Economist: Let my people stay - Why the World Cup’s Somali singalong rapper is proud of his kinsmen

Economist:

THE latest African voice to resonate across the world belongs to a 31-year-old Somali singer known simply as K’naan. His hip-hop number, “Waivin’ Flag,” is poised to bring him global stardom, because it has been chosen by Coca-Cola, a sponsor of the coming football World Cup in South Africa, as the tournament’s anthem. It will be released in 150 countries and some predict it will even outsell Luciano Pavarotti’s rendition of “Nessun Dorma”, the cup’s theme tune when it was held in Italy in 1990.

Born Keynaan Warsame in Somalia’s seaside capital, Mogadishu, he is now a citizen of Canada. But he cherishes his Somali roots. Several tracks on his new album, “Troubadour”, have Somali lyrics. “Waivin’ Flag” refers to Somalia’s banner, a five-pointed white star on a bright blue background.

K’naan’s appeal is wide. He has been singing alongside the football trophy on its journey through 15 African countries. At last year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, known as SXSW, he entranced a huge crowd from the cowboy state. “I figured I’d like it,” says an American radio presenter. “I just didn’t expect to see people crying.” His latest album was recorded at the house of the late Bob Marley, the reggae king, in Jamaica.

The Somali rapper says he suffers “something like survivor guilt”, thinking of the people he grew up with. Several of his boyhood friends were shot dead in front of him. He handled a machinegun and exploded a hand-grenade accidentally but says he never killed anyone. His family was intellectual and well-connected. His Aunt Magool was a famous singer. But as Somalia collapsed, he fled abroad aged only 13.

More recently he has stirred controversy by partially excusing the activities of Somalia’s pirates. He blames Western companies for illegally hoovering up tuna fish off Somalia’s coast and says that European criminal gangs have dumped toxic waste along it. Piracy, he says, is an understandable response. He told an American radio station that the pirates had at least had the effect of “cleaning up the environment”: on that score, he has a point.

In any event, K’naan says he wants to help unite Somalis. Fighting between the clans has been a cause of the country’s breakdown. For that reason he refuses to say which clan he hails from.

Were he to return home, that might not help him. The Shabab fighters who control swathes of the country have banned music. Some Shabab commanders have publicly whipped musicians. “They don’t like me very much,” says K’naan. A suicide-bomber might even target him.

For all that, he and his music are defiantly hopeful. Despite their warrior reputation, Somalis love poetry and music. K’naan thinks the Shabab’s austere version of Islam will fail. The country’s vibrant culture, he insists, will win the day.

Economist: Somalia's pirates - A long war of the waters

We at the IIIrd World have been covering the issue of Somali piracy since it first became a major international issue last year. Here are some of the latest developments on the international efforts to control and understand them.

Economist:

TWO years ago Somalia’s weak transitional government agreed to let foreign navies chase pirates into its territorial waters. Since then, the sea off Somalia’s coast has seen an increasing number of warships mainly from rich countries trying—with partial success—to fend off pirates from the poorest. Ships steaming along maritime corridors in convoys are safer than they were. So the pirates are being forced to venture ever farther out into the Indian Ocean to seize their booty. This means that the remoter reaches are still very dangerous.

Many of the world’s most powerful navies are involved. The French and American ones have killed Somali pirates while freeing their own citizens. For the past year the European Union has deployed its first-ever joint naval force, named Operation Atalanta, to protect ships passing in and out of the Red Sea on their way from or to the Suez canal. Russia has an active anti-piracy mission, helping, among other things, to revive its rusting navy. China has asked if it could set up a naval base in Kenya or elsewhere in the region to support its anti-piracy patrols. The Japanese and South Koreans have sent warships to protect ships carrying their cars. India, Malaysia, Indonesia and South Africa have also joined the anti-piracy fray.

Yet the pirates are still hijacking ships and receiving ransoms with apparent impunity. In the past fortnight they have captured four more big ships. Two of them, the Singaporean-flagged Pramoni and the British-flagged St James Park, both tankers carrying chemicals, were nabbed under the nose of the foreign navies patrolling the Gulf of Aden.

The pirates’ methods remain rudimentary. They use hijacked tuna-fishing boats or local dhows as the mother ship, then launch attacks from skiffs, usually at dawn or dusk. They hold the crews hostage with machine-guns and semi-automatic pistols, then force the captain to anchor off the northern part of Somalia’s coast for several weeks until a ransom is paid.

The patrolling navies say they have begun to do better. Yet the number of recorded hijackings rose from 32 in 2008 to 42 in 2009. The average ransom paid by shippers also rose, from $1m to $2m. If unpublicised pay-offs are included, some by Spain’s government, the pirates probably earned around $100m last year. That must be shared with their financial backers, especially in Lebanon, Somalia and the United Arab Emirates. Well-organised criminal gangs in Yemen also help.

To avoid the patrols, the pirates’ geographical range has increased sharply (see map). Shippers must pay extra insurance premiums, even if they ply a course far from Somalia’s waters. A Greek-owned freighter, Navios Apollon, was captured by Somalis on December 28th, fully 370km (200 nautical miles) east of the Seychelles, which is more than 1,300km from Somalia.

Plainly there is no purely naval way to stop the pirates. Somalia’s coast is more than 3,000km long. They seem unafraid of the warships. If accosted, the pirates usually dump their guns and grapple-hooks in the sea. The patrolling navies are reluctant to arrest them because of the legal complexities. On the rare occasions when pirates are taken aboard, they are usually given medicine, water and enough fuel to go back to Somalia. Within days they will set off again to seek their prey.

The EU has signed a deal with Kenya to imprison captured pirates. But there are concerns that Kenya is asking for too many favours in return for embarking on what is bound to be a messy legal process. If the EU and other concerned countries could get the governments of Tanzania, the Seychelles and other countries in the region to agree to prosecute pirates in their own courts, the legal deterrent against them would be stronger.

The pirates’ main advantage is the lawlessness of Somalia which has long been enmeshed in a civil war. Western governments fear that if they were to send their security forces to attack towns such as Haradheere, a pirate haven, the Islamist fighters of the Shabab militia, which controls much of south and central Somalia and is linked to al-Qaeda, might be strengthened.

Besides, the pirates could yet prove to be odd allies in stopping the Islamists from spreading their jihadist net. The Shabab considers piracy for profit unIslamic. The militants violently disapprove of the pirates’ boozing and whoring. The pirates and the Shabab could yet fight each other, which might benefit everyone else. So far, however, the pirates’ wealth protects them at home. Somalia is one of the world’s poorest countries, yet a low-ranking pirate can probably earn at least $20,000 a year.

The EU says its naval force’s main mission is to protect freighters carrying the food aid on which Somalis have depended for the past five years, and has thus staved off a full-blown famine. Its next priority is to “deter and disrupt” piracy in general. The warships may also deter illegal fishing in Somali waters and the dumping of toxic waste. But they are a small force in a big sea. At last count, there were seven patrolling vessels from six EU countries.

In any event, some shipping people privately say that the effects of piracy have been exaggerated. It may still be cheaper and more convenient to pay higher insurance fees and risk being attacked by pirates than to incur the extra cost of diverting vessels around the Cape of Good Hope.

The International Maritime Bureau in London says that last year 22,000 ships passed safely through waters in range of Somali pirates, whereas actual attacks were in the low hundreds. The bureau also reckons that, as ships take more precautions, the pirates’ success rate will drop.

Most ships now steam along narrow corridors at night and at full speed. In the Gulf of Aden they are usually in a convoy. Many raise the height of the freeboard (between the waterline and the deck) to make it harder for pirates to haul themselves up the side. Others are poised to use sirens and fire hoses. Some American-flagged vessels now have security guards, though it is generally agreed that they should remain unarmed, otherwise the violence and deaths would probably increase.

Plainly, the problem is far from solved. As ransoms go up and get paid, pirates will think it worth taking the risk. Above all, they are sure to persist as long as most of Somalia, including its ports along the coast, remains an ungovernable hell.

Economist: Cool heads or heated conflicts?

