Since 2013, China has been trying to make cities like Beijing more flood-proof by replacing roads, pavements and rooftops with natural materials like soil that soak up water and by giving more space to water bodies like lakes to absorb stormwater.

But despite these measures, massive amounts of rainfall in recent weeks caused floods which killed at least 33 people, destroyed tens of thousands of homes and shut down the Chinese capital’s second busiest airport.

Experts told Climate Home the flooding shows the limited progress China has made on its plan to invest $1 trillion into sponge cities by 2030 – with the city still largely concrete.

Sponge airport overwhelmed

Even new infrastructure, build with the sponge city concept in mind, could not cope with the rains.

Daxing airport opened a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic. Its builders described it as a “sponge airport” as it was equipped with plants on its roof, a huge wetland and an artificial lake the size of over 1,000 Olympic swimming pools.

Despite these measures, the runways flooded on July 30 and it had to cancel over 50 flights.

Floods engulf Beijing Daxing Airport, halting flightshttps://www.yenisafak.com/en/video-gallery/news/floods-engulf-beijing-daxing-airport-halting-flights-3668129 pic.twitter.com/YabfuQbC9Y

— Yeni Şafak English (@yenisafakEN) August 2, 2023

Waters diverted

The government tried to collect the rain in 155 reservoirs in the Hai River Basin, but the measure proved ineffective in controlling the deluge.

About 50 years ago, the basin –a natural sponge–was locked with embankments and reservoirs to manage the water flow.

In recent years though, these structures have made flooding worse as climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall. These structures lead to overflow, collapse and the authorities have blown them up to ease flooding.

Indonesia delays $20bn green plan

Reuters reported that flood waters locked in reservoirs were diverted to low-lying populated land in Zhuozhuo, a small city around 80km from Beijing, to flush out the stormwater from the country’s national capital.

Residents of Zhuozhou were angry at the government’s response, Reuters reported. The government reacted by shutting down criticism on social media.

More work needed

Experts argued that these problems show that, rather than abandoning the sponge city project, China and Beijing need to double down and make them better.

Kongjian Yu is the founder of Turenscape, a company involved in the project. He said that just “maybe 1% or 10%” of the city has been converted to a sponge city.

The government’s target is 20% by 2030. “We have a long way to go,” he said.

Yu added that sponge cities are worth doing not just because they control floods but for managing droughts and refilling groundwater supplies too.

US sparks controversy by backing oil company’s carbon-sucking plans

Tony Wong, professor of sustainable development at Monash University, said that progress was always going to be slow as “it takes a long time and a lot of money” to convert a city like Beijing, with lots of people and concrete buildings crammed into a small area, into a sponge city.

More work is needed, says Wong, because Beijing and many other cities lack effective urban planning, and there is no provision for a safe channeling of extreme floodwater.

“What the city needs is the inclusion of green corridors, just like Singapore – another high-density city- has done to transport excess stormwater into low-lying areas to prevent loss of lives and property.”

If China pulls this off it could become an example for many developing countries with high-density cities struggling to control urban flooding, added Wong.

The post Devastating Beijing floods test China’s ‘sponge cities’ appeared first on Climate Home News.

But, as gold-medal winning Chinese-American teenager Eileen Gu spun four and a half times in the air, the backdrop was three Olympic-ring branded cooling towers.

On social media, it was mocked as “dystopian”, a “hellscape” and a symbol of climate change. Users speculated that it was a nuclear power or coal plant.

It’s actually the disused Shougang steel mill. Previously the city’s biggest polluter and one of its biggest employers, it shut down before the 2008 Olympics due to concerns over air pollution.

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Asked about the mockery, Beijing-based Greenpeace activist Li Shuo told Climate Home News: “I can’t comment on other people’s taste… For me, it is breathtaking. Just stunning,” he said.

The cooling towers were compared to The Simpson’s fictional Springfield nuclear power plant but Li said: “There are at least two themes that are meaningful if one bothers to dig a little deeper than Homer Simpson”.

First, he said, “it tells people that sports could be close to you, not necessarily in the Alps thousands of miles away”.

Second, he said, “it highlights a city’s transition towards a low-carbon economy and the tangible progress that can be achieved”.

Referring to London’s disused coal plant turned art gallery, he asked: “How come Tate Modern is cool and Big Air Shougang is not?”

London’s Tate Modern used to be a coal power plant but is now a modern art gallery (Photo: ReservasdeCoches.com/Flickr)

Over the last two decades, China’s capital has reduced its air pollution significantly by curbing coal smoke from heavy industry and home heating.

The area around the steel mill, which was built in 1919, was tranformed into a destination for tourism and cultural events, hosting weddings, electronic music festivals and breweries.

Engineering firm Arup, who redeveloped the site, claims it did so in a low-carbon way with green buildings, transport and energy. The company also claims the area’s design helps absorb rainwater, reducing the risk of flooding.

While Beijing’s air quality has benefitted from the mill’s closure though, the atmosphere hasn’t. The Shougang company opened a new mill a few hours’ drive out of town in Hebei province. So coal is still being burned to make steel, just not in Beijing.

Steel plants (red and orange) have moved from Beijing to neighbouring Hebei province (Photo: Global Energy Monitor/Global steel plant tracker)

On top of this, according to Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air analyst Lauri Myllyvirta, some of the pollution wasn’t banished far enough away for Beijingers.

“All the heavy industry from Beijing was moved to different parts of Hebei [before the 2008 olympics], assuming that’s so far away – 300/400 km – that it is not going to affect Beijing any more,” he said .

“But in the following half a decade the industry mushroomed to such a size in Hebei that that became a much bigger problem for Beijing’s air quality,” he added.

The games’ environmental critics have pointed to the use of energy and water intensive fake snow, both at the venues in Beijing and at the Zhangjiakou ski slopes, a three hour drive north of Beijing.

This is the Winter Olympics in the era of climate breakdown. The first winter games to rely almost entirely on fake snow. The hills outside Beijing are snow-free, so 49 million gallons of water and 300 snow guns have been used to create this. pic.twitter.com/wYtB6qMGII

— XR Cambridge (@xr_cambridge) February 6, 2022

Fake snow is needed because, although it is cold, the area is dry. Evaluting Beijing’s bid, the International Olympic Committee said: “Northern China suffers from severe water stress and the Beijing-Zhangjiakou area is becoming increasingly arid.” It blamed this stress on climate change, intensive industrial and agricultural use and high domestic demand.

Beijing is not the first host city to struggle for snow. As early as 1964, Austrian volunteers had to carry and hand-pack ice into snow for the Innsbruck games. New York’s Lake Placid was the first games to use snow machines in 1980. In recent years, their use has become routine. They were used in Vancouver in 2010, Sochi in 2014 and PyeongChang in 2018.

But Beijing is the first games to rely completely on fake snow. Strasbourg University geographer Carmen de Jong told the Wall Street Journal that making this snow could use two million cubic metres of water, worsening the region’s water stress.

Turning water to snow is also energy-intensive although the venues’ developer claims the snow canons are powered by nearby wind farms.

The trend towards fake snow is likely to intensify at future Winter Olympics as the climate heats up. Of the 21 past venues, a study by the University of Waterloo found that only 12 will be cold enough to host it with real snow again in the 2050s, even if the world meets its Paris climate targets.

Places like Russia’s black sea resort of Sochi and the Alpine towns of Grenoble, Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Chamonix will be too warm, they found.

This study only took into account temperature, not rainfall levels. So it included Beijing in its list of  eight hosts which will stay “climate reliable” even in a high-emissions scenario in the 2080s.

The next games will be hosted by the Italian city of Milan and the nearby ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo. According to Waterloo University, this will be reliably cold enough for snow.

The post Cooling towers, fake snow: What the Beijing Winter Olympics says about climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

“After that, every time we turned on the water, it came out yellow,” Galicia Flores said. “We tried drinking it for a while, disinfecting it with bleach, but the kids started getting sick.”

The 68-year-old and her family have tried a variety of options over the years, knowing the once-clean water was a lost cause. 

“We live close to a city well,” explained Galicia Flores’ daughter Elena Hernández Galicia, “but that’s where only yellow water comes out. There’s even a sign out front: ‘Not drinkable.’” 

The family is one of many who regularly struggle to get clean water in Mexico City – an estimated 1.3 million of the city’s almost 9 million residents lack regular water access. As coronavirus rips through town, water-poor households are particularly vulnerable to infection.

Last year, the general coordinator of the Water System of Mexico City (Sacmex), Rafael Bernardo Carmona, admitted that more than 40% of the city’s running water is lost to leaks.

And, thanks to increasingly extreme weather conditions caused by climate change, along with rapid urban growth, the situation has grown critical: The World Bank and Mexico’s National Water Commission project enormous water deficits by 2030, gravely impacting water access for millions more.

Severa Galicia Flores stores well water in plastic jugs, disinfecting it with bleach, on her patio (Photo credit: Kylie Madry)

In Mexico, water has been a constitutionally protected human right since 2012 and is heavily subsidised – if it arrives at all. Pedro Moctezuma Barragán, an environmental sociology professor at the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM) in Mexico City and water activist with Agua para Tod@s, Agua para la Vida (Water for All, Water for Life), was key to the fight for constitutional recognition. “Our government made this promise to us,” he said, “and now they have to keep it.” 

San Gregorio Atlapulco, where Galicia Flores lives in Xochimilco, has been labeled by the Mexico City government as a “priority attention neighbourhood,” with some of the highest cases of the novel coronavirus in the area. 

Most residents of the area are in a similar position to her, some going days without water coming out of the tap, forcing them to choose between regular handwashing and other daily activities like washing dishes, laundry, and bathing. It’s a cruel twist of irony, seeing as “Atlapulco” is Nahautl for “where the water churns” – the neighbourhood was known, for centuries, for its fresh water. 

“The lack of water in Mexico has definitely made Covid worse,” Barragán said. “If you look at a map of neighbourhoods without water, and neighbourhoods with high numbers of coronavirus, they’re the same.”

Severa Galicia Flores (right) sits in her front garden with her daughter Elena Hernández Galicia and granddaughter Melissa Fuentes Hernández (Photo credit: Kylie Madry)

Luckily for Galicia Flores and her family, local nonprofit Isla Urbana is installing a rainwater harvesting system in their house today, almost three years after the earthquake. They were picked from a handful of applicants in the neighborhood.

“[The rainwater harvesting systems] are especially important given the sanitary crisis,” said Emilio Becerril, Isla Urbana’s public policy and management coordinator. “With more, and better, water, [recipients] can have higher levels of hygiene and health, free up time for other productive activities like education, work, etc, and apart from that, it significantly reduces the stress caused by water precarity.” 

The group hopes to install 22 systems through September, with another 15 coming in October. Since its founding in 2015, Isla Urbana has set up around 350 in San Gregorio Atlapulco alone. 

City officials and some scientists tout Isla Urbana’s mission as the perfect solution for Mexico City’s crumbling water infrastructure. The group won a contract with the city’s environmental ministry to design and implement a city-wide program, installing 10,000 systems in 2019. It is in talks to carry out another phase in 2021.

Isla Urbana installs a rainwater harvesting system at Severa Galicia Flores’ house on 9 September 2020 (Photo credit: Kylie Madry)

The struggle for water access is not just an engineering problem, it is deeply political.

Alejandro Ugalde González remembers how water used to flow freely through San Bartolo Ameyalco, the neighbourhood where he grew up. With a freshwater spring that had provided water to residents for centuries, things changed in San Bartolo when mega-housing developments started to go up nearby, he says.  

“These massive developments for the rich, every house has their own cisterns that hold up to 20,000 gallons of water, they use it to wash their cars, their horses, water their gardens, everything,” Ugalde González said. “And meanwhile, we stopped getting water in San Bartolo. Now the neighbourhood is split in two: the higher part and the lower part of the neighbourhood. We have to alternate water. Some people get water during the day, some just at night.” 

He’s loath to point all of the blame at the developers, however, saying that the local government, the Álvaro Obregón municipality, has permitted it. “Of course if we ask them if it’s happening, they’ll deny it,” he said. “But where else could all of this water be going? We know how much water comes out of the spring. But we’re not getting any of it.”

That’s why, in 2014, the neighbours of San Bartolo distanced themselves from the municipality, reclaiming its “traditional representation” as a pueblo originario (a small town that was later absorbed into Mexico City).

In the gated communities of San Bartolo Ameyalco, residents have plenty of water to keep their lawns lush (Pic: Kylie Madry)

This means that they now have a semi-self governing body, which Ugalde González was appointed head of in January, though many administrative issues like water management remain in the hands of the city.

The move was spurred by the events of 21 May, 2014, when residents sought to block the installation of pipes they feared would reroute water to other neighbourhoods. The municipality sent 1,500 police to “protect” the installation. In the resulting conflict, 100 residents were wounded and five detained for more than a year.

“It was an enormous violation of human rights,” Ugalde González said, “And the municipality wonders why we don’t trust them?” 

In the middle of the pandemic, many residents still go days without water. “The municipality tells us they’ll send us pipas [water tankers], but they refuse to come here,” Ugalde González said. And just like in San Gregorio Atlapulco, Covid-19 cases have been high in San Bartolo Ameyalco – though the neighbourhood dropped off the government’s “priority attention” list in August. 

There are other factors at play besides water, of course: Ugalde González points to an early lack of education around the coronavirus, pre-existing health conditions, and little government support as contributors to the havoc the virus has played in the area for the past six months.

Residents of San Bartolo Ameyalco painted a mural on the side of a water-pumping station in the neighborhood, the site of the May 21, 2014 clash with police. The mural reads “Freedom for political prisoners,” and “Water isn’t merchandise.” (Photo credit: Alejandro Ugalde González)

For citizens with low confidence in their government, rainwater harvesting systems could give a needed boost of trust in a city known for its rainy season – and its flooding. Every afternoon for close to half the year, massive amounts of water drop down into the city like clockwork  – leaving billions of gallons of potentially usable water to waste. Since Mexico City lacks a comprehensive water drainage system, most of that rain floods out onto the streets, into metro stations, and into homes, costing Mexico an estimated $230 million (£178 million) a year. 

The city’s drainage system is over 50 years old and the city’s population has rapidly expanded in that time, explained Mario Lopez Perez, who worked in Mexico’s National Water Commission (Conagua) for decades. “The pipes aren’t designed to handle double the capacity of water they used to,” he said.

Experts predict that the flooding will only get worse, as climate change causes more erratic weather patterns – in the month of September alone, Mexico City has seen some of its heaviest rains in the past 20 years. Beyond the flooding damage, the crisis is worsening the city’s sinkage levels, sewage spills and earthquakes. 

Rainwater harvesting may not be a long-term solution to flooding, but could offer a needed relief to an overworked, underproducing water system. “They reduce costs just as much for the families as for the government, since, when there’s no water, they have to subsidize pipas and other water delivery methods,” Becarril said. 

The relief they provide to individuals and families may not be the golden ticket, however. “[Rainwater harvesting systems] help, but don’t solve the problem,” Lopez Perez said. The ex-official points to more complicated approaches, such as better urban planning, and looking for more natural water sources, to keep future generations from going without.

But for today, Lopez Perez asks, “What am I supposed to wash my hands with, if I don’t have anything?”

This article is part of a climate justice reporting programme supported by the Climate Justice Resilience Fund. You can find our policy on reporting grants here.

The post Covid exposes Mexico City’s water access gap between rich and poor appeared first on Climate Home News.

The lockdown emptied the roads and cleared the skies over the world’s largest and most polluted cities. It opened a window on what cleaner cities could look, sound and smell like.

At its peak in early April, the slowdown of road, rail and maritime transport contributed the largest drop in global emissions – just under half of a 17% daily fall in CO2 emissions, according to a study published last month in Nature.

Now restrictions are lifting, while the risk of infection puts people off public transport, a shift to private cars threatens to send emissions rocketing. Global emissions have already bounced back to just 5% below pre-pandemic daily levels.

City authorities have a challenge to make sure commuters can travel to work at a safe distance from each other.

‘Final blow’ to aviation climate plan as EU agrees to weaken rules

Many mayors have promised to rebuild greener and fairer. From Mexico City to London and Bogota to Milan, plans for hundreds of kilometres of new bike lanes have been announced – strengthening a pre-pandemic movement to reduce car dominance.

Nearly 40 members of C40, a network of major cities working to address climate change, committed to use the recovery to drive investments in “excellent public services” and increasing community resilience against future threats, including climate change.

This will require a holistic approach, going much further than a few cycle lanes.

“Cycle lanes shouldn’t be an end in themselves – they are a means to live differently,” Carlos Moreno, scientific director of the Entrepreneurship, Territory, Innovation chair at Sorbonne University in Paris and a planning advisor to mayor Anne Hidalgo, told Climate Home News.

Moreno believes the transformation of cities needs to align with a pathway to holding global warming to 1.5C, the tougher target of the Paris Agreement. To achieve that, the best available science says global emissions need to nearly halve by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.

“We have 10 years to radically transform our cities,” he said.

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To live within today’s climate, biodiversity and public health constraints, Moreno argues for an overhaul of urban design to bring essential services closer to people’s homes. People get around by foot or cycle and streets are redesigned not merely as places of transit but as “living spaces”.

The pandemic compelled local authorities in densely populated areas to reclaim streets for public use: entire road sections were pedestrianised in Tel Aviv, pavements enlarged in Auckland, parking spaces became bikes lanes in Tirana, and restaurants were encouraged to use outdoor spaces for dining in Vilnius.

Janette Sadik-Khan, former transport commissioner for New York city, said the move would have been considered  “almost revolutionary” a decade ago.

“This is a historic moment when cities can change course,” she wrote in a report by the National Association of City Transportation Officials which she chairs. “Empty lanes… form the outline of the future cities we need to build,” she said.

While there is clear public support for policies that would maintain air quality improvements, private cars are still perceived as the Covid-safe transport option.

“It would be naïve to think the pandemic is going to lead to the death of the car, in a context where public transport is associated with risk,” said Tim Schwanen, director of the Transport Studies Unit at Oxford University’s School of Geography and the Environment.

Comment: Coronavirus shows why we need an economy designed for wellbeing

The swing back to private cars is a serious concern, he told CHN. In the absence of holistic transport policies, it could cause emissions to rebound sharply.

A spike in air pollution would aggravate any future respiratory pandemic. Researchers established a link between long-term exposure to PM2.5 air pollution, much of which comes from diesel cars, and a higher death rate from Covid-19.

Yet in Wuhan, ground zero for the pandemic, car sales boomed to unprecedented levels when the city reopened after being sealed off for weeks.

An Ipsos survey in March found 66% of Chinese respondents used private cars after lockdown, compared with 34% before the outbreak. Use of buses and public transit dropped from 56% to 24%.

The study also found an uptake in people’s intention to buy a car – a trend so stark it is likely to foreshadow a similar rise in other parts of the world, Schwanen said. Early indications suggest this could already be happening.

Data published by Apple Maps on searches for directions to travel by car shows notable increases compared with volumes recorded on 13 January – a 16% rise in the US and 14% in Germany.

“Cities cannot do without public transport. It’s absolutely vital that it is brought back to some forms of normality within the constraints of public health,” Schwanen said.

“There’s no reopening cities w/o reopening transit,” tweeted Sadik-Khan in response to guidance to employers by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggesting incentives for staff to drive private cars to work.

“Let them drive cars.”

The CDC telling workers to drive alone assumes that everyone owns a car and that cities can handle the traffic.

This is a fever dream.

There’s no reopening cities w/o reopening transit. Ruling it out doesn’t make it safer. https://t.co/CduIy87kma

— Janette Sadik-Khan (@JSadikKhan) May 30, 2020

The document sparked considerable backlash, with University of British Columbia urban planning professor Lawrence Frank telling CNBC: “Promoting private vehicle use as public health strategy is like prescribing sugar to reduce tooth decay.”

Coronavirus delays work to protect the world’s poor from climate shocks

There are some positive signs the recovery to Covid-19 could help accelerate the transition to low-carbon transport.

Germany’s economic rescue package, which includes €5.9billion to incentivise electric vehicles and supporting infrastructure, was hailed as a “watershed moment” by local media. Notably, the government snubbed the powerful carmaker lobby’s calls to extend a buyer’s premium to petrol and diesel cars.

The UK, which is presiding over next year’s UN climate talks, has made the move to zero-carbon road transport one of five key themes for Cop26.

Electric cars are not the whole answer. While they pollute less than fossil fuelled cars, they take up the same amount of space, causing congestion.

Yet without government intervention, it could take years for public transport usage to resume to pre-pandemic levels, as confidence in the safety of the networks has eroded, Mike Lydon, of the urban planning firm Street Plans, told CHN.

“Political leaders need really strong messaging about the reality and safety of using public transport,” he said. “A lot of people assume it’s a big risk to take public transport but maybe it’s not as big a risk as they think.”

Japan to launch ‘green recovery’ platform and ministerial meeting

The emphasis on cycling facilities serves a vocal constituency that is “middle class, young and mostly white,” Schwanen said. This risks failing to cater for more vulnerable communities.

“We are far from doing really inclusive transport planning. Given the speed at which things are taking place, this is not given the thought and attention needed,” he added.

It is a political issue.

In the US, calls to “defund the police” are gaining ground. A rallying cry at “black lives matter” protests, it reflects the fact that policing has come to dominate city budgets. Proponents argue public safety would be better served by investment in community-based services, which could include urban redevelopment.

In Paris, the transformation of urban mobility has become a key issue in this year’s mayoral election.

