Tag: China

Climate Refugees

Climate Refugees

Eleven French journalists – writers and photographers of Collectif Argos – visited some of the people who live on the front line of climate change. Their report was first published in France in 2007, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has now published an English version: Climate Refugees. It invites reading. The written narratives are engaging and immediately informative. The related photographic sections are strikingly alive and stir the imagination. But it’s not lightly done -– the journalists spent time staying with the people whose lives they describe and there’s satisfying depth to the stories and the pictures.

Nine places were visited: Alaska and New Orleans in the US, the low-lying halligen on the North Sea coast of Germany, Lake Chad in Africa, the village of Longbaoshan near Beijing in China, Himalayan Nepal, the small town of Mushiganj in the south west corner of Bangladesh, the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Tuvalu in the Pacific.

Shishmaref is a village of 600 people on the small island of Sarichef off the coast of Alaska in the Arctic Ocean. As their village slowly crumbles into the sea and the whole island moves towards becoming inhabitable by 2050 the issue is not whether they will have to relocate. It’s where they will go. On offer is a move to towns 200 miles away to take advantage of the urban infrastructure. But the Shishmaref Inupiaq are convinced that relocating to a city would be tantamount to “burying their culture, soul, uniqueness and future”. What many would prefer is to recreate the village on a mainland site only 12 miles away. But it would be double the cost – $200 million as against $100 million – and the fear is that the state will not pay the extra.

The village of Longbaoshan, just 38 kilometres north-west of the Beijing suburbs, is not falling into the sea but being slowly buried by advancing sand. Only 700 people now remain. In recent years 200 have already left for the capital.

“My fields are nothing but stones and sand, sand and stones. Where’s the soil? Where’s the rain? The sky is my only hope, the only way we are able to eat. After the big storm in the spring of 2000, my son had to leave. He became a cook at a restaurant in a Beijing suburb. We don’t see him any more.”

The journalists went to the city to track down a couple who made the move, leaving their young son with his grandfather. They found them working very long hours and living in a nine-square-metre single room.

Around the town of Mushiganj in Bangladesh it’s too much water which is driving people away from their homes. Bangladeshis are accustomed to flooding and have learned to use it to their benefit. But global warming has added a scope and duration to floods which are destroying that balance. In the area the journalists visited the salinity of the soil has increased and crops have been replaced by shrimp farms, which bring far fewer jobs than rice paddies. Drinking water has to be fetched in exhausting trips. The nearby mangrove forests of the Sundarbans offer some fishing and other resources but are infested with pirates and are the refuge of the dangerous Bengal tiger. So for many it’s Dhaka for employment and income, albeit in demanding and exhausting work such as rickshaw driving.

The climate change pressures on Bangladesh will only increase and Dhaka will simply be unable to absorb the large-scale rural exodus anticipated. Where will people go? The journalists spoke with a geography professor who rules out neighbouring India and Myanmar as destinations for political and climate change reasons. He looks for cooperation outside southern Asia in preparing for the massive migrations anticipated.

“I think that countries with larger land areas will have to change their immigration policies. If we believe climate change is a global problem. then we must look for global solutions. Trying to solve it at national level is a mistake.”

Another researcher put it this way:

“For a long time now, I’ve been proposing the following solution. Each country must take responsibility for – in other words transport and accommodate – a quota of climate refugees proportional to its past and present greenhouse gas emissions.”

The water problem in Lake Chad is quite a different one. The lake is disappearing and taking life with it. Over the past 40 years it has lost 90% of its area, shrinking from 25,000 to 2500 square kilometres. A UNESCO statement describes the gradual drying up of the lake as the most spectacular example of the effects of climate change in tropical Africa, attributing it to low amounts of rainfall, evapotranspiration from high temperatures and a series of severe droughts. The effects on the surrounding populations are harsh. “God needs to send us a miracle because there’s too much suffering involved in living on the lake.”

