Here we go again!

Since 2010 that I don't post a thing in my tiny pretty blog. I guess many things have changed in my life, priorities and all. 

But now, I think that I have experienced enough to take it back. However, now it won't focus only on environmental matters, and as it is noticiable in this post, everything will be posted in english. 

Well, welcome back to me! 

(I slightly noticed that I forgot how to blog)

Embalagem sustentável com isolamento térmico

by Tulio Kengi Malaspina

Fonte: Nosso Impacto/Marcelorino

Entropy Solutions – Greenbox com gerenciamento térmico

Esta embalagem além de ter ganhado o prêmio Greener Package Award, foi ganhador também do prêmio Inovação do ano.

Greenbox é a primeira caixa de embarque de temperatura controlada produzido com 100% de fontes renováveis, atóxico e biodegradável. O material se chama PureTemp e é produzido por Entropy Solutions (www.entropysolutionsinc.com). O material é um óleo derivado de fontes vegetais que controla as temperaturas extremas que variam de frio como gelo seco, quente como o café, simultaneamente absorvem e liberam calor.

Mantém a temperatura por mais de cinco dias e evitando a deterioração do produto, o que faz com que a indústria deixe de perder mais de US $ 3 bilhões por ano em perda do produto. Além disse ele é reutilizável economizando mais de 65% no transporte e os custos de distribuição. Greenbox é reutilizável mais de 50 vezes.

Como se não fosse assustador os cinco dias de conservação da temperatura, a tecnologia ainda promete o mantenimento da temperatura de acordo com o produto comprado. O portfólio de embalagens térmicas é vasto e pode conservar produtos desde -40°C até 150°C. Não entendeu? Também demorei pra entender. O exemplo que eles dão no site é o do café, utilizando a embalagem de 57°C. Quando colocado o café na embalagem (mais quente que 57°C), o óleo absorve o calor e o mantém até que o café começe a esfriar abaixo da temperatura desejada (57°C) e, quando isso acontece, ela faz a troca inversa de energia, mantendo a temperatura sempre moderada.

Note que essa solução não feita para sua garrafa térmica, e sim para o transporte de produtos perecíveis que necessitam da conservação com pouca variação de temperatura.

Veja mais: http://www.greenboxsystems.com/

Catadores de lixo no Cairo constroem aquecedores solares com material reciclado

Livia Aguiar -18 de outubro de 2010

Na capital do Egito, uma comunidade é responsável pela coleta e reciclagem de cerca de 90% do lixo da cidade: os Zabbaleen (palavra árabe para “catadores de lixo”). A região onde vivem, também chamada de Zabbaleen, é uma cidade que abriga cerca de 50 mil pessoas, construída entre os rejeitos dos mais ricos, um cenário que faz as nossas favelas parecerem condomínios de luxo.

Ainda que vivam com menos de 1 dólar por dia, as casas do Zabbaleen contam hoje com água quente, gás e luz elétrica, tudo proporcionado pelo lixo. Através de iniciativa da Solar Cities, ONG norteamericana, foram construídos aquecedores solares e biodigestores (que queimam lixo e proporcionam gás e eletricidade para a comunidade) a partir dos dejetos de Cairo.

Thomas Culhane, coordenador do projeto, mora no Zabbaleen há quatro anos e desenvolve tudo com muita participação da comunidade. “Preparamos eco-comunidades que possam produzir soluções de água, energia, resíduos sólidos e que as pessoas sintam isso em seus ossos e mãos, que o vivam todos os dias”, enfatizou o pesquisador.

As 17 placas solares já instaladas no bairro, construídas com canos de ferro e chapas de alumínio de latas recicladas, aquecem a água que percorre os canos e a enviam a um tanque conectado com mangueiras e válvulas, também extraídas do lixo. Em um dia de sol (que não deve ser difícil no Egito, convenhamos…), uma família pode ter 200 litros de água quente sem gastar nem um centavo.

Segundo Thomas, a tecnologia para confecção de um aquecedor solar é tão simples que até uma criança de 2 anos de idade pode fazer – se ajudada por um adulto, claro. Um programa para o próximo Dia das Crianças?