Moreno, of the Sorbonne University, has a vision of a capital where people can access all their needs, including schools, workplaces, supermarkets, hospitals, green spaces, culture and sports facilities, within 15 minutes of their home by walking or cycling.

La #VilleDuQuartDHeure, c’est quoi ? C’est la ville des proximités où l’on trouve tout ce dont on a besoin à moins de 15 minutes de chez soi. C’est la condition de la transformation écologique de la ville, tout en améliorant la vie quotidienne des Parisiens. #Hidalgo2020 pic.twitter.com/lcQbPAjdxj

— Anne Hidalgo (@Anne_Hidalgo) January 21, 2020

School playgrounds are open at the weekend as green spaces, every street includes large pavements, cycle lanes and vegetation with reduced space for cars and water fountains are used to cool down the city on increasingly hot days caused by global heating.

Mayor Hidalgo made the ambitious plan the backbone of her re-election campaign, describing it as “the condition for the city’s ecological transition”. The idea has inspired other cities including Melbourne, Vancouver and Milan to develop similar proposals.

“Environmental and health issues need to be addressed at the local level,” Hidalgo said during an online event on the city’s recovery last month. “In this vision for a 15-minute city, I believe there is a solution for tomorrow.”

The post It will take more than a few cycle lanes to make green, pandemic-proof cities appeared first on Climate Home News.

“We were swimming in the rivers, played football and other games on buffers,” reminisced Takele Getachew, a 58-year-old man.

But for the past few decades that has not been possible, as the water became more and more polluted due to urban development.

“I witnessed closely how the Ginfile and Kebena have gradually been polluted and become waste disposal sites and sewerage spillways,” Getachew lamented.

After decades of neglect, there is now some hope for the waterways. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s controversial Addis Ababa River Side Project, also known as the ‘Beautifying Sheger Project’, aims to clean up the rivers, making the city a model of green development in the process.

“I think the new riverside development project will save the rivers,” Getachew said, adding that they are a living memory of “past good times” and of the city’s “identity”.

The three-year project, expected to cost 29 billion birr ($900 million), aims to enhance the well-being of city dwellers by mitigating flooding and pollution through the creation of public spaces and parks, bicycle paths and walkways along the riverside.

But cleaning up Addis Ababa’s rivers comes with a human cost.

“The river was polluted and we were suffering floods during rainy season, but it is being cleaned now,’ said Asnakech Mesfin, 55, a mother of two who lives in an area known as the Sheraton expansion, an area affected by the development.

The project also runs through the densely populated villages known as Basha Wolde Chilot, Siga Mededa and Arogew Kera or generally Arat Killo.

The government “started demolishing our shelters without any warning’’, Asnakech said. “They send police here and demolished our shelters during holidays which led us to live on the streets for 4 months.’’

“The question is where shall we shelter? Any development should give priority for people first.”

The project starts from Mount Entoto to Akaki, covering 56km of green areas along the rivers, passing through the former Basha Wolde Chilot, in front of the national Parliament at Arat Kilo and the heavily populated Piassa in Addis Ababa’s centre.

The first phase of the project, running from Entoto to Bambis Bridge, is under construction with financial support the state-owned China Construction Company (CCCC), and is scheduled to be finished by May 2020. It is estimated to currently be about 55% complete.

It runs down to the Grand Menelik II Palace, through an area with villages like Asnakech’s. Now, there are just the place names remaining, but no residents.

Addis Ababa riverside development plan (Source: Mayor Office of Addis Ababa)

Not far from the project site, there are mud and plastic homes where poor residents still dwell. The few people left along the river are experiencing tough conditions, with huge lorries passing through villages and construction taking place around them.

Thousands fear displacement during the second phase of the project.

The development has been criticised for not respecting two of the 15 principles of sustainable development, agreed in 2012 at the Stakeholder Forum of the Rio 20+ meeting.

Principle 9 states that, “all citizens should have access to information concerning the environment, as well as the opportunity to participate in decision-making processes.”

And principle 5 says developments should ensure “individuals and societies are empowered to achieve positive social and environmental outcomes”.

Neither of these principles appears to have been followed.

Most of Asnakech’s village was demolished long ago. The residents were relocated to the outskirts of the city, paying for new government accommodation through a loan scheme.

“They told us immediately to leave the place. We would be happy if they informed us before’’, she said.

“There is no value just constructing buildings and developing green areas without due attention to livelihoods,” she said. “They are treating us like enemies.”

“The government has not visited us and discussed with us to find a solution. I have been suffering to support my son who is a grade 6 student here on the street,” Asnakech said.

The city government and prime minister’s office declined to comment.

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Addis isn’t the only one of Ethiopia’s cities to have faced critical waste management challenges and difficulties implementing and sustaining urban green infrastructure. But the problem is more complex in the capital.

Dr. Manaye Ewenetu, Associate Engineer at Symmetrys Structural and Civil Engineers, criticised the sustainability of the city’s green strategy but approved of the prime minister’s vision.

Ewenetu is concerned about two things – access to water and pollution. “There is already water stress in the city and will continue to get worse unless a proper demand and supply assessment is undertaken by the relevant authorities,” he said.

“As it is observed on the ground, most of the Addis Rivers are non-perennial rivers which mean they do not have flows for most of the year except during the winter period.’’

A detailed hydrological assessment should have been undertaken to establish the flow regime of the rivers in the city to ensure the flow of water in summer season, he said.

He also worries about pollution in the rivers. “At the moment dirty water from all residential and commercial properties including factories, schools, and hospitals is discharged into the rivers,’’ he said.

So while Addis Ababa’s River Side project is a genuine attempt to green a developing city, critics say it is still a long way from being a model of sustainable development.

This article was produced as part of an African reporting programme supported by Future Climate for Africa. See our editorial guidelines for what this means.

The post Addis Ababa riverside project gives priority to development over residents appeared first on Climate Home News.

But booming car sales may impact efforts to preserve its rare status as a carbon negative country – and an increase in traffic is testing the good humour of its citizens.

Bhutan has seen a more than five-fold increase in cars, buses and trucks on its roads in the past two decades, according to transport authority director general Pemba Wangchuk, with capital Thimphu hardest hit by the influx of vehicles.

Phuntsho Wangdi, a media consultant, says the congestion and lack of parking now makes driving stressful in the tiny Himalayan kingdom where there are no traffic lights.

“I wish there were fewer cars. It wasn’t like this before,” he adds of life in Thimphu, which is home to half the cars in the country.

Climate Home News needs your help… We’re an independent news outlet dedicated to the most important global stories. If you can spare even a few dollars each month, it would make a huge difference to us. Our Patreon account is a safe and easy way to support our work.

The nation’s economy has grown 7.5% each year in the past decade, according to the World Bank. Officials estimate there is now one car for every seven people in Bhutan, which has a total population of 750,000.

But the nation’s narrow country lanes and outdated city roads can barely cope. A lack of infrastructure, along with poor driving etiquette – some simply leave their cars parked in the middle of the road – compounds the problem.

“Every year the number of cars and the number of people are increasing, and the roads have remained the same, and it’s a problem for us,” Lhendup, a taxi driver, tells AFP.

Morning rush hour journeys that once took five minutes now take more than half an hour.

This may seem a small figure compared to the hours of gridlock faced by commuters in Manila, Jakarta, and Bangkok, but it is a step-change for the Bhutanese, who say the situation has rapidly deteriorated in the past year.

“Its chaotic. I eat my breakfast in the car now to save time,” says Kuenzang Choden, who drops her four-year-old daughter at school every day before heading to work.

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The traffic jams are a sign of the wider economic changes the nation is facing. Bhutan is renowned for prioritising Gross National Happiness over GDP, and has captured tourists’ imagination as a tranquil, idyllic land, but there are signs of malcontent.

According to the World Bank’s 2018 report, the youth unemployment rate is high, as is rural to urban migration, which puts a strain on the resources of towns and cities. And despite it’s reputation as a place where well-being is prioritised, it ranked 95th out of 156 countries in the 2019 UN World Happiness Report.

The proliferation of the internet and smartphones are fuelling modern desires, while dealers are filling their showrooms with new brands and models from Japan and South Korea to lure buyers.

And while taxes have increased and restrictions put on vehicle loans, car buyers are not discouraged.

Local financial institutions gave 3.2 billion ngultrum ($46 million) in car loans in 2015, but by last year the amount had reached 6.7 billion ngultrum ($96 million).

The figures please local businessmen but worry environmentalists keen to ensure Bhutan remains one of the world’s greenest countries.

Environmental activist Yeshey Dorji explains: “As a nation that prides itself on being a carbon-negative country, the increase in the number of fossil fuel vehicles speaks poorly of our leadership position in environmental conservation.”

Bhutan and Suriname, both with lush forests, are the only two countries to claim they are carbon negative, absorbing more carbon pollution than they give off.

Analysis: Which countries have a net zero carbon goal?

Methane from cows, the burning of crops and other farm activities used to be Bhutan’s main source of greenhouse gases. But that has changed in recent years to industry and cars.

Bhutan’s constitution dictates that at least 60% of the country must be forest and the figure is currently above 70%.

But Bhutan is now importing more in fossil fuels than it exports in hydropower to India — the country’s biggest revenue earner.

Public transport is poor, particularly in Thimphu, which is home to 100,000 people but barely 40 buses.

The capital’s mayor Kinlay Dorji plans to introduce bus-only lanes on city roads and wants to buy more buses.

“Its time for radical measures,” he says.

“We have to make public transport more attractive and discourage owning cars,” he adds, warning that unless action was taken Thimphu risked grinding to a standstill.

To ease congestion, the city is also constructing its first two multi-storey car parks that will each take about 600 cars.

The National Environment Commission insists Bhutan is still carbon negative despite the traffic jams and vehicle boom, but wants to stop things worsening.

Commission secretary Dasho Sonam P Wangdi explains: “We cannot stop people from buying cars, but we can introduce alternative, less polluting cars such as the hybrid and electric ones to reduce carbon footprint.”

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Just 50% of 4.5 million people in Harare and four satellite towns currently have access to the municipal water supply, the city authority told Climate Home News.

“There is a rotational water supply within the five towns,” Harare city council corporate communications manager Michael Chideme said. “Some people are getting water five days a week especially in the western suburbs, but the northern suburbs are going for weeks without a drop in their taps.”

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Chideme said people were either depending on water merchants, open wells, streams or several council-drilled boreholes. “The situation is bad, period!”

Dr Jean-Marie Kileshye from WaterNet warned Harare’s water was highly polluted: “Water-borne diseases linked to these boreholes are on the rise, but people have had to take in their own hands water supply because the utility has failed to provide water.”

Hardlife Mudzingwa, of Harare’s Community Water Alliance, said 10 typhoid cases were reported during the first week of July in the southwestern suburb of Glen View.

Cities around the world are facing increased water stress. Last week, the Indian city of Chennai began using trains to ferry in emergency supplies after rains failed. In 2018, Cape Town in South Africa avoided a city-wide water network shutdown by just a few months.

Zimbabwe is getting warmer as the climate changes and heavy rains and droughts are becoming more intense. In Harare, rains are expected in October at earliest, according to James Ngoma of the Zimbabwe Meteorological Services Department.

In 2018, a drought warning was issued to Zimbabwe by the Southern Africa Development Community. But those messages were not getting through, said Brad Garanganga, a climate scientist from Zimbabwe. Under-resourced meteorological departments had not been able to help policy makers “make decisions to take action on this type of important information ahead of time rather than wait until a crisis hit”.

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Harare obtains raw water from four dams: Harava, Seke, Chivero and Manyame. Harava and Seke are completely dry. This has led Harare city council to decommission the Prince Edward water treatment plant, which is fed by those dams.

This has left only one water treatment works – Morton Jaffray – supplying water to Harare and the four other satellite towns.

The dams that feed Morton Jaffray – Chivero and Manyame – are larger and closer to capacity, said Harare mayor Herbert Gomba. But they are “heavily polluted”, requiring more than 10 chemicals to purify. Upstream towns dump domestic, sewage, agricultural and mining waste into the rivers that feed the capital’s dams. The city is spending $3 million a month on water treatment chemicals, Gomba said, forcing it to restrict the amount released.

Decreased water levels at the highly-polluted Lake Chivero (Photo: Justin Mutenda/Herald)

Harare’s daily demand is around 1,200 million litres (Ml). Gomba told CHN the city was producing around 450Ml a day. Last month, Harare City Council recommended the water situation be declared a national emergency.

Community organiser Mudzingwa said he believed the city supplies to be less than 100Ml/day. Companies that packaged and sold bottled water to supermarkets and hotels were still receiving municipal supplies, while residents saw their taps turned off, he claimed.

Harare’s water system was designed to service a population of 350,000 people, said Kileshye. The last upgrade was in 1994, but the country has since been in near-constant economic crisis. The city council’s website says some sections of infrastructure have been in use for more than 60 years, “way beyond their economic life of at least 15 years”.

Chennai: Trains deliver emergency water to drought-hit city

With this in mind, in 2011, the Zimbabwean government signed a loan of $144m from the China Export-Import (Exim) Bank to upgrade its water infrastructure.

The government has accessed $72m, according to Gomba, with which the Morton Jaffray water treatment plant was rehabilitated. But five distribution centres and two sewage treatment plants were yet to rehabilitated.

Mudzingwa raised questions over how the other half of the loan was administered, saying: “A 2014 internal audit report produced by City of Harare showed that there was inflating of quotations on materials that were bought through the loan. Corruption marred the water project with commodities overpriced, hence the government was not able to access the full amount.”

Climate Home News launches African reporting programme

Gomba rejected corruption allegations. “We never received liquid money, but equipment procured from China. It was due to the government’s inability to honour previous loans following the economic crisis that hindered access to the balance, not corruption.”

The mayor added that non-payment of residential and commercial rates was hampering his administration from effectively delivering water. Even after rehabilitation, he warned supplies from Prince Edward and Morton Jaffray works would reach only 770Ml per day, leaving a shortfall of 430Ml.

“We have to construct three new dams, to add about 840 million cubic metres. But over time Harare has to decommission the old dams and allow them time to rehabilitate naturally,” said the mayor.

Map: Two of Harare’s four reservoirs, Chivero and Manyame, seen to the west of the city, are heavily polluted.

In 2016, the Zimbabwean government signed a contract with a Chinese contractor Sinohydro to construct a dam northeast of the capital Harare. Mudzingwa said construction of Kunzvi-Musami Dam – 67 km outside Harare – was estimated to cost $850-900 million. But the project was not new.

“The discussion on the construction Kunzvi-Musami Dam as an alternative water source started as early as 1990 but is still not ready,” he said. “The central and local government have failed us on water supply.”

Mudzingwa agreed an urgent infrastructure upgrade was needed to solve the water challenges in Harare but he stressed the need for budget transparency. “We must also ensure citizens are involved actively in water governance framework and smart coordination between water sectors,” he said.

Council spokesperson Chideme said the city was running education programmes for citizens, “to minimize pollution of available water resources and while effectively using the available water sparingly so that we do not run out of water”.

“Technology by itself will not be good enough,” said WaterNet’s Kileshye. “The people across the whole spectrum from households, industries need to be made aware that they are part of the solution to sustainable water in cities.”

This article was produced as part of an African reporting programme supported by Future Climate for Africa.

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The wagons were hauled by a special locomotive, decorated with flowers and with a “Drinking Water for Chennai” banner on its front.

Four special trains a day have been called up to bring water to Chennai – India’s sixth most populous city – from Vellore, some 125
kilometres away, to help battle the drought.

The first consignment will be taken to a water treatment centre before being distributed in trucks to different parts of the metropolis on Saturday.

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Chennai has seen only a fraction of the rain it usually receives during June and July. During a similar crisis in 2001, trains were also needed to bring water to the city of 4.9 million people.

The bustling capital of Tamil Nadu state normally requires at least 825 million litres of water a day, but authorities are currently only able to
supply 60% of that.

With temperatures regularly hitting 40C, reservoirs have run dry and other water sources are dwindling further each day.

The Chennai metro has turned off its air conditioning, farmers have been forced to stop watering their crops, and offices have asked staff to work from home.

The city’s economy has also taken a hit as some hotels and restaurants shut shop temporarily and there have been reports of fights breaking out as people queue for water.

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Last month, the European Commission issued its recommendations on the draft national energy and climate plans (NECPs) submitted by the 28 EU member states to achieve their 2030 objectives.

But “while the plans include ambitious goals, they lack concrete policies and measures to deliver on the promises,” according to new research by the PlanUp project coordinated by Carbon Market Watch, an environmental NGO.

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Finland, Sweden and Portugal in particular were praised for their “overall high ambition” when it comes to setting long-term energy and climate goals. But deeper analysis “reveals a lack of details and quantifiable expected results with regard to policy measures in the transport, buildings and agricultural sectors,” said Carbon Market Watch.

The NGO’s analysis is hardly surprising. In fact, it largely corroborates the European Commission’s own findings. When it issued its recommendations last month, the EU executive identified “substantial” gaps in the draft national plans – particularly when it comes to energy efficiency – and urged all EU countries to submit improved versions before the end of the year.

On transport, the five draft national plans were generally praised for addressing issues such as light transport, biofuels and electro-mobility. “However, they largely fail to recognise the importance of tackling emissions from heavy-duty transport, shipping and aviation,” according to the analysis by the PlanUp project.

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The building sector, responsible for 40% of energy consumption in Europe, was also neglected. Even though buildings are addressed in all of the five plans, they fall short, “especially when it comes to planning for deep renovation rates and energy efficiency improvements”. Germany stood out in this area however, because it set goals to achieve carbon-neutral buildings by 2050.

Agriculture is the other sector where the five countries were found to be missing the mark. With the exception of France and Portugal, “agriculture is again largely omitted” from the draft national plans, the analysis said, even though it has significant potential to contribute to carbon reduction efforts.

Finland’s forestry sector comes under particular scrutiny in this regard. Although the country won plaudits for setting an ambitious goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2035, the current EU Presidency holder plans to rely heavily on surplus carbon credits from forestry to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions in other sectors.

Finland puts new climate target top of EU leadership agenda

“Finland’s commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 2035 is very promising,” said Agnese Ruggiero, policy officer at Carbon Market Watch. “Yet, relying on policy loopholes to reach climate goals is dangerous because it means that targets are met on paper but not in practice,” she said in a statement.

“The final plan is an opportunity for the new government and the current EU Presidency holder to live up to its claims to lead on climate by committing to concrete measures in sectors such as transport and agriculture,” Ruggiero said.

A final area where all plans seem to be falling short is public involvement. While Finland and Sweden held public consultations to draft their national plans, France, Germany and Portugal failed to involve interested parties and the general public.

“A more transparent process…would ensure greater support and commitment from all parties involved,” the NGOs said.

EU countries have until the end of the year to submit revised versions of their draft national energy and climate plans (NECPs).

This piece was originally published on CHN’s media partner Euractiv.

The post EU ‘climate leaders’ plans found lacking appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Big Apple and Western state respectively released a city-wide “Green New Deal” and clean power bill on Monday.

New York mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a raft of proposals in a bid to cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 30% by 2030, the deadline set by UN scientists to limit warming to 1.5C.

“Every day we wait is a day our planet gets closer to the point of no-return. New York City’s Green New Deal meets that reality head on,” said de Blasio. “We are confronting the same interests that created the climate crisis and deepened inequality. There’s no time to waste. We’re taking action now, before it’s too late.”

Bloomberg plugs US funding gap for UN climate body

The New York programme, dubbed OneNYC 2050, sets out to achieve carbon neutrality and 100% clean energy by 2050 by modernising the city’s buildings, transport, and boosting clean energy. In a global first, New York City will be ordering all existing buildings of 25,000 square feet or more, of which there are 50,000 across the city, to carry out energy upgrades in a bid to slash their emissions. Buildings account for 70% of the city’s carbon pollution. The plan bans inefficient all-glass constructions, many of which have defined the city’s iconic skyline. Such buildings will have to meet strict conditions to be built in future.

Moreover, the city’s administration will seek to power its operations from 100% clean energy by connecting the city to zero-emission Canadian hydropower. The entire raft of packages, which includes both new and already committed cash, will cost $14bn.

Cities and states in many parts of the US have been developing their own climate plans, spurred in part by the Trump White House’s efforts to undermine action to tackle the problem.

“We don’t have the benefit of a federal government to lead the way and we can’t wait for this president to wake up. It’s on us to make radical change,” said de Blasio.

Westward, the Washington state senate passed its own clean electricity legislation, which requires 100% of the state’s electricity to be carbon-neutral by 2030 and carbon-free by 2045. The bill, which has already passed the house, also requires state utilities to phase out coal power by 2025.

Championed by democratic governor and presidential candidate Jay Inslee, the bill also brings unions onboard by ensuring jobs in the renewables sector. It offers tax exemptions for projects that promote collective labour organising, local workforces, minority employment and high quality jobs.

“Washingtonians should be proud of their state’s climate leadership,” Mark Specht, an energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists said. “As climate impacts increasingly affect the state’s forests, fisheries, coastlines and air quality, there is no time to waste to enact widescale, impactful change that will reduce carbon emissions. This bill will transform the state’s power grid and set a global example.”

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“The switch to 100% clean energy will happen by increasing renewable power sources and energy efficiency,” Specht added. “State leaders wisely took the extra step of ensuring the bill included provisions to support low-income households via energy assistance programs.”

Hawaii, California, New Mexico and Puerto Rico have all spelt out 100% clean energy targets, with Illinois currently developing legislation to follow suit.