Economist:

A lesson from history on how to prevent climate-induced wars

THE starkest views of climate change paint war as a looming threat. The idea that violence will erupt as drought and rising sea levels displace people from their homes is, in part, why the Nobel prize for peace was awarded in 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. Yet a newly published study analysing the historical connection between war and climate throws into question the assumption that rising temperatures and violence go hand in hand.

Aware that evidence for the link was lacking, Richard Tol of the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, and Sebastian Wagner of GKSS, a research institute near Hamburg, Germany, set out to collect data on climate and conflict in Europe over the past thousand years. Their results have just been published in Climatic Change.

The information they worked with came from a variety of sources. Thermometers and rain gauges have been used in Europe since 1500, and many of the records are now easily available on the internet. For earlier years, the two researchers relied on indirect data such as ice cores, tree rings and the growth patterns of corals that they culled from other people’s papers.

Measuring fighting proved more challenging, since the definition of “conflict” varies throughout history. Dr Tol and Dr Wagner decided to confine their efforts to those events which lasted for a year or more. They used www.warscholar.com to count the number of such contretemps that had been taking place during each year from 1000 to 2000.

The chart shows the correlation between the number of conflicts and the average temperature during most of the second half of the millennium, the period for which the data are best. Until the mid-18th century, this correlation is continuously and significantly negative (the line remains close to the 95% confidence level, suggesting there is only one chance in 20 that it is an accidental, random effect). In other words, lower temperatures mean more wars. Then, suddenly, the negative correlation vanishes. The line goes into positive territory, but not enough to be statistically meaningful. The inverted correlation between temperature and conflict has therefore disappeared.

Dr Tol and Dr Wagner suggest that in the more remote past the effects of cold weather on harvests led to supply shortages, and that these increased the likelihood of people fighting over food and the land needed to produce it. They argue that the reason the relationship between warfare and cold vanishes in the mid-18th century is that this is the moment when the industrial revolution began. Both agriculture and transport improved rapidly at this time. Systematic plant breeding, the introduction of new crops and new forms of crop rotation, and better irrigation increased the food supply. Improvements in roads and the large-scale construction of canals allowed food to be transported from areas of plenty to areas of scarcity.

These developments meant farmers could often produce reasonable yields during colder weather—and even when they could not, long-distance trade provided a buffer against crop failure. Meanwhile, the growth of cities and non-agricultural occupations meant there was money to buy such traded crops.

Just because cold, rather than heat, caused problems in Europe during the millennium that Dr Tol and Dr Wagner examined does not mean rising temperatures pose no threat. The lesson, rather, is that the way to minimise the likelihood of climate-induced conflict in the future is to continue the process of crop improvement (for example, by taking advantage of the potential of genetic engineering) so that heat- and drought-tolerant varieties are available; to make farmers aware of these new crops and encourage their use; and to promote free trade and non-agricultural economic development. That way people will have no cause to fight, and tyrants no excuse to stir them up.

Economist: Seasonally adjusted - Farmland and Climate Change

Economist:

Global warming will make it harder to feed the world in 2050

SINCE time immemorial, farmers have planted their crops according to the seasons. “That is what my forefathers have been doing,” says Mohammad Ilisasuddin in Shibganj, in northern Bangladesh, but now “the weather does not seem right for what we have done traditionally.” Seasonal planting is “useless”, agrees Florence Madamu, a smallholder in Bulirehe, in western Uganda. “The sun is prolonged until the end of September and whenever it rains, it rains so heavily it destroys all our crops.” Oxfam, a British charity, has compiled a litany of laments by poor farmers. John Magrath, a researcher, says they all say similar things: “moderate, temperate seasons are shrinking…rainy seasons are shorter and more violent…making it more difficult to grow crops [and] difficult for them to know when best to plant.”

As the earth warms up, many have feared that farmers will pay a high price. But working out who will pay, how, and where is tricky. Higher temperatures might turn arid shrub lands into deserts while improving the growing season in colder steppes. Global warming could produce more evaporation from plants, and more rain, which would benefit some places, while hurting others. In theory extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should help plants grow faster, though whether this actually happens may also depend on the amount of nitrogen in the soil.

In the most comprehensive effort* so far to think these questions through, the International Food Policy Research Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, has reached some sobering conclusions. In parts of the developing world some crop yields in 2050 could be only half of their 2000 levels. Irrigation may not help: climate change will hit irrigated systems harder than rain-fed ones. And the hope that gainers from climate change will outweigh losers looks vain: the damage from higher temperatures and erratic rainfall will be too big.

In its forecast IFPRI started with the “A2 scenario” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is the second-gloomiest of six IPCC scenarios (it assumes the world will be releasing roughly twice as much CO2 in 2050 as it does now) and says the oceans’ surface temperature will rise by around 1.6°C by 2050.

However, this says nothing about the temperature and rainfall patterns that would result on farmland. To forecast those, IFPRI fed the IPCC assumptions into two climate-change models, one run by America’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the other by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

These gave different descriptions of the world in 2050. NCAR thinks the climate would be hotter and wetter, with rainfall about 10% heavier than now. The CSIRO forecasts that there would be 2% more rain. There were big regional disparities, too: CSIRO forecast the sharpest increases in temperature in southern Africa; NCAR sees Russia and Canada heating up more. To take account of the differences IFPRI fed both forecasts into its own computer, which describes how every agricultural region and, in some places, practically every farm, responds to changes in temperature and rainfall.

The results varied less than the assumptions. In developing countries, IFPRI found, irrigated wheat in 2050 would yield 34% less than in 2000, using NCAR data; and 28% less going by CSIRO figures. For irrigated rice, the declines would be 19% and 14% (see chart). These falls are large but not unlikely: scientists in South Africa recently said the region could see a 50% fall in cereals productivity by 2080.

Bad though they are, the average declines hide even more disturbing variations. Latin America comes out of the exercise relatively well: the yields of its main crops are expected to fall by only a few percent. China’s farming may also be more resilient than it sometimes appears. But South Asia, the world’s most heavily populated region, looks vulnerable: IFPRI forecasts a possible 50% fall in its wheat yield in 2050 (one-sixth of all the world’s wheat grows on the north Indian plain). In the Middle East the institute predicts yield declines of 47% for maize and 30% for rice.

As patterns of production shift, argues Jerry Nelson, the report’s lead author, it becomes all the more important to liberalise farm trade, so that farming keeps pace with changing comparative advantage. But overall, he argues, the yield declines are so great that only another round of technological change—a new Green Revolution—would be enough to offset them. In principle, such a thing looks possible: the technology to double or triple many crop yields exists in laboratories. The problem is to get it into the fields. To that end, last week’s G20 meeting in Pittsburgh promised to put more taxpayer money into farm research and other help for agriculture.

The ups and downs of diplomacy used to be compared to the cycle of the seasons. But as poor smallholders are finding out, the seasons are not what they were.

Economist: Last gasp for the forest

Economist:

A new climate treaty could provide a highly effective way to reduce carbon emissions by paying people to not cut down forests

IN THE south-eastern corner of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, in the municipality of Novo Aripuanã, there is thick forest cover—for now. But as new, paved highways are driven into the trees, illegal loggers inevitably follow. At the current rate of deforestation, around one-third of the forest in Amazonas will have been lost by 2050, releasing a colossal 3.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
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Novo Aripuanã is the site of a novel response to this threat: the Juma Sustainable Development Reserve, an area of 600,000 hectares (1.2m acres) bordered by two highways. This is a nature reserve with an unusual twist: local people will be paid to prevent the trees from being cut down. Each family in the area has been issued with a debit card. Regular inspections will ensure that the trees are still standing: as long as they are, families will have 50 reais ($28) a month credited to their accounts.

These funds come from the rich world, where governments and companies that cannot reduce their own emissions cheaply are prepared to pay others to reduce emissions on their behalf (as “carbon offsets”). Not cutting down trees in endangered areas prevents emissions that would otherwise have occurred, which gives untouched forest huge financial value—and provides people who live in the forest with an incentive to preserve it.
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Still Pictures


This idea is known as “avoided deforestation” or “reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation” (REDD). At the moment REDD is not so much a plan as a collection of proposals and some working schemes, like Juma. The fate of the forests in Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines (pictured above) and elsewhere around the world could hang on the success of this approach. But there will need to be substantial international commitments to reduce global emissions to create demand for the carbon offsets that REDD schemes can provide. This means a lot hangs on a deal being struck in December in Copenhagen, where countries will meet to negotiate a new climate treaty.