(Com informações do site EcoDesenvolvimento

Foto: Alexander Heilner- American Public Media)

Fonte: Revista Superinteressante

The long road to sustainability

Western consciences can do only so much to conserve forests

Sep 23rd 2010 | From The Economist print edition

IN JUNE last year Daniel Avelino, the public prosecutor of Brazil’s state of Pará, the home of most of the Amazon cattle-herd, probably saved more rainforest than many conservation groups ever will. He identified 20 big ranches operating on illegally cleared land and traced the slaughterhouses buying their cattle. He then established that some of the world’s best-known retailers, including Wal-Mart and Carrefour, were buying meat from them. He fined the ranchers and abattoirs 2 billion reais ($1.2 billion) and told the retailers that unless they cleaned up their supply chains he would fine them, too.

The response was dramatic. Overnight, the retailers stopped buying meat from Pará and the slaughterhouses closed. To get themselves off the hook, and cows back on it, the abattoirs vowed that in future they would deal only with ranchers who had registered their names and property details and promised not to deforest illegally. Over 20,000 have done so. In the absence of a reliable land registry, Mr Avelino says this will make it much easier to bring illegal deforesters to book. “Once I know who owns the farm, I can send the fine through the post,” he says.

Around the same time Greenpeace waded in with a report on the role of Amazon beef in deforestation. That, too, hit at the rich end of the industry’s supply chain, linking beef and leather from the Amazon to companies such as Adidas, Nike, Toyota, Gucci and Kraft. Many have since agreed to work with Greenpeace against illegal deforestation. And Wal-Mart has promised to trace its products from the manger to the refrigerator.

That is the upside of growing global demand for tropical food, timber and biofuels: pressure for Western standards to be adopted up the supply chain. This is driven by the eco-worries of Western consumers—and the activists who play on them. Having been long since given the brush-off by rainforest governments, they are finding companies that operate in tropical countries and sell to Western markets much more responsive.

Nestlé, a giant food company, is another of Greenpeace’s recent targets. The environmentalists made a spoof advertisement for one of the company’s chocolate bars, KitKat, which contains palm oil, and published it on the internet. The ad shows an office worker munching on a chocolate bar which turns out to be the bloody severed finger of an orang-utan. This scored more than 1.5m online hits and put Nestlé in a panic. It stopped buying palm oil from its main Indonesian supplier, Sinar Mas, a big conglomerate with a reputation for chewing up rainforest, and said it would purge from its supply chain any producer linked to illegal deforestation. It has since promised to get 50% of its palm oil from sustainable sources next year. And unconvinced by the standard of most of this “sustainable” oil, Nestlé is setting its own.

Three reasons for pessimism

But there are three black clouds over this sunny scene. The first is financial: eco-concerned consumers may want sustainable products, but they do not want to pay more for them. That does not matter much to Nestlé because it buys only 320,000 tonnes of palm oil a year, just 0.7% of global output. It is a bigger problem for Wal-Mart, which deals in bulk and has tight margins. It expects to charge no more for its green beef than for its current offering. That will raise questions about how green it really is. To track an animal efficiently in the Amazon might well involve expensive technologies. Uruguay, for example, has a system of microchipping calves that costs about $20 a head. That may be beyond Wal-Mart’s budget.

The same problem haunts the main forest-related certification scheme, for timber. It dates back to 1993, when the Forest Stewardship Council, an alliance of greens and loggers, drew up a list of rules for sustainable forestry. The hope was that consumer demand for FSC-certified wood products would force logging companies to adopt the scheme. But only about 15% of timber globally, and less than 2% of tropical timber, is covered by it. Getting certified is expensive, costing about $50,000 per concession, and the returns are often meagre. Tests by the Home Depot, America’s biggest purveyor of FSC-stamped products, suggest that barely a third of customers would pay a premium of 2% for a certified product, not enough to green even Western retailers.

The second cloud over tropical certification schemes, as Wal-Mart may find, is doubt about their reliability. Some also say that sustainable tropical logging is impossible. Remove 200-year-old Amazon mahogany or Congolese sapele trees and the species may go locally extinct. And although it is true, as loggers argue, that extracting old, slow-growing trees and preserving their carbon in expensive furniture may represent a net sequestration opportunity, high levels of wastage make the argument less convincing. So does the fact that a logged forest can be much less permanent than a mahogany table.