Hydropower and renewable sources currently account for three-quarters of Washington’s electricity.

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Yearly, we produce five billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent from crop and livestock production.

From seed to mouth, it can be easy to forget how much in terms of production goes into our food. So here’s a couple of things you may not already know about the carbon footprint of your favourite dishes.

1. Sandwich fillers

Chicken isn’t the most carbon-intensive meat, but it may come as a surprise to know that some of our favourite veggies have an equally poor carbon record.

Researchers from the University of Manchester recently calculated the carbon footprint of ingredients in British sandwiches. For sandwich eaters, cutting out tomatoes from a classic BLT (bacon, lettuce, and tomato) may be better for the environment.

Natural gas and electricity are used for the heating and lighting of greenhouses for tomatoes in the UK, contributing to their high carbon footprint. A 2009 report by the WWF found that in the UK, tomato, pepper, and cucumber production is worse for the environment than chicken and turkey.

2. Tofu of us consider everything

Demand for soy is driving deforestation, but think again before you put all the blame onto tofu eaters or the vegan movement. Around 70% of the global soy production is fed directly to livestock.

Beef racks up to 105kg of Co2e per 100g, while tofu produces less than 3.5kg. Trying to feed all those cows has meant that the expansion in soy has led to deforestation and the decline in other valuable ecosystems that store carbon. The Cerrado, a savanna ecoregion of Brazil, has lost half of its natural vegetation to soybean plantations.

One study found that deforestation related to soy production in Brazil is responsible for 29% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

Microplastics in the Azores (Photo: Creative Commons)

3. Something fishy about that

Maybe not strictly carbon footprint related, but microplastics, tiny pieces ranging from 5 millimetres down to 100 nanometers in diameter, are everywhere and a recent article from the World Economic Forum suggested that they have been found in a range of foods from fish to honey, chicken, and beer.

Besides polluting seas and oceans, microplastics are swallowed by fish and other marine creatures and enter our system when we eat seafood. Land animals also consume microplastics, although, unlike with fish, we tend not to eat their digestive systems.

4. Organic isn’t always better

Organic food has an image of health and sustainability but is not necessarily better for the climate than non-organic food. One study published in Environmental Research Letters found exactly that in June 2017.

“Organic systems require 25 to 110% more land use, use 15% less energy, and have 37% higher eutrophication potential than conventional systems per unit of food,” the study found. “In addition, organic and conventional systems did not significantly differ in their greenhouse gas emissions or acidification potential”.

Beetroot burger (Photo: George N)

5. Bleeding burgers

There are a variety of reasons why someone would consider going vegetarian, with studies suggesting that going vegetarian “can cut your carbon footprint in half”. While some vegetarians may miss the flavour of meat, we can’t be certain how many miss being reminded that that’s what they’re eating.

Now, vegetarians and vegans can treat themselves to a meatless patty that literally bleeds… beetroot juice. Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and Naturli are some of the companies working on bringing meat-free ‘bleeding’ burgers to the mass market. 

These burgers are either grown in labs or made from ingredients such as mushrooms, wheat, nuts, coconut oil, beetroot and soy, and have a significantly smaller carbon footprint than the animal-based original. 

Farmers inspecting wheat near Pullman, Washington (Photo: Jack Dykinga)

6. Wheat for it

Most of the emissions from staples such as bread come from the fertiliser used to grow wheat. A 2017 study found that ammonium nitrate fertiliser accounts for 43% of all the greenhouse gas emissions in the production process of a loaf of bread.

But can different types of bread be better or worse for the environment (besides being better or worse for your body)? Cereals used in bread, such as oats and barley, have smaller carbon footprints than typical wheat used in white loaves, as well as rye.

7. One way isn’t the best way

Blanket agricultural production doesn’t work across the world, and it’s important to consider local ecosystems when looking at how best to produce food with the lowest carbon footprint.

A vegetarian typically has a smaller carbon footprint than a meat eater but the plant-based diet isn’t practical everywhere, especially for those who live in dry or cold places that cannot support the growth of most vegetable crops.

Although approximately 1,799 gallons of water is needed per pound to raise a cow, the amount of water needed in order to successfully farm in desert-like climates can be huge and is currently unsustainable. Even though it may be better for the climate to be vegetarian, for some, that just isn’t sustainable.

The post 7 surprising things about the carbon footprint of your food appeared first on Climate Home News.

It has been said that they can be seen as “a house for trees inhabited by people”. The exterior facades feature a total of 21,000 plants, including 800 full size trees.

Recently appointed as president of the Milan Triennale art and design museum, professor Stefano Boeri, is the architect who invented and managed the construction of the “vertical forest”. which was first realised in the 26 and 18-floor skyscrapers in the new business centre of Milan.

CHN: Professor Boeri, how did you come up with the idea of lining skyscrapers with trees?

SB: The idea came from afar; perhaps I first envisioned it when, at the age of 13, I read “The Baron in the Trees” by Italo Calvino: the story of a young nobleman who, by choice, decides to move into a tree and there spend his entire life. Since then, obviously, there were a lot of other hints, but what impressed me most, has been the in-depth study on how big cities in the world rapidly expand, with terrible implications on our environment.

Can you give us some numbers?

Megalopolises grow at impressive speed. To give you an example, Beijing, with its suburbs, has now reached 103 million inhabitants. Cities occupy only 2% of our planet’s land mass but account for 75% of the production of carbon dioxide pollution, the main cause of climate change.

Do you see a way for combating this phenomenon?

Plants are the best defence against these polluting factors. They ingest carbon dioxide through the process of photosynthesis and absorb thin powders and pollutants. Starting from these considerations, I came up with the idea of planting an arboretum in the centre of a large and populated city. My two vertical forest buildings occupy 1,500sq m of ground and host 21,000 plants. If the same number of living trees were to be planted on a flat surface, it would take an area of at least 30,000sq m.

Was this idea immediately well accepted?

Not really. At the beginning, we had to fight against scepticism, mistrust and suspicion, as always happens when you propose new and never before tested ideas.

China: New environment ministry unveiled, with huge staff boost

How did you overcome all objections?

With a coordinated effort by specialists from a variety of scientific disciplines, ranging from botany to sociology, and from environmental protection to design. We studied everything up to the most minute detail, and came up with many original and innovative solutions for the problems we had to face.

For example, in order to identify the most suitable plantings of full size trees capable of withstanding windy days, we went to Florida, a state with a lot of knowledge about hurricanes, There, we conducted tests in their wind tunnels to identify those varieties be placed on the upper floors. Normally you do not have many windy days in Milan but, when they do happen it may create a problem. To our surprise, we discovered that plants with large leaves and extended branches were most fit to resist the wind.

Now, how do you assess this experience?

Now the picture is quite clear and the experiment has been very successful: 800 high trees are in place since 2012 and we have not lost a single one. Only two trees had to be replaced, but it was due to the fact that they had suffered during transportation. The tenants of the two vertical forest buildings have lived happily in this unique environment since 2014. We also discovered that the presence of the plants reduces the effect of dizziness caused by living high up off the ground.

To get it all done we imagine that you had to devise many new and never before tested technological solutions.

Yes, we had to make difficult decisions and impose solutions that, at the beginning, were not appreciated by everyone. As an example, all the plants on the walls of the buildings are considered as a common condominium service and, as such, are managed as a whole. They have been entrusted to Laura Gatti’s team of specialists who had to develop new and peculiar skills, in relation to the special care that they must devote to the vertical forest; we call them “the flying gardeners”.

Four times a year they come in with a seasonal cycle that consists of two external treatments and two internal ones. By doing this, we are able to guarantee professional uniformity in treatments and, last but not least, a drastic reduction of maintenance costs, with respect to what the individual tenants would have to pay if they had to attend to the plants on their own.

Did everything go as planned or have you had some sort of surprise?

We continue to discover new things. For one, we had the clear demonstration of the intelligence of plants as our trees grow and come very close to the ceiling of the overlying terraces, but never touch them. Also, we found that they widen up to get closer to the neighbouring plants without ever overlapping. In essence, they seem to manage the assigned space with great rationality.

Another surprise: for fighting ticks on the plants without using pesticides, we decided to bring in 9,000 ladybirds from Germany. Shortly thereafter, the ticks had disappeared, but the richly fed ladybirds had multiplied. It did not last long, as the birds rapidly exterminated them. As a result, swallows, now very rare in Milan, have nested on our buildings. The vertical forest has become a new and varied ecosystem.

What impact has the vertical forest had in Italy and in the world?

We have not patented anything, and all the adopted solutions have been published; there are no secrets and we are pleased to see that architecture inspired by the same criteria is developing in other parts of the world, from Japan to China to South America to the north of Europe.

Obviously, since we were the first and the ones who accumulated the more in-depth experience in the field, we are constantly called upon to cooperate and to design new green architectural structures. We work a lot in China, and I am very proud of one of our projects to be built in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, where a new complex designed as a vertical forest will be destined to “social housing” for young couples on very low incomes. Interestingly enough, the final cost of these structures, including the green, does not exceed €1,300 per square meter.

In Italy, unfortunately, there is still little attention being paid to urban green areas. Thus we lose incredible opportunities for the development of new jobs and for the managed improvement of the environment. Few people know that in recent years, our wooded areas are expanding in total surface area in spite of forest fires and frequent neglect.

When shall we see the first Vertical Forests in the United States?

I hope soon. 

This article was first published in Italian in America Oggi.

The post ‘We have brought swallows into Milan’, says father of the vertical forest appeared first on Climate Home News.

The reason: a five-year anti-pollution drive has forced rural areas in northern China to switch from dirty coal to the cleaner alternative. The massive retrofitting campaign has sent gas prices soaring while many are left without heating systems at all.

In two villages close to Zhuozhou’s high-speed railway station, on the city’s eastern edge, villagers estimate only about one third of homes have been connected with natural gas supply, while others say they’re still anxiously waiting for the gas company to install furnaces. Their old fashioned coal stoves were all demolished as the government intensified efforts to phase out coal use in rural homes.

As temperatures drop to around -6C, they say nights are “increasingly unbearable”, especially for seniors and toddlers. A street cleaner said he had to burn firewood to keep warm. 

From 2012: Beijing announces drastic action to slash air pollution

“It is very cold, but there’s nothing we can do except wait,” a mother who was picking up her seven-year-old boy from school said, reluctant to be named.

Urban residents of Zhuozhou are more vocal about their grievances, as the sudden increase in natural gas demand means disruption in supply for existing users. 

“Every day, from 7pm to early next morning, there’s no heating. Sometimes the gas supply is not stable when cooking,” said a taxi driver who gave his surname as Feng.

Hebei provincial government, which administers Zhuozhou, issued an orange alert for natural gas supply on 28 November. It is the second on a four-tier warning system, indicating a demand-supply gap between 10% and 20% that will have a “relatively big impact” on economic and social operation.

The provincial government said it would cut supply for industrial users and prioritise use for residential and public buildings, including schools and hospitals. Neighbouring Shandong, Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces all report similar problems.

The area surrounding Beijing is one of the worst polluted in China thanks to its massive industrial production, particularly of iron and steel. Air quality traditionally deteriorates further each winter, with burning of raw coal in rural homes exacerbating factory and vehicle pollution.

In 2013, under a mounting public outcry for government to tackle the smog crisis, China’s State Council, or the cabinet, laid out targets to reduce levels of PM2.5 – the tiny particulate pollutants that pose the greatest health threats – in Beijing from around 90µg/m3 to 60µg/m3 by the end of 2017. The World Health Organisation recommends an annual mean of 10µg/m3. 

Nearby Tianjin municipality and Hebei province – which have worse air quality than Beijing – have been requested to slash PM2.5 particulates by 25%.

In China, such targets bear political importance. The nation’s leader Xi Jinping has placed increasing emphasis on protecting the environment. In 2014, Beijing’s former mayor Wang Anshun promised to “present his own head” to the public if the capital city failed to meet the mark.

Phasing out overcapacity in iron and steel, pushing for better compliances through campaign-based checkups and car use limitations to control vehicle emissions have made only marginal gains. Official statistics from Beijing show the city’s annual PM2.5 levels were still at 73 µg/m3 at the end of 2016.

Environmental authorities decided some rural areas in northern China – especially those close to Beijing – had to embark on the arduous program of retrofitting coal-fired heating system into gas-powered ones if Beijing and its surrounding areas were to meet the targets.

Thrust into the national spotlight, local cadres have rushed to comply by stripping coal heating systems from homes.

“The original plan was to shift coal to gas only in some ‘core areas’”, said He Kebin, head of Tsinghua University’s school of the environment, who also advises the central government on air pollution. “But it turned out local governments are too enthusiastic, greatly raising the demand.”

Liu Deshun, an official with National Energy Administration estimated that natural gas consumption in 2017 could hit 240 billion cubic metres, more than 14% higher than in 2016. He admitted “no one has expected” the surging demand.

Global carbon emissions: Rise in 2017, driven by China

There has also been a substantial underestimation of coal use – and subsequent demand for natural gas – in these rural areas, due to poor energy statistics.

The surge in demand has driven up prices for those who are connected. The official China Energy News reported price for liquefied natural gas (LNG) has doubled in two weeks since mid-November, dealing a heavy blow for both industrial and residential users.

A villager in Zhuozhou who was lucky enough to have gas supply – although unstable – said he was very worried about the rising cost of keeping warm. He expects to spend more than 6000 yuan (around $900) – or twice of what he paid for coal – this winter. 

Studies have shown China’s middle class urban dwellers are increasingly willing to pay for cleaner air. Yet this winter, vulnerable groups in less developed areas are bearing the brunt of the cleanup costs.

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Now the US’ largest city has released a plan that aligns its future to the most ambitious target of the Paris deal – limiting global warming to 1.5C.

On Tuesday, de Blasio released a citywide plan that outlined the first three years worth of measures as the city seeks to cut emissions by 80% below 2005 levels by the middle of the century. The plan – called 1.5C: Aligning New York City with the Paris Climate Agreement – also called for the city to offset all remaining carbon pollution by 2050.

To achieve “carbon neutrality” in just over three decades, the plan says New York will lead the development of a “global protocol”. It said this could include large scale renewables, carbon sequestration and carbon offsets to account for all residual pollution.

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The mayor has called on every agency of the city government to develop strategies to comply with the goal of 1.5C.

De Blasio said: “Big problems require big solutions – and New Yorkers are already hard at work to meet the most ambitious goals of the Paris Agreement. In the Trump era, cities have to lead the way when it comes to fighting climate change. Hotter summers and powerful storms made worse by climate change are an existential threat to a coastal city like ours, which is why we need to act now.”

Mark Watts, the executive director of the C40 Cities group, said the plan was a “world-leading example of evidence-based” planning.

(Source: 1.5C: Aligning New York City
with the Paris Climate Agreement)

The plan, which focuses on specific actions up to 2020, also covered building codes, energy production, efficiency and transport. It heralded the advent of the electric car, announcing $10 million for fast charging hubs in all five boroughs by 2018. By the middle of next decade, it is aiming to install 50 such hubs citywide.

Since Trump became president, almost 200 cities, states and nations – including New York City – have signed up to a coalition led by California governor Jerry Brown. That coalition calls on signatories to develop plans in line with the Paris climate goals.

“In the face of federal inaction on climate change, it is now more important than ever for cities like New York to step up to fulfil the Paris Agreement,” said Daniel Zarrilli, senior director for climate policy in the mayor’s office.

The post New York City aims to be carbon neutral by 2050 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Eight Delhiites die each day from the city’s bad air. In response, the regional government has made efforts to tackle pollution from coal plants and tailpipe exhaust. But any benefits these policies might produce are threatened by skyrocketing imports of a fuel more polluting than coal or diesel.

Petroleum coke – known as petcoke – is a high-carbon residue produced during the refinement of heavy oils. In its raw form, the high-carbon fuel can be used as a cheap substitute for coal.

Delhi’s environmental authorities say petcoke, cut into coal power station feeds around the capital, is now one of the major sources of smog in the city.

In many parts of the world, petcoke is restricted because of its toxicity. In India however, the fuel is unregulated and burned freely. In this regulatory void, demand has soared, rising 23% a year for the last five years. The country imported 20 times more petcoke in 2016 than it did in 2011.

Delhi is in a race against time. The Supreme Court has ordered the use of petcoke to end but the government has failed to ban or regulate the fuel. Activists and public health officials are desperate to convince politicians to act before winter’s still, stagnant weather conditions begin to pool smog above the capital.

(Data: resourcetrade.earth)

When burned, petcoke emits 5-10% more climate change-causing CO2 than coal. But its true filthiness is revealed in the toxic smog it creates. The key air pollution-causing contaminant is sulphur, which creates oxide gases and particles, both of which are harmful to human health.

In Delhi, a (relatively lax) regulation limits sulphur in coal to 4,000 parts per million. The National Capital Territory’s environmental agency (EPCA) says petcoke being burned around the capital contains sulphur up to 72,000ppm. Petcoke emissions also contain significant amounts of toxic heavy metals – particularly vanadium, nickel and iron.

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Petcoke’s primary use in India is in cement-making plants, where the process limits pollution. But when it is used in the coal power stations, the pollutants emerge unadulterated.

In February, India’s Supreme Court released a finding that called the sulphur content in petcoke “extremely high” and said the fuel was a “major cause of pollution in Delhi”. The court directed the national government to either ban petcoke’s use in power generation outright or place restrictions on the sulphur content, which would be a de facto ban.

So far, no action has been taken. The ministry of environment has asked for more time. The court has given the government a final deadline of 24 October to come up with a plan.

This is a problem that begins, in part, in the tar pits of Alberta and the refineries of the US Gulf coast. India produces its own petcoke. But local refineries can’t keep up with demand and the country has emerged from nowhere to become the largest importer of petcoke on earth.

In 2016, 87% of India’s overseas petcoke came from the US, the world’s largest producer. Its use in US power generation has plummeted due to heavy restrictions. As a result, US refiners and traders are looking to markets with looser regulation and, say environmental campaigners at both ends of the supply chain, fuelling India’s airborne public health crisis.

Until 2014, China was the biggest buyer of US petcoke. But Asia’s largest economy has been on a political journey with air pollution. Sulphur restrictions, brought in in 2016, economic downturn and local bans on new power plants combined to stifle US petcoke’s access to the far east powerhouse. Between 2013 and 2014, the trade was cut in half. (Japan also remains a stalwart consumer of US petcoke.)

Global trade in petcoke is dominated by one country, the US (Data: resourcetrade.earth)

“India has become the dumping ground of petcoke from countries like USA and China,” Sunita Narain, who heads the Centre for Science and Environment, told the Economic Times in February. Narain is not only pushing for a domestic ban on petcoke’s use in power plants but an import ban as well.

Lorne Stockman, a senior research analyst at Oil Change International, said much of the US petcoke was left over from the refinement of heavy oil from Canada’s tar sands. Environmental restrictions in the US prevent it from being burned in most power stations, unless they are fitted with pollution scrubbing technology.

“The US refiners have invested in this heavy oil refining strategy in order to take advantage of the cheap dirty feed stock from Canada,” he told Climate Home. “Then this waste product is dumped into markets that will accept it. It’s a perfect example of the industry maximising its profits while maximising its pollution.”

It is uncertain how much petcoke is being burned around Delhi, according to an EPCA report, as refiners do not collect data on how much is being sold into the capital territory. It is also uncertain what proportion comes from the US, as opposed to domestic refineries. During site visits, however, EPCA inspectors found industries were using imported product.

The trade within India is controlled by some of the biggest, most influential and least transparent corporations in the country, including Adani Enterprises. Adani’s website says it sources petcoke from the US.

Climate Home contacted some of the largest US petcoke exporters. None returned emails except for Ahmed Jama, CEO and president of Florida-based PermuTrade.

“I cannot speak for other companies,” he said. “But I do know petcoke is being sold into the power generation industry and steel industry [in India].”

PermuTrade is a relatively small fish. Jama said his company transports between 0.6Mt and 1.2Mt of petcoke every year, 75% of which goes to the cement industry in India. According to Jacobs Consultancy, Koch Carbon trades more than 20Mt globally every year. Oxbow, another company owned by the Koch brothers, also ranks among the largest global traders.

Jama said his company sells only to cement plants to ensure the “environment is protected”. “We could make a lot more money selling petcoke to many other industries, like the power generation industry and steel industry but we are not all about the money,” he said, adding that an India-wide ban on petcoke “might not be the greatest idea”.

“Petcoke should be banned or limited for captive power plants but not for cement plants. There should be clear sulphur emission thresholds in place for companies to comply with and be held accountable to. If petcoke is cut, the government will need to provide cheap coal or they won’t have power,” said Jama.

In fact, environment authorities are not pursuing a ban on use in cement. But they are trying to control power plant emissions before Delhi again disappears beneath the smog of industry.

The post US exports of tar sands waste are fuelling Delhi’s air pollution crisis appeared first on Climate Home News.

If there is one thing to learn from recent flooding in the Caribbean, US, India, Bangladesh and Nepal, it is that the impacts of a warmer world are already with us, and that inaction will only deepen the crisis.

In Paris in 2015, the world’s leaders – carrying the commitments and hopes of thousands of cities, businesses, investors, and billions of concerned citizens – set a collective marker of intent: to reach net zero carbon emissions by mid-century for the benefit of everyone.

To get there, we need to navigate through two critical checkpoints. The first is to ensure the trajectory of global emissions starts to bend downwards by 2020, putting humanity on the least difficult path to full decarbonisation. This turning point will keep us on track to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals a decade later in 2030, ending poverty, protecting the planet, and ensuring prosperity for all.