When the journalists began their stay in Tuvalu they record that they couldn’t help feeling some irritation at what they saw as the carefree attitude and love of the easy life of the Tuvaluans. However further acquaintance revealed a pragmatic people fully aware of their inevitable fate and wanting to do everything in their power to stay on their land as long as possible, though involved in a global struggle to negotiate their relocation under optimal conditions. The Chief of Staff at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

“We asked the governments of Australia and New Zealand to acknowledge the concept of climate refugees.  They refused, saying that, according to international law, refugees can only be people subject to persecution or political, ideological, ethnic or religious pressure – a narrow definition that suits them just fine.”

The journalists, however, wonder whether, based on current scientific knowledge, the existence of climate refugees may give rise to the concept of ‘environmental persecution’ of the most vulnerable populations by the major greenhouse-gas emitters. This could be, they suggest, the beginning of climate justice in which the biggest polluters per inhabitant would not be able to turn away Tuvaluans forced to flee their land.

The Maldives face a similar prospect to the Tuvaluans. The valley residents of Nepal are seriously threatened by growing number of glacial lakes high above them that are becoming engorged with water from receding glaciers and may explode in outburst floods. Many former residents of New Orleans have been relocated in Houston and elsewhere in the US. The sparse population of the halligen in the meantime have a great deal of government money spent on keeping them in their threatened enironment because protecting the halligen means helping protect the mainland.

What is the rest of the world going to do if under the pressures of climate change it becomes apparent that large numbers of people must move from where they now live and work?  The book puts that question squarely in front of us. Some of the migration will be within national borders. That will be demanding enough. But some will have to be beyond those borders. Will the rich nations face up to the responsibility they have incurred?  Will ethical imperatives survive the crunch times ahead?  It would be a hard heart which looked at the photographs in this book and didn’t hope so.

[Buy via Fishpond (NZ), Amazon.com, Book Depository (UK)]

All guns blazing

I well remember a meeting of the Hamilton group of Amnesty International back in the 1990s, when a visitor who lived in the Maldives turned up, wanting to find out more about how AI worked. It wasn’t long before we found out why he was interested, as he told us the story of repression and out-of-sight political prisoners in his country.

One of those prisoners was Mohamed Nasheed, whose party won an election in 2008, ending the 30 years dictatorship which preceded it. He is now President of the Republic of Maldives. It was no easy path to the presidency. His several imprisonments added up to a total of six years, 18 months of which were spent in solitary confinement. And it’s no easier now that he is there. The Maldives, comprising numerous coral islands, is the lowest country in the world, with a maximum natural ground level of only 2.3 metres, with the average being only 1.5 metres above sea level. Its vulnerability to climate change is obvious. It’s certainly obvious to Nasheed, and he’s not taking it lying down, as he made very clear in his blog written last year before the Copenhagen conference:

 

“No one in the Maldives is applauding the recent pledge of the G8 nations to try and hold temperature increases to 2 degrees and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to 450 parts per million. A few years ago, those might have been laudable goals, but new science makes clear they’re out of date…

“In January 2008, James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, published a series of papers showing that the actual safe limit for carbon in the atmosphere was at most 350 parts per million. Anything higher than that limit, warns Hansen, could seed ‘irreversible, catastrophic effects’ on a global scale…

“For the Maldives, climate change is no vague or distant irritation but a clear and present danger to our survival. But the Maldives is no special case; simply the canary in the world’s coal mine. Neighboring Asian countries like Bangladesh are already suffering from saltwater intrusion as seas rise; Australia and the American southwest are enduring epic drought; forests across western North America are succumbing to pests multiplying in the growing heat. And all of this is with temperature increases of nearly 1 degree — why on earth would we be aiming for 2 degrees?”

He has recently appeared — via video link — at the Hay Festival in the UK. The Guardian’s accounts here and here were enthusiastic.

Appearing  by live video link, Nasheed showed more life and animation in 2D than any of the politicians currently wandering around the site (there’s a lot of former Labour ministers with time on their hands these days) usually manage in the flesh. Where our MPs duck and dive and try to say as little as possible that might upset anyone, Nasheed went in with all guns blazing.