Loggers do most harm to forests not by removing trees but by building roads that give land-grabbers access to them. To get FSC certification, companies need to prevent such trespass. But logging roads remain long after loggers have moved on. In Africa they represent a particular threat to precious forest fauna, including chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, by connecting forests to the fast-growing cities where bushmeat is prized. Along a fresh logging road in southern Cameroon, your correspondent once saw many hunters—and the half-eaten remains of two gorillas.

In messy countries like Cameroon, certification schemes get corrupted. At best, certifiers may struggle to examine vast concessions on brief visits, as the guests of loggers who are also paying their fee. Further down the supply chain, timber-dealers and factories are often certified largely on the strength of documents which may be illegally bought. This also allows inventories to be inflated and illegal wood to enter the supply chain. And there is still plenty about, despite the recent reduction reported in Cameroon and elsewhere.

Who cares?

The third factor undermining certification schemes is the most important: the majority of tropical commodities are not consumed in eco-sensitive markets. Most rainforest timber is used locally. In Brazil, for instance, the proportion is 80%. And the biggest importers of tropical timber, China and India, show scant concern for its provenance (though China, the biggest exporter of wood-based products to Western markets, has recently seemed to care a bit more). China and India are also the biggest importers of palm oil. Brazilian beef goes mainly to Russia, Iran, Hong Kong and Egypt. They are not tree-huggers.

This highlights one of the biggest problems in forest conservation. Most of the changes it requires, such as rational land-use planning, law enforcement and the rest, have to be led by governments. Market-led schemes can succeed up to a point, as Greenpeace has often shown, but without government support they soon hit their limits. On the other hand, when governments put their weight behind conservation, a fair bit of progress is possible.

Western governments are starting to do their bit. A 2008 amendment to America’s Lacey act has made it an offence to import illegal timber. This puts the onus on federal authorities to prove illegality, which can be difficult, especially when the wood is from a dodgy place, like Cameroon, and processed by a less dodgy one, like China. Nor is legality the same as sustainability, but often they are close. Gibson Guitar, an iconic American company, is at risk of becoming the first victim of this reform. It is being investigated on suspicion of knowingly importing illegal Madagascan rosewood.

In July the EU also passed a law criminalising the import of illegal timber. Its strict rules on beef imports, which demand traceability in producer countries, could one day help reform Brazil’s cattle practice. But it would be far better if Brazil were to decide to take such steps itself.

Source: The Economist Online

Reciclar para Preservar

O descarte incorreto do lixo é um problema que afeta diariamente a população. São litros e litros de água contaminados, entupimento de tubulações, contaminação do lençol freático, e consequentemente, enormes danos ao meio ambiente.

Um exemplo disso é o óleo de cozinha, que apesar de ser muito utilizado, quase nunca é tratado de forma correta. Segundo uma reportagem publicada no site EcoAgência, atualmente, apenas 5% do óleo sujo é reaproveitado. Porém, o que muitos não sabem é que um litro desse tipo de óleo, que não possui o descarte adequado, contamina cerca de um milhão de litros de água.

O óleo de cozinha, se não tratado corretamente, ao chegar nos rios e mananciais, impede a passagem de luz solar, e com isso impede a oxigenação das plantas aquáticas, afetando todo o seu ecossistema. Isso sem levar em consideração que em uma rede de coleta de esgoto, por exemplo, ele adere a outras substâncias, diminuindo a vazão das tubulações e provocando seu entupimento. Os danos causados podem ser irreversíveis.

Mas, pequenos atos de sustentabilidade podem mudar esse quadro, e ainda gerar matéria prima para indústrias de sabonete, detergentes, ração animal, biodiesel e graxas.

Para tanto, projetos foram desenvolvidos e o número de postos de coleta vêm aumentando cada vez mais. Um deles é o do supermercado Pão de Açúcar que, em conjunto com a Unilever, já garantiu a destinação adequada para mais de 20 mil litros de óleo desde o início do programa, em 2008. “Se levarmos em conta a quantidade de pessoas que tem na cidade, nós recebemos muito pouco desse produto. A população deveria ser mais incentivada”, diz Ademar Santana dos Santos, responsável pela coleta do óleo de cozinha no Pão de Açúcar.