If we reach net zero by 2050, our children and grandchildren will have inherited cleaner water and air, equitable energy and food security, liveable cities and an abundance of sustainable jobs.

That said, the serious challenge we face from climate change is becoming clearer and more visceral by the day. In amongst the floods, destruction and scores of lost homes, it is the human cost which is the hardest to bear. With global warming already measured at 1C, and further warming already baked into our atmosphere, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Our journey is not an easy one, but it is necessary, it is desirable and, importantly, it is achievable. Just as each journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, there are actions and signs of progress in every corner of the world bringing us closer to our destination.

So while some national governments delay climate action, cities around the world are forging ahead.  Working together through coalitions like the C40 Cities and the Global Covenant of Mayors on Climate and Energy, urban populations are getting on with the task at hand.

Report: California to pass law setting 100% renewable electricity goal

The city of Vancouver is leading 179 municipalities across British Columbia to reduce GHG emissions by 33% below 2007 levels by 2020, and is already halfway there.  Over half of the city’s residents walk, bike or use public transport, and driving distance per person has fallen 32% over the last decade.

Vancouver is leading North America by constructing new, zero-emission buildings that are cool and comfortable for little cost. And looking ahead to warmer weather, the city is planting resilient tree species and piloting social housing cooling stations to provide more shade and cool refuge on hot days.

Realising its special vulnerability to sea-level rise and temperature rises that might get to 5C by the end of the century, the city of Sydney was the first local government in Australia to be certified carbon neutral through emissions savings in buildings, street lighting, and vehicles, the latter reducing emissions by 26% over the past four years without any reduction in services to the community.

Sydney’s $8 billion Green Square project is transforming the southern precinct into a vibrant and sustainable urban environment, and is the fastest growing area in the city’s local area.

Sydney and Vancouver are not the only cities on this mission. Mayors all over the world are committing their cities on the journey to net zero emissions and acting with intent. Between 2011 and 2015, the group of C40 cities collectively invested US$1.5bn in low carbon projects, and this has now expanded to a huge portfolio of C40 sustainable infrastructure projects, with an estimated value of US$15.5bn.

Knowing the scale of the challenge we face, and the urgent action required to reach the 2020 checkpoint, we encourage all cities to commit to fully decarbonise their buildings and infrastructure, and we will strive to do the same.

In September 2018, California will host a summit to gather bold new climate commitments from cities, regional governments, business and investors to demonstrate to national leaders that it is possible to raise our ambition, and stay true to the promise of Paris. We look forward to seeing fellow cities step up at that moment because when it comes to meeting this challenge, we must leave no-one behind.

Christiana Figueres is the chief of the Global Covenant of Cities and former head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Clover Moore is lord mayor of Sydney, Gregor Robertson is the mayor of Vancouver.

The post Sydney and Vancouver are fulfilling climate promises made in Paris appeared first on Climate Home News.

The level of access to top officials has raised concerns about the influence of the car lobby in Berlin, just as the 24 September federal election is forcing party leaders to confront diesel pollution.

At a meeting with city leaders in the capital on Monday, chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to double a €500m government-industry fund to help local councils rein back soaring emissions that have sparked European court action and over 50 city lawsuits.

Critics see the proposed car software upgrades and urban transport improvements as a palliative to block calls for comprehensive – and expensive – hardware retrofits. This view may be strengthened by news of the auto industry’s extensive access.

Public unease with Germany’s auto industry has grown, as the revelations that VW stacked its software to cheat emissions tests were followed by allegations that it colluded with Daimler and BMW in cartel-like behaviour.

But Germany’s auto industry directly employs around 775,000 workers, and turns over more than €400bn per year, accounting for roughly a fifth of Germany’s exports in the process. This economic gravity means carmakers maintain a mighty pull on politicians across the country.

Exclusive: EU ‘increasingly likely’ to implement electric car quota

Evincing this, several top advisors and government officials have either come from or gone to work for carmakers.

Merkel’s re-election campaign is being spearheaded by Joachim Koschnicke, a former chief lobbyist for the car maker Opel, while Michael Jansen and Thomas Steg – who served as Merkel’s federal office director, and deputy government speaker – now work as senior VW lobbyists.

Eckart von Klaeden, a state minister for Merkel until 2013 became Daimler’s chief lobbyist, while Matthias Wissmann, a transport minister under the former chancellor Gerhard Schroder, is currently president of the German automobile industry association.

Even Sigmar Gabriel, a respected SPD economic minister, sat on the VW supervisory board for four years while he was premier of the state of Lower Saxony, which holds a 20% stake in VW.

His successor, Stephan Weil, sparked controversy last month, when the German newspaper Bild revealed that he showed a draft parliamentary speech about dieselgate to VW management before delivering it.

Since the VW scandal broke in 2015, government officials have held 387 meetings with auto lobbyists about dieselgate and pollution, compared to 113 meetings with trade unions and just 59 with environmental and consumer groups. The data, seen by Climate Home, was released in response to a parliamentary question.

The German government and car industry both declined to comment on the release.

The content of these meetings is unknown and contact between government would be expected to maintain contact with an important industry. But dieselgate and the continuing non-compliance of the car industry lend credence to NGO claims that access equals inaction. Only around 10% of German cars meeting current ‘Euro 6’ NOx emission limits, according to a new study.

Daniel Freund, a spokesman for Transparency International told Climate Home said that state oversight had “collapsed” under the weight of industry pressure. 

“I think we are no longer exaggerating if we say that the German government and regulatory agencies supposed to control and oversee the car industry have been captured,” he said.

Timo Lang, a spokesman for the NGO Lobbycontrol said the data evinced a “striking imbalance that clearly illustrates the close ties between Germany’s government and the automotive industry.”

He added: “Those close ties were a part of the problem leading up to the dieselgate scandal.”

Analysis: Fiat, Renault, VW scams will hasten rise of electric car

Official figures for 2017 show that Merkel’s CDU party received €100,000 from Daimler, €100,002 from Susanne Klatten and Stefan Quandt, the owners of BMW, and €110,000 from the metal and electrical industry association in northern Westphalia, which partly represents the car industry.

The hard right FDP also banked €195,502 from auto lobby groups, and Martin Schulz’s SPD took €100,000 from Daimler.

However these figures may underestimate the car manufacturers’ largesse as they only cover direct donations – rather than sponsorships, which the auto industry increasingly prefers. In Brussels, VW alone spent €3.3m in lobby activities in 2014, according to Lobbyfacts.

Freund said such quids carried an expectation of pro quo’s – perhaps in the form of an open door policy for meetings with officials. “If they didn’t expect that, it would almost be a market failure,” he said.

“The companies are constantly optimising shareholder value and ensuring that they make money for their investors. If they went around giving money to parties for nothing in return, I think someone might question that.”

On Sunday night, dieselgate was again at the centre of the election campaign, with the SPD leader Martin Schulz calling for industry CEO’s to pay the price of the test-rigging scandal in a TV debate with Merkel.

Schulz has tried to make hay with the issue on the campaign trail, assailing Merkel for blocking collective lawsuits against VW and calling for an an EU-wide quota on electric cars.

However, after Merkel responded in mid-August by agreeing that diesel’s days were numbered, Schulz toned down his rhetoric, saying that diesel would be around for “much longer” than people expected.

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The German SPD MEP and former environment committee chair Jo Leinen told Climate Home that Schulz’s “backtracking” had made him look “weak”.

“I think the trade unions got in contact with him to say: ‘hello, not so fast. We will have that transformation but it will take a long time,’” said Leinen. “Diesel is a bit of an ambiguous issue for the SPD. The Green party will always be more radical so we cannot win with the electorate on that front.”

The European commission is currently assessing whether a deal between the German government and carmakers to provide software updates for 5.3 million German motorists addresses the air quality and legal ramifications of dieselgate.

The agreement would reduce NOx emissions by up to 30%, but environmentalists in Germany are holding out for a more comprehensive – and expensive – hardware retrofit option.

Dorothee Saar, a spokeswoman for environmental NGO Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH), which is pursuing 16 legal cases against the German government for breaching air quality limits, said judicial rulings supporting diesel bans in Stuttgart, Munich and Dusseldorf were forcing the government’s hand.

She told Climate Home: “Merkel’s announcement that she’d join a second diesel summit in October and her invitation to city leaders and federal ministers to come to Berlin on Monday shows that she sees an urgent need for action – and that the court decisions are not going in her favour.”

The post Lobbying data reveals carmakers’ influence in Berlin appeared first on Climate Home News.

Indeed, the economic costs – which will include everything from thousands of ruined and uninsured homes to higher national gasoline prices to lost business activity in the country’s fourth-largest city – will take months to calculate, and years to overcome, said Kevin Simmons, an economist at Austin College focused on storm impacts.

“In the Houston metro area alone, there is more than $325 billion in residential value at risk,” Simmons said in an interview. “Most damage to residential property will be flooding and if people don’t have flood insurance they are on their own.” (Most don’t, in part because the floodwaters reached so far beyond established danger zones.)

Add in damaged cars, commercial property, lost business and the damage outside of Houston, “The bottom line will likely exceed Katrina,” he said. Other economists surveyed by The New York Times earlier this week projected somewhat lower losses, but it is still early days.

While some aspects of Houston’s agony are likely anomalous, a similar set of risk factors threatens hundreds of communities from coast to coast and in between. The natural hazards and geography vary, but the dominant dynamic leading to unnatural disasters is the same everywhere: growth and development continue to put people and property at risk, from overdeveloped inland floodplains to fire-prone western woodlands to crowding coastlines to homes and businesses built in the United States’s Tornado Alley.

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Some of the meteorological threats, like extreme downpours and heat waves, are sure to worsen in a human-heated climate, with warming from elevated levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases seen by many climate scientists as already contributing to the severity of rains like those over Texas in recent days and Louisiana last year.

But some scientists worry that squabbles over the evolving field of “attribution” science, parsing what portion of some storm is due to global warming, distract attention from the utter clarity around the role of on-the-ground decisions, or indecision, in worsening damage when bad weather strikes.

“What gets lost in climate change debates is that society is changing, too,” said Stephen M. Strader, an assistant professor of geography and environment at Villanova University. Strader has done a series of analyses and visualisations with Walker S. Ashley, a geographer and atmospheric scientist at Northern Illinois University, showing vividly how development, over time, creates an “expanding bull’s-eye effect” that exacerbates losses even if a storm’s parameters are not changed.

They have done such assessments for floods, fires, and tornadoes, and each holds the same lesson: hazards are natural, but disasters are unnatural.

One of their studies, published in 2015, examined how population growth and development amplify exposure to tornadoes, using as their template the devastating tornado that struck Moore, Oklahoma, in 2013. That tornado was the third deadly twister to strike that unlucky community since 1999.

It took that third blow to prompt the municipality in 2014 to bolster its building codes, said Simmons, the Austin College professor, who has extensively studied tornado damage. With Paul Kovacs of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, Simmons studied whether the tougher code hurt Moore’s competitiveness with the neighbouring community of Norman, Oklahoma. Their paper found that the slight added costs and complexities of having the tougher standard “had no effect on either home sales or price per square foot for new homes in Moore.”

Hurricane Harvey: lawyers warn of climate lawsuits over damages

Norman still has no such building code, even though it is home to the federal National Severe Storms Laboratory — the leading centre for tornado research.

Tornadoes, to be sure, remain an enigma. One 2016 study found signs of a relationship between clusters of tornadoes in violent outbreaks and climate change. But broader reviews have shown no clear relationship to global warming, with the frequency of the destructive categories of twisters in the U.S. unchanged or slightly declining since the 1950s, according to federal climate scientists.

In regions prone to wildfire, the same dynamics and tensions are in play. A comprehensive 2015 federal report found that, as of 2010, the vulnerable “wildland-urban interface” of the lower 48 states includes about 44 million houses — one in every three houses in the country, with the highest concentrations of houses in California, Texas and Florida.

The growth rate in these combustible zones is similar to that in Gulf Coast floodplains, even as climate change, invasive species and other factors boost fire risk. As the land management group Headwaters Economics has shown in detailed maps, there is a vast amount of developable land that, without new policies, will greatly expand a disaster’s bull’s-eye.

But only 18 communities – out of thousands in fire-prone regions – have signed up with a planning assistance program for living with wildfire developed in 2015 by the group with several partners.

As for the dangers posed by rare, but inevitable, floods of the sort swamping Texas, they have been more discounted than other storm threats like wind, said J. Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences programme at the University of Georgia and a past president of the American Meteorological Society. This is the case even though flooding causes far more deaths and damage, Shepherd said.

The discounting of flood risk in favor of development continues even after disasters, said Craig E. Colten, the Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University. People have a discouragingly predictable tendency to forget a disaster’s lessons – sometimes within months of a cleanup.

Colten has been studying the impact of heavy rain events across states abutting the Gulf of Mexico, but particularly the August 2016 deluge that damaged or wrecked some 60,000 homes in or around Baton Rouge and killed 13 people.

He said that Houston’s flood is a chart-busting anomaly that will be studied for many years, but noted that rains approaching that scope – 48 inches accumulating over a few days – were within the realm of what is possible almost anywhere along the central Gulf Coast. More such disasters are inevitable.

For any big urban areas in regions prone to such rains, whether Houston with 4 million people or Baton Rouge with 300,000, he said: “If you have one of these exceptional rainfalls that become a new record, you really have to take that into account in development plans.”

Analysis: Link between Hurricane Harvey and climate change is unclear

In practice, even around Baton Rouge, which was so devastated just a year ago, that’s not the case, he said.

“Across the Gulf Coast in areas of low topography, we have completely built beyond what’s reasonable in terms of rain events of this scale,” Colten said. “We’re still seeing municipalities resisting safe planning in the interest of economic development and a more robust tax base.”

While several organisations around Baton Rouge are pursuing a “Rebuilding with Resilience” initiative, some local governments appear to be headed in the opposite direction, Colten said.

“The remarkable thing here since the floods,” he said, “is that three parishes in the Baton Rouge area hit hardest have all backed off” on policies related to flood resilience. “Baton Rouge has already approved a couple of subdivisions in the footprint of flood from last year,” he said, adding that city officials also rejected making the most recent, and most severe, flooding event the threshold from which minimum elevations for various classes of buildings are calculated.

Frank Duke, the Baton Rouge planning director, disputed whether explosive suburban growth everywhere amplified the flood damage, according to an article on Nola.com last fall. In that article, one local mayor said if everyone had to build new homes and businesses to new standards of elevation the community would become a ghost town.

Colten said he could sympathise, to a point.

“The compulsion was to rebuild on site,” he said. “They want to rebuild their schools at the size they were. They didn’t want people to leave. But safety needs to at least be on a par with economic development.”

At the national scale, the tensions over balancing development, safety and environmental quality were on display earlier this month when President Donald Trump, in the name of accelerating infrastructure improvements, revoked a 2015 executive order from President Barack Obama establishing reviews of flood risks before the approval of federal funding for housing or other construction projects.

The move was widely criticised as threatening the very infrastructure the president claimed to be trying to revive, including by the R Street Institute, an organisation pursuing Reagan-era approaches to cutting disaster risk and preserving the environment.

The most vocal group cheering Trump’s decision was the National Association of Home Builders, which had fought the Obama plan.

R.J. Lehmann, a senior fellow at R Street Institute, noted that when Harvey came ashore northeast of Corpus Christi, Texas, on Aug. 25, as a Category 4 hurricane, it first struck barrier islands that are part of a 273m-acre zone established under the Coastal Barrier Resources Act, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. That law, later expanded in 1990, forbade federal subsidies for new development in relatively undeveloped coastal regions along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and Great Lakes, including for roads, housing and discounted flood insurance. He said private interests could still build there but at their own risk. His organisation has estimated the law has saved taxpayers more than $1bn and is trying to expand it, as well as reform state laws in similar ways.

“Where this storm made landfall, that area was protected and didn’t have federal subsidies,” he said. “That is a conservative approach to conservation.”

The challenges vary from region to region, with New York City facing risks from both coastal and rainfall-driven flooding, and having a much older and denser layout, said Daniel A. Zarrilli, who is the city’s chief resilience officer and, no surprise, has been closely tracking Houston’s plight.

New York City has been pursuing targeted purchases and acquisitions in some of the city’s most flood-prone spots, building on similar buyouts undertaken by the state. The purchases include the entire community of Oakwood Beach, a Staten Island coastal neighborhood submerged by Hurricane Sandy’s surge in October, 2012.

For the city, impacts go beyond flooding. Other risks could be compounded by climate change, with projections of more heavy downpours in a warming climate increasing the odds of the city’s vital Catskills reservoirs being muddied more frequently – a condition that could require the construction of billions of dollars in filtration equipment that the city had avoided through environmental cleanups around the watersheds feeding into the system.

Zarrilli was on an advisory committee set up by the United States Global Change Research Program under Obama to improve the usefulness of federal climate change risks assessments as communities around the country confront emerging perils. The committee was disbanded on August 18 by the Trump administration.

“The point was to help convert climate science into more actionable sustained policy support,” he said. “This wildly changing climate is making mincemeat of what we thought of as normal.”

This article was first published on ProPublica.

The post Developing disasters: How cities are making hurricanes more destructive appeared first on Climate Home News.

Harvesting the Cordyceps sinensis fungus, called ‘yarsha gumba’ in Nepal, provides a livelihood for Himalayan dwellers. The fungus fetches up to Rs 2,800,000 (£20,000) per kg in raw form. During the peak season of yarsha collection, locals drop everything to pursue fungus hunting, including their usual profession. Even schools remain closed during yarsha collecting seasons.

The fungus grows on the head of the larvae of caterpillars and locals crawl on hands and knees to find it. The work is hazardous in the high altitude regions where the fungus grows, with hunters young and old regularly succumbing to exposure.

Himal Aryal, who has been involved in the yarsha trade for eight years in Rukum, a mountain district west of Kathmandu told Climate Home that 90% of buyers were Chinese.

“It is known as Himalayan Viagra as it helps to increase libido in both sexes, for which only a few rich people buy the fungus,” he said.

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But local yarsha hunters have been experiencing a huge drop in the availability of the fungus in recent years.

Bibek Jhakri, who has also collected the fungus for eight years, said: “I used to find 50-60 yarshas a day during my earlier years, while now finding four to five per day is a matter of luck for me.” He said he was afraid his major source of income won’t last.

Most of the yarsha hunters in Thabang, the western district where Jhakri is from, are worried about their seasonal source of income. They could, a decade before, rely almost exclusively on income generated by yarsha collection. Collectors in hilly areas typically lack academic education and production from agricultural land in those areas is marginal.

A 2016 study published in the journal Biological Conservation, found a combination of climate change and untimely and over harvesting were to blame for the previous falls. Whereas in future the range of the fungus would be reduced by up to a third because less snow would fall in the pastures and snow would melt earlier in spring.

High mountains are experiencing a more rapid change in temperature than lower elevations. “There are strong theories that guide the expectation of climate change being comparatively higher in mountains than at sea level,” Nicholas Pepin, a geographer at the University of Portsmouth, told Climate Home.

In Mugu district, hunters Pabitra Rokaya and Dhir Bahadur Bohara, have experienced sharp decrease in yarsha availability in recent years and people around them have given up. “[We] are able to find only a tenth of what we used to in past years. If the decline happens yearly like this, we could no longer depend on yarsha as our primary source of income,” said one.

The post Climate threatens ‘Himalayan Viagra’ fungus, and a way of life appeared first on Climate Home News.

A widow, Jha lives in one room with her three teenage children. In rural Nepal, widows are treated as social outcasts. They are seen as predatory, potential husband-stealers and their interactions with men are frowned upon.

“You should do what you want,” says Jha, who received training from Empower Generation – an NGO that on Thursday will be awarded a £20,000 Ashden award for promoting the role of women and girls in the clean energy sector.

Another Empower-trained solar entrepreneur, Lalita Choudhary, also faced cultural barriers. “Individuals are going to say all sorts of things” about business women in rural Nepal, she says. Choudhary lives not too far from Jha, in Lahan, Siraha, just 17km from the Indian border. Most people in the area work in agriculture, growing rice and corn or tending to goats and cows.

Runa Jha, in her solar shop in Janakpur, eastern Nepal (Photo: Lucy EJ Woods)

In many communities, women “hide their faces and do not talk to men” and “are not really allowed to get a job,” says Abhilahsa Poudel, Empower Generation’s communications coordinator.

But solar power’s effect on village life is inarguable. Its allows for cleaner home environments, with light into the evenings and the ability to charge a mobile phone.

The social benefits that flow from the women-run solar businesses, means that Jha and Choudhary have become admired for their work by both men and women in their communities. “Everyone wants to be like [Choudhary] and to work like her,” says Poudel.

Jha and Choudhary are two of the 23 women that NGO Empower Generation has trained to be renewable energy entrepreneurs, who in turn, employ and manage a further 170 sales agents. Some of the agents are men, but most are aspirational young women, creating a ripple effect of empowerment through sustainable, profitable employment.

“Before, women were not allowed outside the house, and were told not to study as they have to do the housework,” Jha says.

Empower Generation mentors and supports women registering their own businesses to sell solar lanterns, solar home systems, clean cook stoves and water filters. The trainee entrepreneurs are given lessons on climate change and the adverse effects of fossil fuels, becoming leaders in their community for promoting renewable energy and environmental awareness.