Burning problems

Amid concern that progress towards a new treaty is slipping, Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, hosted a summit in New York this week to encourage nations to agree to carbon-reducing policies. REDD was high on the agenda, and governments and the private sector were urged to start investing in such schemes. There has also been talk of wrapping up carbon offsets into “forest bonds” to interest pension funds.

Preventing deforestation is potentially one of the simplest ways to reduce global emissions. At the moment, carbon emissions from deforestation account for some 18% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, more than all the world’s trains, cars, lorries, aeroplanes and ships combined. Reducing deforestation and land-degradation will be vital if temperature increases are to be kept to within safe levels (generally assumed to mean no more than about a 2°C increase). Some argue it would be a quicker and cheaper way of reducing emissions than many alternatives, such as weaning the world’s vehicle fleet off fossil fuels, forcing people to cut back on energy use or switching to low-carbon forms of power generation, such as wind farms and nuclear power. All those things will be necessary too, but they will take a long time, will require new technologies and cause controversies of their own.

Paying people to not chop down trees looks easy by comparison. It does not depend on any elaborate or costly new technology and is likely to be able to garner the required political support. Achim Steiner, the head of the UN’s environment programme, thinks avoided deforestation should be an easy thing to sell. As well as reducing carbon emissions, keeping forests standing also protects soil from erosion, improves the quality of water, helps regulate rainfall and ensures biodiversity. “How on earth can we not afford to make this work?” he asks.
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Still Pictures

Learning in the forest

But if it is to work, REDD must address the failings of the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which forms part of the Kyoto protocol, the 1997 treaty that aims to curb greenhouse gases. Since 2006, the CDM has allowed developing countries to sell carbon offsets, known as credits, for adopting green technology: switching an entire village to energy-saving light bulbs, for example, or planting lots of trees. The CDM has been criticised, however, for allowing countries to sell credits even for dubious things like building dams. There are also concerns about enforcement. And the Kyoto rules do not allow countries to sell offsets from avoided-deforestation schemes. Planting new trees qualified, but refraining from cutting down existing ones did not.

REDD raises further concerns of its own. One of the main criticisms of it is that some rich countries might, in effect, outsource the tricky business of reducing carbon emissions to the developing world, by buying carbon offsets and continuing with business as usual at home. Some also wonder if the promised amount of carbon reduction could be so large. Gilberto Câmara, head of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (which monitors deforestation from space), thinks that REDD’s capacity to deliver global emissions cuts is being oversold. Based on his analysis of Brazil, which accounts for 40% of the world’s deforestation, he says there is no way the world can cut 18% or so of emissions through avoided deforestation. This figure is based on outdated estimates of the rate of deforestation, which has fallen dramatically in Brazil in recent years, he says.

This highlights another problem with REDD: it is hard to say how much deforestation there would have been anyway. Benchmarking REDD schemes against existing data, which can be out of date with higher rates of attrition, would give an exaggerated impression of their effectiveness, overstating the volume of emissions that had been prevented and causing rich countries to pay too much.

Nicholas Stern, a British economist and author of a report for the British government which put avoided deforestation on the climate agenda in 2007, says the exact amount by which emissions can be reduced is not terribly important. “It actually doesn’t matter whether it is 15% or 20%—the point is that it is big,” he says. What if Dr Câmara is right and avoided deforestation can reduce emissions only by, say, 10%? “I suspect it is not that low, but 10% is still a big slice,” says Lord Stern. “The point is to get the mechanisms going and the funding at a serious level.”

A further difficulty is that countries that have already taken effective action to prevent deforestation, such as Costa Rica, will be unable to benefit from a REDD scheme; it would, paradoxically, end up rewarding the worst offenders, since they would have the greatest scope to mend their ways, and get paid to do so. Various proposals have been put forward to pay retrospective rewards to such well-behaved countries.

Provided these problems can be overcome, what would REDD cost? Again, hard and fast figures are difficult to come by. The cost of setting up and running REDD schemes is unclear, and successful efforts to reduce deforestation would probably drive up timber prices, which might then make it necessary to pay more to prevent deforestation. Estimates for the cost of halving the rate of deforestation (and therefore reducing global emissions by as much as 9%) range from $7 billion to $28 billion a year. These costs do not include the initial set-up process, during which appropriate enforcement mechanisms would need to be put in place in leafy-but-dodgy countries.

If avoided deforestation is to work on a global scale, it will need to involve Indonesia and Congo, countries where corruption and mass deforestation go hand in hand. So REDD projects will require reporting, auditing and monitoring mechanisms. The advent of low-cost satellite imagery will help, but all this will still be expensive.

Seeing the wood

Assuming world leaders cut emissions by 20-40% relative to 1990 levels, however, the scale of the investments required would be about right, according to the International Institute for Environment and Development. This British think-tank says the global carbon market will be worth $118 billion a year, so if 10% of the reduction in emissions was achieved by purchasing REDD offsets, forest-carbon credits will be worth $11.8 billion a year.

The world has rallied around the idea of REDD with remarkable speed. The UN, the World Bank and governments in several countries, including Australia, Britain and particularly Norway, have already stumped up around $800m over the past two years to get REDD projects going. Benoit Bosquet, head of the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, says early funding is important to allow organisers to get started in anticipation of a new global climate agreement.

Even if the world fails to reach a deal in Copenhagen, REDD schemes like the one in Juma will not grind to a halt. Many countries, notably America, are expected to rely heavily on the purchase of forest-carbon credits as part of their efforts to reduce emissions.

One way to do this is for governments and companies in particular countries to fund REDD projects in other countries directly. The drawback of this approach is that instead of bringing into being a truly international market for carbon credits, it looks rather more like traditional bilateral aid. Such projects would also be vulnerable to political manipulation. For example, if America started bilaterally financing REDD projects it is easy to imagine that the State Department would insist on having a say over which countries should receive funds and which should not. The result could be a kind of arboreal Washington consensus, with an approved set of tree-related economic-policy prescriptions

Another disadvantage is that different schemes will end up being subject to different rules, regulations and standards, so it will be difficult to compare them. If private-sector investors are to provide capital for REDD schemes, they would much prefer an international trading scheme where credits are fungible across the entire market. Abyd Karmali, head of carbon emissions at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, says such a scheme would set a harmonised standard for forest-carbon credits and might include rules for profit-sharing with indigenous communities or local landowners, monitoring and verifying credits and protecting biodiversity. Without such standards, he says, the result could be “sustainability arbitrage”, where project developers and companies flock towards less sustainable schemes that offer cheaper credits.

There are also concerns about market-based schemes. Even though markets could provide much-needed finance for REDD schemes, many people are uncomfortable that they could also yield big profits for investors and landowners. In China, a market-based scheme to encourage companies to phase out a powerful greenhouse gas, HFC-23, produced such enormous windfall profits for some companies that the government felt it necessary to impose a 65% tax, with the proceeds invested in green development projects.

It seems likely, however, that REDD will start off as a series of funded projects, with a market in forest-carbon credits emerging in a few years’ time, depending on what happens at the Copenhagen meeting. Many people expect that ultimately both approaches will co-exist.

However they end up working, REDD schemes will still face the question of how to distribute the money they produce. Governments could launch national initiatives to prevent deforestation, selling credits and directing the proceeds to the activities it believes are effective. One advantage of this country-level approach is that any “leakage” of deforestation (where a forest protected in one area shifts deforestation to another) would be easier to control. But governments will need to distribute some of the money on the ground—especially if the locals feel they have every right to cut down their trees.

In Juma, in addition to the payments made directly to local people, proceeds from the scheme also support investment in schools, hospitals, transport, communications and helping people find new, sustainable sources of income. All of this makes REDD look very much like traditional development aid. But Mr Karmali says he would not want to get involved with any REDD project that did not involve local communities and environmental groups. “We can’t make the mistake of thinking we have all the answers,” he says.