De acordo com Sidney Cândido, supervisor da área de reciclagem do Pão de Açúcar, todo o óleo recolhido é doado para cooperativas. “O produto vai para indústrias específicas, como a Bioverde, por exemplo. Ele é transformado em biocombustível e é muito utilizado em caldeiras de indústria”. E completa “a unidade da avenida Ricardo Jafet , em São Paulo, é a que mais recebe doações. Recebemos em média 100 litros de óleo por mês”.

Em outros estados, como o Rio de Janeiro, foi criado o Disque Óleo, que coleta o produto no próprio estabelecimento ou na residência em garrafas PET ou galões, recicla, e depois vende para as indústrias.

O processo funciona da seguinte forma: primeiramente, o óleo recolhido é despejado no reservatório de filtragem, passando por um sistema de peneiras onde são retirados os principais resíduos. Em seguida, ele é colocado em um tanque de decantação. Enfim, armazena-se o produto em tanques, e esses são vendidos para as indústrias. Já o sabão usado diariamente nas residências, pode ser feito pela própria pessoa, de uma maneira bem simples, utilizando apenas amaciante e soda cáustica.

A reciclagem do óleo de cozinha gera benefícios para o meio ambiente e consequentemente para o ser humano, por isso é importante que cada um faça sua parte, contribuindo assim, para a sustentabilidade possível de se realizar. Desta forma, o que se espera para o mundo atual são compromissos, não apenas com a produção e a difusão do saber culturalmente construído, mas com a formação do cidadão crítico, participativo e criativo para fazer face às demandas cada vez mais complexas da sociedade moderna.

Fonte: E esse tal Meio Ambiente?

Descartáveis x Duráveis x Comestíveis

Quantos itens de plástico descartável estão ao seu redor ao longo de um dia? Copos de água, colherzinhas para mexer o café, pratos de doce…

Substituir os descartáveis por objetos de materiais duráveis é uma opção mais responsável visando à proteção do meio ambiente.

Por que não levar para o trabalho seu próprio copo ou caneca para tomar o cafezinho nosso de cada dia? E que tal substituir os mexedores de café por uma colher de metal? Em uma festa, dê preferência a copos e pratos de vidro. E caso não queria correr o risco de quebrar seus pertences, é sempre bom investir em itens de plástico durável (como os da foto ao lado) ou outro material mais resistente.

É importante ter em mente que o volume de água gasto na lavagem de pratos, copos e outros itens também pode colaborar para causar prejuízos ambientais. Nessas horas, o bom senso indica que o melhor é controlar o uso da água ou separar os descartáveis para a reciclagem, dando continuidade ao ciclo de reaproveitamento.

Entretanto, uma novidade tecnológica pode oferecer mais uma opção de objetos amigos do meio ambiente: os copos comestíveis!

Desenvolvidos pelo escritório de design The way we see the world, o copo comestível Jelloware promete revolucionar o conceito de beber. Ele é feito a partir de um tipo especial de gelatina de algas (agar-agar) e possi três sabores: limão e manjericão, gengibre e hortelã e alecrim e beterraba.

Mesmo com alguns aspectos polêmicos(e se você não quiser comer? Não pode reaproveitar? Pode-se produzir em larga escala? Tem prazo de validade?)e sabores de gosto duvidoso, o desenvolvimento dos copos Jelloware é interessante pois demonstra que sempre existem outras opções a serem criadas em prol do meio ambiente.

O que acham dessa invenção?

Fonte: Portal Exame.

Copos de gelatina? Biodegradáveis e comestíveis! (fonte: Portal Exame)

Energy in Texas: The search for power

Pondering alternatives to oil and gas in the land of the wildcatter

Sep 30th 2010 | MIDLAND, TEXAS | From The Economist print edition

THE Permian Basin, named for the geological era in which much of it was formed, stretches across hundreds of miles of eastern New Mexico and western Texas, capped by the deceptively modest-looking cities of Midland and Odessa. Much of the wealth in Texas came from oil and gas trapped here, and although oil production in Texas has dropped by two-thirds from its high in the early 1970s, the state’s reserves are sizeable still. Texas has nearly a quarter of America’s crude oil reserves, and 30% of its natural gas. Taxes on their production fill state coffers, allowing Texas to be one of the few states without income tax.

