Waste-lifters of the world unite
Durban: As expected for the final day of the international climate negotiations, things are hotting up – press conferences have been cancelled, which is a reliable barometer of such things. Journalists, under pressure from their editors to report some news – any news – have taken to interviewing each other. I’ve seen at least two news teams wandering around the media room reporting on the media at COP17, which is a level of navel gazing that’s surely not even interest to fellow journalists.
Literally a green house exhibited at the conference
But with no agreement likely to be reached before early hours of Saturday, the barrel must be scraped. Yesterday, reporters excitedly wrote up what they interpreted – or willed – to be a change of heart in the US position on agreeing to the EU roadmap that might resuscitate the dying Kyoto Protocol and get us some way out of this mess. The reports, based on a “subtle change in tone” and a “nuance”, but sadly not on US representative Todd Stern’s actual words, were swiftly squashed in a “clarification to the media”, issued by the US State Department. Basically, if the US was to see sense and act on international climate commitments, then Obama better kiss a second term goodbye. Having seen this year’s crop of Republican offerings, I’m willing to forgive him for this otherwise inexplicable moral madness. So, it’s down to China now…
Alternative agriculture on display
Outside the negotiating halls, meetings, lectures and other activities continue. A few Canadian and US students have been ejected from the conference for protesting the lack of urgency and progress on actually doing something about carbon emissions. In a rather unconvincing bid to prove that climate change deniers are not part of the loony fringe, Lord Monckton and Senator Inhofe descended from the skies like a bug-eyed alien and confused old guy, in a parachute stunt that was largely ignored even in these news-straitened times.
Monckton
Pursuing other diversions, I sought out a group of waste-pickers, who are campaigning for greater recognition of the work they do and some protection for their livelihoods as their countries mechanise and develop. Waste-pickers and other ‘informal workers’ are people at the very poorest end of society. They are often homeless or slum-dwellers without basic water, sewerage and electricity provision – often these people have no identity papers or method of receiving government help. In short, waste-picking is the only way that millions of people have of acquiring food for survival.
Africa with this morning's cardboard collection
In the poor world, enterprising individuals can often find a task that needs doing and scrape by on that. As economies become richer, corporations are given contracts to perform these services, and they start to own the space and occupations of the most destitute. In addition, no respectable country wants to see bare-footed rag-wearing tramps bin-diving in its newly shining cities.
Waste-pickers meeting the recycling collection truck
As the countries of Asia, Latin America and, now, Africa start to provide municipal services like waste collection and treatment, conflict is breaking out as corporations seal off landfill sites and security patrols ban people from collecting waste from shops and residences. In response, waste-pickers have been banding together in cooperatives, with the help of NGOs, and have even formed a global alliance to defend their livelihoods.
The waste-pickers are paid according to weight of their collections
The case they make is bigger than their own livelihoods, though. In poor countries, as it should be everywhere, recycling is not a middle-class lifestyle choice, it’s a matter of common sense – there is almost nothing that cannot be re-used or have some further value eked out of it, whether that be feeding it to a cow or having its materials disassembled and sold on by waste-pickers. Governments confronted by waste management issues, however, are contracting companies to deal with it in the most cost-effective way: incineration or landfill.
Waste-pickers recycle more than 95% of rubbish, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion, and energy use.
The new cooperatives are making some progress. In some places, such as Pune in India, they now have safer working conditions, including trolleys for their collections, overalls and gloves, and they now get better pay and even schooling for their kids.
Durban has an estimated 15,000 waste-pickers, I learned, and I spoke to Africa, who has been working as a waste picker for 25 years and has never had it so good. Thanks to the help of a charity called Asiye Etafuleni, he now receives a better rate per kilo for the cardboard he collects, a trolley so that he doesn’t have to haul it on his head, and overalls. He’s also now a recognised part of the local economy with waste-collection relationships with businesses.
I made some short videos of my meetings with the waste pickers, but I’m an idiot at editing, filming and generally anything that might make the results look like a watchable video, so apologies for that, but I’ll post the clips anyway.
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Kyoto carry on
Durban: Expectations of a successful outcome here in Durban are, as even the most optimistic would agree, modest. It’s a technique that I find works well enough when applied to my own parties, let alone the rather grander Conference Of Parties, and means that the smallest flirtations between guests will generate wild excitement.