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As women do not traditionally work in energy, Empower Generation’s work aims to “really move the needle on how women are valued,” and change the rural Nepalese culture of women being considered to be the property of their husband’s families, says Empower Generation co-founder Anya Cherneff.

The “priority is to create bad-ass business women,” says Cherneff.

Since owning and running a solar business, Jha has taken on other leadership roles, including leading a community clean-up group. “I feel like I want to lead now; I like to lead,” says Jha.

Many of the women working with Empower Generation apply their skills and confidence to further business ventures and other arenas of public life. Choudhary is currently running as a candidate in local government elections, and Sita Adhikari, Empower Generation co-founder is now a United Nations adviser.

The Ashden awards ceremony on Thursday will host former US vice-president Al Gore as keynote speaker.

Adhikari said that receiving the award “encourages us to work even harder to cultivate more women entrepreneurs who are providing reliable, affordable clean tech solutions.”

The post ‘Bad-ass business women’ bring solar empowerment to Nepal appeared first on Climate Home News.

Since 1 January, the government-run Nairobi Water company has been distributing water piecemeal to more than 3 million residents.

In December, Ndakaini dam – the source of 84% of Nairobi’s water – was only 48% full. Nairobi Water said the rations would ensure that the declining water stored in Ndakaini reached every resident.

The water company projected that by April, the levels in the dam would have risen to normal capacity, replenished by Kenya’s long rains, which traditionally begin in March and fall until May.

But the rains have not arrived and water levels earlier this month at Ndakaini Dam had fallen to a low of 25%. By April 18, despite occasional showers in the city, the rationing programme was still in place.

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According to Nairobi Water’s distribution programme, some parts of Nairobi are receiving water for as little as 12 hours a week. Only a few areas such as the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport are receiving an uninterrupted supply.

Companies seeking water for manufacturing or office use have had to fill their tanks using water transported by bowsers run by private firms, which comes at a higher cost. According to a report by Cytonn Investments, the water shortage was likely to have resulted in job cuts.

Nairobi residents, especially those who cannot afford a means of storing water when it is available in their area, have had to spend extra money to buy the commodity from private vendors. A 20-litre container has been selling for between KES20 and KES100 ($o.20-$1) – a 9000% mark up on the current city tariff.

Nairobi Water’s corporate communications manager Mbaruku Vyakweli said sufficient rain was yet to fall in the Aberdare Forest and around Mount Kenya – the main water catchments for the Thika, Githika and Kayuyu rivers which feed into Ndakaini dam – 82 kilometres away from Nairobi.

“The catchment areas are still dry and we are praying that it rains soon,” Vyakweli told local newspaper The Star.

March to May – known as the “long rains” – are normally wet months in Kenya. But in recent years, peak rainfall season has begun in late April.

Ndakaini dam, pictured here in 2013, is now at just 25% capacity.
(Photo: Ahero Dala)

In March, the Kenyan Met Office predicted the 2017 long rains would fail entirely across large parts of the country.

The crisis comes on the back of a drought in 2016 when the “short rains” of October to December failed to reach some parts of the country. Some areas were severely affected enough for president Uhuru Kenyatta to declare a national disaster.

Recent research from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) project found that additional heat from climate change had exacerbated the 2016 drought by increasing evaporation from the soil.

This year’s water shortage in Nairobi also comes not long after an equally severe shortage that hit the capital in 2011. Eugene Wamalwa, the cabinet secretary in charge of water and irrigation, said the dam capacity witnessed in April mirrors the all-time-low recorded in 2011.

Kenyan Met Office predicts rains to fail sparking crisis worse than 2011

Samwel Mwangi, the deputy director of the Kenya Meteorological Department, told Climate Home a multiplicity of factors were behind the shrinking of volumes in Nairobi’s main reservoir.

“We need to factor in the human population pressure on the natural environment. With the increase in population, natural resources are stretched. You have people clearing forests to do agriculture and all that. All these things affect the way the weather behaves. We are building more cities and all that; so these things have a bearing on how weather and climate behave,” he said.

Currently, 220,000 households in Nairobi are supplied with water and the Nairobi Water Company pumps 550,000 cubic litres a day. As the population and economy grows, that infrastructure is struggling.

“If you look at the population of Nairobi from 2011 to now, you realise there are quite a few changes. The numbers are going up. The water demand is higher,” said Mwangi. He said he was certain there would be a similarly acute shortage within a few years.

Scientists from World Weather Attribution (WWA), who analysed counties in the northwest and southeast parts of the Kenya, agreed.

“The lack of OND [October-November-December] rains in 2016 is expected to occur once every four years while the overall lack of rainfall in 2016 is expected to happen once every five years,” they said in their March report.

The post ‘We are praying it rains soon’ – Nairobi on severe water rations appeared first on Climate Home News.

Climate change is hardly – if ever – on the agenda, yet, of all the major pitch games, cricket will be hardest hit by a warming world. From the ochre-coloured Australian outback to the windswept Scottish coast, cricket is defined almost entirely by the weather conditions. If they change, so does the essence of the game.

Many of the big cricket-playing nations are on the frontline of climate change. In 2016, a major match in India had to be moved due to a severe water shortage. And pitches in Bangladesh – a country threatened by intense cyclones, rising sea levels and increasing temperatures – are also feeling the pressure.

Sri Lanka and the West Indies are vulnerable to rising sea levels. And intense droughts, interspersed with periods of equally intense rainfall, are disrupting the game in southern Australia.

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In Britain, there is a danger that what are considered to be traditional weather conditions for cricket could disappear within 20 years.

Russell Seymour of the venerable Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) – one of the oldest cricketing bodies in the world – is the UK’s only cricket sustainability manager, and he is deeply concerned about how the game will cope with changes in climate.

“A match can be changed fundamentally with a simple change in the weather,” says Seymour.

“In the morning, sunny conditions make batting easier, because the bowlers can’t get any movement in the warm, dry air. Cloud cover after lunch increases humidity, and the ball starts to move. After a shower, conditions change again.

“Now imagine what happens with climate change. There will be alterations to soil-moisture levels, and higher temperatures will bring drier air, then drier pitches. This will bring a change to grass germination and growth, which in turn affects the pitch and outfield.”

In other words, the assumptions we make about English cricket, its landscapes and rhythms, will no longer apply. The ball may not move in 2025 the way it did in 1985 or 2005. The old-fashioned English seamer could be on his last legs.

The UK’s weather is likely to become ever more erratic. There are indications that longer, drier summers will be interspersed with more intense downpours.

The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) won’t release precise data on how much cricket has been lost to rain over the last 10 years. But, according to Dan Musson, the ECB’s national participation manager, it is considerable.

“There is clear evidence that climate change has had a huge impact on the game in the form of general wet weather and extreme weather events,” says Musson.

“I’ve been at the ECB since 2006 and we have had to implement flood relief efforts on half a dozen occasions, both in season – particularly in 2007, with flooding in the Midlands and the Thames Valley – and out of season, as in December 2015 when winter storms Desmond and Eva ran through the north of England.

“Wet weather has caused a significant loss of fixtures every year in the last five at recreational level, and posed challenges to the professional game.”

In the UK, the recreational game is most at risk: small clubs have fewer resources to protect against the threat, and more difficulty gaining insurance. And many municipal grounds are located on floodplains because the land is usually cheap and fertile. Games are repeatedly called off.

At grassroots level, the ECB has made some progress. They have commissioned research from the UK’s Cranfield University to identify flood risk, produced guidance for clubs, and they run a small grants scheme to fund wet-weather management and preventative measures.

In 2016, more than £1m was doled out to flooded clubs, which are also encouraged to install solar panels, recycle rainwater and look after their equipment. A further £1.6m has been set aside for 2017.

But at an international level, little has been done to mitigate the impact of climate change. The International Cricket Council (ICC) – the game’s governing body – has not commented publicly on climate change or the challenges it presents to the game, nor outlined a grand plan.

The ICC does not set environmental targets for its members and shows little interest in issues such as reducing emissions.

International tours by various countries fail to take green issues into consideration, with no pressure on members to plan a lower-impact itinerary. A recent winter tour by England to India included a mishmash of cross-country flights, when a more sustainable approach could have been taken.

The men – and it is still predominantly men – who run the game are not scientists or activists: they are often ex-players, sometimes businessmen.

They are juggling huge budgets, balancing television deals with the need to proselytise. No one pretends it is easy. As one commentator on the game observed, the role of administrators has traditionally been to “inure cricket against change rather than to enact it”.

Perhaps those who run the game are not worried about the climate, or don’t see the urgency, or are too busy. But prudent businessmen always look to the future and many corporate organisations around the world are now pressuring for action on climate change.

Cricket is slow-bowling its way into the future. It has plenty to lose in a warming world. It also has a moral responsibility to act.

Tanya Aldred is co-editor of The Nightwatchman, the Wisden Cricket Quarterly, which covers contemporary issues surrounding the game. This article was first published on Climate News Network.

The post Rain stopped play: Cricket ignores its climate threat appeared first on Climate Home News.

If Mumbai has been spared the ignominy of New Delhi – listed by the World Health Organisation in 2014 as the most polluted city in the world, along with 13 of the 20 worst polluted figuring in India – it is due to sea breezes that cool this megacity.

The coast road and sea link could put paid to that with some 200,000 cars estimated to use the route every day. Cars and taxis crossed the one million mark in Mumbai in the past year. The Brihanmumbai (Greater Mumbai) Municipal Corporation (BMC) will scrap tolls on the coast road, increasing the traffic flow.

“The coast road will increase air pollution as additional traffic is placed in an area where natural wind patterns carry pollutants into the city during some seasons,” said Sumaira Abdulali of the Awaaz Foundation, a Mumbai NGO. “Mumbai is already among the most polluted cities in the world and the health of its citizens demands that all efforts are made towards reducing air pollution, not creating additional sources in locations which will worsen the problem for the entire city.”

Asked about the increase in air pollution from the road, BMC chief engineer Mohan Machiwal told Climate Home: “We have conducted an environmental impact assessment: it will be beneficial to the environment. Since traffic will move smoothly, it will save fuel and reduce the carbon footprint.”

Ashok Datar, who heads the NGO Mumbai Environmental Social Network, said the detailed project report for the road was inconsistent in projecting future traffic volumes increasing by 5% per year. Mumbai’s central business district was shifting from the south to northern suburbs, which was why 50,000 fewer cars are using the existing sea link than estimated previously.

A recent study by the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai found air pollution caused 80,665 premature deaths in adults over 30 in Mumbai and Delhi in 2015, twice the number in 1995. Delhi recorded more such deaths due to vehicle exhausts, among other pollutants.

Work will soon begin on the 32-km route along the west coast of Mumbai, after many false starts. It was revived seven years ago as an extension of a 4.5-km sea link that was completed in 2009, both southwards towards the central business district and northwards to the western suburbs.

In his budget speech in February 2016, municipal commissioner Ajoy Mehta said that the coast road was “one of the most prestigious projects to be undertaken by the BMC… It is proposed to resolve the traffic congestion in Mumbai in addition to providing several environmental friendly features to the city.”

Despite not receiving final environmental clearances from the federal Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, the BMC  is testing the soil along beaches as well as identifying consultants with international experience to complete the road up to Bandra, a suburb.

Environmentalists and public transport activists have made requests for a public hearing, which have been repeatedly turned down. They organised an independent people’s tribunal in October 2015, where two former municipal commissioners, scientists and experts unanimously called for the project to be scrapped.

Dr Rakesh Kumar, chief scientist of the Mumbai Center of the National Environment Engineering Research Institute, said that it would be more effective to transport commuters through multiple alternatives discussed in the tribunal report.

“Even if we spend a fraction of the money in the existing public transport system, we would have solved the problem to a greater extent,” he said. “The current neglect of public transport shows that the project is mainly to move cars and not people.

“Environmental impacts of the project have been very marginally addressed. The major issue is the impact on beaches and shores. More so, when we are looking at the climate change impacts which will comprise high/extreme events and sea level rise.”

The BMC’s own detailed project report [as it is officially known] for the road said: “Greater Mumbai’s environmental health is affected by increasing air pollution (caused by vehicular pollution and construction)…while its coastal location makes the city vulnerable to flooding and landslides, specially during the monsoon.”

According to a recent unpublished paper by R. Mani Murali from the National Institute of Oceanography, as much as 40% of Mumbai – a staggering 190 sq km – could be under water within a century.

“Going by previous studies by NIO researchers, we considered a 3 mm rise (annually) in sea levels along Mumbai’s coast. That, coupled with factors such as natural calamities and tidal changes, will result in an approximate increase of 3 metres,” Murali told the Hindustan Times newspaper.

Due to protests by environmentalists, the municipal corporation has abandoned the extension of the road from Bandra to Versova and replaced it with a sea link, 900 metres off the coast. The original alignment would have bisected some fishing villages, cutting off access to boats, and also destroy mangroves when 170 hectares of land were reclaimed.

The post Mumbai highway project threatens new air pollution crisis appeared first on Climate Home News.

They face serious discrimination and severe health impacts as a result of their work. Yet they provide a valuable social service.

Their efforts reduce the amount of waste in the streets, which lessens the health risks that other city dwellers face. Waste picking is also an effective form of recycling, allowing the urban poor to recover and re-use products that wealthier people have thrown away.

Yet when local governments design low-carbon strategies, they rarely recognise the important role that waste pickers can play. Too often, they focus on technological fixes such as incineration or landfill gas utilisation.

These measures can help to reduce emissions, but they are only part of the solution. If they are going to reduce poverty and vulnerability to climate change, city governments need to work closely with low-income communities.

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It is well-established that cities in the Global South are producing increasing quantities of greenhouse gases. Kolkata in India, for example, is expected to see its annual emissions grow by 54% over the next ten years.

However, new research published in Environment and Urbanization shows that these cities have significant opportunities to reduce their emissions. Many of these opportunities are economically attractive.

For instance, Kolkata could reduce its emissions by 20.7% over the next ten years, compared to ‘business as usual’ trends. These low-carbon investments would also reduce the city’s energy bill by 8.5%.

Delivering these emission reductions does require significant investment – we estimate that it would cost around $4 billion – but these measures would pay for themselves in seven years and then continue to generate savings throughout their lifetime.

But what impact will they have on urban poverty?

The age of Xi: will China flex its climate muscles in 2017? https://t.co/SZ5UCnqhrR pic.twitter.com/ESK3nktz8z

— Climate Home News (@ClimateHome) January 2, 2017

In some cases, a low-carbon strategy will benefit low-income residents. This is obvious in the transport sector.

Most of the urban poor cannot afford cars. However, they are more likely to spend time outdoors and live in polluted areas than wealthier urban residents. This means that the poor breathe in far more of the pollutants produced by private vehicles than those who drive them.

Pedestrians, cyclists and street vendors are also at greater risk of road fatalities, which is the leading cause of death for people aged between 15 and 29 years old.

And of course, even rickshaws get stuck in traffic. Buses, bike lanes and pedestrian pathways encourage people to travel in less carbon-intensive ways.

They are more inclusive, avoiding the social costs associated with private cars such as congestion, air pollution and road accidents. Yet low-carbon strategies are not always win-win.

As illustrated with the waste sector, low-carbon measures may jeopardise the well-being of some of the poorest and most vulnerable urban residents. How can they sort through waste if it has been incinerated?

City governments therefore need to work with communities as they plan and deliver low-carbon strategies. This allows the urban poor to influence decision-makers, making sure that new policies and projects are designed in ways that protect their livelihoods.

Often, these partnerships are only possible if the urban poor are organised. The Alliance of Indian Waste Pickers, for example, represents 35 micro-enterprises, co-operatives and community-based organisations in cities across the country.

In many of these cities, the Alliance has demonstrated that low-carbon technologies can be adopted in ways that do not exacerbate urban poverty.

For example, government agencies can provide sanitary sites where waste pickers can identify and extract waste with potential value. The remainder can then be incinerated or added to landfill. In Kolkata and Pune, cooperation between local government and community organisations actually made investments in waste infrastructure more cost-effective.

The example of Kolkata shows that cities in the Global South can significantly reduce their carbon footprint. Many mitigation options prove very financially attractive. Others help to improve the health and mobility of low-income urban residents.

However, the economic case for low-carbon measures does not always align with the social case. Some investments could exacerbate poverty and vulnerability to the impacts of climate change.

Where there are conflicts, governments need to work with affected communities to ensure that the costs of climate action do not fall on the poor. By making sure that their voices are heard in decision-making forums, these partnerships can also help to tackle the drivers of urban poverty: marginalisation, exclusion and inequality.

Sarah Colenbrander is a ‎researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Follow her on twitter @s_colenbrander

The post Why India’s waste pickers are key to a fair climate deal appeared first on Climate Home News.

Kellen Murugi is an energetic single mother who provides for her three children by trading scrap metal. She lives in Nairobi’s Mukuru slum, which is home to an estimated 600,000 people. The former industrial area still bears signs of its past, with decaying factory buildings standing tall amidst a maze of metal shacks.

The young woman is determined to set aside enough money for her children’s future, but she says that regular flooding makes it very difficult to run her business: “Whenever it rains, the vehicle that comes to collect the scraps of metal and bring them to the recycling plant cannot access the settlement.”

Kellen Murugi says she would leave if she could (Pic: Lou Del Bello)

In Kenya, where about 60 to 80% of the population lives in slums, flooding is a regular menace that disrupts the life of the poor, often making the difference between a small income and an empty plate.

Nairobi’s informal settlements cover only 6% of the total residential land area, yet 60% of the 3 million living in the Kenyan capital calls them home. For many slum residents, living in an insecure environment is not a choice and the prospect of climate change worsening the flooding problem fills them with dread. But escaping climate change is not that easy if you are poor.

Analysis: Can ‘smart migration’ build climate resilience in Africa?

Western leaders, including US president Barack Obama and senior military figures, warn climate change could lead to “mass migration” and a “refugee crisis of unimaginable scale“. If climate change is not addressed urgently, they say, in the near future tens of millions of people will flee from rising sea levels, drought and even conflict exacerbated by harsher environmental conditions.

The evidence available to date paints a more complex picture. A recent study examined the trends in six years of migration and weather data from Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Senegal.

“Many people would assume that extreme heat would force households to send more migrants out,” said Clark Gray, lead author of the study. “That’s what’s happening in Uganda but not in other countries.”

Indeed, in Kenya and Burkina Faso, migration even appears to decline when temperatures rise, suggesting people become “trapped” by environmental misfortune.

Migrating is expensive. Individuals leave behind domestic tasks to be covered by those who stay. Families who move together need somewhere safe to go and money upfront. They also need a place where they know someone, have friends or other family members ready to lend a hand. “You do that when times are good, not when they are bad,” said Gray.

Report: African climate plans in doubt amid slow aid flows

Gray’s study looks at cross-border migration, counting the people who choose to leave their country. But erratic weather and higher temperatures also drive so-called internal displacement, which moves people within country borders.

While Murugi doesn’t plan to move abroad, she would love to leave Kurumu and go back “upcountry” to Meru county where she comes from. But the metal dealing business is very competitive and doesn’t pay that much: “I need to save for when my boys will want to leave our home and rent their own place,” she says. “And in Meru county there aren’t many opportunities either.”

For the time being, the family remains stuck in Nairobi and puts up with the hardships of an increasingly erratic climate.

According to a report released on Friday by research group Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), in 2015, almost 93% of the 1.1 million disaster-related internal displacements across Africa were due to floods.

A child in her recently flooded home, Mukuru (Pic: Lou Del Bello)

The study says that the 1.1m figure doesn’t capture slow-onset disasters such as dry spells, which would significantly increase the total. It highlights the example of Ethiopia, where between August 2015 and May 2016 food insecurity due to drought and water scarcity displaced over 390,000 people. The report points out how poverty acts in tandem with the impacts of climate change, “trapping” people in displacement for many years.

Michelle Yonetani, a senior strategic advisor at IDMC, said Gray’s work shines a spotlight on the complexities of climate change related displacement. Often people move after an extreme event, and some of them are able to go back home soon after. But a significant proportion of them won’t be able to move back.

“Some people return to a place that is not safe anymore,” she said. “Once the crisis is over, disaster risk continues to be very high so they are likely to be faced with recurrent, repeated cycles of displacement.”

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But because recovery can be difficult and slow, their vulnerability increases over time, so they become poorer.

“This is something that the study misses, it doesn’t capture this really important dynamic,” Yonetani says. “It’s not that you are just trapped and can’t move, but you can’t escape from this very vulnerable situation. For me that’s also an important part of the [trapped migrants] idea.”

Researchers want to dispel the idea that global warming will see hordes of people descend on developed countries. “This story that is flying around, about climate change displacing a huge number of people to Europe or to the United States, just does not make sense and it’s not consistent with any of our evidence,” said Gray. “The idea of climate refugees is too simplistic, but that doesn’t seem to have sunk in to the policy and political community.”

Gray believes that if people get stuck in an inhospitable environment, the priority should be to help them where they are. That’s where adaptation, a sector that despite receiving growing attention within the African community still attracts just a fraction of the funding it needs, will be increasingly crucial for the survival of both migrants and trapped populations.

Lou Del Bello’s series of reports on Africa and climate change is funded by CDKN

The post Catch 22: when climate change *prevents* migration appeared first on Climate Home News.

The sticky goo that leaks from the trunks was once used by vintners to seal their amphorae. The resulting turpentine taste, to which Greeks grew accustomed, is still celebrated in retsina long after the practical need for the sealant has passed.

Modern techniques have diminished the amount of resin needed to produce the flavour. Despite the enduring popularity of the wine, production has collapsed to just a third of the 12,000 tonnes collected in 1965.