Watching carefully

Preventing deforestation does not simply involve close monitoring of forests themselves. Mr Bosquet of the World Bank thinks the forces driving deforestation “are mostly outside the forest sector and are the big challenge for REDD.” Dr Câmara points out that in Brazil 90% of deforestation is illegal encroachment driven by the desire to make money from timber and agricultural products grown on cleared land, such as soyabeans. Rather than paying money to criminals, he says, international traders should refuse to buy timber, soyabeans and beef from deforested land. A number of schemes try to certify that products such as timber or palm oil have been produced without causing deforestation. But so far the results have been disappointing: European consumers are reluctant to pay premium prices for goods made from certified timber, for example.

Palm oil, much of which is produced on land that was once virgin rainforest in Indonesia, is a particular problem. According to a report by McKinsey, a consultancy, if the present rate of deforestation continues, Indonesia will lose 1.1m hectares of forest every year until 2030. A plan to certify palm oil seems unlikely to help. The idea that air travel has environmental consequences is now widely understood, but the environmental consequences of palm-oil-based toiletries are not. Even a big multinational such as Unilever says it can do little to insist that its suppliers do not use palm oil from deforested land, since the power in the market rests with the sellers.

Deforestation is an integrated and multidisciplinary problem, says Mr Bosquet. That means preventing it may involve adopting different strategies in different countries. In some parts of the world, such as Indonesia, this might mean launching efforts to increase agricultural productivity and the use of marginal land in order to reduce the pressure for forest conversion. In other parts of the world it might involve certification or helping people find alternative ways to earn a living.
AFP
AFP

Last one standing

Land tenure is another big flashpoint for REDD. There are fears that putting a value on forests will lead to land-grabs in areas where property rights are poorly defined and not well protected. In Africa, for example, governments claim ownership of 98% of the forest, but making REDD work will involve recognising the rights of those who live in the forest too. If that does not happen, there is every reason to fear large-scale corruption and human-rights abuses, because it will be far cheaper and quicker to clear people from the forests than to work out a sustainable way for them to stay.

Even though governments have yet to introduce legislation to govern the trade in forest-carbon credits, some private-sector investors have not been content to wait. This impatience brings risks. In Papua New Guinea, landowners have been hoodwinked into paying to get involved in non-existent deals that promised huge returns from “sky money”. The local World Wildlife Fund office has even been asked by landowners how the carbon from burning trees will be captured and transported to the capital. International negotiators decry the behaviour of “carbon cowboys”, but they have to recognise that private capital can move a lot faster than plodding national and international legislation.

Overshadowing all these discussions is the spectre of the CDM, which has been bedevilled by its lack of transparency and the difficulty of proving that its carbon offsets are genuine. REDD is a big idea that will work only if all these smaller problems are sorted out. It probably will help to prevent deforestation and to reduce carbon emissions, though perhaps by less than some people hope. But it has the potential to tackle such a big chunk of global emissions, and deliver so many other environmental benefits, that it is worth trying.

Making it work

There are risks for forest dwellers, who must rely on outsiders both to ensure that their rights are protected and to provide an alternative path for economic development. But although REDD poses risks, the alternative—in which deforestation continues as usual—presents even greater long-term environmental and economic dangers, because the world’s poor will bear the brunt of climate change.

Doing nothing, in short, would be more dangerous than giving REDD a try. Kevin Conrad, Papua New Guinea’s climate ambassador, says financial systems must begin to take account of environmental values “if our economies are to survive”. Given that the basic principle of REDD is to establish a financial link between those who will benefit from preserving forests and those who must ensure the forests’ survival, it is an economically sound idea. The question is whether the world has the determination to create a system that will work. Some, like the UN’s Mr Steiner, say that it isn’t rocket science. Others, though, wish it were that simple.

Economist: Climate change talks - Wanted: fresh air

Economist:

WHEN argument fails, try metaphor. Shyam Saran, who heads India’s international negotiating team on climate change, says that greenhouse gases are taking up “carbon space” in the atmosphere. Past emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases from rich countries have taken up much of that space. Now the poor countries are standing up for their right to a little bit of that space too.

Put in those terms, it seems a matter of plain justice. Mr Saran is merely defending India’s right to industrialise. But as a negotiating position, it is one of the reasons why the talks on climate change at the G8 meeting in Italy this week have proved so fractious. Mr Saran says that the only limit India will accept on greenhouse-gas emissions is the same per-person amount enjoyed by citizens of developed countries. From the planet’s point of view that would mean a huge, and possibly catastrophic, increase in overall emissions.

India’s tough approach is supported by other developing countries. China, now the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitter, is particularly annoyed about a provision in America’s new cap-and-trade legislation on carbon emissions that would let America impose tariffs on goods from countries that do nothing to control emissions. The bill’s drafters reckon that China and similarly energy-thirsty countries are in effect subsidising their exports by allowing their firms to dodge costly environmental standards. But the Chinese say the measure could lead to a trade war.

Brazil takes a similar position. The cutting down of trees in the Amazon alone releases 700m tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air annually, fully half of the country’s total emissions. Brazil says it wants to curb deforestation, but it is reluctant to let outsiders’ rules tie its hands on the management of its sovereign territory.

The rich countries think they have already done a lot to meet the poor world halfway. At the G8 meeting in L’Aquila they proposed a “vision” in which the industrialised countries would by mid-century cut their emissions by 80% (against which base year is unclear), as part of a global effort to reduce emissions by half. The developing countries could burn more carbon as they got richer, but far less than the rich countries did in the 20th century. If the sums are correct, this would cap the rise in average global temperatures at 2°C (though that may still cause a lot of harm). If the poor countries do nothing, the rich countries argue, their own expensive efforts will be in vain. But with no interim targets, by mid-week the “vision” was fading from the draft deal at the summit.

This failure threatens to unravel a flimsy diplomatic consensus that dates back to the 1997 Kyoto protocol. Signed by most rich countries, this spoke of “common but differentiated” responsibilities for cutting emissions. This was diplomatic language that required nothing binding of developing countries and was the main reason why America never signed up for Kyoto. Barack Obama’s green-minded administration has changed that. So the spotlight is now on the poor countries. Their past position, of denouncing the previous American administration for inaction and hypocrisy, was enjoyable while it lasted but looks flimsy now. Instead they are being pressed to explain what if anything they are willing to do to save the planet.

The rich-world coalition is getting rickety too. America’s new seriousness turns unwelcome attention on countries such as Canada, Japan and Australia. They are seen as having fallen behind by the Europeans, the leaders (relatively speaking) in clean green growth

A dose of Mr Obama’s eloquence may bring a breakthrough by the end of the week. But the departure of the Chinese leader, Hu Jintao, to deal with unrest at home, seemed set to jinx the meeting’s chances. If the L’Aquila summit fails, the deadlock will threaten the climate summit to be held in Copenhagen in December. Governments’ efforts to deal with what many voters see as the world’s biggest problem will look pretty feeble.

Fresh thinking, instead of stale arguments, has rarely been so badly needed. A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week offered a contribution, based on the idea that it is rich people, rather than rich countries, who need to change the most. The authors suggest setting a cap on total emissions, and then converting that cap into a global per-person limit. This would be low enough that if everyone stuck to it, the worldwide target would be met.

Each country would then have the task of reducing its national consumption according to its number of “high emitters”—people with an extravagant output of carbon. Such individuals are scarce in India, more common in China, and common in America. If the goal were to cap emissions at 30 billion tonnes in 2030, say, that would mean squeezing the behaviour of some 1.1 billion “high emitters” worldwide. So the high-living, carbon-guzzling rich minority in India and China would not be able to hide behind their poor and carbon-thrifty compatriots.

The paper suggests that the personal emissions target would be set at around 10.8 tonnes of CO2 per year. China would have 300m emitters over this level by 2030, meaning that the country’s 4 billion tonnes of carbon emissions in 2003 should rise to no more than 8.5 billion in 2030, as opposed to a predicted 11.4 billion if China does nothing. The cuts required in Brazil and India would be far smaller, as they have fewer rich people. America’s cuts would have to be greater than those in the administration’s cap-and-trade bill.