China, for example, is growing daily friendlier with Europe, Brazil and South Africa, our very accommodating host. India is not really in the party mood and standing by the snacks complaining of hunger but refusing to eat, while the USA is sulking outside with a filthy cigar, leaving his beleaguered date, Todd Stern, to explain his behaviour.
At the moment, it looks likely that the Kyoto Protocol will be extended (woohoo!) but with big caveats (boo!).
Campaigners for the Kyoto Protocol
Currently, states are split into two Annexes in the protocol, according to how rich they were 20 years ago when the protocol was ratified: the rich ‘developed’ countries are in Annex A, and the poor ‘developing’ countries are in Annex B. Annex A countries was required to cap its emissions over the past decades, but Annex B was not. This is partly because developed countries were the big emitters of greenhouse gases, and partly because it was appreciated that in order to develop their economies the poor countries would need to produce increasing amounts of carbon dioxide. In 2011, though, some countries that in the 1990s were considered ‘developing’, such as China, have now become such significant emitters that their per capita greenhouse gas emissions exceed that for some EU countries, let alone their total emissions. The Guardian has a cool interactive here.
John Prescott in town for a few days
The new proposal currently being negotiated, I understand, is for the introduction of an Annex C, in which would be subject to an emissions cap but at a different volume or rate as those in Annex A. Annex B emerging economies, such as China, Brazil, Mexico and others could become Annex C, distinguishing themselves from, say, Rwanda and Guatemala in Annex B.
It’s ideal on several levels: it wouldn’t require a whole new treaty to be ratified because it’s just an adjustment of the existing protocol; the USA can’t disrupt it because they aren’t a part of the Kyoto Protocol; and it allows the protocol to continue past 2012, rescuing this whole sorry international process.
A cheerful Kofi Annan
Before we crack open the champagne, there are a few niggles to be ironed out – the negotiations have another couple of days to go and delegates would feel cheated if they had to spend them relaxing on the beach rather than sweating it out in a beige conference room. The first problem is India, which refuses to consider any caps on its right to emit – I’ve written about this before, and it does seem crazy that starting as it is from a base level of infrastructure, it doesn’t choose clean energy (like Maldives, for example) over coal, thereby setting itself up for the same tricky grid/energy switch that Europe’s facing now. (It’s like going from no telecomms to installing payphones, rather than directly to cellphones.)
The other issue is the timing of all this and the level of the caps. Europe wants the process to begin in 2015; China is talking 2020. And over what time period will the reductions run? All problematic. But, as the surprisingly trim John Prescott told us yesterday – bearing in mind that the protocol is in many ways his project – it was only in the last 3 hours of negotiations in 1997 that agreement was reached on the Kyoto Protocol. So, it may be a late night for delegates on Friday.
Meanwhile, Japan and Canada are exiting the protocol altogether – a process that simply requires them to send a letter with one month’s notice. For shame.
If the Kyoto Protocol fails to be extended or replaced, the ramifications are serious. For starters, the EU, which leads on climate sensible policy, will never get its 30% greenhouse gas reductions policy agreed, and it’s likely that the current north south global split will prevail in Europe for climate mitigation, as it already does economically. And if rich blocs like the EU can’t act, then what hope for the rest of the world? Impressive moves from Mexico to Brazil will surely falter. Even in China, where domestic policy – led by a top-down respect for science, because the leaders often have a science background – has committed the country to producing 15% of its electricity from non-fossil fuels by 2020, it still opens 1.4 new coal power stations every week (down from 2 a week).
China, though, is not the place that most worries me: it has big plans to be more energy efficient than Japan, to be the leading wind-energy producer, it’s developing smart grids, expanding micro-hydro, and the progress it’s made in cheap PV manufacture have been to the benefit of other developing nations the world over. If China wants to go green, I have no doubt it will – and hopefully before its wildlife and people expire from the pollution there.
Other countries, though, need these international negotiations to succeed, because in this corporate market based society, where a few rich groups set the agenda in so many ways, only strong regulation and binding commitments will produce change.
Picturing climate change
If you’re in London, I recommend visiting the 2011 Environmental Photographer of the Year exhibition at the SW1 Gallery, from 6-17 December, not least because my ‘highly commended’ video is being shown. But also because there are some gorgeous photos of our amazing living planet on display, offering different perspectives on the social and environmental impacts of our interactions with the natural world.