The first two parts of this series discovered a post-colonial legacy in Australia and Canada, where the loss of traditional land management practices – in those cases indigenous fire farming – was exacerbating the already troubling trends of climate change to put homes and lives at risk.

Collecting pine resin, Greece. Source: Cephas

In the Mediterranean, where the land has been farmed by smallholders for thousands of years, changing land practices are also adding to the danger of climate change.

EU census data shows that in Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy the number of farms and farmers is falling. Meanwhile the size of farms is increasing as industrialisation drives agriculture to new scales and focuses economic attention on the most fertile land.

After countless generations, families are abandoning the hills. The amount of forest Greeks use for resin tapping has fallen from 327,500 to 147,500 hectares.

When they are worked, the pines, each one owned by a specific family, are fiercely protected. Goats and sheep keep the undergrowth down, staving off the threat of fire when the brutal heat of summer lies like a dream over the Aegean.

Now the shrubs grow tall and wild. Fires, the like of which have not been known in modern times, are being visited on Greece. Around Athens, the villages on Mount Parnitha burned during massive fires in 2007. Two years later, Marathon and Makri – large satellite towns of the capital – were ravaged.

“This is a size of fire we have never experienced before,” says Ioannis Gitas, an associate professor from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki’s forestry and natural environment faculty. “It is climate change, because we didn’t experience mega fires twenty or thirty years ago. Now we experience mega fires in the country.”

But he adds: “In general we have changed the way we deal with the land. That’s a big problem.”

Fire bombs: a city in the path of climate disaster

Once smallholders abandon less productive land, the forests return, less wood is gathered from the understory and fewer domesticated animals graze beneath the trees.

The return of a wilder Europe has been celebrated by advocates of “rewilding”. It has seen the flourishing of wolves, bears and bison in places they were once lost. But in the hot, dry southern countries of Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal, a land full of fuel has lead to the inevitable.

As summer comes to southern Spain, the population doubles as visitors from abroad and other parts of Spain flood toward the sea. Many former farming villages have been transformed into holiday towns, where people have second homes. But all around them, the land is falling back into a wilder, more volatile state.

“The first species to recolonise are shrubs, which are quite flammable,” says professor Emilio Chuvieco from the University of Alcala in Spain.

The picture of how climate change will affect fires in the Mediterranean is complex. In some places, drying out of the landscape could eventually occur to such an extent that plants do not grow. This could limit the fuel available. Other work shows that the amount of land burned could double by 2090.

For now, says professor Emilio Chuvieco from the University of Alcala in Spain, there is a clear trend towards more dangerous and destructive fires.

“Whenever you really have extreme climate conditions, then the likelihood of having very severe seasons is higher than in the past,” he says. “There are fires that affect much larger territories than they used to because there is much less fragmentation.” These larger fires are occurring closer to residential areas than they used to, he adds.

Worst hit in recent times has been Portugal, which accounted for more than half of the burned land in Europe in 2016. More than 200 homes in the Madeira resort town of Funchal were destroyed in August.

In Australia, this series found councils unwilling or unable to convince rate payers to stump up for radical land management techniques beyond periodic fuel reduction burns. In Canada, programmes are in place, but they remain hopelessly underfunded.

So how can economies of the southern Mediterranean, perennially in crisis, hope to combat this threat?

In Spain, the rules of firefighting are being rewritten. Once, says Chuvieco, it would have been anathema to Spanish fire fighters to allow a fire to burn unfought. But now they are simply too ferocious and too many to extinguish.

This may have the unwitting result of positively affecting the size of fires. Forest managers in the US now advocate letting remote fires run their course in order to reduce fuel load and perhaps prevent large fires from moving into inhabited regions in future.

Fire bombs: British Columbia prepares for infernos

One recent study found that adaptation and prevention could reduce the impact of climate change on Mediterranean fires by 74%. But in Greece it is illegal to conduct strategic burns – considered the minimum of fire management in Australia and North America.

Gitas says he has made many representations to government to get in front of this looming crisis. But political ineptitude is as native as retsina at the southern end of the Balkans.

In 1998, the responsibility for fighting forest fires was transferred from the forest service to the metropolitan fire service. But no staff were moved between the departments, says Gitas. This loss of experience led to a lost decade of fire management during the strongest period of economic growth in the country’s recent history.

Now financial crisis has hit, and no-one is interested in handing out money for prevention.

“We have to manage our space better before a disaster, not after. This is common sense, but you know in Europe we are having difficult financial times,” he says. “You talk to the politicians about it. Nobody is going to give you any money for planning. At least in my country. They are going to pay after the fire happens.”

Our dance with the danger of wildfire is getting faster and closer with every season. Talking to fire scientists around the world, you can hear their barely concealed fear as the fuel builds up in the hills.

Lori Daniels, from Vancouver, asked why we delay when we know that acting now will save lives, homes and money in the future?

Looking down on my home town of Hobart in Tasmania, David Bowman described its destruction in appalling detail. Our civilisation’s inability to respond to threat is a pathology, he said: “It’s a fight we have to have with ourselves.”

The post Fire bombs: why is the Mediterranean burning? appeared first on Climate Home News.

But the two share a less merry distinction – they are both sitting ducks for catastrophic fire.

The first article in this series found Tasmania’s capital Hobart facing the twin threats of climate change and a landscape overbrimming with fuel because traditional fire management by Aborigines had ceased with colonialism.

There are strong parallels in BC. As the climate warms, fires are predicted to become more severe, larger and occur more frequently in unusual times of the year.

The times call for bold ideas. Here, authorities are attempting to avert danger with a scheme so radical that one fire scientist in Tasmania calls it “crazy”, although not as crazy as living in a tinderbox.

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“Almost every year for the last five years we’ve said: wow, this is the earliest start to a fire season in a long time or ever,” says Lori Daniels, a forest scientist at the University of British Columbia’s tree ring lab.

The coastal region in BC gets more rain than the interior. Even so, the capital Vancouver’s northern slopes, where Daniels lives, are desperately exposed once the perennial summer drought arrives. Here the city has made trouble for itself. The hills around the harbour were once lined by old wet forests. But those have been logged and replaced by more flammable woods.

“The forests that have grown back are very productive and are a really different structure and now we have more than a million people who live in the vicinity of those forests and are very active ignition sources,” said Daniels. In other words, Vancouverites have laid their bed and manage to set fire to it every chance they get.

To the east, behind the coastal mountain ranges, the densely populated forests of the interior pose an even greater threat to human life and property. A rain shadow leaves timbered communities behind the mountains sitting among the hottest and driest forests in Canada.

At the root of the problem in both Canada and Australia is the European colonists’ toxic relationship to the land.

Daniels says (as yet unpublished) analysis of burning patterns within trees reveals what can only be human-induced fire activity. Abnormal distributions of grasses also hint that the forest ecosystem evolved under a regime of regular burns. Much like Australian Aborigines, the original inhabitants of BC burned the forests in order to manage them.

Modern British Colombian townships nestle into the same forests, but they have changed in perilous ways.

“We moved into the same places that first nations were. But then we’ve eliminated fire,” said Daniels. “We’ve eliminated first nations and their management from the land. And now we have communities surrounded by very dense forest, full of fuel, that are vulnerable.”

Earlier this year, wildfire caused the evacuation of the Alberta town of Fort McMurray. Thousands lost their homes in the costliest disaster in Canadian history (C$3.58bn). But Daniels believes that the geography of British Colombia, with its steep hills and rain shadow cast by the coastal mountains, makes parts of that province even more fire prone than the boreal forests of Alberta.

A large fire burned much of Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park in British Columbia, in 2003. It burned into the city of Kelowna, where 239 homes were destroyed (Photo: Cate Eales/Flickr)

There are 356 communities in BC that have been assessed for fire vulnerability and 298 are considered to live under high or severe risk of catastrophic fire. Yet nearly half have never engaged with the province’s Strategic Wildfire Prevention Initiative (SWPI), which provides funding for fire planning and management. Of the communities who have made a plan, just half of them have actually acted on it.

The ski town of Whistler is a star performer. In summer, the mountains here become hot and dry and the million-dollar lodges sit amid a forest ready to explode. In order to protect these assets, the council has engaged in one of the most expensive and intensive fire management programmes anywhere on Earth.

The forest is thinned out, often by hand, and the understory is dragged away. Only some mature trees are left. This creates an open parkland – more closely resembling the forests that indigenous peoples would have known in the days of regular fire management.

The open forest creates a buffer zone between the woodland and homes. The lack of undergrowth stops fire from climbing into the canopy. It also gives firefighters critical advantages. With the fuel stripped from the understory, crews can fight the fire from places it would have previously been too dangerous to stand with a fire so close by. Water bombing is much more effective is the water actually hits the ground. That requires a thinned out canopy with less tress.

So far, 43,000 ha of forest has been thinned out across BC. The government believes three communities – West Kelowna, Alexis Creek and Barnhartvale – were spared disaster during the 2009 and 2010 fire seasons as a direct result of this work. It’s a vision that Tasmanian fire scientist David Bowman says all vulnerable communities should adopt if they insist on living beside fire-prone woods.

“[The] idea is crazy,” he says. “But living in a firebomb is not? We grafted a European city onto a wild place and we’ve half done it. We’re not going to take our cities and towns away. So we are just going to have to bite the bullet.”

But is it realistic? On the surface, the costs are astronomical. According to Forest Practices Board manager Tim Ryan, the average cost per hectare is $10,000. In communities such as Whistler, says Daniels, where residents have insisted on a careful, aesthetically-sensitive approach, the cost is more than twice that.

Imagine then, the task of securing all of BC, where 685,000 ha of forest borders communities at high risk. If you include communities at moderate risk, the number approaches one million hectares. Even if the rudest, cheapest approach is taken, the cost would approach $10bn.

“Between 2004 and 2015, $78m was contributed in the province of BC towards this preventative fire management,” says Daniels. The gap seems unbridgeable. Until you consider the costs of not doing it.

Report: Saskatchewan denies climate science as wildfires lick its border

In 2003, thirty-three thousand people had to be evacuated from BC’s third city of Kelowna as a wall of fire descended from the hills. The province’s worst fire destroyed more than 230 homes. In that year, the province’s fire fighting bill alone was $750m.

“That’s ten times what we spent over the subsequent decade trying to prevent another $750m year,” says Daniels.

The bill mounts when the disastrous and potentially avoidable damage to homes, communities and the local economy are factored in. The BC government says the net benefit of treatment is more than $7,000 per hectare.

That is before they account for the enormous health costs and impacts on the environment that are the result of large wildfires. The science of estimating these costs is imprecise, but for a guide, one study in 2006 found smoke exposure from a single day of a fire near the city of Edmonton cost the city between $1m and $5m.

“When you start lining up all the actual costs, it justifies spending the money to actually act and try to reduce these fuels that cause such tremendous fires,” says Daniels.

Just like the human response to climate change, which is driving fires towards Canadian homes, prevention is less costly and painful than reparation. But even in wealthy former colonies, the lure of deferred payment is proving a powerful demotivation.

The last in our series, to be run on Wednesday, will look at the Mediterranean, where an ancient landscape is being transformed by modern economics, sending fire into communities that have worked the land for centuries.

The post Fire bombs: British Columbia prepares for infernos appeared first on Climate Home News.

A hot, northerly gale and rolling fireball turn the forest around us into a blast furnace. The oil-filled eucalyptus canopies explode. One by one, the hills around the city catch alight. Then with a great sweep the fire runs up the slopes of Mount Wellington. Chunks of burning wood are flung into the air and rain down on the city. Office buildings, churches, schools and homes (perhaps the one I grew up in) randomly burn. In all, he says, four or five suburbs are destroyed.

That’s the catastrophe, Bowman says, that the residents of Hobart live blithely beside every summer. And the odds are steadily getting worse. Both on land, and in the atmosphere, humans are creating bigger and bigger problems for ourselves.

This Climate Home series will examine a dangerous trend in three distinct but related landscapes – Australia, western North America and the Mediterranean.

In each of these places, climate change adds what Bowman, a professor in fire ecology from the University of Tasmania, calls “the plus”: a dialling up of danger as weather patterns shift towards a more fire prone future.

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He gazes down at Hobart, home to 200,000 people. “I’m horrified at the complete disaster about to unfold,” he says with the bluntness of someone who has given up trying to coax people into listening to him. He could be dismissed as an alarmist. Indeed, he says, he often is. But this cataclysm has happened before.

Almost fifty years ago, on 7 February 1967, a small spot fire in the northern suburbs of Hobart was grabbed by a brutal northerly and sent roaring towards the city.

It was the last day of school summer holidays. A teenaged Mark Nicholson (a friend of my family) was fishing with his grandfather in a clinker-built dingy on Cornelion Bay, a few kilometres from the city centre, when he felt the wind begin to strengthen.

A rough estimate of scale puts the distance between the front at 1:30pm and 2:30pm at 6km. Source: Hobart City Council

“The wind just got harder and harder and hotter and hotter,” he recalls. “The wind was really hot and embers started to land in the bay. Then this fireball raced down through Lenah Valley and ended up setting fire to the Domain [the parkland beside the city centre]. Our house backed on to the Queens Domain so I wasn’t quite sure whether the house was still there.”

Powerless to row to shore against the wind, Nicholson and his grandfather had to tie up to a yacht to prevent being carried across the estuary. They sat and watched as the mountain exploded with flame. It was “terrifying”, he says.

On what became known as Black Tuesday, 62 lives were lost. In just five hours, 2,640 sq km of forest was burned; 1,293 homes were destroyed.

“The capital was a city of terror, with people standing in the streets openly weeping,” reported the Australian Shipress news. Random ember attack had turned suburban streets into a lottery. Grateful, unscathed looked out of their side windows at destituted neighbours. Nicholson’s house survived.

Charles Roberts and Elsa (dog), survey the ruins of the Fern Tree store two months after the Black Tuesday fires (Photo: Stuart Roberts)

In the intervening half century, the city has stretched up its encircling hills, reaching further into the embrace of the forest.

“You can see why they want to do it,” says Bowman. “Wake up in the morning and listen to the birds. It’s marvellous… Culturally we are really decoupled, we want to have it all.” But he believes the piper must be paid.

The memory of Hobartians may have faded; but the land remembers. Behind the city, Mt Wellington looks down, a dominating presence like the famous Table Mountain of Cape Town. Today you can stand on a rocky outcrop and look over the white skeletons of the giants that burned fifty years ago. The young trees are still climbing at their navels.

But Bowman isn’t so much interested in the trees as what lies beneath. On Knocklofty, just behind the suburb in which my mother has her home, twisted thickets of tea tree, black wattle and native cherry make the forests impassable.

“City of Terror”, the Shipress News reports on the 1967 fires in Hobart. (Photo: Nigel Roberts)

It’s this incredible volume of fuel that haunts Bowman, whose own house is just 250 metres from the forest edge. When the fire comes, the undergrowth acts as a ladder for the fire to reach the explosive eucalyptus crowns. The forest, according to Bowman and other fire managers I spoke with, is as primed as it was in 1967.

Now add in the changes to southeastern Australia’s climate as the planet warms. There will be more big wet spells that promote growth, then droughts and heatwaves that make catastrophic fires like 1967 ever more likely.

Screengrab: The Climate Council

Because of the many complex causes of fire – including human population growth – identifying climate driven trends has been difficult. But one trend is clear and unequivocally linked to climate change. Globally, the length of the fire weather season increased by nearly 19% between 1979 and 2013. This has been particularly true in eastern Australia.

Just three years ago, less than an hour’s drive from Hobart, the small rural community of Dunalley was razed by a brutal fire.

“It could just as easily have been Hobart,” says Bowman. “We are not even dealing with the now. How do you deal with the plus?” In the face of this stacking of the climate dice, which will be resolved (or not) in boardrooms and fora far from the provincial green island of Tasmania, it is important to look at the things that can be controlled. This is the creed of what climate wonks call “adaptation”.

Bowman has a radical vision for Hobart’s adjustment to the new normal, but to understand it, he says, we need to walk further around Knocklofty.

On the eastern flank of the hill there is a city council interpretation sign that shows a painting by the colonial artist John Glover. The sign is placed where Glover sat at his easel in 1855. His painting depicts an expansive view of Hobart’s estuary, seen through some tall trees and an open wood.

Looking down the valley today, the difference is startling. No glimpse of Hobart can be seen. The valley is filled by a green wall of small trees and shrubs.

Australians wondering about the difference between 1.5C and 2C of warming? Here's what it means via @climateinstitut pic.twitter.com/bMVtE6GNSP

— Karl Mathiesen (@KarlMathiesen) August 23, 2016

When Hobart was first settled, the woods were open and airy. This was the result of thousands of years of fire management by indigenous Tasmanians, says Andry Sculthorpe, an ecologist and member of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. Regular burns diversified the hunting fodder and allowed for easy passage.

While much traditional Tasmanian knowledge was lost amid a particularly severe and brutal programme of colonial eradication, Sculthorpe says there are many clues that reveal the landscape created by his ancestors.

“Where we can see a lot of old campsites in the middle of dense scrub. Well, we can know that they weren’t sitting in the middle of impenetrable thickets in their camp, so that’s the indicator that the country was open,” he says.

Before Aborigines, there were other landscapers. Megafauna, such as the hulking Palorchestes azael – a tapir-like marsupial the length of a horse – crashed about flattening shrubs and mowing down the understory.

None of this means that there have not always been huge bushfires (the Australian term name for wildfires) in Tasmania. But as humans have disassociated from the landscape and left it to go wild, we’ve simply turned up the danger.

“There’s probably always going to be weather patterns where fire is going to be dangerous but I think the extent of damage that we’ll see, with the way the bush is at the moment and they way it was in ’67, is going to be a lot worse than if there had been previous fire management through the country,” says Sculthorpe.

John Glover’s early colonial work. (Photo: Karl Mathiesen)

This breakdown of the human relationship with land and the inherent dangers are not native to Tasmania. Bowman lists off a range of other places – Sydney’s Blue Mountains and the Adelaide Hills in particular – where Australia’s cities are blundering their way into a burning building.

Given the headlong rush towards dangerous climate change humanity is currently engaged in, Bowman and Sculthorpe both advocate controlling the factors close to home. Hobart’s city council does conduct seasonal burning. But the walk I go on with Bowman reveals the inadequacy of the programme. The grasses and leaf litter are blackened and the occasional stump has been torched, but the medium-sized scrub, that ladder to the treetops, remains.

Bowman says the only way to defend against “the plus” is to transform the landscape. This, he says, would involve a drastic slashing of all undergrowth in a 500 metre perimeter around the city. A massive programme of biomass removal to create an open forest buffer around the city.

Bowman sighs when he looks at the Glover painting: “I love it”. The forest, he believes, should be engineered to resemble the painting and the ancestral memories of the Aborigines. He has met with opposition among environmentalists, who believe the forest should be left to its natural state.

“It’s natural in the sense that it will grow like that by itself,” says Sculthorpe. “But if you think about how the forests were under Aboriginal management then a lot of them are thicker now than what they were. So they do need a bit of care.”

Report: Climate-linked bushfire warning as Tasmania’s ancient forests blaze

The largest constraint on Bowman’s plan is that it would be hugely expensive – something Canadian forest managers will discuss in the next instalment of this series. The Hobart city council’s bushfire planning reports recognise that more needs to be done. Consequently the council is ramping up burning – which compels residents to complain about smoke pollution – and the creation of firebreaks.

But the investments are limited by a budget that general manager of the City of Hobart Nick Heath says is governed by people’s perception of risk – rather than reality.

“Risk level tolerance varies within and between communities and would be governed by a range of factors, including cost and willingness to pay in an environment of competing interests and not unlimited budget,” he says.

Bowman calls this inability to conceive of and respond appropriately to imminent danger “a disease. A sociological pathology. Can we cure ourselves in time?”

Bowman’s fire management strategy may sound severe, but it is considered the gold standard in another landscape that has seen its traditional owners forced off and danger creep in: British Colombia. BC’s fire prone communities will be next in our series.

The post Fire bombs: Hobart lies in the path of climate disaster appeared first on Climate Home News.

City leaders from Paris, Atlanta, Cape Town, Seoul and Vancouver are among those set to sign up to a new declaration in Mexico City at the annual C40 Cities Mayor’s summit.

“We all share a commitment to adapt, revitalize and mitigate climate change impacts in our communities,” said Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris and incoming C40 Cities chair.

Climate Home understands wider public transport networks and incentives to encourage electric cars, cycling and walking are areas where city leaders will pledge rapid investment.

On Thursday the mayors of Paris, Mexico City, Madrid and Athens announced that by the mid-2020s they would phase out cars and trucks powered by diesel engines, which release high levels of toxins and particulates.

According to the World Health Organisation an estimated 3 million people a year die from outdoor air pollution, a figure that rises to 6.5m when impacts from indoor fumes are included.

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Around 80% of urban areas have air pollution levels above those that are considered healthy, said the WHO in a report earlier this year, calling for greater support for green transport, heating and energy networks.

The renewed drive by cities comes as concerns grow over how Donald Trump will tackle climate change when he assumes the US presidency in January 2017.

During his campaign the billionaire labelled global warming a hoax and said he would roll back president Barack Obama’s plan to green the energy system.

Mayors around the world appear to disagree, with over 7000 cities now signed up to a new ‘Global Covenant’ on climate action chaired by UN cities envoy Mike Bloomberg and European Commission vice president Maroš Šefčovič.