It sounds a rather elegant idea—if implausibly complex to carry out. But as a thought experiment, it shows how even Mr Saran’s definition of “fair” falls short of the mark.

Economist: Migration and climate change - A new (under) class of travellers

Economist:

THE airstrip at Lokichoggio, in the scorched wastes of north Kenya, was once ground zero for food aid. During Sudan’s civil war, flights from here kept millions of people alive. The warehouses are quieter now, but NGOs keep a toehold, in case war restarts—and to deal with what pundits call the “permanent emergency” of “environmentally induced” migration.

Take the local Turkana people. Their numbers have surged in recent decades, and will double again before 2040. But as the area gets hotter and drier, it has less water, grazing and firewood. The drought cycle in northern Kenya has gone from once every eight years to every three years and may contract further. That means no recovery time for the Turkana and their livestock; the result is an increasingly frantic drift from one dry place to another.

A local crisis with local causes? Only partly. Scientists think it is part of a global phenomenon: people across the world on the move as a result of environmental degradation. Just how many are moving, or about to move, is maddeningly unclear.

The International Organisation for Migration thinks there will be 200m climate-change migrants by 2050, when the world’s population is set to peak at 9 billion. Others put the total at 700m.

These startling numbers may conjure up a picture of huge, desperate masses, trekking long distances and if necessary overrunning border defences because their homelands have dried up or been submerged. But at least initially, the situation in Kenya and other parts of east Africa is likely to be more typical: an already poor population whose perpetual search for adequate pasture and shelter grows harder and harder. In such conditions, local disputes—even relatively petty ones between clans and extended families—can easily worsen, and become embroiled in broader religious or political fights. And that in turn makes it harder for everybody in the area to survive, and more desperate to find new places to live, even if they are not far away.

A new report—“In Search of Shelter”—by the United Nations University, the charity CARE and Columbia University in New York lists the eco-migration “hot spots”: dry bits of Africa; river systems in Asia; the interior and coast of Mexico and the Caribbean; and low islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

A one-metre rise in sea levels could displace 24m people along the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow rivers—which together support a quarter of humanity. A two-metre rise could uproot 14m people on the Mekong alone and swamp much of its farmland. Meanwhile, the melting of the Himalayan glacier will cause floods and erosion upstream, boosting the price of rice and other staples. And many regional conflicts could be exacerbated.

The scale of the likely population shift raises big questions. Will climate-change migrants be recognised? The classic definition of refugees—tossed between states by war or tyranny—is outdated. Eco-migrants will be paperless paupers, whose multiple woes are hard to disentangle.

Poverty campaigners want a revised legal regime to protect the new migrants. However, this looks tricky. America resists calling them “environmental refugees”: the word “refugee” implies guarantees that cannot realistically be given to the coming torrent of migrants. As American diplomats quietly admit, their rich country is still reeling from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which killed 1,800 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.

Can the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) expand to cope with eco-migrants? It has already struggled to widen its remit to include the internally displaced (26m at the end of 2008) as well as strictly-defined refugees (10m, excluding the Palestinians who come under another agency). A tenfold surge in the numbers within its orbit would push the agency out of control, says James Milner, a professor at Ottawa’s Carleton University. Meanwhile some aid workers see signs of a competition between institutions to take ownership of the eco-migration issue, perhaps by oversimplifying it.

Charles Ehrhart of CARE thinks UNHCR will remain central, but wonders how it or anybody can now distinguish between “forced” and “voluntary” migration. He says climate change may cut agricultural output by half in lowland Africa by 2020. “In such a context, does migration constitute a choice or a necessity?”

Migrants’ rights may be easy to assert for islanders whose homes are drowned—but hard in the case of big, messy movements across Africa and Asia. Most of the displaced will drift to the next-most-liveable place, as the poor do anyway.

“Many states are already overwhelmed by internally displaced populations,” says Mr Ehrhart. “Will they be able to support even more people on the move? If not, whose duty is it to make up the difference?”. At the least, the gap between carbon usage and climate change’s effects portends angry North-South rows.

Meles Zenawi, who as Ethiopia’s prime minister will speak for Africa at several global gatherings this year, predicts that some parts of the continent will become uninhabitable and “those who did the damage will have to pay.” At the December summit on climate change in Copenhagen, he hopes that Africa will “aggressively” demand compensation for environmental damage as well as help with migrants and the mitigation of climate change: in his view a demand of $40 billion would be reasonable.

Many agree that more research is needed to pinpoint the reasons why migrants pick up sticks. People concur that climate change fuels conflict in Darfur, but nobody knows how big a factor it is. Drought helped jihadist fighters seize bits of south Somalia, but was it the main reason?

Gloom abounds. James Lovelock, an environmental guru, posits a collapse in human population, in part related to migration, with a few “lifeboat” regions surviving. Then there is the pace of social change. The number of “megacities”—with populations in the tens of millions—may grow to several hundred by the middle of the 21st century. Most are poorly planned.

Would a migrant from a collapsed city receive aid? “We’ve not experienced anything of this kind, where whole regions, whole countries, may well become unviable,” says Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

No wonder strategists see vast new security risks, and a big expansion in the world’s “ungoverned spaces”. But much can be done before the exodus turns biblical. In West Africa subsistence farming is badly irrigated. Improve that, throw in some seeds and fertiliser, scrap tariffs, build warehouses and roads, and the region may beat the worst of climate change.

Geographers at UN Habitat, a city-planning agency, say conurbations must adapt to the needs of climate-change migrants. “You can’t just stockpile people,” says Alex de Sherbinin of Columbia University. The pressure is tangible in Addis Ababa, which already has teeming slums. The price of teff, a staple, has surged after a famine that is still pushing people to the city. Mr Meles is not alone in his wrath.

Economist: Flying for ever - Solar-powered manned flight

Pretty damn cool if you ask me. The technology is clearly there, we just need the will to do shit.

Economist:

A new solar-powered aircraft attempts to fly around the world with zero emissions

WHEN an airliner takes off for a transatlantic flight it needs to carry some 80 tonnes of fuel, which accounts for around one-fifth of its weight. On really long flights, fuel can account for 40% of a plane’s take-off weight, so that around 20% of the fuel is used to carry the rest of the fuel. Each tonne of fuel burned also produces 3.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Yet inside a hanger at a Swiss airfield is the prototype of an aircraft (illustrated above) that does not use any fuel at all. The wings of this aircraft are almost as big as those of an airliner, but they are covered in a film of solar cells that convert sunlight into electricity to drive its engines.

Solar-powered aircraft have flown before. The pioneer was Paul MacCready, whose Gossamer Penguin made the first manned flight in 1980 in California, with his then 13-year-old son at the controls. A derivative, Solar Challenger, crossed the English Channel in 1981. But nothing like HB-SIA, as the Swiss aircraft is known, has ever taken to the air. If it works as expected, another version will be built and this will take off, climb to 10,000 metres and, by storing some of the electricity generated during the day, continue flying through the night. Its pilots, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, plan to cross the Atlantic in it and later to fly it around the world.

The prototype will be unveiled on June 26th by Solar Impulse, a project the aviators run. Mr Piccard helped pilot Orbiter 3, the first balloon to fly non-stop around the world, and comes from a family of adventurers: his grandfather, Auguste, was the first to fly a balloon into the stratosphere and his father, Jacques, plunged to record depths in a bathyscaphe. Mr Borschberg is an engineer and fighter pilot.

Testing to the limit

Although he has flown HB-SIA in a simulator, Mr Borschberg says he will not really know how it performs until the first test flight later this year. The prototype pushes some technologies to their limits, especially in the trade-off between weight and performance. So, although it has a wingspan of 61 metres, HB-SIA has room only for a pilot. It weighs just 1,500 kilograms, making it five times lighter than a high-performance glider would be if made that big.