Ed Miliband interviewed Nasheed.  There were several points where his sense of the urgency of the issue was very apparent. When asked about educating people about climate change he declared it is too late for that.

“What we really need is a huge social 60s-style catalystic, dynamic street action. If the people in the US wish to change, it can happen. In the 60s and 70s, they’ve done that.”

But he also expressed uncertainty about the US, considering China and India actually far more receptive to the concept of climate change.

“My sense of China is that they tend to believe in climate change. My sense of the US is that a fair amount of them simply don’t believe in it.”

He noted how, unlike the developed world, India listened to small countries’ fears over the issue. “The refreshing thing about India is they listen to people, certainly they listen to the Maldives.”

Nasheed said countries committed to tackling climate change should press ahead with agreements and emissions reductions regardless of whether they took more recalcitrant nations with them.

“We cannot wait for the lowest common denominator where everyone agrees to doing almost nothing.”

He’s not waiting, like New Zealand, for others to take the lead. The Maldives is embarking on a programme to become the first carbon-neutral country within 10 years. It has three large wind farms under construction and photovoltaic technologies are being developed, although the country is also having to build sea walls to repel the ocean and energy-hungry desalination plants to replace fresh water supplies lost to the sea.

It might look like hoping against hope, but this was his conclusion:

“I believe in human ingenuity. We are not doomed. We can succeed and we must work along those lines.”

Brave words, though there must be times when they become difficult to say.  The Maldives lives on the edge of a slow disaster. We can be grateful for the clarity and persistence with which Nasheed and others like him keep drawing attention to what is happening. But the forces of denial in rich countries are not yet exhausted. Few politicians in power in those countries are willing to speak with like clarity to their populations, and denialist bluster still holds considerable sway among legislators. Nasheed’s concern that the US is not yet ready to face reality is well founded. It is by no means clear that we will act in time to save the Maldives from the ravages of a rising sea.

Note: There’s a short video clip here from the UN Environment Programme in which Nasheed sets out his concerns in very reasonable terms which are his trademark.  This Al Jazeera interview covers more specific ground. I liked his statement in the course of it: “Leaders cannot afford the luxury of ignorance.“

Friedman: China beating US on low carbon energy

Thomas Friedman is now doubtful that China will follow an American lead towards a greener economy, as he suggested in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded reviewed here. He considers rather that it is more likely to pull ahead of the US. He writes from China in his recent column in the New York Timesthat he’s been astonished to learn of how many projects have got under way in China in just the last year –- wind, solar, nuclear, mass transit and more efficient coal burning.

He quotes Bill Gross, head of a solar-thermal Californian company, eSolar, announcing the biggest solar deal ever, a 2 gigawatt, $5 billion deal to build solar thermal plants in China using California-based technology. Gross comments that China is being more aggressive than the US. His company applied for a US Department of Energy loan for a 92 megawatt project in New Mexico. In less time than it took them to do stage 1 of the application review “China signs, approves, and is ready to begin construction this year on a 20 times bigger project!”

Friedman goes on to instance other developments. Solar panels are one. He says so many new solar panel makers emerged in China in the last year alone that the price of solar power has fallen from roughly 59 cents a kilowatt hour to 16 cents. 50 new nuclear reactors are expected to be built by 2020, while the rest of the world may manage 15. High speed trains are breaking world records. A high speed rail link from Shanghai to Beijing means trains will cover the 700 miles in just five hours, compared with 12 hours today (and 18 hours for a similar distance from New York to Chicago in the US).

China is on the way to making green power technologies cheaper for itself and for everyone else.

“But even Chinese experts will tell you that it will all happen faster and more effectively if China and America work together — with the U.S. specializing in energy research and innovation, at which China is still weak, as well as in venture investing and servicing of new clean technologies, and with China specializing in mass production.”

Friedman concludes with a call to America to put in place a long-term carbon price that stimulates and rewards clean power innovation. “We can’t afford to be asleep with an invigorated China wide awake.”