But in recent years, renewable-energy sources have captured more attention in Texas. Pride is a factor; Texas is a national leader in energy production (as well as consumption), and loth to let that go. But more to the point is that circumstances demand the switch. The state’s population is growing quickly, and energy needs will keep pace. Oil and gas will not be enough.

Texas already leads the nation in wind- power capacity, and in 2009 some 6% of its electricity was pulled from the air. The sky over west Texas is studded with wind turbines, which dwarf the drilling rigs that used to dominate the landscape. But critics notes that wind power can be erratic: if the wind slows (as it did for an extended period earlier this year), conventional power must be there for backup. And growth in the sector is constrained, at the moment, by transmission. Texas has its own electric grid, which was not built to handle so much generation from west Texas.

Though the state’s Public Utility Commission is building additional lines, advocates for other energy sources want a bigger piece of the pie. Nuclear power made up 14% of the state’s electricity generation in 2009, and several more reactors may be built, pending approval from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But nuclear power has staggering capital costs, and brings the controversial question of how to dispose of or recycle nuclear waste. Solar power has an intuitive appeal under the blistering south-western sun, but it is still expensive per megawatt. Meanwhile, efficiency experts chime in that some share of the state’s growing needs could be obviated by tighter standards.

Jobs are a key consideration. A report from the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation suggests that the more ambitious scenarios for renewable-energy investment in Texas could bring an additional 23,000 jobs to the state each year until 2020. Already the wind farms have hired thousands of workers in west Texas.

The oilmen, for their part, are fretting less about competition than about interference from Washington, DC. “They don’t understand our industry,” says Kevin Sparks, the president of Discovery Operating, shouting to be heard over the noise of a drill on a hot Midland afternoon. He was pessimistic about new taxes, and new federal regulations against hydraulic fracturing (a method of freeing underground fossil-fuel deposits by blasting the rocks with water and chemicals). There is a worry that the process contaminates groundwater, and the Environmental Protection Agency is studying the issue. It is a particular concern in Texas as a huge gasfield, the Barnett Shale, sits under the city of Fort Worth.

The oil industry’s bugbears, in addition to the environmentalists, include the not-quite-dead possibility of cap-and-trade regulation, and the ramifications of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Industry spokesmen think it unfair that all should be punished for the misdeeds of one, and hope that pragmatism will prevail. If the issue is power and jobs, it probably will.

Source: The Economist Online

This year’s Nobel prizewinners owe their award to insights into how people find jobs

Oct 14th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

TWO coconut trees grow on the veranda of the Chitradurga employment exchange in India’s Karnataka state, where Kalandar Khan, a young member of the state civil service, holds jobs fairs and recruitment rallies. A snapshot on his mobile phone shows the veranda thronged with potential applicants for an ambulance-driver post. Another shows an event for Bharat Fertiliser: again, standing-room only. Mr Khan’s task—matching job-seekers from a variety of backgrounds to employers with quite specific requirements—is not easy. Many of those registered on his exchange lack the skills that employers require.

Mr Khan is hardly alone in worrying about a mismatch between workers’ abilities and the jobs on offer. Halfway around the world, some reckon that many unemployed Americans lack the skills needed to fill those jobs that are being created as the country emerges from recession. Others blame deficient demand for the country’s stubbornly high unemployment. Still others point to the housing bust, which has hampered American homeowners’ ability to move to where new jobs are being created.

Divergent as they are, these opinions about America’s persistently high unemployment rate are all based on a similar conceptual view of the labour market. It is seen as a mechanism for pairing people with jobs in which matching cannot take place instantaneously. This way of thinking about the jobs market and unemployment owes an intellectual debt to research on markets with search frictions carried out in the 1970s and 1980s by Peter Diamond of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dale Mortensen of Northwestern University and Christopher Pissarides of the London School of Economics (pictured from left to right). On October 11th they were awarded this year’s Nobel prize for economics for their work.