And did I mention my video is in the exhibition? Here it is (but do visit the exhibition for far more talented offerings):
Early hope for climate negotiations
Durban: Sawubona! – Hello! – from KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa’s subtropical eastern seaboard. Safer than Johannesburg and more racially integrated than Cape Town, Durban feels like a comfortable city, flourishing in lush rolling hills on the edge of the Indian Ocean. Europeans settled in this Zulu kingdom from the 1820s, bringing Indians over at the end of the 19th century to work on the railways – the legacy is a tri-cultural influence in music, food and language. All the ‘Indians’ I’ve met here have Hindi as their mother tongue, yet neither they nor even their grandparents have set foot outside of South Africa.
City on the Indian Ocean
Black kites hang above the city, frangipani flowers are in fragrant bloom and surfers ride the waves off the city beaches. It’s hard not to fall for this clean and relaxed, African city. (Although there is another side to Durban.) The locals are smiling more than usual: with an extra 20-30 thousand visitors in town for the COP 17 climate negotiations, taxi drivers are working around the clock and every hotel and restaurant is fully booked. “I started work today at 2am,” one driver tells me, as he careens around a corner at 7pm, high on adrenaline or something more powerful. In the past two days, I’ve passed 5 junctions hosting serious car crashes, and the top discussion point on local radio is the question of why more delegates aren’t using the free city bikes provided by the conference organisers. This, incidentally, is in a city where car use is almost a necessity because public transport provision is so poor.
Hand-pulled rickshaws ply the modern streets
The conference centre behemoth is abuzz with happy-looking delegates, despite the negotiation pessimism. This is presumably because the pale and fraught looking people from the north are delighted to see the sun again, and the southern delegates are just glad to be away at an event where people are interested to hear their stories. All the usual agencies are here manning exhibition stands and issuing documents, from the influence-wielding scientific institutions and NGOs to the fringe campaign groups, some of which border on the loony. Among the delegates, the same rule holds. These annual, international climate conferences, which have been going for nearly two decades, have become an enjoyable lifestyle choice for some people. For others, it’s a frustrating process that sees the annual presentation of scientific findings increasingly caked in political excuse and delay.
Rachel Kyte of the World Bank is a reliably good speaker, unlike so many other delegates
There are some cool ideas on show, including a Korean university pilot project to make paper and biofuels from red seaweed plantations, which “avoids deforestation, provides marine ecosystem services and sequesters carbon”. Another project aims to avoid deforestation by poor people, who use timber to make charcoal fuel to sell for food, by replacing the wood with fast-growing bamboo – the charcoal produced looks like hollow rods.
Women face the biggest impacts from climate change and this year's conference has several events with the gender theme
In terms of the actual negotiations, there have been a few positive developments already, and it’s still early days because most of the parties are only arriving in Durban today. The push to pay (or ‘compensate’) poor people for conserving rainforests, rather than chopping the trees for charcoal, timber, agriculture, grazing and other lucrative pursuits, received a boost. Delegates have agreed a mechanism for measuring avoided deforestation in terms of the carbon stored in the living trees, and how this will be regulated and reported in a transparent way. This is actually a pretty important step. At the moment, individuals, corporations and industry that want to pay – or are compelled to through carbon cap policy – for their greenhouse gas emissions (‘offsetting’ them) use this ‘REDD’ system to fund avoided deforestation in the tropics, equivalent to the amount of carbon emitted.
Could vegetarianism save the planet?
The system is full of flaws and obstacles, but since it’s the only mechanism currently available to get polluters to pay for carbon storage, it is certainly worth pursuing. Later this week, delegates will try to thrash out the funding issues for the REDD system so that international agreement can be reached in a legally binding manner. They will almost certainly fail. But, in the mean time, the achievement made around the technicalities of how to measure and regulate the system, can be used in smaller-scale schemes between individual countries (such as Norway and Brazil) or subnationally between rich and poor states, such as California and Amazonas.