Meanwhile India has plans to be a world leader in solar power, as announced by the Prime Minister a couple of days ago. He launched the National Solar Mission with a target of 20,000 megawatts of solar generating capacity by 2022. It will be helped along by a regulatory and incentive framework. Manmohan Singh hoped the new laws and incentives will “lead to a rapid scale up of capacity. This will encourage technological innovation and generate economies of scale, thereby leading to a steady lowering of costs. Once parity with conventional power tariff is achieved, there will be no technological or economic constraint to the rapid and large-scale expansion of solar power thereafter”.

He said he was “convinced that solar energy can also be the next scientific and technological frontier in India after atomic energy, space and information technology”. The scheme has pride of place in India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change.

After Copenhagen: new world disorder

coplogoIt’s a bit like reading the runes — trawling through reactions to the events of the last couple of weeks, trying to work out what the Copenhagen Accord means. I don’t mean a parsing of the words, though translating the language of diplomacy is never trivial, but what the various parties to the Accord, and the rest of the world, think it means — and crucially, what that implies for future action to reduce emissions.

For background, read this excellent BBC analysis of Copenhagen, and Joe Romm’s interesting take at Climate Progress (which refers to Bill McKibben’s reactions at Grist, plus there’s a more considered McKibben article at e360), but the article that really helped to crystallise my thoughts is Mark Lynas’ insider’s account of the final phases of negotiations:

Continue reading “After Copenhagen: new world disorder”

A thread of hope

The following column was published in the Waikato Times on 1st December

Do we lament that the Copenhagen Conference is evidently not going to produce a binding global deal to tackle climate change?  Or can we take comfort from the likelihood that it will produce an agreement in principle and proceed to further legal negotiations with a deadline for their conclusion?  In other words a delay, not a failure.

The cruel reality is that President Obama, who needs no convincing as to the seriousness of the challenge, has not yet seen legislation from the Senate which will seal a US commitment to emissions reduction. It seems likely that he will see it, but not before Copenhagen and therefore not in time for the US to yet be fully confident of what it can offer to the global deal.

When one considers how for the eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration the US acted as an anti-scientific spoiler of international negotiations it may be understandable that less than a year later they are not yet quite ready for what they so long delayed. The complicated American system of government is not easily harnessed to the change of direction. The President has to carry Congress with him.

To counter disappointment it may be worth remembering the political progress that is apparent. The science of climate change is now overwhelming and widely accepted by world political leaders. They know that emissions of greenhouse gases by human agency must start to lessen almost immediately, drop substantially within the next decade, and continue to fall heavily as the century proceeds. If this doesn’t happen, the prospect for humanity is dire.  Obama, Brown, Sarkozy, Merkel, and many others say as much. Even Medvedev has recently sounded the alarm after years in which Russia seemed lukewarm on the issue.

And this has happened in spite of the organised forces of denial which continue to work feverishly on public perception to blunt the impact the science ought to have. We still see letters to the editor and opinion pieces claiming that temperature is going down, not up, that thousands of scientists disagree with their colleagues, that any changes are just naturally occurring variations, and so on.  None of it true, but well packaged and unceasing.

However although it has helped delay effective action for many years since it was first launched by vested corporate interests, denial of the science is no longer entertained by educated political leadership. That’s progress.

Of course it’s worth nothing if not translated into effective remedial measures. Politicians are notorious evaders but on a matter now accepted to be of such serious consequence there are surely enough among them who will push for adequate action. Copenhagen may not be the time when it is all stitched up, but legal agreements not too long afterwards would be acceptable.

The November meeting between President Obama and President Hu Jintao in China was encouraging.  These two powers are central to a global deal.  Without them it will not work. They are the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases.  The fact that they are now talking and working together on the issue is of great significance.  Their meeting announced unexpected bi-lateral agreement on a variety of areas of practical cooperation including clean energy research, electric vehicles, an energy efficiency action plan, and a number of other quite specific matters. This is beyond sterile arguments about the respective responsibilities of developed and developing countries.  It’s affirmative joint action.

Their statement on the Copenhagen Conference was similarly positive, and carried no suggestion of drawing back from the task of finding a common legal agreement.

I don’t think we should surrender hope yet.