The economists’ approach to these issues was a sharp break from the norm in the early 1970s, when standard economic models mostly treated labour as a commodity which had the worker’s wage as its price. There could be no unemployment in the simplest versions of these models, because wages would fall instantaneously to eliminate it. True, few economists took these simple models literally: lots of research was done to modify their assumptions and generate more realistic results, often by making it harder for wages to fall. But even the modified models took little note of data on how people flowed into and out of employment. The stretches of unemployment, the job hunts, the moves from job to job, the rate at which workers were fired or hired: all this was absent. Mr Mortensen argued that this needed to change. Investigating the way people actually went about finding jobs in an uncertain environment, he believed, should be a central concern of the analysis of labour markets. Initially working independently of each other—though Messrs Mortensen and Pissarides later collaborated fruitfully—this year’s laureates would go on to do just that.

The three economists built upon earlier work by George Stigler, who had studied the process by which people acquired information, and who won the Nobel prize himself in 1982. Pointing out that getting information costs time and effort, Mr Stigler argued that people would do so only as long as the additional benefits of having more information exceeded the additional costs of acquiring it. Mr Mortensen saw this framework as a useful way of thinking about labour markets, because finding employment in a decentralised labour market typically involves gathering and evaluating information on vacancies and wages.

Mr Diamond modelled this job-search process in a series of seminal papers written between 1979 and 1982. One was based on the premise that not all jobs are equally suitable for all workers. The first person offered a job might not be as good a match for it as the second or third person. So if every unemployed person grabbed the first job that came his way, the match between workers and jobs that resulted would not be optimal. By making it possible for workers to be more selective about the jobs they accepted, Mr Diamond showed, unemployment insurance would improve the efficiency of the labour market.

In another famous paper published in 1982, Mr Diamond showed how an economy in which different agents need to seek each other out could end up with several equilibrium rates of unemployment. In other words, there was no single “natural” rate: policymakers could in principle try for the equilibrium they most favoured. In a touch which Mr Khan in Chitradurga might appreciate, he explained his reasoning using the example of a tropical island where finding and trading coconuts was the only form of economic activity. Just as some people cannot find work, so some coconuts do not find a buyer. Economics students today still study the “Diamond coconut model”.

Not-so-rough Diamond

The best-known work by Messrs Mortensen and Pissarides, a joint paper written in 1994, is also a staple of economics courses. Whereas earlier analysis had tended to make assumptions about the rate at which job vacancies arose, the two figured this out from more basic assumptions about the incentives of workers and employers. Their results have particular resonance today: their model showed why unemployment would shoot up in a recession but fall much more slowly when a recovery began.

The work that earned this year’s Nobel prize was carried out decades ago. But with the unemployment rate in America stubbornly stuck at 9.6% 16 months after the official end of the country’s recession, it remains as relevant today as when it was done. Mr Diamond, for one, may soon have to apply some of the insights from his research to the real world. His nomination to the board of America’s Federal Reserve is still in limbo after some Republicans questioned his competence. Perhaps a Nobel prize will encourage them to revise their opinion.

Source: The Economist Online

Clearing up the climate

Aug 30th 2010, 20:22 by The Economist online

WHEN the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is in the throes of producing one of its periodic assessments of the science of climate change, its plenary meetings can be a sight to behold, with all the brinksmanship, skullduggery and last-minute compromises that aficionados of foreign policy could wish for. In between times, these meetings of the governments that give the IPCC its name, and mandate, are of little note. That may change, though, at the plenary scheduled for Busan, in Korea, this October.

Prominent on that meeting’s agenda will be the results of a report on the IPCC produced under the auspices of the InterAcademy Council, an umbrella group for the world’s national academies of science, which was released today. The report, written by a committee chaired by Harold Shapiro, a former president of Princeton University, was commissioned in March by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and the IPCC chair, Rajendra Pachauri, after errors were spotted in the most recent IPCC report last winter. While expressing admiration for the IPCC’s achievements to date, the Shapiro committee offers sharp criticisms of the way the panel organises itself and calls for reforms.