The development that has the biggest potential to overturn the entire stultifying UNFCCC process and render it a successful and progressive business, is the suggestion that China may be willing to agree to legally binding emissions targets. This would be such an exciting prospect, that I hardly dare report it. But in a couple of press conferences and interviews here, Chinese delegates (including Xie Zhenhua, who heads the Chinese delegation) have hinted that they would agree to caps from 2020 or even 2015. The wording is careful and, of course, key, so it’s not sure exactly what China means. If it is agreeing simply to the cuts laid out in previous agreement – ie, for ‘developed’ countries (as defined in the 1990s) to cut their emissions, while China continues its dirty development trajectory – then it is saying nothing new. But it’s possible that China is now willing to engage with this important process.
If so, then that would leave India – which would surely capitulate – and the USA as party poopers. The US has had China’s position to justify its own crazy selfishness (between the two countries, they emit 40% of global carbon emissions). Without a Chinese excuse, it would be isolated, taking a stand with the likes of Russia and Saudi Arabia. And it is likely that the rest of the world would simply continue the process of negotiations, making progress without US hindrance.
Right, I’m off for a tasty Bunny Chow.
Durban calling
London: I thought I’d mark my 3-year bloggiversary with an update post – a look back, a look forward, a look inward and outward (who knows, maybe I’ll find my lost Oyster card). This time last year, we were with giant tortoises in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. The year before, we were with mountain gorillas in the volcanic highlands of Rwanda. And this time 3 years ago, we were setting off on our extraordinary journey, heading for the Himalayas in Nepal - all highlights in an incredible 28 months. But for more than half a year, I’ve been fixed in London, where the everyday issues of the developing world are faraway and seldom mentioned.
Female gorilla in Rwanda
Now, I’m preparing to head for Durban in South Africa, where the world’s leaders gather next week to negotiate how we will reduce the anthropogenic climate change threats, including of melting glaciers in Nepal, drought in Rwanda and acidifying oceans around the Galapagos. Read more…
Why wait for 2015?
London: As we hurtle towards a 4-5 degrees hotter world, with all its inherent dangers, I have taken some small consolation in the fact that action on climate change is one of the few things that the British government has cross-party agreement on. In fact, the UK has been one of the few rich-world countries to consistently call for carbon cuts and, to some extent, led the world in demand for action – although its actions have not exactly kept pace with its words. So last week, when Chancellor George Osborne announced a regressive approach – UK businesses would not be cutting their carbon emissions any faster than their counterparts in Europe – my heart sank. Instead of providing the vital assurances that clean-tech investors are desperately seeking, instead of removing some of the perceived (and, perhaps, real) risk that is crippling the low-carbon market and delaying the inevitable move to green energy, the UK government has bowed to short-termist interests.
UNFCCC head Christiana Figueres has eyes of two different colours
What a way for my elected representatives (and that of 60 million other British Earthlings) to negotiate our future at Durban this December. The international climate talks in two months’ time are supposed to achieve Read more…
The future is a foreign planet
London: Later today, I’ll be hosting a live web chat with two fun and inspired scientists, ecologist Erle Ellis and geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, asking: Are we entering a new geological age? (based on my feature article in this week’s Science magazine). The Science Live chat starts at 3pm for Erle and those of you on east coast US time, 12pm in west coast US, and 8pm for me, Jan and everyone in the UK – do join us and ask some probing questions. (After the chat, you’ll be able to read the whole transcript of the discussion.) And I’m also interviewed about the Anthropocene in this week’s Science podcast (about 20 mins in).
Children of the Holocene or the Anthropocene?
The idea that we’re entering a new geological age – the Anthropocene, or ‘Age of Man’ – is something I’ve discussed before. It’s a fascinating time in our species’ history. As far as we know, Earth is the only living planet, and we are the only species – in the Universe – to be making system-wide changes to a planet; changes that are so profound, that they can be considered on a par with those made by Earth-shattering asteroids or planet-cloaking volcanoes.
Jan Zalasiewicz is a geologist exploring how we are making fossils
We’re taking our spinning lump of rock, and everything on it, on a journey into the unknown – into a hotter, less climatically stable future, with a vast and growing human population, but with rapidly diminishing biodiversity. And, we are now aware of the effects we are having. It’s the first time in the history of the Universe that an organised DNA-toting sack of chemicals has knowingly changed a planet.
Erle Ellis is an ecologist looking at the way we are changing Earth's covering
So join us, as we discuss how we’re changing Earth, whether we’ve entered a new geological age and how we might modulate our impacts to ensure the survival of as many other DNA bags as possible on this, the only living planet. In short: how can we become good ancestors?