The complex skeleton of HB-SIA is constructed from carbon-fibre composites formed into honeycomb and sandwich structures. This is covered in plastic film. The film on the upper surfaces of the wings and the horizontal rear stabilisers is embedded with 12,000 photovoltaic cells. These are capable of converting sunlight into electricity with an efficiency of 22%. Cells with slightly better conversion rates are available, but they are heavier.

A quarter of the weight of HB-SIA is accounted for by its lithium-polymer batteries, which will power the four electrically driven propellers during the first test flights. As those flights become longer and higher, the aircraft will start to draw power from its solar cells. It will fly slowly, only at about 70kph in windless conditions. Its electric motors can produce a maximum of 9 kilowatts, or 12 horsepower—which is about the same as the Wright brothers had. With all four engines at full power, HB-SIA is only as powerful as a motor scooter. Yet with careful rationing of its stored energy, it should be possible to achieve the closest thing yet to perpetual manned flight—with man being the limiting factor because of the need to carry food and drink, and to remain awake for long periods.

If the prototype succeeds in flying through the night then the design of its successor will be finalised. This aircraft, HB-SIB, is intended to operate in stints of around five days and nights. If it succeeds in crossing the Atlantic, it will then try to circle the globe, following the Tropic of Cancer and landing on each continent.

This will involve some daring, with the aircraft spending all day climbing as its batteries are recharged and then descending slowly under power throughout the night to conserve energy. It means keeping a close eye on the weather and navigating around windy areas. The team has experimented with simulated flights using real-time meteorological data. Encountering a headwind at night is a worry. “It could make the night much longer and cause you to run out of energy before sunrise, which would be a disaster,” says Mr Borschberg. Success means a flight plan which ensures that “every morning you are in sunshine”.

A number of companies and groups are sponsoring Solar Impulse, including the International Air Transport Association (IATA). At its annual meeting in Kuala Lumpur this week, the trade group pledged to cap emissions from aviation in 2020. A solar-powered airliner is still a distant dream, but IATA knows that pushing the boundaries of technology will be necessary to help clean up air travel.

Economist: Seeing REDD in the Amazon

Economist:

Saving rainforests needs both property rights and payments

FORESTS lock up a lot of carbon. Cutting them down accounts for around 20% of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases. On paper, halting deforestation should be the simplest way to cut emissions. Achieving a similar reduction by building wind turbines or nuclear-power stations, or by mandating more fuel-efficient cars and buildings, would take years and cost billions. In practice, however, halting deforestation is hard: much of the world’s rainforest has already succumbed to loggers and farmers. That is because it is difficult to align the interests of people who live in forests (now 20m in the Brazilian Amazon) with those of the rest of humanity.

The best way of doing so involves a mixture of two ideas: establishing clear property rights over land and paying its owners not to cut down trees. If these policies are to work anywhere, it will be in Brazil, which possesses 60% of the world’s greatest tropical forest. Brazil has powerful motives for preserving the Amazon. Deforestation does terrible damage to the reputation of a country that is a pioneer in renewable energy. It also puts at risk the Amazon rain factory that enables Brazil to be one of the world’s biggest agricultural exporters.

Brazil now has a sophisticated system for monitoring deforestation from satellites and aeroplanes. It has set aside some 40% of the Amazon as national parks or Indian reserves. It has laws that restrict deforestation in the rest. The problem is enforcing those laws over a vast area where many of the inhabitants dislike the rules (see article). The first step is a proper land registry to confirm who owns what. Some 15-25% of the Amazon is private property, which is supposed to be kept 80% forested (though often is not). Most of the rest is nominally federal land, but in practice is up for grabs: title deeds are forged, people are killed and deforestation accelerates because of competing claims. Some farmers even clear trees as a way to solidify land claims: fines from Brazil’s environmental agency can create a paper trail that acts as proof of ownership.

A law approved this month by Brazil’s Congress aspires to end this mess—but at a price. It would grant title to all landholdings up to 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) occupied before 2005 in the Amazon, comprising an area the size of France, and ban further land claims. The law entrenches injustice: it risks rewarding people who used violence to obtain land, including large landholders who occupy almost 90% of the area under discussion. Brazilian greens want to limit the measure to smaller plots, and to ban their resale for ten years.

Yet that risks defeating the object. Better for the government to complement this attempt to end battles over privately owned land with a decision to take the rest of the Amazon into public ownership, as parks or reserves. Countries with rainforests also need to have due regard for their preservation and for the Indians who live in them when allowing mining and oil exploration. The lack of such procedures was behind a bloody clash in Peru this month (see article).

Lay down that axe and you will get cash

At the moment it makes economic sense to cut down trees: those who do so can sell the timber and turn the land into farms or ranches. So the second idea for saving forests lies in changing economic incentives by paying people not to chop down trees—an idea known in the ghastly jargon of climate-change diplomacy as “reduction of emissions from deforestation and degradation” (REDD). Since many rich countries felled their forests as they developed it seems fair that they should pay some of the cost of this.

There are difficulties, though. One is that “avoided deforestation” is hard to define and quantify. Another, raised by officials in Europe who have chosen not to include REDD in the European carbon-trading scheme, is that the carbon market would be flooded with deforestation credits that will push down the price. Companies would then buy cheap credits and continue doing business as usual rather than cutting their own emissions. Further tricky issues abound: who should have the right to sell credits? How should the money be split between central governments, local governments and indigenous people? And should the money be paid in perpetuity?

REDD schemes will require careful monitoring to ensure that forests really are left intact and that carbon credits for an area are not claimed more than once. Murky goings-on in Papua New Guinea, one of the leading advocates of REDD, highlight such worries (see article).

Even so, it is worth trying, simply because avoiding deforestation is so effective in slowing carbon emissions. So REDD deserves a place in the world climate treaty to be negotiated in Copenhagen in December, to replace the Kyoto treaty when it expires in 2012. As with other forms of carbon credit, today’s voluntary and experimental REDD schemes will need to be replaced by more rigorously accredited and monitored schemes. But they have a chance of working only if the countries in which they operate define forest land rights clearly. Brazil’s flawed attempt to do this is a step forward.

Economist: Ecuador, Chevron and pollution Justice or extortion?

I purposefully did not post this economist article yet because I wanted to get the response from Steven Donziger, the attorney's trying the case on behalf of the indigenous tribes. I was just on a conference call him, and both he and his their media rep explained the nefarious way the Economist reporter misrepresented what he was writing, didn't explain it was for the Economist, and only interviewed them for minor details. Steven Donziger wrote a letter the editor of the Economist, which will be published in the June 13 copy of the Economist.

Check out the BS flung by the Economist in this article (pretty surprised by them):

HIDDEN behind a row of trees and a rusted barbed-wire fence on a rutted dirt road in the Ecuadorean jungle, Shushufindi 61, a pit in which oil waste is dumped, is hardly a beauty spot. But it has attracted a string of visitors ranging from Hollywood actresses to Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, and managers from Chevron, an American oil company. It is one of several hundred such pits that are at the centre of a long-running legal wrangle between Ecuadorean and American activists and Chevron. For the activists, the case shows that oil companies are nowadays held accountable for their actions in developing countries. For Chevron’s supporters, the case amounts to an attempt at judicial extortion that throws doubt on whether multinational oil companies can ever get a fair deal in parts of Latin America today.

At issue is waste dumped by Texaco (bought by Chevron in 2001) as long ago as the 1960s in the region around Lago Agrio in the Ecuadorean jungle. From 1977 onwards, Ecuador’s state-owned oil company (now called Petroecuador) took a 62.5% stake in the field, though Texaco continued to operate it. In 1992 Petroecuador took over the whole operation and Texaco withdrew from Ecuador.

In a suit first filed in a New York court in 1993, lawyers representing 30,000 people in the Lago Agrio area argued that billons of gallons of waste dumped by Texaco in several hundred pits such as Shushufindi 61 caused damage to human health as well as to the jungle. They also argued that the oil company should compensate Indian people for their forced displacement. American judges ruled three times that they had no jurisdiction over the matter.