The report finds problems with the way the IPCC handles reviews of its work, the degree to which it shows fairness when considering areas that are disputed, and the way it communicates the certainty, or lack of it, wherewith it speaks. It calls for new rules on conflict of interest (or more accurately, it calls for rules—at the moment the panel has none), a new full-time leadership position and a new executive committee. Perhaps most strikingly, the report can also be read as a call for Mr Pachauri to resign, though neither Mr Pachauri nor Mr Shapiro have characterised it in quite that way.

First, a quick IPCC primer. The panel provides various types of report and analysis, most famously a series of vast “assessment reports” on the state of scientific and academic knowledge about climate. Each report comes in three volumes produced by three different working groups, one that deals with the physical science of climate change, one that deals with the impacts of change, and one that deals with ways of reducing the amount of change to be expected. Each working group consists of hundreds of authors under the leadership of two (or sometimes more) co-chairs, one from a developed country, one from a developing country. The fourth assessment report was published in 2007; the fifth is slated to come out in installments starting in 2013 and finishing in 2014.

The Shapiro committee’s report points out that the IPCC has to a large extent sat out the “governance revolution” in accountability and transparency that charitable, educational and other organisations have been dealing with in the two decades of the panel’s existence. One way to start getting up to date, it suggests, is to create a new executive committee able to act in the panel’s name between the plenary sessions that actually bring the member governments together. This could make the IPCC a lot more responsive and communicative.

The committee would consist of the IPCC’s chair, the co-chairs for each of the three working groups, an executive director (a newly created post) and three others appointed by the governments to whom the IPCC is answerable, with at least one of these council members coming from outside the world of climate science. The executive director would be a full time appointment (the chair and the working group co-chairs are part-time roles), a job for a senior scientist who could command at least as much respect within the community as the co-chairs, and who would do most of the work involved in actually running the panel.

The sting in the tale of this suggestion is that the report recommends that the IPCC insider members of this executive committee should serve for only one term—that is, they should make their contributions over only one of the six-year assessment-report cycles. Between the end of work on the fourth assessment report and the beginning of work on the fifth all but one of the working group co-chairs did in fact change over. Mr Pachauri himself, though, did not; he is now well into his second term. Mr Shapiro refused to be drawn on whether the idea that Mr Pachauri should go was the logical conclusion of the report’s argument that “A 12-year appointment is too long for a field as dynamic and contested as climate change,” allowing only that it was “one possible logical response”. Mr Pachauri said that he had taken up a burden, and that putting it down was a matter not for him, but for the Busan plenary.

In a further move towards transparency, the report says the IPCC should start clearly defining the criteria by which it selects authors and others, including the chair and the new executive secretary, and documenting the steps it takes to ensure that all relevant scientific points of view are being represented or at least addressed. It should also make sure that regional assessments benefit from global expertise, not just that of those living in the regions in question. This will go some way to meeting the worries of those who see clear signs of “groupthink” in the panel’s workings, though some of those critics might still press for the entire process of author selection to be made transparent.

Beyond organisation and personnel, the Shapiro panel also has things to say about the reports themselves. The drafts attract thousands of comments from expert reviewers and governments—last time round working group II’s volume alone attracted over 36,000. Dealing with them piecemeal, as is now the case, does not make the most of the insights they express, and allows things to slip through the net, such as the now-infamous erroneous claim about Himalayan glaciers vanishing in the next three decades. From now on review editors should be more forceful in identifying major issues in the comments and getting pertinent responses from the authors.

The report also highlights what might be called the political epistemology of the IPCC. In the summaries for policymakers that each working group provides, assessments of how likely an outcome may be do not always communicate the amount of evidence and the level of understanding on which that assessment is based. Mr Shapiro and his colleagues suggest that in the working group II summary, in particular, this led to statements being given a confidence level they did not deserve. A related problem was high confidence given to statements, such as “Nearly all European regions are anticipated to be negatively affected by some future impacts of climate change, and these will pose challenges to many economic sectors,” too vague to be assessed in any rigorous way.

