws on his work in Ghana, it illustrates many of the contradictions of globalization that were in various headlines last week in the business press on Ghana’s incredible oil boom. The size of the Ghanaian economy grew by a third in just one year and there’s been a massive expansion of mobile communications in a country where average incomes are still only about $3/day per person (exchange rate conversion) and 1 in 5 live under the poverty line of $2/day (PPP$s) (see data here and there’s a reasonable but mixed picture on the UN poverty goals in Ghana - see here).

(more…)