But as a result of the publicity generated by the cases, Texaco agreed with the Ecuadorean government that it would clean up 161 pits, or its share of the total, at a cost of $40m. The work was done by 1998 and the government signed an agreement releasing Texaco from any further liability. Petroecuador was supposed to clean up the rest of the pits, but didn’t do so, partly because it continues to use some of them (including Shushufindi 61).

Meanwhile Ecuador enacted an environmental law, something it had previously lacked. This is not retroactive. Nevertheless the plaintiffs filed a claim against Chevron under this law in 2003 in a court in Lago Agrio. They sought $6 billion in damages. Last year a court-appointed expert, Ricardo Cabrera, filed a 4,000-page report arguing that Chevron was liable for no less than $27.3 billion in damages. Of this $9.5 billion is compensation for 1,400 deaths from cancers that he alleges were caused by the pollution; $8.4 billion is for “unjust enrichment”; the remainder is for environmental clean-up.

Chevron has filed a 9,000-page rebuttal of Mr Cabrera’s report. It disputes his fitness as an expert, arguing that he has little experience of the oil industry. It found evidence that he used the Amazon Defence Front, a group working for the plaintiffs, to collect soil samples from sites. Sections of his report repeat verbatim documents filed by the plaintiffs. Chevron also notes that in 2007 a California court dismissed as fabricated some individual claims that the pollution caused cancers; it fined one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers for this. As for “unjust enrichment”, a Chevron manager points out that Texaco’s total profits from its operations in Ecuador were only $497m, while over the 20 years to 1992 Ecuadorean governments received $25.3 billion in profits, taxes and royalties from the field.

The judge in Lago Agrio, Juan Nuñez, is expected to rule on the case later this year. He has made no secret of his sympathy for the plaintiffs. The lawsuit appears to have the backing of Mr Correa’s government. Last year it objected to the 1998 agreement with Texaco, arguing that since the company was the operator of the field it should have cleaned up all of the pits. The attorney-general charged seven former senior officials who had signed the agreement with fraud, as well as two Ecuadorean lawyers for Chevron.

Chevron has filed a claim in an international arbitration court in The Hague and has asked the American government to review Ecuador’s trade preferences. But it faces political pressure in the United States as well as in Ecuador. On May 4th Andrew Cuomo, New York’s attorney-general, sent a letter to Chevron requesting information on the case on behalf of the state’s pension funds, which have more than $1 billion invested in the company.

If the Ecuadorean courts rule against Chevron, the plaintiffs’ lawyers can be expected to file suit in the United States to collect the settlement. Since they are working on a contingency basis, they stand to gain a substantial portion of any damages.

Texaco may have benefited from Ecuador’s past lack of environmental standards. It is questionable whether any of the pits would have been cleaned up had it not been for the campaigners. But the lawsuit may now be preventing Chevron from helping Petroecuador to clean up the rest. Ecuadoreans were the main beneficiaries from the oil—although some of them suffered some damage from it. They will also be the most important victims if the Chevron case shows that the rule of law is the servant of politics in Ecuador.

Economist: Climate Change - Seat-of-the-pants estimates won’t be enough to cool the world

This is one of the major reasons why climate negotiations are difficult: because even the basis for arguments are unclear.

Economist:

THE human impact of climate change “is difficult to assess reliably”, say the authors of a new report from the Global Humanitarian Forum, a think-tank run by Kofi Annan, a former United Nations secretary-general, aided by a raft of eminent folk. But they make a stab, reaching the conclusion that 325m people around the world are seriously affected by climate change every year and that this number could more than double, to around 660m, by 2030.

As in so many reports of this kind, the trend looks plausible, but there seems little basis for the exact numbers. For example, the authors attribute two-fifths of an expected increase in weather-related disasters to climate change and use this as a basis for all their other sums. But they offer no convincing rationale for this approach, and admit with refreshing candour that “the real numbers may be significantly lower or higher.”

On slightly firmer ground, the authors elaborate on the familiar point that most of the damage from a changing climate will be felt in poor countries. Warmer temperatures are actually leading to increased crop yields in some parts of North America and Russia. But areas where yields are falling because of climate change include sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where the victims are small farmers eking out an already meagre living. And the countries seen as most vulnerable to climate change are all poor: they include Somalia, Burundi, Niger, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Chad.

Nor are people in those countries well placed to adapt to change. As their livelihood vanishes, they are more likely to fuel the ranks of the temporarily or permanently displaced. The eminent writers duly propose a huge (nay, hundredfold) boost in funding to help the poor cope with a shifting climate—through drought-resistant crops, for example.

In another haphazard estimate, the authors of “Human Impact Report: Climate Change—Anatomy of a Silent Crisis” say 26m people have already been displaced by climate change. But here again, accuracy is impossible. Should Cyclone Aila, which hit Bangladesh and India on May 25th and affected hundreds of thousands of people, be classified as a climate-change event? Even if scientists could agree on the contribution of global warming to the rising frequency of such disasters, it would still be hard to classify the causes of any given catastrophe. Nor is it easy to disentangle the effects of climate change from those of avoidable failures in policy.

In South Asia, for example, climate change is likely to bring more water to a perennially thirsty region. A blessing in disguise, then? No, because so little progress has been made on ways to trap and use this water when it cascades down in a short space of time. Given that governments have missed so many obvious tricks, is there any reason to assume that more money thrown at the problem will be spent wisely? Coping with climate change will certainly cost money—it is anyone’s guess how much—but plenty of wisdom will be needed too.

Economist: An awkward absence

Economist:
YOU do not see many milestones on the floor of the ocean, but one was passed this week. May 13th was the deadline for the submission of new claims to the seabed, and from pole to pole coastal states have been asserting ownership of vast chunks of continental shelf in a rush for territory unrivalled since the scramble for Africa at the end of the 19th century. The treasure this time is not ivory or cocoa beans but petroleum, or at least the promise of it, and perhaps amazing fuels and wonder drugs, as well as gold, silver and other minerals. The claims will now be accepted or rejected by a United Nations commission, but one big maritime power will, by choice, be absent: the United States. It should not be.

Unlike 156 other countries, America has never ratified the 27-year-old UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, under which this carve-up is taking place. That is no worse than unfortunate: the deadline applies only to states that acceded to the treaty more than ten years ago and America still has time to make its claims. But first it will have to ratify the treaty. This the Obama administration, like its two most recent predecessors, wants to do, as probably does most of the Senate, which must provide its advice and consent. A determined minority, however, wants to block it, and finding the time for the necessary procedure may prove difficult.

America’s original objections to the treaty related to the requirement that its companies should share technical information with poor countries. The treaty was changed to meet those complaints. Now the objectors say it would lead to a loss of sovereignty. In fact it would do the opposite, since it would allow America to claim sovereign rights over both the exclusive economic zone that extends 200 nautical miles (370km) from its shores and also its share of the continental shelf beyond that, so long as certain geophysical criteria were satisfied.

The treaty does other useful things. It provides the right of passage by sea for all countries’ armed forces, and for almost all shipping through other states’ territorial waters if the passage is innocent. An absolute right of passage is given in international straits and certain archipelagoes, such as Indonesia. Such provisions can only benefit American national security.

And just as America needs the treaty, so the treaty needs America. The sea is badly in need of better management. It is overfished, chiefly, it is true, in coastal waters, but also in the great expanses that belong to no state. The sea is increasingly used as a rubbish bin, filled with poisons, plastics and other pollutants. Parts of it are infested with pirates. All of it is growing alarmingly acidic, as the carbon dioxide spewed out by modern activities finds its way into the briny. And much of the CO2 that causes this problem derives from oil and gas made less scarce by the reserves now recoverable from below it.

Scope for slip-ups in the Arctic

Nowhere is this last paradox more apparent than in the Arctic, where global warming means melting ice, which in turn means easier access to huge quantities of petroleum, most of it offshore. At the same time the once-icy Arctic may be opening up to shipping through the North West Passage, bringing the possibility of collisions, oil spills and other environmental horrors in a particularly vulnerable part of the world. For the people—and animals—who live in the polar region, even the law-of-the-sea treaty, fashioned in an era unconcerned about global warming, may provide inadequate safeguards.