“The leadership of cities is more important than ever in the fight against climate change,” Bloomberg said in a statement.

“This group’s diverse experience from cities on every continent will help support local action and speed global progress.”

A carbon price, a coal phase-out and… two new tar sands pipelines. Trudeau accused of mixed messages on climate: https://t.co/LvW1RkQbOQ pic.twitter.com/3TqljIHQ98

— Climate Home News (@ClimateHome) December 1, 2016

Tagged the ‘largest ever led city coalition’ the alliance spans 199 countries and represents 600 million people, nearly 10% of the world’s population.

All members have promised to start the transition towards low carbon or carbon neutral cities resilient to extreme weather events, and have committed to delivering clean and cheap energy to citizens.

UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa and her predecessor Christiana Figueres have been appointed advisors to the Covenant’s board, joining mayors from Morocco, South Korea, India and Canada.

“As the former Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, I know just how significant city action is and what an important and critical platform the Global Covenant of Mayors will be for all of us,” said Figueres in an emailed statement.

“My involvement will help ensure the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy serves to instigate even greater action by cities and local governments in support of the Agreement and countries’ climate action plans,” said Espinosa, who presided over her first UN climate summit last month in Marrakech, Morocco.

The post Mayors signal desire to fight climate change at city level appeared first on Climate Home News.

This policy mix is key to the public’s growing acceptance of EVs. However, the adoption of EVs is still being held back by the limited number of charging points and the strain on electricity grids from the additional loads from cars.

License to buy 

Like Zhang, fellow Beijinger Li Fang was persuaded to buy an EV by the near impossible odds in the public lottery for license plates for petrol vehicles. At least 2.72 million people are registered in the lottery competing for just 90,000 licenses. Li had taken part since the lottery’s 2011 launch, but with no luck. “So I had no choice but to look at an EV,” she told a low carbon seminar in August.

By contrast, EV licenses are not awarded by lottery but through queuing. However, as the EV market becomes more established, it too is facing license plate scarcity. An annual quota of 51,000 private car licenses (excluding taxis, trucks and government cars, etc.) was exhausted in August, leaving 4,644 applicants having to wait until 2017.

Beijing’s 2016 quota for EVs was 40% of its total new car license plate quota. This is likely to increase, with further cuts due in the quota for traditional-fuel vehicles, and EV buyers anxious to purchase before expected reductions in subsidies happen for domestically produced EVs.

Annual license quota for all traditional and electric vehicles (conventional cars in blue; EVs in red)

National and local subsidies soothe worries over the higher cost of EVs: Zhang was pleased to get a 30,000 yuan (US$4,366) car for only 20,000 yuan (US$2,910). Other benefits include exemption from anti-congestion rules, which prevent drivers using their petrol and diesel vehicles one day each week.

Beijing’s approach has shown that when purchase options are constrained, consumers care first about owning a vehicle and less about how it is powered. However, Beijing’s approach is not reproduced nationally, where EVs are still less than 1.5% of all new car sales.

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A major issue that risks damaging public acceptance of EVs and limiting adoption is a lack of charging points.

Even in Beijing, which has 14% of China’s charging stations, recharging can be difficult. This means EVs still remain impractical for long journeys across the country.

Although automakers are busy developing vehicles with longer ranges, for the time being at least, drivers are legitimately concerned about getting stranded because a charging station cannot be found. Li says she struggled to get home once on a 200 kilometre-round trip to Tianjin, Beijing’s neighbouring city, because she couldn’t recharge her car.

Beijing had 6,789 public charging stations at the end of 2015, second only to Guangdong. Most cities have far fewer, according to the 2016 China New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Report.

Beijing added 1,000 public charging stations in the first half of 2016, and total private charging stations reached 8,000.

But Beijing has issued licences for 51,000 EVs this year, and the National Development and Reform Commission’s target of one charging station per EV by 2020 remains far off.

Power problems

EVs can still require lengthy charging sessions at one of two kinds of charging station. Most private charging stations use alternating current (AC). These are slower but place less load on the grid. Direct current (DC) stations are faster but place greater stress on local grids.

“500,000 EVs recharging on direct current would cause Beijing’s electricity grid to collapse,” says Liu Chun, deputy head of the New Energy Centre at China Electric Power Research Institute.

Property managers sometimes ban private charging points to protect safety and power supply. But if space is available, a private charging station is good value for drivers. Li estimates her EV’s running costs are just one third of an equivalent petrol car.

Zhang’s electricity supplier installed his charging point for free, and he profits from renting it out to other EV owners at one yuan per kilowatt hour (US$0.14), roughly double what he pays.

Drivers can face queues at public charging stations; recharging takes time, and EV rental firms hog some venues. Public charging stations are often costly, too, though prices diverge wildly in an immature market that proper pricing regulations. Zhang calculates that recharging her car a public charge point costs 50 yuan (US$7.2) per 100 kilometres, which offers no real saving compared to the cost of refueling a petrol car.

Higher-end EV brands, such as Tesla, offer free, unlimited fast recharges at the company’s 11 Beijing stations but such perks are rare.

New infrastructure

To make Beijing more EV-friendly, the city plans to install 435,000 charging stations between 2016 and 2020, more than twice as many as Shanghai. But more than a million EVs will be sold over the same period, according to the 2016 China New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Report.

Also, as EV ownership increases so too does demand for electricity. Two solutions are being considered: more power sources and better management of existing ones.

The Beijing Development and Reform Commission is leading a project to bring all EVs and charging points onto a single charging platform, said Niu Jinming, director of the Beijing New Energy Vehicle Development Centre. This will make it easier for vehicle owners to connect and pay for electricity at charging stations. The platform, which is operated by a private company, can also be used to charge vehicles in line with user preferences. In future, such platforms could reduce peak demand on the electricity grid.

A solar solution

A team at Tsinghua University has proposed installing small-scale solar farms on city rooftops to power charging points, along expressways and at tourist spots surrounding Beijing, though trials have yet to take place. A similar model may be pursued by Tesla, which merged with rooftop solar power firm Solarcity in November; a step towards linking EVs with locally-produced solar power.

The government’s effort to encourage EVs in Beijing is in the hope of cutting emissions and meeting air quality targets. China’s coal consumption has been declining since 2014, and an anticipated restructuring of the economy towards high value-added manufacturing and services means that future emissions growth may come from the buildings and transportation sectors. Beijing’s 13th Five-Year Plan for Transportation Development and Construction estimated that by 2020, 57 million journeys will be made daily within the city’s sixth ring road – up 21% on 2015.

Although concentrated in a few cities, total EV sales in China rose dramatically from 74,000 in 2014 to 330,000 in 2015, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

For Beijing, which already has a high rate of car ownership and major congestion problems, the next question on the minds of policymakers may be just how much scope there is for greater car use.

This article and the embedded video were produced by chinadialogue

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While countries such as Morocco, which hosts the world’s biggest solar photovoltaic plant, are ready to embrace the power of large-scale renewables, solar technologies still lag behind in many African regions. Unpredictable subsidies, poor installations and lack of training on how to maintain the solar panels have hindered the spread of solar.

Rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa are peppered with broken solar panels, often not installed properly or donated by institutions that could not cover maintenance costs. This fuels the belief that solar photovoltaic is a bad investment.

But where large-scale projects fail to reach those in need, entrepreneurs are taking over to show that small-scale solar can be versatile, a source of income and perform a surprising variety of functions. Here are six ideas that are changing the perception of solar energy in modern Africa.

1. Mobile microcredit

Swahili for “borrow”, “kopa” is the keyword at the heart of one of the most successful solar enterprises in sub-Saharan Africa. It combines mobile technology, microcredit and clean energy.

M-Kopa targets the rural poor of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, who survive on an average of less than US$2 a day and cannot afford to buy solar panels outright.

The hardware package is a small solar panel and battery to power three led light bulbs, a phone charger, and a radio. It comes with a SIM card for payment – and here’s the clever bit.

Customers pay 3,500 Kenyan shillings ($35) upfront, followed by daily instalments of 50 shillings ($0.50). Once the daily payment is made via mobile, a signal is sent that switches on the system. After a year’s worth of payments, they own the system and use it for free.

So far, M-Kopa has connected more than 400,000 homes, with 500 systems being added every day.

2. Solar suitcase

Solar suitcase is a portable system that fits in a small box and has been deployed in various African countries. The prototype was originally developed by the California based charity We Care Solar to improve the conditions of maternity wards in rural Nigeria.

During a research trip, the charity’s co-founder discovered that in many maternity wards electricity was sporadic. That meant that nighttime deliveries were attended in near darkness, surgeries had to be canceled and critically ill patients would often lose their lives due to the lack of lighting.

The prototype was so successful that is now used to power schools, orphanages and homes all over rural Africa, with the active participation of communities and local institutions, most recently in Kenya.

Solar engineers at work in Kenya. Credit: Daphin Juma

Here, a team of local female solar engineers install six solar suitcases as part of the country’s pilot project, which hopes to put women at the forefront of a clean energy revolution.

3. Cold hubs

Citizens of rich nations take their fridges for granted. But a couple of hours of occasional power shortage and the weekly shopping ending up in the bin are a reminder of the importance of cold storage.

In developing countries up to 45% of the food that is not kept fresh after harvest spoils quickly. As a result, 470 million small-scale farmers are lose about a quarter of their annual income in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, according to Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu, founder of the company Cold Hubs.

The Nigerian entrepreneur, who is a radio presenter and a farmer himself, turned to solar power to provide cheap and effective refrigeration to million of farmers.

He set up solar-powered cold rooms in major markets, where farmers can store their produce for a daily fee. Refrigeration extends the lifespan of vegetables from two to 21 days, reducing waste and boosting farmers’ income.

4. Connecting slums

In Africa, it’s not only rural people who struggle with energy access. As Climate Home reported, the urban poor often live in off-grid fringes of major cities.

For the past four years, the town of Stellenbosch in South Africa has been involved in a pilot project aimed at demonstrating that solar power can work for urban slums.

With funds from the South African Government’s Green Fund, the Ishack project has been providing off-grid solar on a pay-for-use basis to residents of the local informal settlement, also training them to install and maintain solar panels.

Credit: Ishack project

Although based on donations, the project aims at finding a replicable, self sustaining business model for the urban poor, generating jobs and bringing down the prices of solar services so everyone can afford them.

The initiative has so far powered over 1,000 households and aims to expand its reach to the 2,500 homes of the area, setting an example for other informal settlements in Africa

Once established, the business model could also incorporate off-grid sanitation, water and food production services.

5. Small business boost

“Africa is a continent of entrepreneurs” said Xavier Helgesen, co-founder of the company Off-Grid Electric. “From the farmer selling her harvest, to the salon owner serving his neighborhood, to the shopkeeper charging mobile phones, these are the businesses that are the lifeblood of local communities.”

After building its huge client base and expertise in the solar field by powering rural homes in Rwanda and Tanzania, the company has now launched Kazi na Zola, a portable solar system targeting small businesses, in particular phone charging shops, restaurants and barber shops.

For a monthly fee, shopkeepers can offer a higher value service to their customers, boosting profits.

The standard kits come with a solar panel, battery box, LED lights and a radio. Barbers get electric hair clippers, phone-charging stores get solar lanterns that they can rent, and restaurants get a TV. The company also plans to introduce solar kits for internet cafes, health clinics and computer labs.

6. Solar sister

Of the estimated 1.6 billion people currently living without electricity in the world, 70% are women.

Women are the main consumers of household energy and know better than the men what they need to run a home or a small farm.

Although portable solar technologies are well established, distribution is still a challenge in remote communities.

Solar Sister is a network of female entrepreneurs that tackles the problem by involving African rural women in the distribution of solar products within their villages. The social enterprise now counts over 2,000 members in Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, South Sudan and Nigeria, bringing light to more than 370,000 people.

On top of generating income from sales, families can drop the use of kerosene, keep their animals warm and healthier, and provide light for the kids to do their homework after dusk.

Lou Del Bello’s series of reports on Africa and climate change is funded by CDKN

The post Six bright ideas lighting up Africa from the grassroots appeared first on Climate Home News.

And that is precisely why they should have a place at the table of future climate change negotiations, according to a special report presented by the Brazilian Panel on Climate Change (BPCC) at the UN’s COP22 climate conference, which ended yesterday in Marrakech, Morocco.

Although most environmental stories from Brazil are about the Amazon and the rainforest, Brazil has been rapidly transforming itself into a country where the majority of the 210 million population live in urban settlements. By 2050, a staggering 90% will be city dwellers.

The report on climate policies and the impacts of climate change on urban infrastructure was presented by Suzana Khan, president of the BPCC’s scientific committee.

She said: “Although they are not present at climate change negotiations, it is in the cities that most impacts will occur. They are the ones who will have to adapt because they are where most of the world’s population lives.”

196 countries to Trump – UN must tackle climate change: https://t.co/Eyj1C7eoWy #COP22 pic.twitter.com/dHmFY5Jqaa

— Climate Home News (@ClimateHome) November 18, 2016

Khan pointed out that it is the cities that consume half the world’s energy, so they also have an important role in the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Urbanisation is a global trend. In 1900, only 13% of the world’s population lived in cities. Today, it is over half, and by 2050 it will be two-thirds − or between 5.6 and 7.1 billion people, according to the UN’s 2014 report on world urbanisation prospects.

The biggest increase is in developing countries, where more and more people live in unplanned urban settlements.

Yet in spite of the fact that it is the urban population that is most affected by climate change impacts, cities as such have not been represented independently at the talks. They were not present at the Paris Agreement negotiations last December, nor were they present at the COP 22 talks in Marrakech.

The BPCC report says that there is already a high concentration of people in Brazil living in areas of risk that have been occupied without formal permission.

More than 3 million homes are located in 6,329 slums and shantytowns. Less than half of the population have access to sewage systems, and only 40% of wastewater is treated.

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The cities have already begun to suffer the impacts of climate change, with an increase in heatwaves and a higher frequency and intensity of extreme events, such as flooding and droughts.

Khan said: “Climate change intensifies and amplifies the problems that are often already present in a city, such as flooding, mudslides, and a greater incidence of diseases, including the mosquito-transmitted viruses dengue, zika and chikungunya.

“Added to these problems are new challenges such as the lack of water caused by prolonged drought, more frequent heatwaves, and rises in sea levels.”

Rainfall could diminish by 22% in the Northeast region of Brazil by 2100. But, in contrast, 37% of Brazilian towns and cities were affected by flooding between 2008 and 2012.

California is looking into joining UN climate talks if the US quits: https://t.co/3jXDeD7jR1 pic.twitter.com/NrbLB78mvN

— Climate Home News (@ClimateHome) November 18, 2016

The report says that cities in coastal areas − 12 of Brazil’s main cities are on the sea − can expect a rise in sea levels and storms, affecting inhabitants, infrastructure and ecosystems.

The impact on water supplies will also be considerable, as urban areas are the second biggest consumers of water in Brazil, after irrigation systems.

Extreme events such as intense rainfall in a short period of time result in more residues and detritus entering the water supply, and the lack of drainage worsens the situation, leading to serious hazards for drinking water purity.

And prolonged droughts lead to a loss of quality in the water supply because polluting elements are not washed away.

As a result of these problems, combined with the effects of larger populations, the report foresees that by 2025 the demand for clean water will increase by 28% from the level in 2005, demanding investments of around US$ 7 billion.

Gloomy forecasts

Faced with such gloomy forecasts, are there any potential solutions?

Suggestions include preserving any fragments of forest and vegetation that remain in cities, creating linear parks along streams to minimise flood impact, creating natural and artificial barriers such as dams, marshlands and wetlands as buffers to contain rising seas, and altering construction regulations to reduce energy consumption for heating and cooling buildings.

There must be a much greater efficiency in the use and re-use of water, with improved water storage capacity. Hydrological basins must be recovered and reforested.

In view of the cities’ role in climate change, Khan believes not only that they should “be integrated into Brazil’s action plan for reaching the Paris targets”, but should have a place at negotiations alongside national governments.

Recent experiences show that, without joined-up thinking between the various levels of government, progress will be slow.

In 2009, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro − Brazil’s two largest cities − cancelled their municipal plans to fight climate change, claiming they depended on national actions such as incentives for public transport or regulations for energy generation.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Time for cities to get a seat at global climate talks? appeared first on Climate Home News.

That provision is being put to the test in North America, where indigenous communities fiercely oppose oil pipelines and a major hydropower dam.

Kevin Hart, regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations – an organisation representing 900,000 Canadians, has come straight from Standing Rock to UN climate talks in Marrakech.

“I was there as an international observer representing 600 nations. I went down to give my support to my relatives in Standing Rock,” he told Climate Home. “You know, I witnessed firsthand women being attacked by security forces with dogs, goons hired by Dakota Access pipeline.”

Standing Rock, US has been the site of fierce clashes over a US$3.8 billion oil pipeline. On one side, the native Sioux tribe and environmentalists are trying to block construction, fearing its impacts on the Missouri river and contribution to climate change. On the other, security forces defend the property rights of developer Energy Access Partners, which has permits for the project.

To Hart, it invoked a dark period of human history. “When arrests were made, our people were put in dog kennels in the Morgan country sheriff’s department,” he recalled. “They had numbers written on their arms… Back in the second world war, we had another regime do that to another group of people.”

Lord Stern: Indigenous land rights are fundamental to climate safety

Another leader from the Assembly, Francois Paulette, feels the same anxiety. He lives about 200 miles downstream from Alberta’s tar sands, where crude oil is to be extracted and taken to refineries in the US Gulf Coast under the Keystone XL pipeline project.

The Keystone Pipeline XL project was halted by US President Barack Obama, who refused to grant the application of TransCanada, the company behind the project. His successor Donald Trump, however, has promised to un-block fossil fuel projects.

Paulette said the wastewater discharged can seep into the Athabasca river, which flows into their territory. This is what happened with other existing pipeline projects, he claimed: “That river is so polluted, people are dying from cancer, people cannot eat fish.”

Francois Paulette is in Marrakech to register his opposition to oil and hydropower projects (Pic: Purple Romero)

It is not just oil pipelines that concern Paulette, either.

In August, the Canadian government approved two permits for the construction of the Site-C dam, which will flood the Peace River valley territory, a major fishing and hunting site for the Prophet River and West Moberly First Nations.

Paulette maintains that prime minister Justin Trudeau, like his predecessor Stephen Harper who approved the Keystone Pipeline XL project, did not consult indigenous people before giving the Site-C dam the green light.  “He approved it. He approved Site C. He said he’s gonna talk to us, he did not,” said Paulette.

The indigenous leader said this raised questions on the effectiveness of the Paris Agreement as a tool for upholding human rights. “The Paris Agreement is very supportive, but on the ground, it’s another story.”

Trudeau: Canada to set national carbon tax from 2018

The Trudeau government is keen to show respect for indigenous rights as part of its commitment to implement the Paris Agreement, which it ratified in October.

In her speech at the high-level segment of the UN climate talks, Canada environmental minister Catherine Mckenna introduced Maatalii Okalik, a young leader of the Inuit people, to the world.

“With your continued leadership that will define our future on climate action, I am hopeful that it is done in cooperation with indigenous peoples, in platforms, and with respect to our rights, which ultimately support indigenous self-determination,” Okalik told delegates.

Mckenna would later say that Canada was already doing this: “At home, officials from all levels of Canadian government are working with indigenous peoples, business leaders, youth and environmental organizations, and all citizens to develop a Canadian framework for clean growth and climate change.”

Paulette said this pronouncement should result in Canada putting its foot down against oil pipeline projects and the Site-C dam.

“We have to tell them if Canada is gonna be leading, they can’t extend anymore these hydro dams, projects using the tar sands.”

Hart remains hopeful that Trudeau will make good on his word that he will nix economic activities that harm the environment and the tribal communities. “He indicated that his most important relationship is with us First Nations.”

In the next steps that will be taken by the Canadian government, they should remember two things, said Hart: “When you make a decision you always, have to think of the 7seven generations,” and that “no means no”.

The post Indigenous leaders call on Canada’s Trudeau to uphold Paris deal appeared first on Climate Home News.

Speaking for the first time after the billionaire’s shock US election victory, Mexican diplomat Patricia Espinosa said it was early days but that she was “open” to dialogue.

“We believe we have lots of information to provide… of the opportunities and challenges but at same time hoping for a better world for everybody,” she said.

Speculation over the Republican candidate’s low carbon plans has raged since the result dropped in week one of the annual UN climate summit in Marrakech, Morocco

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Trump is on record calling global warming a hoax and threatened to “cancel” the deal reached by 195 countries last December to try and limit emissions from burning fossil fuels.

His candidates for cabinet include the co-founder of oil products company Lucas Oil, former Alaska governor and climate change sceptic Sarah Palin and Oklahoma oilman Harold Hamm.

Incoming vice president Mike Pence now reckons there’s no doubt humans are making the planet warmer, although back in 2001 he wrote it was a “myth”.

Climate change directly impacts everyone across all seven continents. We all must do our part to #ActOnClimate. pic.twitter.com/7IvF6SwWDV

— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) November 11, 2016

In a pointed rebuke to climate-denying Republicans, secretary of state John Kerry this week flew to Antarctica “to see firsthand the drastic impacts of climate change.”

Kerry is slated to attend the Marrakech COP22 summit next week along with France president Francois Hollande: both are expected to emphasise the diplomatic costs any country that backtracks on its commitments could face.

And in a sign that global emission-slashing strategies may already be shifting, the head of C40, which represents 80 cities including New York, Los Angeles and Washington DC proposed a new alliance of progressive sub-state leaders.