Mr Pachauri and his colleagues welcomed the report at a press conference, but what actions it will lead to remain to be seen. The authors for the next assessment report have already been chosen. To deselect them and go through the process again would be time consuming and erode the goodwill on which the unremunerated process depends. Other reforms, though, could be set in train more easily, if the plenary wants to do so. The IPCC is a unique and remarkable institution; the governments that make it up will soon have the opportunity to improve it, if they can agree about just how much reform they want, and who they want to lead it.

(Photo credit: AFP)

Source: The Economist

How best to balance economic growth and protection of the environment?

Commentary by Yani Saloh, Office of the President for Climate Change, Indonesia -- special to mongabay.com

August 30, 2010

When people are hungry for an uncertain income, they will destroy everything. When people become poor due to a poor decision they were excluded from making, who should be responsible for that?

Development is seen as the answer to poverty. However, many controversial developments have actually increased poverty, and while the investors in such schemes may benefit, the local people pay the price.

This happened in Tundai, a fishing village in the ex-mega rice area near Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan. When central government in the 1990s decided to convert the peat swamp forests into rice fields, the community had no voice or involvement in the decision. The project failed. Now over a million hectares of former lush forests have become a wasteland, and the people of Tundai have been thrust into poverty.

The wider environmental impacts have become clear over time. The deforested and drained peat swamps easily catch fire in dry years resulting in huge fires and suffocating smog that may linger over the village for months. The haze affects public health and especially young children and the elderly. In dry years over 30% of the children have respiratory disorders because of the resulting smog.

Nobody knows the long-term effects are of many years of breathing - for months on end - the toxic peat smoke. The peat degradation also results in continuous emissions of huge amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Yet another consequence of the environmental destruction is the decrease in fish productivity in the area’s rivers and streams. This has directly affected the economy and livelihoods of the local people.

The decision to convert the peat swamps into rice fields enabled the rapid harvesting of the valuable timber in the area. Some people got very rich. But the people of Tundai village were left with a degraded environment and increased poverty.

With a new international financing scheme named REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation), there is hope that there will be payments for forest restoration and protection. Whereas in the past the conservation of tropical forests was seen as the responsibility of tropical countries alone now – there is international interest to pay substantially for the regeneration and conservation of forests and peatlands.

Reducing emissions and sequestering carbon has become a new business opportunity. It will be essential, however, that the local communities are involved in these developments from the outset: in planning, decision-making and implementation. These developments will again attract people from the outside. This brings a risk that the carbon projects will fail unless they are developed with, and by, local people, who need compensation for their efforts.

"REDD provides an opportunity for international communities, namely developed countries and companies, to contribute to the solutions of maintaining carbon stocks above and below the ground, while creating new sustainable livelihood opportunities for the locals," explains Agus Purnomo, Special Staff to the President of Republic Indonesia for Climate Change.

But REDD is complex, and clear mechanisms for international funding to reach the local people and action on the ground are still in their infancy. “I never heard anything about such a thing,” I was told by the local people. “If this mechanism can become reality, we hope that the funding will provide benefits directly to the local people.”

“Grants currently received often go to the ground like an inverted pyramid” said Suwido Limin, head of Center for International Tropical Peat Forest Research (CIMTROP) at the University of Palangkaraya, meaning that while a lot of money goes into the system, only a small percentage of funding is received by local people. “The challenge is how to reverse the pyramid of benefits so the people on the ground will be receiving more than those at the top?”

“The government should ensure that payments will be reaching the right targets,” said Alue Dohong, Kalimantan Site Coordinator of Wetland Indonesia Program.

“The management of large areas of degraded peatlands for forest regeneration and emission reductions can create thousands of local jobs,” asserts Marcel Silvius of Wetlands International, a Netherlands-based environmental NGO. “Local communities could become shareholders in carbon credit schemes, thus benefiting from successful projects.” To unlock this potential, national and local governments need to create the necessary regulations and oversee the governance of the projects.

There is a need to balance economic development and conservation of natural resources. The natural resources utilization should according the state laws and be aimed at economic growth for the welfare of the people at large, not just a few. It is time for the local people to be empowered in these exciting and new opportunities for sustainable development. Local wisdom needs to be respected and included into the decision making process for policies that will impact their lives.

Source: Mongabay