The treaty is certainly not going to solve all the troubles afflicting the oceans, nor settle all the world’s maritime disputes. But it can help. To be effective, though, it needs America. Ratification has waited too long. The Senate should press ahead.

Economist: Growing on trees - A profitable rainforest

The Economist:

A MOST unusual document landed on your correspondent’s desk recently: a financial report from a rainforest. Iwokrama, a 370,000-hectare rainforest in central Guyana, announced that it was in profit. It added, more intriguingly, that rainforests had entered the “global economy”.

Iwokrama is part of the largest expanse of undisturbed rainforest in the world, which overlies the Guiana Shield. It has a unique history. In 1989 the president of Guyana had the foresight to give the forest as a gift to the Commonwealth for research into global warming. Today it is administered by an international board of trustees, who have devolved the day-to-day management to the Iwokrama International Centre. It is this centre that has been working to exploit the forest sustainably.

Edward Glover, one of Iwokrama’s board of trustees, says that it became clear more than a decade ago that the forest could not rely on donor funding to survive, so it had to look elsewhere for finance. The centre’s first job was to identify the forest’s assets and to exploit them. It seems to have perfected its art. Today the centre makes money in areas such as ecotourism, timber-extraction, forest-products such as honey and oils, bio-prospecting and forestry research. Its results for 2008 reveal that it made a surplus for the first time that year, with revenues of $2.4m and a profit of $800,000. The previous year it had lost $200,000. Revenues from timber were up by 44%, ecotourism by 26% and training by 22%.

There should be more money to come. Eighteen months ago, it sold a licence for the measurement and valuation of the forest’s “ecosystem services”. This is not to say that the forest has actually sold these rights, but that an investment company, Canopy Capital, based in London, has bought the rights to create a financial deal for the forest’s services.

Ecosystem services are what a forest provides merely by existing. A standing forest can generate rainfall, prevent flooding, regulate the soil, provide biodiversity and store carbon. These benefits are received by everyone in society, but no one pays for them. Such environmental services are often termed “externalities” because they are not included in the price of the forest. When forests are traded in a traditional way, their price usually depends only on the value of the timber and the land on which it grows. No account is taken of the broader services to society. The result is that forests are being cut down because an incorrect price is put on them.

When forests vanish, people suffer. That is why many believe that there is an urgent need to bring forests onto the global financial balance sheet. Last year Pavan Sukhdev, an economist at Deutsche Bank, reported that the world was losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year as a result of deforestation alone. If money could be made by selling these ecosystem services, then the financial equation for forests would change.

At the moment, nobody wants to give too much detail about what an eventual deal for Iwokrama’s ecosystem services might look like, as it is currently being negotiated. Mr Glover says they want to create a new class of asset management, one that includes all of Iwokrama’s services. It is not just about carbon emissions trading, he says, “we want something different and imaginative and forward-looking”. Rather unusually for a clever financial deal, Hylton Murray-Philipson of Canopy Capital says that when it is completed, they will reveal how they did it so that other people can copy it.

Looking at the value of the carbon sequestration alone, there is a deal to be done. Mr Murray-Philipson asks “why pay BP $100 a tonne to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and bury it when you can do the same with a rainforest for a fraction of a dollar?”. He adds that the science of forest carbon sequestration is “definitive” and that standing forests are responding to higher carbon dioxide levels by “bulking up”, and are sequestering between one and four tonnes of the gas per hectare per year. Even taking the lower figure, with one billion hectares of forest in the world, if the rights to the sequestration of carbon dioxide are sold for just $10 a tonne—that would generate $10 billion a year.

Iwokrama is making money now, before it has even sold its ecosystem services. It is already part of the global economy. But with sustainable forestry and ecosystem services, the lesson of Iwokrama is that rainforests present an opportunity. For a few bright sparks out there, financial innovation and engineering combined with science will let them generate wealth in a whole new way. There is money in the forest. It is growing on trees.

Economist: Rainfall and GDP - How rainfall can affect economic growth

DEVELOPING countries are more at risk from climate change because of their dependence on agriculture, especially the subsistence sort with poor irrigation. Climate variability has a more severe impact on the economies in which agriculture is a large share of GDP. In Ethiopia, around 75% of the population are dependent on farming, which is almost entirely small-scale and rain-fed. A further 10% earn their living from livestock. During the famine of the 1980s, rainfall was well below average and growth plunged. Whether rainfall is an accurate indicator of GDP growth is another matter, however. This chart from the United Nations appears to show changes in GDP growth preceding similar changes in rainfall in certain years.

Economist: Environmental values - How to ensure the environment is properly accounted for

ANY attempt to put an economic value on fresh air, clean water or tropical rainforests can offend the delicate sensibilities of those who argue that the conservation of nature is a moral duty. Yet although the best things in life appear to be free, that does not mean they are without financial value. It simply means that nobody asks you to pay when, for example, you watch a beautiful sunset over the hills. Putting a financial value on the environment, however, may be the most important thing that people can do to help nature conservation. When governments allocate money, they do so according to where it will bring benefit. If a government is unaware of the value of a landscape to its tourism, or of a swamp to its fishing industry—and thus its foreign-exchange income—then it will invest too little in managing these resources. Worse, if the true value of a forest or swamp is hidden, governments may destroy it by subsidising the conversion of the land to agriculture. The costs are unknown for now, but may appear eventually as the price of building a filtration plant to remove the sediment from the water that the forest once took care of, or the price of importing food when fish vanish.Some estimates of the annual contribution of coastal and marine ecosystems to the global economy exceed $20 trillion, over a third of the total gross national product (GNP) of all the countries of the world. Even so, says Katherine Sierra of the World Bank, such ecosystems are typically much undervalued when governments made decisions about development. Glenn-Marie Lange, also of the World Bank, attended a meeting in Washington DC organised by her employer to launch its report “Environment Matters” on April 6th. She told participants that one of the reasons why ecosystems become degraded is that their value to local people is often small. As a result, these people do not have much reason to manage their resources carefully. She estimates, for example, that only 36% of the income generated by the coastal and marine environments in Zanzibar goes to locals. Most of this comes from fishing; only a tiny fraction of the money from tourism ends up local hands. More broadly, Dr Lange wants the value of the environment to be integrated into national and local accounting. She argues that governments should identify the contributions that marine ecosystems make to their countries’ GNPs and foreign-exchange earnings. She also wants them to examine whether or not they are running down their countries’ “natural capital”. Emily Cooper of the World Resources Institute, an environmental think-tank, put some figures on the value of tourism, recreation, fisheries and shoreline protection in Belize. It was an impressive $395m to $559m. The entire economy was worth about $1.3 billion in 2007. These figures, she thinks, have allowed environmentalists to protect Belize’s threatened mangrove forests better. For too long, an absence of proper green accounting has allowed people to privatise the gains from the environment but socialise the costs, to paraphrase Carl Safina, an American scientist and environmentalist at the meeting. As Dr Safina puts it, “conservation is not a trade-off between the economy and the environment. It is a trade off between the short and long term.”

Economist: The Illusion of Clean Coal

“FACTORIES of death” is how James Hansen, a crusading American scientist, describes power stations that burn coal. Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels, producing twice the carbon dioxide that natural gas does when it is burned. That makes it a big cause of global warming. But some of the world’s biggest economies rely on coal. It provides almost 50% of America’s and Germany’s power, 70% of India’s and 80% of China’s. Digging up coal provides a livelihood for millions of people. And secure domestic sources of energy are particularly prized at a time when prices are volatile and many of the big oil and gas exporters are becoming worryingly nationalistic. It is hard to see how governments can turn their backs on such a cheap and reliable fuel.....

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13235041


Stay tuned for an EDF study (I researched and helped write) on how Multilateral Development Banks and Export Credit Agencies have been funding coal-fired power plants in the developing world, due out at the end of this month, just in time for the World Bank spring meetings.

Economist: The Maldives Goes Carbin-Neutral

ON MARCH 15th the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, announced that his country would try to stop using fossil fuels—and thus eliminate most of its greenhouse-gas emissions—by 2020. The Maldives is not wealthy but it leads richer nations in tackling climate change.........

http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=7933604&story_id=13354355