“I am a bit worried by what he has said,” said Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris. “We mayors are saying this [Paris climate] agreement will enter into force – it is the future that is at stake.”

Nearly 60% of people now live in urban areas, accounting for 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Mayors were “autonomous” from national leaders argued Hidalgo, allowing them to develop carbon-cutting policies even if their national leaders hold a different view.

The post UN climate boss offers to work with Trump on carbon plan appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Gullah or Geechee people inhabit the Sea Islands and “low country” along a 650km stretch of Atlantic coast from northern Florida to North Carolina. (Gullah is the preferred name in the Carolinas, Geechee in Georgia and Florida.)

With many of the lands and waterways that sustain them lying barely above sea level, this culture that endured slavery now faces eradication.

Okra crops have withered under drought, rising tides swamp fields with salted water and leave dead trees piled on the shore. In recent years, freshwater floods have shut down oyster farms.

Source: gullahcommunity.org

“We have been agrarian and sea-working people since the 1600s, since our ancestors were put on these islands during chattel enslavement,” says Marquetta Goodwine, also known as Queen Quet, the Gullah/Geechee’s elected head of state and chieftess.

“Our ability to sustain our culture is in jeopardy because of these changes in the climate.”

Goodwine will go to Morocco next week to represent her people at the UN climate talks.

A crowdfunding campaign to cover the costs has reached more than half of its $3,000 goal. But Goodwine says she will go, whether or not she reaches the funding target.

“It means so much to our community for me to get there and have our story be a part of this finally,” she says.

40% of all West African slaves arrived on the US mainland at the ports around Sullivan’s Island, where the ceremony to make Goodwine chieftess took place.

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After emancipation, they remained on the coast farming, working the ocean and weaving beautiful basketry. Far from Africa, the culture that grew there has withstood the entropy of modernity.

“The land is our family and the waterways are our bloodline. That is how we as the Gullah Geechee people see this land. We are inextricably tied to the land and the Sea Islands,” says Goodwine.

Today, the Gullah/Geechee population is roughly one million, according to Goodwine, with about half of them living traditional lifestyles along the Atlantic littoral.

Despite their numbers, their pleas to US politicians have been repeatedly ignored, either because they don’t think climate change is a real phenomenon or they are simply not interested.

But Goodwine is used to such fights and she has prevailed before. In 1999, she travelled to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Switzerland.

The sight of a US citizen giving testimony of injustice to the UN left lawmakers red-faced. A heritage act recognising and funding the preservation of Gullah/Geechee cultural traditions and cultural sites followed.

“I’m doing what I know works and that is having the international community support our consistent existence as a culture because what happens domestically here is not focused on us,” says Goodwine.

“You would think that the US would automatically take care of us because our cultural group is a part of them. But it’s not looked at that way and we’re not treated that way.”

She says participation at the talks will bring many benefits to her people beyond bypassing the political roadblock in Washington.

She sees her nation as part of the well recognised group of Small Island Developing States and wants to forge alliances and understanding between her people and theirs.

From the conference, she hopes to send envoys around the world to learn how communities are fighting the rising of the tide.

“I’m sure that there are other communities that are dealing with very similar issues to what were are dealing with,” she says.

The post Former US slave nation heads to Marrakech climate summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

In early November 2013, a six metre storm surge drove up the Leyte Gulf toward Tacloban. Thousands of lives were lost and 90% of the city was destroyed. Residents of the extensive “informal settlements” found little left of their makeshift homes of corrugated iron, scrap wood and plastic.

Perhaps for their safety, perhaps judging the timing opportune, the government fast-tracked existing plans to relocate these unauthorised neighbourhoods (knowns as barangays). A “no-build zone” was implemented (somewhat arbitrarily) at 40m inland from the high tide mark.

Families from roughly 40,000 households had not only lost their homes, but were now told that they would not be allowed to rebuild.

The government plan was to relocate the settlements to permanent, legal communities on higher ground. But the programme has been plagued by insufficiencies. Of a planned 200,000 new housing units, just 10% have been built. In September, vice president Leni Robredo interceded to try and rescue the situation, calling on government agencies to “eliminate red tape” that he said was causing delays.

Alice Thomas, climate displacement programme manager with Refugees International, visited Tacloban twice in the months and years after Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda.

Map: Google

“The relocation plan was never backed with sufficient resources or a commitment from the government to do what it takes to do a relocation programme,” she says . “They were just trying to find plots of empty land here or there and just put people there, without sufficient water, without access to electricity and without access to livelihoods.”

As a result, she says, “people had nowhere to go, so they just went back where they lived before”.

Paulina Lawsin-Nayra, executive director of the Eastern Visayas Network based in Tacloban, says that despite the overarching threat from typhoons, which are likely to be made more severe by climate change, there was little will to move among the tens of thousands who remain by the shore.

“Yolanda taught a lot of lessons,” she says. “But then because of the lack of alternatives people are still staying there.

“People are conscious in terms of heeding the calls for immediate evacuation. But in terms of moving away from their permanent home, the acceptance is not that high. Especially among the fisherfolk communities. Because the alternatives sites that were given are up on the hills, so to them they will be displaced. Even if they opt to live there it will be very expensive for them to be travelling to the site where they have their fishing boats.”

Despite this there has been some movement. Hundreds of families have heeded the government’s call to move. But the trickle of households moving uphill has been outweighed by a flood of relatives coming into the no build zones to take advantage of good quality temporary shelters provided by aid organisations.

“There are several barangays whose population has actually doubled and even more than doubled after Yolanda because of the availability of assistance in Tacloban,” she says.

Lawsin-Nayra stresses that the data are anecdotal and concrete figures do not exist. But her consultations with local community groups report consistent rises in population in the typhoon danger zone in Tacloban.

“It is meant to be temporary [housing] because many of them have received shelter assistance from different agencies. But the houses that they built are actually better than the houses that they had before Yolanda [the Filipino name for Haiyan]. So those, the families invite relatives, who are coming from the towns outside Tacloban and they would settle there,” she says. “There may be movement [to the permanent government housing] but you won’t notice it because of the sheer number of additional migrants, new occupants.”

Communities quickly rebuilt amid the rubble of Tacloban. Photo: Henry Donati/DFID

The problem is not isolated to Tacloban. It is estimated that one million people were left either displaced or living in makeshift shelters in “unsafe areas” across the country by Haiyan.

The typhoon-prone Philippines already has one of the highest populations of informal settlers in South East Asia. Many of them crowded around the coast, where the economic opportunities are greater. Moving them into formal housing is shaping as a huge political problem for Rodrigo Duterte’s new government, says Lucille Sering, the Philippines former climate change secretary.

“That’s the biggest challenge for us, the relocation of this tremendous number of individuals who would still refuse to be relocated. I think that’s on the top of the list,” she says.

Duterte has approached the issue gently, promising that no communities would ever be demolished without proper relocation being available. This indicates just how much electoral power the informal settlers command.

Philippines warning as communities return to danger zones post Haiyan

“The political aspect would be hugely difficult,” says Sering. “Because we have elections every three years and its always an issue to be taking out people where most of your voters are from. So the political will has to be tremendous, not just from the president, but from the local [governments] which are the main entity which has to implement this.”

Thomas believes using the disorder and chaos of typhoons as a trigger for mass relocation is not the panacea for the Philippines’ vulnerable communities.

“Post disaster relocation is a really risky strategy. But that doesn’t mean that governments shouldn’t be proactive and be considering how to do planned relocation where it’s necessary and thinking about how to get people out of harms way or at least building good evacuation shelters,” she says.

“The priority has to be getting information about climate risk into the hands of the communities themselves so they can make choices about what they want to do. You need to empower them with knowledge so that they can decide where they want to go and how they want to go and make their own plans.”

The post Slums boom in Philippines typhoon danger zones appeared first on Climate Home News.

When the sun goes down, the rest of the city slowly lights up, but pockets of poverty such as the informal settlement where she lived for 16 years stay dark, save for the dull glow of kerosene lamps.

Now a solar engineer and entrepreneur, part of an ambitious program to revolutionise the participation of women in clean energy, Juma doesn’t forget what it feels like to do your homework to the flickering light of a lantern. “I want to make sure that everyone has at least some lighting at home,” she says.

Juma exudes optimism, often interrupting her story with an infectious laughter. Her big dream is to eradicate energy poverty in Kenya through the power of sunshine.

Kenya enjoys over 3,500 hours of sunlight every year, but despite booming energy demand the uptake of solar panels in Kenya remains low.The government’s development plan for the next 20 years foresees solar providing just 1% of the energy mix. For comparison, coal is expected to provide 9% of the total, while geothermal energy will account for 60%.

Researchers have put this down to poverty and general lack of public financial support, but that is only part of the story. Inadequate technical support to the households that choose to go solar is also a barrier.

In pictures: the energy poor of Africa’s biggest slum

The Women in Sustainable Energy and Entrepreneurship (WISEE) collective was founded to bring light where Kenya’s national grid doesn’t stretch. In partnership with Strathmore University and USAID, the program offers free training and mentoring for women who wish to start a hands-on career in the sector.

It also addresses a stark gender imbalance in solar engineering. After realising that poorly trained technicians were leading to a proliferation of dangerous and short-lived solar photovoltaic systems, the Kenyan government introduced a compulsory licence. In 2014, out of 257 licensed technicians serving the whole country, only six were women.

Yet in Kenya, women are the main custodians of their home’s energy system. “If something breaks they will be the first family members to be on it while the men are at work, so they should be able to figure out what is wrong,” says Tameezan wa Gathui, a sustainable energy practitioner and co-founder of WISEE.

“When you are a girl child in Kenya your tasks are very much clear cut: household, cooking, fetching water. The boys will help but ultimately they are the ones who get the opportunity to go to school.”

Things are changing and WISEE is expanding the options for women. Over a ten-day crash course, trainees learn to design a solar system according to the specific needs of each customer and troubleshoot it. They get a certificate and additional support if they wish to obtain the licence that will allow them to practice in the field.

We have given women the opportunity to be energy professionals and entreprenuers @JulieGichuru @CarolineMutoko pic.twitter.com/RoZgYugkf1

— WISEE (@wisee_015) December 2, 2015

“Lack of accredited technicians holds back solar penetration in Kenya,” says Izael Da Silva, Director of the Strathmore Energy Research Centre. “The few practitioners around tend to stick to the big urban centres, where it’s easier to do business.”

In rural areas, home to 77% of Kenya’s population, people are wary of buying solar panels without technical back-up. “This is rather obvious,” Da Silva wrote in The Conversation. “Would you buy a car if the closest mechanic was 200km away from you?”

Juma, who after attending the WISEE training ditched a career at a main energy distributor to start her own business, also finds that lack of trust prevents rural Kenyans from embracing PV.

“Top priority of my business model is to restore people’s faith in solar. If you travel in remote areas, so many will just point at a dead solar panel and say ‘solar doesn’t work’,” she says. “But often it’s just a matter of replacing a battery. Perhaps the system was badly designed, or poorly maintained. Nothing that can’t be fixed.”

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She plans to launch a “Solar Doctor” project early next year, travelling around rural Kenya to collect and repair solar panels for free. “And when other members of communities realise that solar works, they will be encouraged to try too.”

To fund that service, Juma expects to make a profit from designing and installing solar systems for those who can afford them. She decided to go it alone rather than work for a bigger company because, she says: “If I work for a corporation the solution I offer will be dictated by someone else. Working for myself I can minimise my profits and benefit the customer more.”

The young entrepreneur has had to adjust her ambitions since taking the course 18 months ago, she laughingly admits: “Fresh after the training course, I decided I would install 1MW of capacity by the end of 2017. Well, that was unrealistic, but with my first three clients I am set to install 2kW of solar energy. It’s good to feel that I am moving somewhere.”

For now, Juma’s initiative may be just a drop in the sea, but it is part of a bigger movement that is tackling a key hurdle to the spread of clean energy in Kenya. Fostering a new generation of solar engineers will not only fill a country-wide technical gap, but will also prevent the growth of e-waste, guaranteeing longer life to solar systems and better value for money for the customers.

Lou Del Bello’s series of reports on Africa and climate change is funded by CDKN

The post Can this woman restore Kenya’s faith in solar power? appeared first on Climate Home News.

The baby’s home came down around her when flash floods struck the outskirts of Kenya’s capital Nairobi. She was found in a basin, perhaps put there by her mother while she attended to domestic work. It might just have saved her life.

Later identified as Delarine Saisi Wasike, the six-month-old had a lucky escape from the Huruma Estate disaster in April this year. At least 134 others were injured and 12, including the baby’s mother, were killed.

The rescue team searching for people buried under the debris (Credit: Kenya Red Cross Society)

Mwangi, who was part of the Kenya Red Cross unit that arrived first to the scene of devastation just 20 minutes after the collapse, said the incident was so much worse because of the timing of the floods.

“It all happened around 9PM, when people in Kenya would normally be at home, after dinner,” he says. That meant the majority of the 200 residents were at home at the time.

“Luckily, the building shook just minutes before going down, so many fled in time to avoid the worst,” he says. “Others weren’t as lucky.”

Last year’s El Nino had a huge impact on Kenya with violent rainfall, landslides and mudslides that destroyed infrastructure and swept away livestock. According to the UN, the heavy rains intensified in late April, affecting nearly half a million people in the East African region. In Nairobi, the urban poor had to face the double whammy of erratic weather coupled with poorly constructed buildings and unregulated, unsafe settlements.

Six months later, I visited Huruma to see how people were coping.

Samuel Obera Onguto is a Huruma resident, and remembers that day well. “It rained very heavily for hours, and after that the lives of most people in Huruma were put on hold. Poor children whose parents don’t have a car could not go to school for three months, because the roads were damaged,” he says as we walk through the dusty roads of the neighbourhood.

Around us, most buildings are decrepit, with frameless windows like empty black eyes. I ask Samuel if all of this is down to last spring’s floods. “No, these buildings are built with cheap materials and just crumble”.

The government found some of the structures to be so insecure that it ordered they be demolished. But people keep living there because they have nowhere else to go, and the landlords still collect their rent.

Both Obera and Patrick Agengla Nyegenye, another resident we meet along the way, agree that infrastructure in Huruma is so poor that people have no protection in case of extreme events. They hold the government responsible for the situation: “Kenya is riddled with corruption. The government sells the land concession to private builders who choose sub-standard materials to save money,” Nyegenye says.

He and Obera agree that the government should directly take care of building quality structures and then sell the finished homes to people. “The government has plans,” says Obera, “but these plans and regulations are never enforced, unless an election is coming up. Right now they are going to erect small buildings to show that the government is doing something.”

Walking towards the slum part of Huruma, people express a sense of impotence in the face of seasonal floods.

The UN’s climate science panel tentatively foresaw in its last assessment report a rise in flash flooding risk for Kenya, as global temperatures rise. Models show an increase in bouts of heavy rainfall for East Africa, although the data is too patchy for strong predictions. In any case, the growth of cheaply built housing near rivers means more people are exposed to extreme weather.

The residents see the weather becoming more erratic by the year and they feel left alone by the authorities. Both the buildings and the informal settlements are extremely insecure, and the slum stretches right next to the riverbanks, its shacks prone to be wiped out as soon as the river swells.

“[The poor] who live in urban areas have been neglected consistently and that continues to be true with climate change, which is a new area of concern,” says Sarah Colenbrander, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

The way extreme poverty is defined (having less than US$1 a day) can fail to capture the struggle of the urban poor. They may have a bit more money, but their quality of life can be worse than that of those who live in rural areas.

Improving adaptation in urban areas is becoming an increasingly urgent issue, says Colenbrander: “A growing proportion of the population lives in urban areas and by 2050 more than half of the people in Africa will live in cities.”

She sees the growing density of urban population as an opportunity to get things right quicker: “[In cities] you can provide essential infrastructure such as draining, sanitation and drinking water in a way that is climate resilient, where you can serve more people with the same amount of investment.”

For now, Huruma’s slums lack basic safety measures and the shacks, with naked cables hanging over water puddles from the last bout of rain, are full of hazards. Charities are trying to introduce a few safe homes made of bricks, but those we see seem half built and already deteriorating in the sun.

For those who have been displaced by the floods, there is little hope. “Currently they don’t have an alternative, the authorities are just demolishing the houses that still stand but are at risk. People have lost everything and have no safeguards. They are back at square one,” says Obera.

We get to see what remains of the collapsed building, a tall dune of fine rubble. A group of boys playing tag rushes through and disappears over the horizon.  

If nothing changes, the situation in Huruma can only deteriorate, with the damage left unfixed and the mounting threat of climate change. Last spring’s floods were linked to a wicked El Nino, which is not caused by climate change, but could have been exacerbated by rising temperatures.

“El Nino comes around regularly, and when you have climate change accelerating as well, that combination is going to be very pronounced,” says Colenbrander.  

But something is slowly moving. Associations of slum dwellers, who negotiate with the city council to address their problems, are now putting climate change at the top of their agenda. Groups such as Muungano wa Wanavijiji (Swahili for “United Villagers”) are raising awareness and calling for the government to help climate-proof their communities, with better drainage systems and more robust buildings.

Preventing the worst impacts of floods in slums can be straightforward – just a matter of improving basic infrastructure – but it can lead to long lasting benefits.

Lou Del Bello’s series of reports on Africa and climate change is funded by CDKN

The post In pictures: the aftermath of Nairobi’s deadly flash floods appeared first on Climate Home News.

It is now certain that less than one year will have passed from the beginning of the COP21 climate negotiations in December 2015 to the moment when the Paris Agreement will come into force.

These weeks and months are when the nations of the world stared over the precipice of catastrophic climate change and chose to act. By standards of international diplomacy, the ratification of the Paris Agreement has been remarkably swift.

Leaders of the many nations who have ratified the deal deserve our praise and gratitude.

From the biggest emitters, China, the United States and the European Union, to the smallest Island nations that are most at risk from the effects of climate change, each has recognized the scale of the threat we face and acted with commendable speed.

Habitat III: what to expect from the UN’s urban summit

After 20 years of waiting for an inter-governmental agreement to tackle climate change it is fantastic that nation states are now moving so rapidly to bring it into international law.

There is no time to waste because the next years are crucial. Global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2020 and then fall rapidly.

The next step is for countries to put forward national emissions plans that are as ambitious as the aspiration of the Paris Agreement. Almost none are at present.

Fortunately, mayors of the world’s great cities have also been using the months since December 2015 to ramp up climate action.

This determination to act by mayors is consistent with more than a decade of international leadership on climate change before the Paris Agreement, through powerful networks like the C40 Cities and common platforms for declaring commitments like the Global Covenant of Mayors.

At the height of the COP21 climate negotiations, Paris City Hall hosted more than 1,000 mayors and city leaders at the Climate Summit for Local Leaders.

This local and global display of commitment by mayors was instrumental in showing national leaders negotiating to secure the Paris Agreement that they were far from alone.

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Throughout 2016 cities have continued to deliver concretely ambitious climate action.

Last week, Paris confirmed the pedestrianisation of the right bank of the Seine, building on its world famous cycle hire scheme to further creating a city that prioritises sustainable transport.

This summer, Rio de Janeiro hosted the most ecological Olympic and Paralympic Games in modern history with new light railway lines, 150km of rapid bus lanes, and hundreds of kilometres of bike lanes that are creating a mass transit revolution in the city.

Mexico City is taking decisive action to create a clean and efficient transport network, through the growth of its Bus Rapid Transport as well as the subway systems, while creating cycling infrastructure.

This includes cycle lanes, bike parking and a public bike share system, all integrated to the city’s transport card.

In pictures: the energy poor of Africa’s biggest slum

One of reasons that city leaders have been particularly bold is because we work together. Through networks like C40 we are learning from each other in delivering, so that success gets copied quickly and replicated around the world.

The cost of innovation is reduced and we are all able to learn from inevitable mistakes.

Cities will prove it again during the C40 Mayors Summit 2016 in Mexico City from 30 November – 2 December 2 where the most world’s most influential mayors, representing 650 million citizens will work together and present their common goals for a sustainable future, one year after COP21 in Paris.

Cities are leading the way to make the Paris Agreement concrete for citizens, but as mayors, we cannot do it alone. We welcome the leadership of national leaders in committing to the Paris Agreement but now we call on Presidents and Prime Ministers of every nation to empower their cities.

C40’s research shows that one third of the remaining global ‘safe’ carbon budget could be locked-in by urban policy decisions taken just between now and 2020.

Report: China, India back $150m GEF initiative to green cities

Supporting mayors to be able to take the most far-sighted decisions on, for example, land-use planning, transport infrastructure, and building codes, could be the single most efficient way for nations to kick-start their commitments under the Paris Agreement

For example, mayors of the world’s great cities have identified sustainable infrastructure projects, innovative policies and carbon cutting initiatives, but yet too often they are not able to deliver on their ambitions because they lack access to finance.

National governments must now help mayors and cities by devolving authority over finance for sustainable infrastructure.

In parallel, international financial institutions must grant cities direct access to green funds and lending mechanisms to finance their ambitious climate plans.

Our responsibility is huge and citizens reminds us of this every day. If today is a moment of great hope, we must never forget that the hard work of making the Paris Agreement a reality has only just begun. Cities are ready to help in getting the job done.

Anne Hidalgo is Mayor of Paris, Eduardo Paes is Mayor of Rio de Janeiro and Miguel Ángel Mancera is Mayor of Mexico City

The post After ratification, cities can deliver the Paris climate deal appeared first on Climate Home News.